Settler and Creole Re-Enactment

Settler and Creole Reenactment Edited by

Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb with Daniel Spoth

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Settler and Creole Reenactment

10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

Reenactment History Reenactment has been generally associated with cultural heritage events and living history performances and was seen mainly as the preserve of history buffs and fantasy role players. During the past decade, however, reenactment has emerged as a vital trend in popular as well as scholarly forms of historical representation. It has begun to make its way into historiography as a new concept in the understanding of the past. The Palgrave Reenactment History addresses this new interest and embraces ways of understanding diverse experiments in simulative and affective forms of historical representation. It is hospitable to the study of any practical engagement with the past in which the empirical outcome is determined not by what is known in advance, but by the experience of making it. Common to all these forms of historical representation is an attention to the details of physical, emotional, and psychological experience rather than the sweep of large-scale historical processes, or structures. In one respect reenactment returns the specific historical moment to the discipline of scientific experiment, where what was known once may be known again by means of replicating the original circumstances of the discovery. In another respect it introduces history to passions generated when an individual dwelling in a present moment of time achieves a sympathetic identification with another inhabiting an earlier one. A hypothetical structure becomes a real position. Conjecturalism of this exact and yet powerfully dramatic kind lends reenactment a great emancipatory potential, perhaps in some respects a dangerous one. In ways that other forms of historical representation cannot, reenactment binds the circumstances of the original event to its repetition in order to release energies not usually associated with the garnering of knowledge, and powerful enough to prevent the outcome being predictable. If reenactment is an inquiry whose success depends on the mutuality of cognitive and affective impulses of the mind, implying a new understanding of the task of the reenactor-historian and the very purpose of historical representation, then a critique apt for its novel blend of epistemology and aesthetics is an urgent challenge. The series aims then to survey new kinds of histories by breaking with traditional approaches. Its volumes treat various historical periods, sites, and disciplinary approaches to historical representation – colonialism, realism, affective cognition, literature, music, art, architecture, drama, performance, agriculture and the sea. With its comprehensive scope and its theoretical edge, the series will interrogate different disciplinary approaches to reanimating and representing the past. In so doing, the editors expect that it will cause us to not only examine what we know about the past, but also how we know it. Finally, it will prompt us to inquire into the social and political uses made of historical knowledge in the present. Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb (editors) SETTLER AND CREOLE REENACTMENT Iain McCalman and Paul A. Pickering (editors) HISTORICAL REENACTMENT From Realism to the Affective Turn

Renactment History Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–20286–3 (Hardback) 978–0–230–20287–0 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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Series Editors: Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb and Iain McCalman

Edited By Vanessa Agnew Associate Professor, University of Michigan, USA

and Jonathan Lamb Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, USA

With Daniel Spoth Lecturer, Vanderbilt University, USA

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Settler and Creole Reenactment

Editorial matter and selection © Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb 2009. All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2009.

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Contents

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

1 Introduction to Settlers, Creoles and Historical Reenactment Jonathan Lamb

Section 1

Europe

1

19

2 Settlers, Workers and Soldiers: The Landscape of Total Mobilization Georges Teyssot

21

3 Settlers on the Edge, or Sedentary Nomads: Andrei Platonov and Steppe History Donna Landry

41

4 Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection Christopher Pinney

55

Section 2

America

79

5 Alexander Hamilton and the New Republic’s Creole Complex Sean Goudie

81

6 “The Shrug of Horror”: Creole Performance at King’s Bench James Epstein

94

7 Taxonomies of Terror Colin Dayan

Section 3

107

Africa

121

8 Voortrekkers of the Cold War: Enacting the South African Past and Present in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples Monica Popescu

123

v

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List of Figures

vi Contents

138

10 Failing with Livingstone: A Voyage of Reenactment on Lake Nyassa Iain McCalman

156

Section 4

169

Australia

11 Impossible Historical Reenactments: Invisible Aborigines on TV Chris Healy

171

12 Colonialism and Reenactment Television: Imagining Belonging in Outback House Catriona Elder

193

13 “Blacking Up” for the Explorers of 1951 Stephen Gapps

208

Section 5

221

New Zealand

14 “The finest race of savages the world has seen”: How Empire Turned Out Differently in Australia and New Zealand Mark Williams

223

15 Reenacting Aotearoa, New Zealand Stephen Turner

245

16 Reenactment and the Natural History of Settlement Alex Calder

259

17 Native Reenactments/Living Iterability: Lisa Reihana’s Native Portraits n.19897 Jo Smith

273

Epilogue: Genealogies of Space in Colonial and Postcolonial Reenactment Vanessa Agnew

294

Bibliography

319

Index

336

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9 History Below the Water Line: The Making of Apartheid’s Last Festival Leslie Witz

List of Figures

2.2 4.1 4.2 6.1

11.1 11.2 11.3 13.1

13.2

14.1 14.2 E.1 E.2 E.3 E.4 E.5

The primitive house of the Arya, from Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, The Habitations of Man in all Ages. A Swiss chalet (ancient style) from Julien Guadet, Éléments et théorie de l’architecture. Willow-pattern fragment. The sherd of Amenartas in Rider Haggard’s She. Louisa Calderon on the piquet, from The Trial of Governor T. Picton for Inflicting Torture on Louisa Calderon. Production shot from Alcheringa. Doris Simpson. Bill Onus making boomerangs, c. 1950s. Production shot from Alcheringa. Arthur Johnson. Reenactors of Charles Sturt’s 1830 exploration party for the Jubilee of Federation Celebrations of 1951 are under “attack” by European Australians dressed as Aborigines. At Balranald in south-western New South Wales, an ABC Television documentary crew found “authentic” Aborigines to participate in the filming ambush Sturt’s party. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 January 1951, p. 3. James Barry, The Rev Thomas Kendall and the Maori chiefs Hongi and Waikato, 1820. Benjamin Duterrau, ‘The Conciliation’ (1840). “The new world.” Shaun Tan, The Arrival. “The ship foredeck.” Shaun Tan, The Arrival. “The arrival hall.” Shaun Tan, The Arrival. “Migrant inspection.” Shaun Tan, The Arrival. Tom Roberts, Coming South 1885–86, oil on canvas 63.5 × 52.2 cm.

22

24 58 76 101

175 183 188 208

208

226 227 309 311 312 313 315

vii

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2.1

The contributors to this volume embraced the challenge of conceiving of colonial and postcolonial issues in terms of historical reenactment. We would like to thank them for both their disciplinary inventiveness and their historical reach. Christopher Pinney’s contribution originally appeared in Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2003): 125–61; Monica Popescu’s piece was first published as “Mirrorings: Communists, Capitalists and Voortrekkers of the Cold War” in Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late-Cold War Conflicts, ed. Gary Baines and Peter Vale (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2008): 42–55; and Sean Goudie’s essay appeared as the second chapter of his book Creole America: the West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). We gratefully acknowledge the permission to reprint these essays. Thanks are due, too, to our respective institutions. Vanderbilt University underwrote the project from its beginnings in the “Settlers, Creoles, and Re-enactment of History Conference,” held at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, Nashville in November 2005. Vanderbilt University provided Jonathan Lamb with generous leave and research funding and the University of Michigan’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures supported Vanessa Agnew’s research leave. We would also like to recognize the research assistants who provided unstinting support—Amanda Hagood, Seth Howes, and Daniel Spoth. Daniel Spoth’s aid with copyediting, author liaison, and image permissions has been invaluable and we salute his role in the project. Our editor at Palgrave, Michael Strang, has likewise been a pleasure to work with and we gratefully acknowledge his commitment to the Palgrave series on historical reenactment. Our respective families, Bridget and Charlie, and Kader and Sefa, provided numerous kindnesses and moments of inspiration. We thank them most dearly. Finally, the Pacific community lost two influential scholars while the volume was in preparation—Australian historian and anthropologist Greg Dening and Tongan writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa. May their ideas about historical performance, cross-cultural relations, and indigenous histories live on.

viii

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Acknowledgements

Vanessa Agnew is Associate Professor in the German Department, University of Michigan, where she researches and teaches on the cultural history of eighteenth-century music, travel, and historical reenactment. She is the author of Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (2008) and Georg Forster’s Voyage Round the World (forthcoming), and coeditor of several volumes on reenactment. She has held research fellowships at the Australian National University, Universität Paderborn, National Maritime Museum, Humboldt Universität, and Forschungszentrum Europäische Aufklärung. She is currently working on a monograph on German historical reenactment and a travel book about patterns. More information at http://www.lsa.umich.edu/german/german/faculty Alex Calder is a member of the English Department at the University of Auckland, where he teaches nineteenth and twentieth century literature from New Zealand and the United States. His research currently focuses on the literary and cultural history of settlement and on the works of Herman Melville. He has been a recipient of a Marsden award, and recent publications include editions of Old New Zealand and Other Writings by F. E. Maning, and Tales of the Maori Bush by James Cowan. Colin Dayan is Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Her books include Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction; Haiti, History, and the Gods; and The Story of Cruel and Unusual. Catriona Elder is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology and Social Policy Department at the University of Sydney. Her research interests are in the broad field of race relations and national identity. She is the author of Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity (2007) and Dreams and Nightmares of a White Australia (2009). Her current research explores ideas of national belonging in Australian historical television mini-series. James Epstein is Professor in the Department of History, Vanderbilt University. He is the author most recently of In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain. He is presently working on a study of Britain and Trinidad in the age of revolution. ix

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Notes on the Contributors

Stephen Gapps’ Doctoral Thesis, Performing the Past: A Cultural History of Historical Re-enactments (2003), looked at the long history of historical reenactments and its relationship with the contemporary practices of self-styled “re-enactors.” Stephen currently works as a Consultant Historian and has is co-director of a “History Events Management Company” HISTORICA. His current research interests lie in the problems and possibilities of historical reenactment and public commemoration. In the course of his research, Stephen has been known to dress as an ancient Greek, a Viking warrior, a medieval minstrel, a British redcoat soldier and an Irish convict rebel. Sean X. Goudie is Associate Professor of English and a member of the Advisory Board for the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State. His book Creole America: the West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006), was awarded the 2007 Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. His current book project examines the ways in which the Caribbean region becomes a primary locus for U.S. empire building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by treating artistic and literary proponents of such expansionism as well as its detractors in North America and the West Indies. Chris Healy teaches cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include: From the Ruins of Colonialism (1997), South Pacific Museums (co-ed., 2006) and Forgetting Aborigines (2008). Jonathan Lamb has taught at the University of Auckland (NZ), Princeton, and Vanderbilt. Currently (2009) he is a visiting fellow at Kings College, Cambridge. He is author of Preserving the Self in the South Seas (2001) and The Evolution of Sympathy (Pickering and Chatto 2009). He is completing a book on things and the imagination for Princeton University Press, as well as two further collections—on maritime reenactment and affective cognition—for Palgrave, together with a book on the psychological effects of scurvy. Donna Landry is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Kent, and the Director of the Kent Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century. Her most recent book, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture, has just been published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. She is currently part of the team organizing a project of historical reenactment, The Evliya Çelebi Ride, in which following on horseback in the hoofprints of the great seventeenth-

