Foundations

Every day we face decisions, crossroads that can take us on wildly different rides. Our lives are never certain, no matter how well we plan. Although, fascinatingly, unknowingly, sometimes spookily, we can find ourselves on paths once trodden by our forebears…

In Foundations, Karin Speedy takes us on a whirlwind journey through time and space as she navigates intersecting personal, local, family and global histories, stories that help her reckon with who she is and where she stands in this complicated (post)colonial world. If colonialism, slavery, violence and heartbreak feature heavily in her memoir so too do friendship, love, poetry, books, music, laughter and resistance. Warm, funny, quirky yet also confronting and, at times, shockingly brutal, her childhood and young adult memories bring to life the scenes and sounds of 70s, 80s and 90s New Zealand. At university, Karin's unquenchable thirst for knowledge and social justice see her embark on her first research project, a decolonial study of Louisiana Creole, research that cements her future as an anti-racist, activist scholar. Forever questioning the master narratives, digging deeper and peeling back layers to expose what lies hidden beneath and behind, Karin reminds us that history and trauma are all around us, ingrained in our lives, etched into our landscapes and at the very foundations of our cities and infrastructure. When she begins to examine her own family stories, rooted in colonisation and working-class struggle and embedded in the national histories of Aotearoa and Australia, she uncovers astonishing inter-generational palimpsests and starts to grasp the importance of listening to her ghosts.

About the Author

Karin Speedy is an interdisciplinary academic whose research weaves together her expertise in history, literature, linguistics and translation. She has published extensively on colonial and decolonial Pacific and Francophone history and literature, as well as on Creole languages, slavery and African and Indian Ocean diasporas in the Pacific. Alongside her scholarly works, she enjoys communicating her research creatively which, until Foundations, has been mostly through poetry. In 2013, she was awarded the John Dunmore Medal for research, recognising her major contribution to knowledge of French language and culture in the Pacific and she recently obtained a Marsden Fund grant. Karin currently holds an honorary Visiting Research Fellow position at the University of Adelaide and lives in Aotearoa New Zealand with her two daughters, her partner and two cats.