Finding culture in ‘poetic’ structures: the case of a ‘racially-mixed’ Japanese/New Zealander

In this article, I analyze discourse taken from my interviews with a ‘racially-mixed’ Japanese/New Zealander in which he represents his ethno-national identities to me in New Zealand. Drawing on the concept of ‘poetic’ structure, I reveal implicit assumptions in the patternings of discourse. Specifically, he discursively constructs his ‘racially-mixed’ identities by presupposing ‘pure race’ as a social fact. It is also shown that a powerful implicit assumption is the hegemony of whiteness, to which he responds in the construction of New Zealander identities. For comparative purposes, I further analyze interview data taken from another Japanese-heritage participant. Based on the analyses, I discuss implications for the analysis of multicultural discourses, and suggest that the reproduction of hegemonic values deserves more attention