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x Notes on the Contributors

Notes on the Contributors xi

Iain McCalman is currently Research Professor at the University of Sydney. He has written numerous articles in British, American and European History and Literature journals on Modern British, European and Imperial cultural history. He has also written and edited numbers of books, including Radical Underworld (2001); Gold: Lost Histories and Forgotten Objects of Australia (2001), his much acclaimed The Romantic Age: An Oxford Companion to British Culture, 1776–1832, and, The Last Alchemist. Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (2003), which has been translated into 12 languages. He is currently working on a monograph for Penguin (Australia), Simon and Shuster (UK) and J. J. Norton (US) entitled “Darwin’s Armada. The Story of Four Scientific Voyagers to the Southern Oceans and their fight for evolution”. This is to be the basis of a TV Series (ABC, Canada, NZ and Germany) and exhibitions at the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Macleay Museum, University of Sydney. Christopher Pinney is Visiting Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. His publications combine contemporary ethnography with the historical archaeology of particular media. His current book projects include Lessons From Hell (concerned with popular Indian depictions of punishment), a “visual history” of modern India, and Visual Encounters. Monica Popescu is Assistant Professor of English at McGill University, where she teaches and researches postcolonial literatures. She is completing a book manuscript entitled South African Literature Beyond the Cold War, focusing on the role of Eastern Europe in the South African cultural imaginary. She has published articles on cultural translation, nationalism, the Cold War in Southern Africa, and a book on the politics of violence in post-Communist films. Jo Smith is Senior Lecturer in the Media Studies Program at Victoria University of Wellington. She researches in the area of postcolonial media theory, film theory and new media studies. Georges Teyssot has taught at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, where he was Director of the Ph.D. program in architecture.

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century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, and the nineteenth-century English travellers, Wilfrid Scawen and Lady Anne Blunt, promises to reveal hidden traces of rural worlds vanished, vanishing, and as yet unknown.

Presently, he is Professor at Laval University’s School of Architecture in Quebec (Canada) and he teaches at the ETH in Zurich. He has directed a collective volume entitled The Architecture of Western Gardens (2000, 2002). Recently, he was the curator of an exhibition on The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life at the Canadian Center for Architecture (Montréal, June–November 1998), and the editor of a volume on the same exhibit (1999). Stephen Turner is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Auckland. His studies focus on settler histories and indigenous media studies. He is currently revising a book entitled Broken History: First Law and Second Settlement in Aotearoa/New Zealand for publication. Mark Williams teaches English at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. His most recent book is Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914 (2006), which he co-authored with Jane Stafford. Leslie Witz is a professor in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa. His research centers around how different histories are created and represented in the public domain through memorials, museums and festivals and tourism. He is the project leader of “The Heritage Disciplines,” a National Research Foundation funded project based in the History Department. His book, Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts, was published by Indiana university Press in 2003. He has also written two books for popular audiences: Write Your Own History (1988) and How to Write Essays (1990). He is also the chair of the Board of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum.

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xii Notes on the Contributors

1 Jonathan Lamb Vanderbilt University

Historical reenactment begins with the assumption that history can be managed: it can be framed, reproduced, brought closer, and it can be made part of our human experience again, in a reassuring way. In the process it will become not only more vivid, but also more intelligible and shapely. The past shall be made more intimately part of the present, and because it comes so close we shall get to know history as it really is. The emphasis on realism in reenactment—having just the right fabric for the clothes, just the right food in the kitchen, and just the right lock on the gun—offers a challenge which, if successfully met, allows the reenactor simultaneously to represent and to experience what happened in history, and to live out its authenticity in the eye of the world as a special form of mimesis. There might be tears, shouting, and sulks on the way to this achievement, but such disturbances are the incidental guarantees of the truth of the performance and the pleasure that goes with it: nothing good comes easy. However, in the excitements, trials, and conflicts of the reenactment it is often possible to observe the germ of something that is not quite shapely or symmetrical, something that can skew the whole performance and leave it looking not at all as we had expected. We can call it contingency, chance or accident; but whatever we call it, if it grows from a germ into an event, it takes history out of our hands and turns it into History, a painful and surprising force with its own drift and meaning, and perhaps too fiercely obscure to be really known at all. When History happens to us in this unpredictable way the passions of reenactment become very powerful indeed, and instead of possessing the past we are possessed by it. All the essays in this volume tackle to some degree the uncalculated element in historical reenactment; and they do it from the point of 1

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Introduction to Settlers, Creoles and Historical Reenactment

view of settler or creole societies. History is important for settlers because they are very directly implicated in the processes of change— or at least that is the opinion of the mother cultures from which they spring. Why is it that the American brothers and sisters of the English dwindled into cousins? In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Montesquieu, Buffon, and Raynal explained this change in terms of the food, climate, and soil of new places, which triggered changes in the physique and temperament of the people who had gone there, often for the worse. Raynal recurred to an ancient belief that movement over land and sea itself transformed travelers and voyagers even before they arrived in the new land, leaving them different in ways that they themselves could not fully assess. Ovid begins his Metamorphoses by tracing of the origin of metamorphosis in general to the cutting down of trees and the laying of the keels of ships. This commenced the art of navigation and the growth of trade, heralding the onset of the age of iron and the decay of all good things as people became more avaricious and savage in proportion as they became more mobile. Metropolitan accounts of the colonies are filled with abusive epithets expressive of this change when it was conceived, as it generally was, to be for the worse. Andrew Trollope said the Old English of Ireland were “degenerated from all manhood and humanity… worse than dogs” (quoted in Canny 1987: 168). William Douglass said the British settlers in North America were “like the wild Irish, they dread labor more than poverty; like dogs they are always either eating or sleeping” (Douglass 1755: 153). Told of a woman who had escaped from Fort Augustus to rejoin the Indian tribe that had adopted her, James Boswell said, “She must have been an animal, a beast;” and Samuel Johnson went one better, “Sir, she was a speaking cat” (Boswell 1980: 912). In Sherlock Holmes stories, people from the colonies are generally remarkable for certain sinister characteristics, such as belonging to secret societies, being victims of diseases unknown in England, or having acquired knowledge of exotic drugs and poisonous creatures. Even if they are benevolently inclined, like Magwitch in Great Expectations, their generosity is somehow monstrous. For settlers and creoles this is a troubling account of their history for two reasons. The first is that it challenges so directly their amour propre, for often it is exactly the identity of self that is put in doubt. The second is that they cannot account for a history which has made them different from what they were, for it involves two disparate eras and two different selves, so (like many a story of metamorphosis in Ovid)

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2 Settler and Creole Reenactment

the victim cannot tell it. Under these pressures, and having arrived in what she believes is Australia, Lewis Carroll’s Alice cries, “I can’t explain myself because I’m not myself, you see.” In response to the first problem settlers emphasized the novelty of their lives and the vividness of their imaginations. In the New World, the peninsular Spanish noticed in the criollos, the Spaniards who had been born there, characteristics peculiar to them, such as their love of ostentation, the liberties accorded to the women, their passion for tobacco, their highly figurative modes of expression, and the different shapes and caparisons of their saddles. In the plantation culture of the American South, there developed an extravagant cult of honor centered on the punctilios of the duel and the chivalrous worship of Southern womanhood. In eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels, West Indian creoles and the East Indian nabobs appear as defiantly passionate, spendthrift and exotic, brandishing or performing the fact that they are no longer recognizably English. The response to the second problem of settlement is less coherent. There is a melancholy counterpoint to the sense of being different that no amount of performance will ease. Settlers who felt that they had changed were never quite certain why, for they were the creatures of the change, inside it as it were and unable to take a view of it. Thus Antoinette of Wide Sargasso Sea confesses, “I often wonder who I am and where is my country and why was I ever born at all” (Rhys 1966: 67). “We’ve been changed,” cry the Creole children in A High Wind in Jamaica, and one of them complains, “But they never said they were going to change us” (Hughes 1999: 89). Jonathan Swift said, “I am a free Man in England, and do I become a Slave in six hours by crossing the Channel?” (Swift 1935: 40). Yes, you do change by moving—that seems to be the consensus on both sides. The question is whether movement drives history, or whether the force of history impels us to move. All settler communities confronted history in three pieces. The most recent part was their own experience of a new world, rather older was the history of the mother country, and oldest of all was the history of the aboriginal people of the land. How were first the two to be annealed, or should the separation between them be confirmed? Well, creoles could in some sense live up to the division, and celebrate it. Ovid was first published in Mexico City in 1577, and when the figures of Perseus, Actaeon, and Daphne emerged in the frescoes of Ixmiquilpan as centaurs, severed heads, and shrubs, a blend of preHispanic and Ovidian imagery, they did not represent allegories of a

