The anti-Antigone: Pākehā settler masculinity, racialized kinship, and contested paternity in Carl Nixon’s Settlers’ Creek

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article places Carl Nixon’s novel Settlers’ Creek (2010) alongside Sophocles’ Antigone as the springboard for an inquiry into the dynamic relationship between kinship bonds and state legitimacy in a settler-colonial context. Loosely based on a high-profile legal case in Aotearoa New Zealand regarding funerary practices, the novel highlights tensions between settler and indigenous constructions of law. Settlers’ Creek and Antigone share a central premise: rival claims for justice centred around the matter of an unburied corpse. However, where Antigone has been read in Continental philosophy to theorize the ascendance of the impersonal modern state and the deposition of kinship, Nixon’s novel can be read as an allegory of the reverse historical process through a (re)turn to filiative relationships in western nation states. By highlighting the Pākēhā protagonist’s failures to engage with bicultural kinship, the novel critiques a paternalistic colonial regime and undermines the affective grounding of settler cultural racism.