Tense and the other: temporality and urban multiculture in Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand

Expressions of concern about the national future, or the surfacing of history through postcolonial melancholia and nostalgia for a lost Golden Age, illustrate how temporality and tense have been absorbed into discourses, affective attachments and practices of cultural recognition and national belonging. First, this paper aims to develop the discussion of urban multiculture in human geography in an original direction through a theoretically‐driven argument for the significance of social divisions of tense. It contributes new knowledge about the availability of this discursive field when the issue of cultural recognition arises. Second, through considering the relational dynamics between settler, Indigenous and exogenous peoples together, the paper ties together debate on migration and ethnicity with indigeneity and colonialism. Third, the paper emphasises the importance of careful attention to local histories, contexts and oppressions when researching conviviality and multiculture in a settler colonial context. The analysis draws on 12 months of qualitative research with first‐generation British migrants in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand to examine several illustrative encounters of British migrants with Māori, the Indigenous peoples, and exogenous alterity, a term used to refer to migrants and racialised citizens deemed ‘foreign’.