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Jonathan Lamb 3

hybrid Christianity but the proofs of the perpetual force of metamorphosis, according to Serge Gruzinski (Gruzinski 2002: 89–90). Under its influence the relation between settlers and indigenes could tighten. The history of the creole elite of New Spain was based on a wholly new concept of time, derived from the study of Aztec calendrical wheels, and delivered in a narrative that blended the conquista with a mythology of local Aztec gods (Canizares-Esguerra 2001: 282–5). For his part Thomas Jefferson and his fellow founding fathers invented a history that stretched from a mythic Saxony westwards, ever westwards, in a perpetual renewal of uncorrupted civic virtue. W. G. Atherstone, writing of the wilder parts of South African geology, found it hard to give an intelligible account of what he had seen precisely because geological history seemed to have gone into reverse: “The rocks have a tendency backward” (Atherstone 1978: 144). Reading these “volumes of stone” did not make the usual sense, and their nonsense invaded the narrative of settlement. Beyond the ranges of the Southern Alps of the South Island of New Zealand, Samuel Butler imagined a community where time itself had been turned back, where machines were lodged in museums, and where the logic of consequences and therefore of narrative was quite inverted. Frederick Maning, trying to give an account of his life in the Hokianga, in New Zealand’s North Island, confessed that it was so singular he could not tell it straightforwardly: “I never yet could get the proper knack of telling a story… By no effort I can make can I hold on to the thread of my story. This is digression on digression and I cannot help it” (Maning 1863: 169). Some very special effort at representation is needed in order to make these historical difficulties intelligible. Herbert Guthrie-Smith, an historian of New Zealand settlement, introduces his remarkable story of the changes caused by animals, weeds, humans and weather on the landscape of his sheep-run as follows, “If the following pages have any value it is because of the insistence on the cumulative effect of trivialities … only to a small number of observers opportunity is offered of marking and tracing them; only a trifling minority continue in long enough occupation of any one area, fully to be cognizant of their marshaled immensity” (Guthrie-Smith 1969: 195). So the options seems to range between a preposterous history that runs backward, or another that curls around itself digressively, or another that is the sum of its contingent details. How would any of these be reenacted? What would the purpose of reenactment be—to make sense of the changes experienced in a new place; to explain the importance of those changes to people in other nations; to reconcile

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the claims of native peoples with the fact of settlement, or to perform an extravaganza for the sake of performance itself? If the emphasis falls on making sense of change and explaining its importance, history needs somehow stand still so that its picture can be taken and represented. If it is to be a performance, then explanatory force yields to spectacle, and history is what each spectator makes of it. It seems as if what is required is a reenactment that falls between these two extremes, being mobile enough to do justice to a history of change, but not in itself so protean as to lose a sense of the sweep of time, or of the crimes and injustices that have occurred in the course of it. In the following essays we shall see all four versions of reenactment in operation, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident, and sometimes by cunning adaptation to the pressure of contingency.

Europe We start in Europe, assumed to be the source of settler emigrations and the point of reference for a creole’s sense of difference. But it is clear that the oceans which carry people and goods to and from the metropolitan centers, and the vast frontiers to the east and south of nations such as Germany and Russia, represent an opportunity to cross them and a challenge to stay where one finds oneself. Far from being the still point of the turning world, Europe historically has been a vortex, perpetually modified by migrations, settlements and new migrations. Bereft of better explanations, Leo Tolstoy summed up the War of 1812 as the vast movement of people from the west to the east, then back again. Georges Teyssot deals with Germany and France and Donna Landry with Russia, but they share a historical model that involves two clear alternatives to migration. Either the movement of people terminates in settlement, where an intimate relation to the land takes place, or is claimed to have taken place; or it results in nomadism and the desire for movement becomes perpetual. Teyssot’s starting point is the architecture of the original European dwelling, the chalet or cottage. One school of historians took the settlement point of view, and understood the relationship of these buildings to the land to be like that of trees, organic and immemorial. Another school maintained on the contrary that peasant huts were derived from wagons and chariots, ancient but exotic structures harking back to a nomadic origin. When it came to defining the European human type, with the so-called dolichocephalic northern Europeans on the one hand, and the

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so-called brachycephalics originating in Asia Minor on the other, the same difference was observed, with one tending towards migration and the other to settlement. A stable conception of national boundaries required some sort of adjustment between movement over the land and plantation upon it. Here the importance of reenactment in German ideologies of landholding becomes clear. The Bund Deutscher Heimatschutz believed that that Siedlung, or settlement, could be defended only by a mobilization which reenacted the pairing of its original formation, combining migration and the putting down of roots. The ancient migrations of the Germano-Franks thus predicted the pattern of invasion in the First World War. At the same time that the strategic reenactment of movement and settlement was being theorized, an earlier distinction between the crowd (inchoate, restless, undirected) and the Volk (stationary and monumental) was being replaced by historians such as Siegfried Kracauer and novelists such as Thomas Mann with a new social category of the Mass, associated with movement on a grand and perpetual scale—Total Mobilization. The most articulate prophet of Total Mobilization was Ernst Jünger, who saw the reenactment of the occupation of Eastern Europe as an epochal event that carried reenactment back beyond the strategic deployment of the Heimatschutz to the migrations of whole peoples during the decline of the Roman Empire. He traced three levels of mobilization—partial (ancien regime), general (French Revolution), and total (World War I). In this transformation all individuals turn into types, and types act in concert on a huge scale over landscapes that are transformed too by “a new will of another nature.” This will is no longer human; it is mechanical, architectural, logistical. History is now a congress of personifications—planning and Gestaltung; its memorials are the network of fortifications that laced European coasts and frontiers; its aim, domination; its home, No-Man’s-Land. Whatever survives of reenactment in this plenary absorption of human will and energy is history’s own business. In Landry’s reading of a novel of the Russian Revolution written by Andrei Platonov in the 1920s but not published until 1988, Chevengur, the same opposition between settlement and movement is set out. Peasants have settled on the land establishing villages and gardens, depending uncertainly upon the reality and stability of the land for their title to hold it; but the impulse that brought them there in the first place was nomadic and predatory, and its vehicle: horses. So village confronts steppe, garden opposes frontier, the dour holding of property stands against the mobility and strong feelings of nomads.

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Between these two extremes Bolshevism interposes the mean of sedentarism, the temporary halt of mounted men. In sedentarism there lies nested a layer of reenacted histories—of mounted Cossacks, Turcoman tribesmen, the flying columns of the Ottoman Empire, as well as looser confederations of bandits and adventurers, all of whom roamed and then paused to consolidate the frontiers they had expanded or to enjoy the goods they had plundered. The two revolutionaries in Platonov’s novel, riding eastward on their mounts, aim to collar for the benefit of the new Russia “the agency of history as the movement of men on horses.” And this they intend to bring about by means of a measured reenactment of the national narrative, softening the harshness of violent movement and soothing the anxiety of stasis. Fragments of the past, experienced as lived similarities, are meant to trigger presentiments of a sedentarized revolutionary future. The agency of history is not so easily adapted to human ends. What is in fact reenacted in Chevengur is the boundless violence of steppe history. When the village is attacked by Cossacks fighting for the white Russians, “the agency of history as men on horses” gets a new, unconsoling meaning, one that places reenactment outside the scope of human intention. The promise of a reprisal infinitely more violent than this Cossack raid is made and soon kept. Platonov sets the stage for the forced collectivizations and migrations of Stalinist Russia. Once again reenactment proves to be a Pandora’s box, releasing forces that cannot be controlled by performance, no matter how elegant. Chris Pinney is digging in his garden when he comes across a shard of willow pattern. Like the hat, three caps and two non-matching shoes that confront Crusoe on the beach of his island, this fragment left over from the trade driven between the East and the West in the last five centuries gives the gardener a hard and implacable stare. Thinking of the foolish self-congratulation of the allegorical picture hung in East India House, The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, Pinney wants to know how Britannia was altered by these things she was sent, and how her history was entangled in theirs. Why was it that powerful addictions to spices from the Moluccas, particularly pepper, caused the Americas to be discovered? Could it be that imperialism arises from an appetite, an impulse of the palate and stomach? And why is it that the fragment he uncovers is not in fact Chinese at all, but the product of a factory such as the Caughley pottery in Shropshire that specialized from the late eighteenth century in imitating Chinese export porcelain? Again like the head- and footwear on Crusoe’s beach, this bit of willow pattern is emphatically not exotic; nor is it familiar.

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What intrigues him is its fascinating illegibility; his attention is held by its contingent appearance and its adhesive power: it commands his eye and sticks to his imagination like a lamprey. Pinney notes that the entangling effect arising from the circulation of materials between the East and the West can best be described, in the words of Theodor W. Adorno, as a series of ahistorical (and implacable) demands made by things upon human beings. Their color, texture, shape, and glow prevents Britannia (for example) from conceiving of herself as a unity or as a model of rational national enterprise: she is forced to yield to the aesthetic power of objects, and to observe that they have become as personate as she by virtue of the energy of which they are possessed. Such things show themselves, impress their creole materiality upon our senses. They have agency. Pinney points to three examples of such objects in fiction of the imperial era—the Sherlock Holmes story “The Speckled Band,” Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, and Rider Haggard’s She. In each work, there is an object with the power of a fetish. It has its ostensible origin in the East and seems to hold the key to a mystery—a poisonous snake; a stolen jewel; and the sherd of Amenartas, a kind of Rosetta stone. Although each is proffered by the storyteller as a solution to a puzzle or the deciphering of a code, in fact all three things reenact the implacable stare of objects. It is the look of them that is most important. They arrest our gaze and upset the factitious principles of unity, reason, narrative intelligibility, and history on which our primary distinction between subject and object is founded. Each of these three stories can be treated as a reenactment of the shock of finding things acting like persons, a shock that happens to us again and again, capable of occurring in any place at any time, and for which we always try to blame the East. Pinney locates in extreme aesthetics our receptivity to the sense of the independence of events. That sense seems to be what historical reenactment always tries futilely to control inasmuch as the independence of things other than ourselves is what ultimately and inevitably it exhibits.

