NZ visual diary - entry 39

You Do You - Auckland CBD store display

Yascha Mount, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University, recently published a book titled The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. The book asserts and explores the premise that diverse democracies are very fragile.

His arguments about diverse democracies weigh heavily on me, so much so that I am seeing the world these days through a lens of his construction.

. . . which brings me to New Zealand . . .

The narrative on colonisation and its consequences over the past 200 years remains unsettled and is highly contentious. Our collective understanding of Māori/Pākehā history, and more fundamentally our desire to understand that history and its legacy, is the contemporary fault line.

Our grand experiment, to borrow Mount's phrase, has produced a nation of peoples who are at once celebratory of and suspicious about the country's diversity and constructed narrative on nationhood.

. . . which brings me to a store display . . .

The window's photographic images present a panorama of New Zealand's ethnic diversity, a collection of peoples who are presented as thoughtful or outwardly joyful, and entirely worthy of our admiration.

The store front also offers the passerby 5 mannequins, the representational markers of what is desirable and worthy of our attention (and pocketbooks). All 5 are ghostly white.