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- Publisher
- University of Hawai'I Press
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2004 University of Hawai'i Press.
- ISSN
- 1527-9464
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
and hope that leaves one with an abiding sense of satisfaction. artist himself working on a large canvas across which is scrawled the word "holocaust." The nineteenth-century decimation of the Mäori people is likened in this moment to the Nazi slaughter of the Jews, and for New Zealand audiences that very comparison occasioned a recent controversy when a politician, Tariana Turia, applied the word "holocaust" to what happened to the Mäori people (Rapata Wiri, pers comm, Oct and Nov 2002). This moment in the film reveals Shylock's motivations in his bond with the Christian merchant. He wants justice, compensation, a restoration of mana for personal and collective suffering. In a 2001 editorial in the Shakespeare Quarterly (52, vi), Michael Neill says that this Mäori translation of The Merchant of Venice differs from Shakespeare's play "not just in its linguistic medium but in the fact that it presupposes an audience that will sympathize with the Jew as representative of an oppressed minority." According to Rapata Wiri, by as early as 1868 the Mäori people had already likened themselves to the Jews who were exiled in Egypt and trying to regain their promised land (pers comm, Nov 2002). While postWorld
Journal
The Contemporary Pacific – University of Hawai'I Press
Published: Aug 31, 2004