The Americas In the figure of Alexander Hamilton, Sean Goudie locates the focus of tensions that disturbed the new republic of the USA. Hamilton was a creole just like Jefferson and Adams, yet they abused him as a Creole bastard, even more colorfully as a Bolingbrokian creole bastard, as if he embodied the illegitimacy and degeneracy conventionally associated

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with Europeans who settled far away from home. Why was Hamilton the exemplar, and not themselves? Did not Jefferson take to task Buffon for suggesting that all species on the American continent, indigenous as well as introduced, lacked the stature and vitality of their European counterparts? Well, part of the answer lies in the axis chosen by Hamilton for the trade and development of the republic, which for him lay in an arc from the west to the east, comprising the planter states of the mainland and the islands of the Caribbean. Adams and Jefferson looked steadily westward, whither Bishop Berkeley had foreseen the course of empire taking its way. They wanted as little to do as possible with the colonies of Britain, or with Britain herself, who set a high price for entry into this lucrative trading area. But underlying this purely economic and political disagreement lay another about the succession of creole cultures and the nature of creole history itself. By encouraging the frontier to ply to the west, Jefferson hoped for a perpetual renovation of the patriotic fervor of the revolution. Living by agriculture and avoiding the nexus of world trade, the American farmer would recover in its full measure the intrepidity and moral virtue of his Saxon forefathers. Creolism was for Jefferson a series of reenactments of settlement made necessary by the kind of degeneracy he and Adams noted in Hamilton, and which Guillaume Raynal had noted in the slave plantations of the Caribbean and the American South. Stepping westward involved a series of reengagements with the grand original of civic virtue, each made necessary by the growing imperfection of the last. To go in the opposite direction was to turn the clock of patriotic progress backward and to collapse into historical chaos and moral illegitimacy. The essays of James Epstein and Colin Dayan between them cover issues of reenactment in the zone of Hamilton’s arc, comprising the United States, the Caribbean and Britain. Epstein concentrates on a unique example reenacted creole history when the torture of Luisa Calderon, a Trinidadian creole, was reenacted in a London courtroom. It occurred during the trial of Thomas Picton, the British governor who had ordered that she be picqueted, i.e. hung by her wrist, her other wrist tied to her ankle, while her toe took the whole weight of her body, supported by nothing but a sharp stake. When she adapted her body to the angles of this torment as a supplement to the picture of it shown the jurors, the effect on the court was such that the judge, Lord Ellenborough, thought it prejudicial to an impartial view of the evidence. In an age when politicians and the stage were closely aligned, and history was as it were acted before it was reenacted, Ellenborough

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and the journal The Anti-Jacobin, which took a very dim view of such public excitement, were in the minority. Epstein points to the Gothic dimensions of the scene, where Picton plays Montoni to Calderon’s Emily St Aubert; a parallel utterly apt, considering how, since the publication of Sophia Lee’s The Recess, history was being retailed to young women such as Austen’s Catherine Morland in Gothic form, with the same adjacency of heroines to instruments of torture. The Gothic plot of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre recapitulates the miserable imprisonment of a creole female, this time in an English setting, a story returned to its Caribbean roots by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea. Colin Dayan’s essay considers the current War on Terror, and the tortures its sponsors have illegally encouraged, as a series of historical replays of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, where he suggested that the delight we take in sublime scenes is owing to modified terror. In his career as an actor on the Parliamentary stage, Burke was condemned to behold in Hastings’s Bengal and Robespierre’s Paris examples of terror unmodified, what he took to be the sheer expression of absolute power usurped (in Robespierre’s case) in the name of the will of the people. The politicians who also cite “we the people” as the authority for their decision to abridge our rights (and human rights in general) in pursuit of the war against terror, occupy the same absolutist position as Burke’s Robespierre by officially defending what effectually they deny. Dayan understands the history of this prevaricating absolutism as one in which the torture and civil death of human beings has been the price willingly paid by those fending off some specious Armageddon. All the way from the cancellation of the person of the slave to lockdown in high security prisons, whether the threat has been represented as the horror of a slave revolt, a tidal wave of drug-related crime, an army of Islamo-fascists, or Palestinians bent on the extirpation of the state of Israel, the reaction of a cowed electorate has been the same eager relinquishing of its liberties. With the alibi of these perpetually reinvented terrors, state terrorism (or what is now known as securitization) gives itself all latitude in dismantling the protection of the laws. It is interesting that Dayan’s history involves the replay specifically of settler violence, comprising the creole elites of America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, although that is seldom how they characterize themselves or their histories.

Africa In 1838 the Boers of South Africa made the Great Trek to the Orange Free State in order to detach themselves from the sphere of British imper10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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ial government. It was a remarkable proof of settler identity and independence of spirit. Sixty years later testimony of this sturdy pursuit of independence was given once again in the war fought by the Boer commandos against the British army, when a conflict expected to have been a cakewalk became a major war. The memory of the Great Trek as a founding moment has much in common with the memory of other founding moments, such as the Fourth of July. Recently Peter de Bolla has shown that the Declaration of Independence was in fact a constellation of different moments, none of them identical with Jefferson’s recollection of when it was delivered and how it was composed. But every year when that founding moment is remembered and reenacted, each American experiences what de Bolla calls a fantasized encounter with the real. This is possible because there is a degree of unanimity across partisan and racial divisions about the significance of the selfevident truths the Declaration announced, and the value of the republic it brought into being. In South Africa it was different. After the Second World War, Boer settler nationalism enjoyed an era of dominance which led to such appalling abuses of power, particularly under the doctrine of apartheid, that there was no longer any consensus about the reality of history, only about the fantasy. History could abet any agenda. Thus reenactments of the Great Trek, instead of commemorating an antiimperial assertion of independence, became vehicles of bigotry and intolerance. Among hardline South African nationalists this “Manichean politics” generated such a degree of historical and political confusion that General Hendrik van den Bergh, caught between his detestation of the Soviet Union and his horror of Western decadence, declared, “Communism is the highest form of capitalism.” In unraveling the continual but far from homogeneous metamorphoses of the narrative of the Great Trek, Monica Popescu provides a detailed background for Leslie Witz’s study of the last historical reenactment of the apartheid regime. In 1988 at Mossel Bay, a whitesonly beach, it was resolved to reenact a founding moment in the history of civilization and Christian faith, namely the landing of Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese navigator whose only recorded act in that place was the slaying of a native. But for a South African government feeling increasingly isolated, this seemed to present an opportunity to celebrate the multicultural achievements of this settler culture. So Dias’s arrival was to take place to the accompaniment Israeli, Italian, and Indian dancers, a Scots pipe band, a Malay choir, and gumboot dancing. The highpoint of the multicultural event was to be a display of mass rhythmic gymnastics by a troupe of black policemen. The whole plan fell into disarray. Because it was being held in a place reserved for whites, it 10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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was boycotted by the black and colored communities. The black policemen were injured in a traffic accident; and since no other black South Africans made themselves available, the man playing Dias had to be greeted by a throng of whites in blackface. Since the historical record itself was slender and equivocal, this reenactment ended up as a fantasized encounter not with the real but with fantasy itself. Iain McCalman’s reenactment of David Livingstone’s navigation of Lake Nyassa was intended to be a part of his personal history, a journey back to his childhood in Malawi, a time when he learned “to love African habitats as my own.” But a series of unpredictable events turned this pleasant exercise in nostalgia into an experience more sinister, terrifying and painful than he could have imagined. An attack of amoebic dysentery and an encounter with two of Hastings Banda’s secret police introduced him directly and physically to an unlovely intimacy with the past. Livingstone discovered that the lake he had come across was a highway for slave-traders carrying their human goods to the Indian Ocean. His horror at what he discovered deepened as his party succumbed to repertoire of diseases. McCalman’s mood and physical condition kept grim time with Livingstone’s. “I felt caught up in some squalid reenactment of slave days,” he confesses, as he finds that an experience he thought he was going to possess has actually possessed him: “a reenactive experience that I’d never intended, and one with a power that I would never forget.” Here is disturbing personal testimony to that force of history—History—outside the limits of human intention or government.

Australasia In the former colonies of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand settler identity has been shaped—not always happily—by relations with the – indigenous people, the Aborigines and the Maori. The present multiculturalism of Australian society disguises a history of violent dispossession of native peoples, long thought to have no right to the land on which they led, or were assumed to lead, a nomadic existence. It was within living memory that Aborigines got the vote, and it is only recently that the victims of a post-war policy of forced adoption of Aboriginal children by white parents—known as the Lost Generation—have had this injustice publicly acknowledged. The land rights of the indigenous people of Australia have been difficult to assert except on islands, where proof of their continuous settlement has been easier to establish. Successive conservative governments, unwilling to

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offend powerful mining interests, have taken an obtuse pride in refusing to sponsor what they call “black armband history.” In New Zealand – a bitter war was fought between settlers and Maori in the nineteenth century, leading to extensive confiscations of native land. Despite the founding treaty of the colony, the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, which – promised to protect Maori rights to land and fisheries, large tracts of land, forest, and foreshore were alienated, with scant chance of redress until the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975. This has led to some landmark decisions in favor of native title, accompanied by substantial monetary compensation. Owing to the renewed importance of the treaty, struck between the Crown and the chiefs of many important iwi or tribes, New Zealand’s postcolonial history has been dominated by what is known there as biculturalism. This accords – – – primary importance to Maori and settler (known as Pakeha) interests in determining the history and the future of the country. It is an arrangement almost the inverse of that governing Australia, where the claims of post-war immigrant cultures have largely overwhelmed those of native people, a state of affairs that old settler interests, or what used to be known as the squatocracy, have readily countenanced. The different histories of settler nationalism in Australia and New Zealand are the theme of Mark Williams’s broad-ranging essay. In both he identifies a period of “enactment” in the nineteenth century. In New Zealand this took place after the wars between the settlers and the – Maori, when there was no longer any threat to the colony. It involved – – – – a heroization of the Maori, a cult of the Pakeha Maori or early settlers as tangata whenua, adopted people of the land, combined with a utopian view of the country itself, rechristened “Maoriland.” In Australia there was a cult of the White Aborigine, i.e. the heroic settler with lots of country skills, for whom actual Aborigines provided a faint backdrop, or none at all. Reenactment dates from various post-war purgations of settler colonial guilt that nevertheless rely on ethically inflected elements of enactment. This is what the New Zealand poet J. K. Baxter brings to bi-culturalism and what the Australian novelist Patrick White brings to multiculturalism. Of course there is a difference between what is consciously reenacted and what History decides to make of it. In Keri Hulme’s novel the bone people, the violence of settler history – and Maori culture erupts in unexpected and distinctly unpleasant – ways, as it does again in Once Were Warriors, by the Maori novelist Alan Duff. A fascinating but mordant debate was started in Australia after the publication of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005). In this historical tale of the settlement of the Hawkesbury River in New South

