New Zealand Women Traveller Writers : from exile to diaspora

Abstract

The focus of this article is a group of New Zealand women traveller writers of the first half of the twentieth century who left their country of origin, and in the encounter with new worlds overseas, reconstructed themselves as deterritorialised, diasporic subjects with new understandings of home and belonging. Their work can be read as both transitional and transnational, reflecting the ambivalence of multiple cultural affiliations and reinflecting literary conventions. Such encounters and new points of reference from transiting through foreign lands inevitably catalyse new and unusual forms of diasporic writing, notable for a heightened consciousness of difference (Kalra et al 2008: 30). This article aims to identify patterns of similarity and contrast in their work, and to determine how they incorporate their varied experiences of loss and liberation into artistic reconciliations with the homeland