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  • Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy
  • Edward Watts (bio)

In Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914, Jane Stafford and Mark Williams examine the undervalued beginnings of New Zealand’s national literature, spanning the beginning of the Commonwealth in 1900, detaching, as most postcolonialists do, political self-determination from literary nationalism. This period is defended as enacting a difficult transition wherein settler writers struggled to reconcile their dependence on British literary modes, models, and markets with the need for local subjects and narratives reflecting the complexities of New Zealand life—especially with regard to race—for which British writing provided no imitable forms or models. The authors explore Maoriland writers to frame literary nationalism among settler populations as a tenuous balance between the “settler” as colonized and colonizing, following the ideas of Helen Tiffin, Stephen Slemon, Alan Lawson, and others.

They trace how William Satchell’s The Greenstone Door (1914) rewrites colonial history as a complex collision of Maori tribes, European ethnicities, and intercultural groups cohabiting the land. For confronting the local version of “the white man’s burden,” Maorilanders were dismissed as too British during an era of post-ANZACS jingoism and racism through the mid-twentieth century.1 Later, with the rise of Saidian postcolonialism, they were viewed as racist and patriarchal, dismissed now as imperialist embarrassments. Stafford and Williams end with a comment on the cultural politics of both perspectives: “in seeking to expunge the embarrassments of their colonial past, they continue to invent a history for themselves rather than encounter an actual one” (275). From both perspectives, scholars constructed purified narratives: settlement as either glorious or satanic, white hat or black armband. Maoriland writers were pilloried by both for querying the space between. In the end, New Zealand’s early literary history is more complex and vitalized, its lasting conflicts given a more distinct genealogy.

For the same reason, we might apply similar reading strategies to American literature from the Revolution to the “Renaissance” of the 1830s. The [End Page 447] older narrative famously skipped from Edwards to Emerson: the struggles of early republic writers to find a national voice while acceding the inevitability of British tradition dismissed as simply reactionary, and not creative, their art merely a component of their politics (contra New Critical metrics). Early republic writers at best foregrounded Irving’s Sketch-Book in 1818. Even then, early national texts were read as harbingers: Brockden Brown as foregrounding Hawthorne or Poe; Freneau, Bryant; or Bartram, Thoreau. Then, starting around 1990, this erasure was redoubled through the lens of Saidian postcolonialism: David Kazanjian, Andrew Doolen, Malini Johar Schueller, John Carlos Rowe, Timothy Marr, Amy Kaplan (twice), and others use that version of postcolonialism to brand even the earliest US culture as unilaterally imperialist. Russ Castronovo’s “‘On Imperialism, see. . .’: Ghosts of the Present in Cultures of United States Imperialism” documents how footnoting Kaplan and Pease’s Cultures of US Imperialism (1993) taps into a narrative of monolithic imperial and racial nationalism in US literature, policy, and culture.

Summarizing this perspective, Michael Warner concisely rephrases the common result of applying colonial discourse theory to the US: “National culture began with a moment of sweeping amnesia about colonialism. Americans learned to think of themselves as living in an immemorial nation, rather than in a colonial interaction of cultures” (63). This version of nationalism imagines the nation as inevitable, the colonial pasts reconstructed to foreordain a nation purged of the paradoxes of contact, conquest, and colonization. As an “immemorial nation,” then, the US transitioned to empire, immediately embarking on paths of internal and external empire building, its literature aiding and abetting the subsequent excesses. These readings have unpacked and explained important aspects of early American culture, clearly moving the field forward in important ways. The texts they address are implicated in the racist and imperialist aspects of nation building.

However, both methods of erasure (traditional and poststructuralist) overlook important elements in the early republic and so risk re-erasing its texts as embarrassments. Ironically, the application of another branch of postcolonial studies—settler theory—should continue to revitalize our study of the decades in question and preserve it in our national literary histories more generally. For instance, the...

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