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Wales, Grenville was concerned with a settler family called Thornhill, and she made no attempt to include the Aboriginal side of the events, other than descriptively. She confessed, “I don’t pretend to understand or be able to empathize particularly with a tribal Aboriginal person from 200 years ago.” The historian Inga Clendinnen thought the result of this reenactment was a partial and “untutored” empathy with white settlers. To the question Grenville posed herself in writing the story, “What would I have done in that situation, and what sort of a person would that make me?” Clendinnen answered, “Grenville would not have been Grenville in that situation. We cannot post ourselves back in time” (Clendinnen 2006: 20). Williams is attentive to this advice. He points out that discrepancies, “or even different levels of attention within a common ideology, can produce real differences in the process of their reenactment, and reenactments are always affected by the contexts in which they occur.” We may effect historical changes, but that doesn’t stop History from affecting us. One effect of settler reenactment that Grenville is not shy of pointing out is the feint that reduces or erases the outline of the indigene without seeming to mean to do so. This is the theme of Chris Healy’s essay on Alcheringa, an Australian TV series on the lives of preEuropean Aborigines made in the early 1960s. When Bill Onus, the Aboriginal narrator, says to his white audience, “Come back with me,” where is he taking them, will he still be Bill Onus when he gets there, and what will they be—prehistoric settlers, settlers before settlement? This is an exercise of what Stephen Turner calls the art of making natives appear to disappear. Healy calls it, “a kind of magic of appearance and disappearance,” owing to the fact that, as he says, “‘Our primitives’ are, in this televisual rendering, occupying ‘our’ country … the relative emptiness of the mise en scène … connects the world of Alcheringa to the cultural imaginary of terra nullius.” Healy mentions an example of disappearance on the actual set of the series, when their lead actor was arrested by the local police at Lake Tyers on a trumped up charge of carnal knowledge, for which he was convicted and sentenced, and no-one on the set heard of him again. Up until that time Michael Arthur Johnson had been working at the General Motors plant in Melbourne; so it was in an odd way the reenactment itself that disappeared him. His fate is not dissimilar to that of the Aborigines in Kate Grenville’s reenactment of the settlement of the Hawkesbury River. In the Jubilee of 1951 celebrating 50 years of Australian federation, there were reenactments not of James Cook and Arthur Philip arriving

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on the shores of the colony, but instead of the explorations of the hinterland of South Australia and the Blue Mountains. Stephen Gapps notes that no provision had been made by the organizers of these pageants for the many aboriginal people encountered by the original explorers, but as if to make up for the deficit, numerous white Australians blacked up and greeted, and sometimes even ambushed, the reenactors. Gapps refers this spontaneous mimicry to “minstrelsy” and is careful to assign it no particular motive. He suggests that it is a form of anti-pageantry, a sort of do-it-yourself history; that it is a way of showing that Aborigines have not gone away (whether that is considered to be a bad or a good thing); that it is a performance intended to redefine rural and urban relations; and finally that it is “a comic festival of racist lampooning.” It is hard however not to see it in a light similar to that which Leslie Witz sheds on the 1988 reenactment in Mossel Bay, where whites in blackface supplant the natives who cannot or will not participate. One way or another, their performance confirms the disappearance of those they seem to make appear. Similarly in Catriona Elder’s discussion of the Australian “house” series, Outback House, the two aboriginal contributors to this mimic act of occupancy disappear. Mal builds himself a shelter away from the house, and Danielle, descended like Mal from the Wiradjuri people who once lived on this land, leaves the series in episode six after a row with the woman playing her mistress. Stephen Turner analyzes in some depth this phenomenon of the appearance of disappearance of natives in the reenactment of settlement, noting certain preposterous claims that are made about occupancy. For example, “Tasman brought Europe to our shores,” a statement that allows settlers to prehistoricize themselves in order to share the authority but not the future of the native spectator. By means of such tricks of speech, reenactment constitutes a virtual history, leading to affirmations of self-location equal to various impossible statements: “I am here then,” or “There we are before we were.” The illusion corresponding to this one of pre-settlement is that of the indigenous figure who appears only to disappear, being instanced or outlined only in order to confirm his or her departure from the scene. As the plan of reenactment is always subject to accident, however, this – illusion may be performed in reverse. In the Maori reenactments of history various prophetic figures have foretold the coming of liberators and the restoration of the land, as the warrior Te Kooti foretold the messiah Rua Kenana and the utopian foundation of Maungapohatu, and – as Rua foretold the return of Maori land in recent years. For inheritors of

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this tradition such as Tama Iti of the Tuhoe people the realization of – – the dream includes the eviction of the Pakeha. Turner points out that reenactment supposes an intentional historical line leading from A to B, or from Auckland south to Hamilton, but coiling around that line is – another sort of history that he associates with the spires of the Maori serpent god, the taniwha. Chris Pinney calls it “wavy meaning.” Jo Smith – considers a specific example of Maori reenactment, Lisa Reihana’s installation at the National Museum of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, entitled Native Portraits n.19897. Based on nineteenthcentury studio portraits of Maori, Reihana puts them back in time by making them move, so that the moments before and after the original shot are recorded. While restoring a degree of subjecthood to figures who were before merely objects, Smith has many reservations about the locale of this recuperation, a state-funded museum. Notwithstanding Te Papa’s explicit commitment to biculturalism, and its museological orientation towards outreach and interactive displays, she feels that Reihana’s reenactment is compromised by a state authority that allows natives to appear, and reappear, only when their history has – already disappeared. However, she notices that the experiment of Maori reenactment inside the frame of a museum releases a kind of passionate energy—she calls it enthusiasm—that abundantly compensates for that limitation by unfreezing the frame, and turning it into something like a movie. Alex Calder’s essay discusses Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s history of the settlement of a parcel of land called Tutira in the Hawke’s Bay area of New Zealand. Calder follows Guthrie-Smith in treating humans merely as one of the forces—animal, vegetable, meteorological, and volcanic—that shaped Tutira over half a century. From Guthrie-Smith’s point of view, history is the aggregate of multifarious actions of water, earth, air, creatures, and plants: it can be summed up, if one is careful enough to do it properly and to circumscribe the object of study, but it is too complex to be predicted or staged. Guthrie Smith says of the land, “The vicissitudes of its pioneers cannot be re-enacted … repeated … resuscitated.” Of his own work he writes, “If the following pages have any value it is because of the insistence on the cumulative effect of trivialities … only to a small number of observers opportunity is offered of marking and tracing them; only a trifling minority continue in long enough occupation of any one area, fully to be cognizant of their marshaled immensity” (Guthrie-Smith 1969: 195). And how does he marshal that immensity? Why, as miracles such as those wrought by the earthquake of 1931 which neatly severed every cigar in a closed

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box in his study without harming the box or breaking any of the windows in the house, and which then caused the whole chimney stack to fall in a curve off the roof, to come in at the verandah, then out again on to the path, without breaking the roof or the railings of the verandah. With these momentous enigmas he can fix the attention of his reader and give the immensity of his particulars a chance. But marshaled immensity, like the miracle of the earthquake, seems to be the enemy of reenactment. The reenactment that can make its way through these vicissitudes and return to us a piece of the past is performed by a portion of Tutira that was left by chance to grow back into primordial woodland. This is what Calder wants to concentrate upon—the prehistory of the land as part of what happens who live on it, their minds dimmed by the incalculable effects of history, or History, itself, but their senses alert to the mystery of regeneration and the reappearance of what had been supposed to have gone forever.

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Jonathan Lamb 17

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Section 1

Europe

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2 Georges Teyssot Laval University

In the second half of the nineteenth century, beginning with Gottfried Semper, architects started to look for a “scientific” foundation for the origin of architecture. The classical notion of archetype referred to original ur-forms such as the temple or the basilica, strictly in relation to Greek and Latin history, while Semper extended those ur-forms to the different activities of “primitive” men, such as weaving, potting, and carpentry. Semper was probably one of the most prominent architectural scholars to investigate the regional production of domestic architecture in Europe. He connected medieval buildings of Northern and Southern Germanic countries to some primitive, and vanished, archetype. In his volume Der Stil (1860–1863), he developed his interest for the Fachwerk type of buildings; edifices consisting of the combination of structural carpentry (Gezimmer) and masonry (Gemäuer), either in stone or brick, best illustrated by the example of a mill at Effretikon, near Zurich, which he illustrated with engraved plates (Semper 1860, 1878–1879: vol I–II). This primitivistic enquiry was further pursued in Viollet-le-Duc’s History of Human Habitation (1875), where, according to him, the first houses were those of the “Aryas” (by which he meant the Aryans), who built walls and roofs using logs, and then stones (Viollet-le-Duc 1875: 20, Figure 2.1).1 From the second half of the eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth century, a new genealogy of the European nations was written, allowing, for instance, an author like Henri Martin to think of, “the great Indo-European family… of which Ariya, that holy land of the earliest ages, appeared to have been the cradle” (Poliakov 1974: 35). It was in France, through the works of the paleontologist baron Georges Cuvier, and later the historian Jules Michelet, that the difference between the Semitic world and the Indo-Germanic 21

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Settlers, Workers and Soldiers: The Landscape of Total Mobilization

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22 Settler and Creole Reenactment

Figure 2.1 The primitive house of the Arya, from Eugène-Emmanuel Violletle-Duc, The Habitations of Man in all Ages (Boston, 1876). Trans. Benjamin Bucknall, James R. Osgood (publisher), p. 14.

