To settle the settler: pathologies of colonialism in New Zealand history films, 1925 - 2005

• Main Author: Lacey, Cherie
• Other Authors: Simmons, Laurence.
• Published: ResearchSpace@Auckland 2010
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2292/6076

Social pathologies are thoroughly intertwined with colonial history. From the colonial project���s drive to categorise and treat indigenous disorders, to postcolonial theorists��� attempts to understand the psychological effects of (de)colonisation, psychology has provided a lens through which to investigate the (post)colonial condition. For the most part, these psychocolonial investigations have focused on either the colonised or the coloniser, or on the relation between them, thus remaining silent on the nature of the settler subject. Unwilling to identify as the coloniser, and unable to identify as the colonised, the settler occupies an ambivalent subject position, in which traditional psychological investigations of colonialism are confounded. Furthermore, too often, postcolonial theorists have recourse to certain pathologies, such as anxiety, melancholy or trauma, without a thorough awareness of the intricacies of the disorder itself. This study is grounded in the belief that, when it comes to understanding the psychical structure of the settler, we need to read colonial disorders anew. With this in mind, my research returns to Lacanian psychoanalysis in order work through the (post)colonial disorders of the settler subject. Lacanian analysis provides us with one of the most complex languages through which to examine subjectivity and has a long history of association with the discourse of (post)colonialism; it thus provides us with a point of reentry through which to approach a psychoanalytic exploration of settlement. This examination will be carried out through analysis of New Zealand settler narratives; in particular, films that return to a specific time in New Zealand���s early settlement period: the New Zealand Wars (1843-1972). The Wars occurred in response to what many M��ori understood to be breaches in the Treaty of Waitangi (signed in 1840), and were instrumental in forging the identities of both M��ori and P��keh�� as peoples. Narratives of the New Zealand Wars have been repeated throughout New Zealand���s cinematic history, and act as crucibles for the formation of P��keh�� (white settler) identity at the time of their making. As ���veils of fantasy��� (in Slavoj ��i��ek���s words), films provide us with a back-door into knowledge; by paying attention to what is not said about colonial history, to the unspoken and the unspeakable in these films, my research attempts to reveal something about the concealed unconscious structure of the settler subject in New Zealand society.