Speculative poetics of the Moana : whakapapa, monsters, and desire in Māori and Pacific futures : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Abstract

This thesis argues that Indigenous speculative fiction in Aotearoa and the Moana constitutes a distinct expression of Indigenous story sovereignty: a cosmologically grounded mode of world-making in which literature functions as theory, method, and political intervention. Speculative writing is examined as genre and as methodology—a wānanga through which whakapapa spirals from Te Kore to Te Pō to Te Ao Mārama, providing conceptual tools for navigating ecological crisis, colonial violence, and future possibility. Grounded in Mātauranga Māori, Mana Wāhine theory, Pasifikafuturism, and Indigenous relational ontology, the thesis develops Kaupapa Māori Speculative Poetics as its overarching interpretive method, attentive to huna, uncertainty, relational ethics, and cosmological emergence. Through close readings of Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray’s Indigihorror Path of Ra trilogy, Gina Cole’s Pasifikafuturist Na Viro, and Whiti Hereaka’s Indigifantasy Kurangaituku, alongside the creative work “Kēhua,” the thesis identifies four signatures that structure Indigenous speculative writing: rupture, embodiment, refusal, and futurity. Monsters, cyborgs, spectral kin, and atua-wāhine are shown to be ontological participants in genealogical, ecological, and erotic worlds—not metaphors but agents who register breaches in relational order and open pathways for repair.

Kaupapa Māori Speculative Poetics generates several original critical contributions, including the articulation of a Māori Indigihorror hermeneutic grounded in whakapapa and cosmological accountability; the development of Taniwha teratology as a culturally specific theory of Māori monstrosity; and the theorisation of the cyberwāhine as a sovereign posthuman figure whose embodiment reconfigures global posthumanisms. “Kēhua” demonstrates this methodology in practice, showing how creative writing produces theory through spectrality, whakapapa, and more-than-human relation. The thesis concludes that Māori and Pasifika speculative literatures—critical and creative—reshape genre, provincialise universalising posthumanisms, and extend Indigenous Studies toward cosmological and speculative horizons, asserting Indigenous story sovereignty as an ongoing practice of resurgence and world-making.