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world was cast in terms of struggle. In Germany, one of the most influential promoters of the “Indo-German,” or Aryan Myth, was Jacob Grimm, who in his classic History of the German Language (1848), introduced a chapter entitled “Immigration,” which gave an account of the successive invaders of Europe from the East (Poliakov 1974: 189–90). It was this dangerous mixture of history, linguistics, and archaeology which would contribute to build, via Herbert Spencer’s reading of Charles Darwin, the long lasting myth of the Aryan. Viollet-le-Duc believed that the primitive type of architecture in the West was the “chalet,” the Alpine rural dwelling that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had described for the first time in his Nouvelle Héloise (Rousseau 1988: 127–30). An obvious source for the suburban and resort villa, the Swiss chalet in France, or in Germany, was the equivalent of the cottage in England. In his article on the “house,” published in his Dictionary of Architecture, Viollet-le-Duc stated that the dwelling in the West was the expression of the feeling that one’s family was something distinguished; the Western house was a symbol of modern individualism, hence the definition of his term “individual edifice.”2 He added, “everyone desires their own house.” He then entered a peculiar genealogy of the chalet, interesting to study because he considered it to be a structure nearest, at least in Europe, to the primitive abode (Figure 2.2). It is possible to postulate the influence on Viollet-le-Duc of the selfproclaimed “Count,” Joseph-Arthur Gobineau’s Essay on the Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races of Human Races (1853–1855), which offered a genealogy of Aryan migrations and the theory of the superiority of the German Nordic races. Viollet-le-Duc suggested that it was the chariots of these nomads (traveling houses that settled at a certain point) that provided the archetype for the Swiss chalet, the Muscovite cabin, and the Norwegian peasant’s hut (Viollet-le-Duc 1875: 42–3). He would even state that this genealogy could be extended to the rural houses in Normandy, and in the Vosges, which were still built in wood during his lifetime. He also built for himself his own version of this nomadic hut, a chalet in Lausanne named “La Vedette,” during the years of 1874–1876 (Gubler 1993: 34–42). As Laurent Baridon notes, the architectural myth of the chalet was also a political myth, probably one of the strongest during the nineteenth century, because it was able to collapse the multifarious sources of biology, ethnography, and history into a single image (Baridon 2000: 107–17). Meanwhile, across Europe and in the United States, the idea of type had to be presented as a scientific truth, derived from scholarly research

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Georges Teyssot 23

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24 Settler and Creole Reenactment

Figure 2.2 A Swiss chalet (ancient style) from Julien Guadet, Éléments et théorie de l’architecture, 3. éd., Paris, [1909], 4 vols.: I.

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associated with site excavation. The German legacy of cultural history (Kulturgeschichte) would repeat some of the assumptions exposed by Semper and Viollet-Le-Duc, as one can read in Doktor Franz Carl Müller-Lyer’s History of Social Development, of 1912: “The house of wood was typical of the early Aryan culture. According to [Karl] Weinhold [the famous German medievalist, 1823–1901], the Germans only built of wood, hence the connection of the word ‘bauen’ = to build, and ‘baum’ = tree” (Müller-Lyer, 1921: 146). In Germany, an original genealogy was “scientifically” traced, connecting culture and civilization, i.e. the Aryan culture with the (German) wooden house. Thus, an archetype, wrapped in the authority of the academy, was born. Frédéric Le Play’s opus on the different “type” of European workers had been an answer from the elite to the challenge thrown down by Marx’s work. He wrote important monographs on specific cases, and was able to contribute to a “typology” of European workers in his enquiry of 1855, which was, later on, completed by his study published during the Paris World Exhibition of 1867: The Social Reform in France, deducted from Comparisons and Observations of the Different People of Europe (Le Play 1855). Le Play and his followers shared the belief that the science of society, or “social science,” should be a normative science. Also, Le Play, as a conservative Catholic, wanted to defend the private, family life from the encroachments of public bureaucracies (Sternhell 1978: 21).3 And Le Play’s followers were certainly not Marxists, either. One of them, Edmond Demolins studied, for example, the migratory route of the nomads of the Asian steppes, and how migration had determined the development of new types of families and societies, in his two volumes on How Does the Road Create the Social Type? (1901–1903). Rejecting Le Play’s “three ages of work” (age of pastures, machines, and coal), Demolins thought that the history of the people of the steppes was the key to the understanding of the origin of western civilization (Demolins 1901–03).4 The nomads, first settling in the western part of Scandinavia, evolved into a system of “particularized families,” which would then be exported into England, America, Australia, and New Zealand. This was opposed to Mediterranean societies, who he claimed had retained the patriarchal family type for a longer period. The connection between nomadism and individualism created, for Demolins, the norm, or the “type,” that modern society should follow. In this way, he provided the “scientific” basis for the sanitization and modernization of the family. Not by chance, Demolins would write a book on Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due, which

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Georges Teyssot 25

was translated immediately into English in New York in 1899. The new, ideal “type” of family and household was to be North American: unconstrained by tradition, individualistic and nonconformist, selfgoverning and self-sufficient, and entrepreneurial. The impending drive to compare craniums and brains, in the attempt to build a “typology” of human beings, was pursued by the Turinbased scholar Cesare Lombroso, who actually analyzed the remains of Kant, Volta, Foscolo, and Gauss, in his widely translated book, Man of Genius (Lombroso 1881). Using the principle of Franz Joseph Gall’s organology, which Johann Caspar Spurzheim’s “phrenology” had vulgarized, Lombroso defined, by statistical methods, the frequency of the criminal type within the population of condemned people and honest people. The “delinquent type” was defined by “stigmata degenerationis,” the stigma of the degenerate. Within his system of criminal anthropology, each stigma of the criminal contributed to the make up of the criminal type. The criminal is such by nature, and, like a savage in a civilized country, he is an anachronism, and by carefully isolating those types, society might free itself from them (Strasser 1993: 352–9). This process of exclusion based on the notion of a diseased population, will of course be easily extended to a “hygiene of race.” From a methodological point of view, the idea of embedding the history of a nation with the history of Volk, or people, can be referred back to Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s The Natural History of the German People in four volumes, written largely between 1851 and 1855. The literal title was “Natural History of the People As the Foundation of German Social Policy,” showing that Riehl’s sociology and anthropology of folklore (Volkskunde) had the precise conservative agenda of idealizing rural life, while championing the virtues of neo-corporatist social organization. In the first three volumes of his major opus (Naturgeschichte), centered on “Civil Society,” “Land and People,” and “The Family,” German society was presented as an organic totality, a natural work of art, explaining the connection between the physical and the cultural topographies inscribed in the land forms. Riehl’s exaltation of the Germanic folk ethos to be found in villages, guilds and social estates, was a bulwark against bureaucratic socialization, and an antidote to revolutionary egalitarianism. Stressing the traditional German opposition between culture and civilization, Riehl pontificated, “I raise my voice on behalf of the rights of forests, over against fields, of mountains over against plains, of a natural popular culture over a homogeneous civilization” (Riehl 1990: 324). His enemy was the fourth estate, what he called the “estate of the estateless,” including factory workers,

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day laborers, bureaucrats, commercial travelers, commodity speculators, wholesale merchants, intellectuals, journalists, Jews, and gypsies. Named professor of the faculty of social sciences at the University of Munich, Riehl presented the family as both model and metaphor for society at large. The very idea of family, he thought, had been disintegrated by modern life in Germany, by cosmopolitanism in France, by the nomadism of gypsies in the rest of Europe, and by the absence of roots in North America, where family life had almost completely disappeared “in the stampede to earn money” (Riehl 1990: 306–9). Central to Riehl’s notion of decay and degeneration was the old notion of the “entire household” (das ganze Haus), which tended to disappear when the individual members of a family divided into separate groups. The site of the household, both architectural and within the landscape, contained the extended family, including not only relatives, but servants and agricultural workers, and imposed “domestic discipline” on each of its members. “This expanded household,” he wrote, “extends the benefits of family life to entire groups who would otherwise be without family… For the social stability of the nation as a whole, such a practice is a matter of the most profound significance” (Riehl 1990: 312). Claiming that the renewal of society depended on a renewal of the home, he dismissed modern residential architecture, which he described as “miniature versions of box-like urban tenements, designed to be as cheap and profitable as possible.” Riehl lamented the disappearing large halls, the huge family hearths, and the ornamented galleries on each floor. “It is a fact of art history,” he wrote, “that the medieval house, castles, and churches were built from the inside out, that the exterior forms and proportions were freely arranged to suit the requirements of the interior, the practical uses of the building, whereas in our doctrinaire fashion we moderns, routinely build from the outside in.” He referred, as an example, to the models provided by the “authentic” German farmhouses, and the so-called Swiss chalets, “which are constructed purely with a view to domestic utility, yet thanks to the instinctive aesthetic sensibilities of the common folk, are as lovely as folk song, as picturesque as peasant costume.” Interestingly, in his praise for the Swiss chalet, Riehl foreshadowed Semper and Viollet-le-Duc’s use of the same example, and both agreed (paradoxically, since Riehl despised the French attitude and manners) that the house of the future should be constructed “from the inside out,” in the same way as the social household. The family first had to be reconstituted, so that it would build a house in its own image. “Once we have reestablished a solid domestic tradition,” wrote Riehl,

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Georges Teyssot 27

“a new and organic residential architecture will also emerge, and architects will be at a loss to explain precisely how it came about—for the style will have come to them, not the other way around” (Riehl 1990: 318–23). For him, the organic household had a name, grew like a plant, and was sung as a folkloric melody, while the modern house was changeable and temporary, mass-produced, and even worse, rented. As such, it became a commodity, drawn into the maelstrom of larger urban capitalist society. Riehl was very influential in the further studies of the household and its settlement (Siedlung), such as those by Friedrich von Hellwald (1842–1892), who wrote a history of civilization from an evolutionary perspective dedicated to the biologist Ernst Haeckel (who coined the term “Oekologie”), which was considered authoritative in the Germanic countries. Later, von Hellwald was to write a volume on the history of human settlements (House and Court, 1888). A good representation of the “Urgermanische Familie,” (“the original German family”) is given in Wilhelm Baer’s The Prehistoric Man (1874). Meanwhile, a Wagnerian Germanic warrior of the Iron Age was associated with the funerary Tumulus, at Steinziet, near Waldhusen, in von Hellwald’s Cultural History in its Natural Development up to the Contemporary Period (1876). To give other examples representative of Kulturgeschichte, in the same volume compiled by 20 well-known authorities, Ludwig Büchner wrote a chapter on “Races and History,” expressing a belief in the congenital incapacity of “primitives” to raise their minds to the level of abstract ideas (Poliakov 1974: 273). Riehl’s presence may also be seen in the four volume opus by August Meitzen, Settlement and the Essence of the Agrarian in West and East Germans, the Celts, the Romans, the Finns and the Slavs, which was a cause of great concern for contemporary French scholars, because it extended the Germano-Frank type of the house to half of France, denying the historical existence of the Gallo-Roman model. In this way, scholars were already preparing the next war. In Germany’s history, it is not the city that is fundamentally important but the land (Land), and it is Man’s labor on the land that builds the country’s landscape, its Landschaft. The landscape is the physical setting that Germans call either “fatherland,” or Heimat, a place were one feels at home (Heim), the homeland. The Land refers to that part of the country in which Germans have established themselves as a farmer (Bauer). Such a farmer is a settler (Siedler) and his territory establishes a Siedlung, a settlement or a colony. This settlement must be defended not only as “fatherland,” the land of the fathers, but as a new Heimat. The defense of old values associated with Land represents Heimatschutz. This movement for the defense and protection of the Land, and its tra-

