Final Grade: A
Very happy to get an A (88%) for this, my first university assignment in decades.
Feedback
What the heck! For transparency, this is the feedback I got…
Kia ora Gavin. You engaged well, courageously, from welcome professional experience and have come to new insights, esp in the later part of your creative work, testing the validity of your approach of imagining the Māori invitation, and whether you could assume that position on Māori’s behalf.
Earlier, your call for ‘guard rails’, (Mutu), while understandable, does not take into account that your own view and critique on Mutu’s call for a better way to proceed together again comes only from your Euro- frame of thinking. Where slavery is generally understood to be indeed abhorrent, apply that same frame in a wider sense, to see that slavery by Europeans provided the European advantage too, and that inhumane consequences of the colony to this day mainly affect non-Europeans.
Your external review yielded good insight and you revised your work accordingly. Well done.
You have engaged very well with this course, and have contributed with frankness to the studio discussions. Thank you for that, Gavin!
Reflecting on this feedback
I’ve thought a lot about this feedback, and do think it’s fair. I do have one point of clarification. To me, it is possible to read this as slavery being “more bad” when one culture does it to another. I absolutely don’t think my tutor would have meant it this way though, and I got an A, so I’m going to view this as just an interpretation thing and leave it alone. If I run into him on campus and it seems an appropriate time, I will check on this.