Songs of (Settler Moves to) Innocence

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers how public recitation or quotation of Romantic poetry in Aotearoa New Zealand can be read within Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s framework of “settler moves to innocence.” Examining three distinct acts of settler use of Romantic poetry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, featuring Felicia Hemans, Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, the article suggests that we can interpret these moments through the lens of “generations” or the Māori term “whakapapa.” Understanding these apparently isolated moments as part of a process of generating a settler futurity out of Romantic poetry, and foreclosing Indigenous futurities in the process, the essay proposes that some of Romanticism’s cherished lines and authors have underpinned the settler colonial project in Aotearoa in ways that remain both influential and publicly visible to generations of the twenty-first century.