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ditional forms or figures, is the impulse behind the foundation of the “Bund Deutscher Heimatschutz,” instituted by Ernst Rudorff and Hugo Conwentz in Dresden in 1904. The effect of this mobilization was an appeal for the monumentalization of the landscape. This league was soon joined by Ferdinand Avenarius and Paul Schultze-Naumburg. The Bund extended the notion of preservation of (historical and architectural) monuments (Denkmal) to the whole Landschaft, thus suggesting that the entire landscape is a Kulturarbeit, the result of prolonged and habitual interaction with land. This deep alliance with land has not only to be defended, but also revived by a new trend of “returning to the land,” and to the cultivation, or care (Pflege) of the soil. The entire country becomes an object of monumentalization by reenactment and the method of achieving this revival is fueled by the new development of applied arts. Therefore, an aesthetics of daily life is established, a theoretical move that Ferdinand Avenarius had already proposed in his magazine “Der Kunstwart,” subsequently developed by SchultzeNaumburg in his Kulturarbeiten series of volumes. Both Jugendstil and Art Nouveau created parallels between aesthetics and hygienics that likewise reenacted what were believed to be ancient modes of life. The curves of the “natural” body were brought into the building, while the building curved to receive the imprint of bodies. A doctor, Henri Cazalis, was particularly anxious about hygiene: “for the first time since antiquity, this new art gives to hygiene the place which it rightly deserves in the design and organization of the building or the house” (Cazalis 1901). The major influence at the end of the century was William Morris’ arts and craft movement, whose theories were disseminated by Dr. Henri Cazalis, writing under the name of Jean Lahor. Cazalis was also a physician, involved in psychiatric therapy and in eugenics. Doctor Cazalis / Jean Lahor went on to mention an exhibition on the hygiene of hotels and inns, praising the simplicity and the cleanliness of the northern European countries, observing that aesthetics was obliged to occupy itself with this very humble but ancient virtue. Finally, quoting the experiments of the Lever Corporation at Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, and the house of cure built by the Krupp factory in Bensdorf, which were exhibited at the Parc de Vincennes, Cazalis revealed his program: “We want art to be distributed to everybody, like air and light, and we want it to be everywhere, in the a house of the artisan, as in our own, from school to college, from those university barracks usually so ugly and always lugubrious, to hospitals, railway stations, and everywhere where human crowds, and especially popular ones, assemble” (Beeson 1911; Davison 1916). Dr. Cazalis/Lahor was also the founder of the

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Society for the Protection of French Landscapes: for him, as for SchultzeNaumburg, the hygienist and aesthetic reform of the household entails the protection of the homeland.5 Aesthetics recapitulates and defends the virtues of the past. The reference to the “crowd” is probably an allusion to the rightwing theories of the physiologist Gustave Le Bon, who published a volume on Civilizations of India in 1887, and whose book on the Psychology of Crowds, references Cazalis by name (Le Bon 1896: 139). For Le Bon, the crowd was the receptacle of the unconscious, and opposed to the conscious elite. An inferior part of contemporary society, it had to be controlled by medical strategies. Le Bon warned that the crowd, with its “herd mentality” could bring about the psychological decline of races, because its irrationality was the cause of mental contagion, and open to manipulation by leaders. It should be noted that this book went through 18 editions by 1913, and was carefully read by, amongst others, Georges Sorel, the theoretician of the political use of violence, and Benito Mussolini. “A crowd is a serial flock that is incapable of ever doing without the master,” wrote Le Bon. He remarked that men collected in a crowd are subjected to “rapidly contagious” emotions, which explains not only the suddenness of panic, but madnesses such as agoraphobia. An affirmation “sufficiently repeated,” he thought, could lead, as in advertising and political campaigns, to the convincing of a truth by the “powerful mechanism of contagion.” The same mechanism was at work, so powerful that it could enforce “not only certain opinions, but certain modes of feeling as well” (Le Bon 1896: 134).6 Le Bon was probably himself influenced by the psycho-physiologist Jules Soury, an ultra-nationalist who used evolutionary biology to justify racial, as well as social, inequalities. These Frenchmen wanted to found an official society similar to Francis Galton’s Eugenics Society, founded in London in 1867 (Cowan 1985). They believed in the new “science” of anthroposociology, which, through craniometry (the measurement of the cranium), would determine racial typologies. From 1875 to 1885 Rudolph Virchow, a prominent German liberal and physiologist, who will go through a much-publicized controversy with Ernst Haeckel in 1887, by arguing that Darwinism was more useful to Socialism than to conservatives, launched a colossal enquiry, measuring the cephalic index of 15 million school children (the army had refused to participate), the aim of which was to establish a statistics of cranium morphology in all Germany (Poliakov 1974: 273–4).7 In a similar exercise in 1891, the social anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge, aided by Paul Valéry, measured 600 craniums extracted from an old cemetery. Vacher de Lapouge,

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author of The Aryan: His Social Role (1899), believed that the “unfit” must be prevented from reproducing, through a process of medical selection (his book was reprinted in Germany in 1939). A follower of Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel, he would develop a racial classification between the “Brachycephalics” (round headed men with brown hair and eyes) and the “Dolichocephalics” (who had long and narrow skulls, blond hair and blue eyes, and were heirs to the original “Aryans”). The Dolichocephalics corresponded to the Homo Europaeus that emigrated to northern Germany, Great Britain and the United States, while the Brachycephalics engendered the Homo Alpinus that came from Asia Minor and the Balkans to Switzerland and France.8 A follower of Herbert Spencer, convinced of the biological determination of human destiny, Gustave Le Bon believed that the struggle for life would cause inferior people to die out, and the best adapted human races to survive. This kind of racism also had pessimistic implications, since in this theory, the amelioration of the environment did not improve human race. Like Le Bon, Dr. Cazalis, alias Jean Lahor— Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde—was also a qualified representative of social Darwinism: “Let’s educate the majority, which is made up of the common people… to avoid destroying our own majority; because as a Darwinian, I repeat that innumerable masses, masters of today’s life, … are always a cause of mediocrity…” (Cazalis 1901). Cazalis’s political idea was the institution of an authoritarian and elitist government that would erase the fatality of 1789 and rebuild a new democracy: “hygiene, a branch of aesthetics—because health and cleanliness are necessarily the essential conditions of beauty—hygiene already attempts to give to people’s habitations what has for too long been lacking, pure air, and the sun that kills pathogenic germs, and light, which is as much necessary for thought and the soul as it is for the body” (Cazalis 1901). Dr. Cazalis signed his volume on eugenics, the Science of Marriage (1900), dedicating it to nationalist author Maurice Barrès, who wrote a best-seller, The Uprooted (1897), a novel lamenting the eradication of traditions, because of the deleterious influence of people without roots. While William Morris thought that art should be made by the people, Cazalis/ Jean Lahor thought that it had to be made for the people, as the title of his 1902 book, Art for the People, amply demonstrates. His hygienic democracy was part of a general eugenics: the doctor wrote books on “scientific” marriage, prenuptial inspection, hereditary diseases, and the protection of health and race. In this period, ethnic cleansing and aesthetic hygiene went side by side.

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In the conclusion of one of his last books, describing Low Cost Dwellings and Low Cost Art (three editions between 1903 and 1905), dedicated to Georges Picot, President of the Society of Habitations à Bon Marché, the housing society of France, the doctor repeated his Darwinian credo, that inequality between men is a universal, natural and eternal law. Through the elimination of the weakest, the elite in France must win, and “like true soldiers, they must think only of victory” (Cazalis 1903: 89). However, for humanity the battle was not only political but aesthetic, based upon the vigorous reenactment of a history that combined stoic virtue and organic form. It was a fight for the continuation of the Aryans, who were able to inspire “a religion, or a future philosophy that would help to make life more enticing and exciting for many spirits who are too doomed, too silent… while revealing all there is of mystery, all there is of prodigy, all there is that is human and divine, in the lesser animal and in the lesser plant, being able to recognize and to affirm according to the Aryan dogma the kinship that unites all beings…” (Lahor 1902: 25). To quote again a theoretician of Kulturgeschichte, Dr. Franz Carl Müller-Lyer, whose book, The History of Social Development (1912), was read by many in Germany in the 1920s (including Walter Gropius): “Just as in organic nature a progressive movement exists from the monad to the mammal, so is it in culture. And in both developments the movement goes from small to great, from simple to complex, from homogeneous to heterogeneous, and in these processes of increase, combination and differentiation […], lies progress—and it lies in nothing else. That is the objective formula of the idea of culture progress [sic]. The happiness of the individual has no place therein. For Nature offers up the individual everywhere with cruel indifference on the altar of—the Type” (Müller-Lyer 1921: 349). What was invoked here as a kind of social program was, in fact, the Darwinistic elimination of the individual on the “altar of the type.”9 And the type was revealed most clearly in the conscious reproduction of the beauty of organic forms and the renewal of the vitality of an ancient calisthenic culture. A large-scale solidarity of the new Human “type” was also to be found in the new Siedlungen and in sporting activities of the Weimar period. According to Count Harry Kessler, an enthusiastic visitor to Frankfurt, the new architecture of Siedlung Römerstadt could in fact express the new ideals of the German youth: the nude sunbathers: “are indicative of only part of a new vitality, a fresh outlook on life, which since the war has successfully come to the fore. People want really to live in the sense of enjoying light, the sun, happiness, and the health

