The Postcolonial Subject in a Global Era: the Cultural Imaginary in Alan Duff’s Dreamboat Dad

Abstract

In his recent novel Dreamboat Dad (2008), New Zealand Māori novelist Alan Duff renews his exploration of Māori individual self-fashioning, with the effects of cultural globalization on individuation more foregrounded than in his early fiction. The protagonist's attempt to come to terms with a globalized cultural imaginary reveals tensions between his desire for individual autonomy and the constraints imposed by local conditions; yet it also suggests the possibility of a constructive re-engagement with his indigenous tradition. I shall examine this attempt from a perspective located between the two psychoanalytic traditions formulated by D. W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan, with Duff’s perspective on how an individual adapts to maturational needs and develops a self-identity in a context of cultural change.