Humanitarian critique and the settler fantasy: the Australian press and settler colonial consciousness during the Waikato War, 1863–1864

Abstract

This article examines the response of the Australian press to humanitarian critiques of settler colonial practices in New Zealand during the Waikato War 1863–1864. In doing so, this article revisits Alan Lester's work on British settler discourse in the colonial press to suggest ways in which this form of analysis might be pushed further by drawing on psychoanalytic theories of nationalism. The power of the press to systematise discourses is crucial. Yet I argue that when read as symptomatic of settler colonial consciousness, the defensive rhetoric and contradiction read in settler newspapers suggests deeper levels of feeling than can be accounted for in a discussion of ‘representation’ alone. This first level of discursive reading pays little attention to the reasons for the affective attachment of settlers to their ‘way of life’. To move this analysis forward, I read the response of an influential Australian newspaper to perceived humanitarian attacks on fellow British settlers in New Zealand through the psychoanalytic concepts of enjoyment and fantasy, as elaborated by Slavoj Žižek. Further, I merge these concepts with recent theorising of settler subjectivities to discuss the unconscious bonds that underpinned settler discourse. Through this theoretical engagement, I explore the seemingly contradictory nature by which the figure of the humanitarian came to be positioned as a threat to settler colonial society, and, at the same time, fundamental to the settler colonial fantasy. Central to this argument is the paradoxical concept of enjoyment as that element which, through transgression, exceeds pleasure. In sum, I suggest that rather than merely challenging the discursive position of settlers, humanitarians provided the impetus for the transgressive enjoyment that bound settler colonial societies.