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of their bodies.” And, he adds, the Siedlungen, “are another expression of this new feeling for life […], the new domestic way of living.” The architecture “is simply an expression of the same new vitality which impels youngsters to practice sport and nudity […] This German architecture cannot be understood unless it is visualized as part of an entirely new Weltanschauung.”10 In Hans Surén’s book, Men and the Sun (Stuttgart, 1925), one observes photographs of followers of the Laban Dance School, naked woman waddling between reeds, muscled masculine bodies throwing the medicine ball, a nude skier practicing the christiania turn on deserted slopes, group choreography articulating machine-like limbs, javelin throwers, mud bathing melees, archery, etc. It is as if the whole modern suburb has thrown off its clothes, and is ordered by rhythmic gymnastics and geometric mass dancing. The erotic “Nacktkultur” of the Weimar period appears best in the production of the dance school of Ida Herion, also in Stuttgart, which had been in operation since 1912, and made famous by of the book of her students, Max Adolphi and Amo Kettermann, Tanzkunst und Kunsttanz (Stuttgart, 1927). Herion linked nudism and ecstatic dance, not to recover a primordial state of freedom, but to acquire a kind of wilderness, a remoteness, from the conventional theater stage. In her intensely eroticized images, it is the body itself that creates beauty, detached from the world, and elegantly poised. Licht, Luft und Sonnenschein (“light, air and sunshine”) were the slogans celebrating the beginning of an “athletic democracy,” as Thomas Mann put it.11 This was the age of geometrization of crowds, “ornamentation of the masses,” and “total mobilization.” In his 1927 essay, “On Mass Ornament,” Siegfried Kracauer had already described such a body culture, born in the United States and imported to Weimar’s Germany: he compared the geometric precision of the chorus girls to what was taking place in the stadium, where ornaments were created by thousands of bodies, moving like crystals in a kaleidoscope. There, the bearer of the ornament was the mass, not the people (Volk), and the mass gave rise to new figures, to a new kind of artistic performance, akin to the rhythmic gymnastics of that period but very different in scale. For a critic and an architect, such as Kracauer, “the ornament resembles aerial photography of landscape and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but rather above them” (Kracauer 1995: 77). Such a phenomenon appeared with the tracing of the new industrial cities, such as the Siedlungen in Germany, but also with the geometry of the trenches during World War I, during the Battle of the Somme, for instance. In the first truly industrialized war,

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Georges Teyssot 33

mass ornament arose from a situation where the individual became irrelevant, and only vast clusters of bodies acted in a gigantic “ballet mécanique,” an abstract, mechanical and macabre dance. In Ernst Jünger’s 1930 manifesto, “The Total Mobilization,” an historical distinction is made between different kinds of mobilization. While the Ancien Régime saw only a partial mobilization, and the French Revolution a general one, the twentieth century has developed the total mobilization of troops, economy and logistics. In an industrial conflict, the armies on the Front need similar armies at the base, armies of workers. Both soldiers and workers—men and women—are engaged in the process of war, blending the two social types into one. Traditionally, battles and war had been the privileged activity of the aristocracy, but today, in a time when everybody has become a worker, the deployment of great masses implies a kind of “democratization of death.” Jünger, a multi-decorated storm-troop officer during World War I, and a witness of what has become known the battle of materiel (Materialschlack), depicts his experience at the Front as being drenched under “die Stahlgewitter,” a “storm of steel” (Jünger 1920).12 Together with the clouds of asphyxiating gas and the aerial bombardment of civilians, this storm confers upon the war the “indifference of a meteorological phenomenon,” and the monotony of an industrial production, fueled by energy and human blood (Jünger 1989: 112, 114–15). For Jünger, this type of deployment of forces cannot be explained without the supposition that one is confronted by “a phenomenon related to a cult” (116–17). Only the common belief in a cult, such as, for instance, the belief in progress, could have had the power to mobilize the masses. Besides, Jünger adds: “the masses lacked the will and the power to remove themselves from this ordeal, all the more because their conviction in the religion of progress was imbedded in them” (Jünger 1990: 116–17). So powerful was this conviction that for the liberal democracies it was enough to appeal to that belief in progress. Like the Nietzschean “Wille zur Macht” in action, mobilization is a “Wille zur Gestaltung,” a need to create new forms and to imagine a superior “principle, which has the power to dominate the spirit of an epoch” (Jürgen 1990: 124). Superior mobilization requires an orientation and a consciousness obedient to its own logic and retentive of its own particular structure. The building of equipment, the development of a market of appliances, and the organization of services provided by the State, created at the same time, and by the same movement, large masses of “dividuals,” huge entities, i.e., the consumer, the producer, the commuter, and the

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34 Settler and Creole Reenactment

spectator. In that sense, planning and housing are part of the same genealogy, in the Foucauldian sense of the word; a general policy of building the equipment of the State, enabling individuals to be integrated into the various fluxes of sanitary policy, social hygiene, normative sociology, and professionalized and preventative “assistance.” All these are at the same time, axiomatics, and fluxes of activity through which the population moves. The physiology of poverty became the eugenicist medicine of the biological type. Craniometry, and then biometry, the elaboration of a bio-typology, was now the true knowledge with which to manipulate social matters, that is, in Deleuzian terms, the matters of the Social.13 Society now opened its arms to the winners of natural selection. The era of “total mobilization” led to the era of the worker, Ernst Jünger’s The Worker: Domination and Figure (1932), now understood not as an individual, but as a “type.” The idea of type was of course something German architects found useful during the Nazi period. A book on the type of the German Siedlung, published in 1938 by Adolf Helbok described very carefully the different medieval settlements of the Germans in the east, listing examples of Rundling settlements, a circular orientation around a pond, and Strassendorf type, arranged linearly along a road. This was of course no pure science, but a scientific theory justifying the “reoccupation” of Eastern Europe. At the same moment in a parallel way, Paul SchultzeNaumburg, who had become a Nazi dignitary, was publishing studies on the German “Typen des Wohnhaüser,”14 and Paul Schmitthenner was creating the catalogue of the German wooden house (a return to Semper’s Fachwerk) in his study on “Das Haus in sichtbaren Holzfachwerk,” and a series of publications attempting to rebuild the Deutsches Wohnhaus, and developing a typology of built form (Gebaute Form, 1943–1949).15 In his thesis on The Worker, a bestseller by 1933, Jünger explained that it was not only millions of people who were killed during the First World War, but the very idea of the individual, as the last remnant of the bourgeoisie. In the new landscape of war, individual people are difficult to find; in order to survive, everyone must become objectified. The soldier has only a functional value. He either fights or is “out of order,” like a machine. Within this new landscape, a new type of soldier appears. At the same time, an interesting metamorphosis establishes an equivalence between the war “Front” and the work front, where numerous specialists exercise their uniform activity, expressing the total character of work, and developing the monotony of labor. The nineteenth century crowd (as in Le Bon), disappears, as in a chemical reaction, and is

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Georges Teyssot 35

replaced by the working masses, able to organize a plant or a factory, knowledgeable about the points of control, and the new networks. The war, global and civil, has created a new uniformity, a supra-partisan and extra-national being, whom Jünger calls a “type” (Typus). The Typus will signify the completion of a Darwinian transformation by reconciling the organic and the instrumental within a new humanity that becomes inherently prosthetic (Jünger 1989: 147–55).16 Jünger’s own œuvre has typically been classified under the headings of Revolutionary Nationalism, Reactionary Modernism, Magic Realism, Avant-gardism and Nihilism, but an unprejudiced and dispassionate reading of his work and life could place him into a new composite heading, the “warrior dandy,” one that also embraced writers and artists such as Gabriele D’Annunzio and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.17 Jünger’s 1932 book, The Worker, shows how the industrialized war has seen the decline of individuality and the appearance of the “Einzelne,” the isolated person, cut off from his roots and his values, who fights in a total war, but tries at the same time to recapture some sort of meaning within the desolation of that new experience of the Front, the Fronterlebnis. For the various new corps that appeared during the World War I—tank-crews, pilots, storm troopers, flamethrowers, commandos, etc.—the gaze of the various fighters under the steel helmet, the German M16 “Stahlhelm” or the French Adrian helmet, for instance, has become more precise, quasi mechanical, steel-like. This metallic face will lead, according to Jünger, to a “new race” of combatants, adapting itself to a “new landscape,” where the individual is not represented as a person but as a type (Jünger 1989: 149). To recognize the influence of this landscape is not more difficult than to identify that of natural regions, such as forests, mountains, or seashores. The fighterlaborer inhabits this new landscape, shaping it and being shaped by it, creating a specific experience and an uncorrupted community. In German, this condition is expressed by the formula “Die Heimat als Front,” describing a condition where No-Man’s Land becomes homeland, as opposed another expression, the “Heimatfront,” the battle on the homefront that organizes propaganda, develops war industries, raises money, and supplies new materials like rubber.18 So much had home become the front lines that, near the Somme River, appropriately, the British army printed maps with the English names they had given to some salient or eye-catching features of this landscape.19 Inasmuch as on each war front there was also a work front, soldiers and workers became equivalent, spawning the worker-warrior. Jünger’s universal type tended to become the Worker, “der Arbeiter,” whether

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he/she acted as an infantryman, a factory worker, an engineer, a howitzer crew, a dispatcher on his motorcycle, a stretcher bearer, a pilot, a sailor, a nurse or a cook.20 Much has been written about the mobility of the 1939–1940 Blitzkrieg, but the twentieth century of war is made also by fixed lines and vast fortifications: from the massive steel observation dome of Fort Vaux above Verdun, to the “Siegfried Stellung” (named the Hindenburg Line by the Allies) in 1916, up to the Maginot Line on the eastern border of France (1930–1935), to the Siegfried Line of blockhouses on the western boundary of Germany (named the Westwall, from 1937 to 1945), and to the Atlantic Wall, from Narvik in Norway to Saint-Jean de Luz in France near the Spanish border (1940–1945). As Jünger wrote in 1932: “one is perfectly able, for instance by observing aerial photos, to identify in what place a new will of another nature has begun to inscribe its traces in the landscape” (Jünger 1989: 274). Which is exactly the landscape Jünger was describing in the profusely illustrated volume he published with Edmund Schultz “The Changing World” (Die veränderte Welt, 1933). For Jünger, “In the landscape of building sites in which we find ourselves, planning realizes itself within the frame of a Total Mobilization that aims towards Domination (Herrschaft)”—a “domination” of modern technocracies (Jünger 1989: 268). Thus, this why “the construction of housing and habitation problems have become tasks which are dependent on State programs” (Jünger 1989: 273).21 In a paradoxical way not foreseen by SchultzeNaumburg’s book on The Configuration of Landscape by Man (1928)—a copy of which he had dedicated and given to Adolf Hitler—Jünger’s prophetic vision on the mobilization of landscape seems to have been more true and more faithful to reality than Schultze-Naumburg’s reactionary, völkish advocacy for the monumentalization of the landscape by means of historical reenactment.22 Notes 1 Viollet-Le-Duc owned a copy of Semper’s Der Stil: see also: Catalogue des livres composant le bibliothèque de feu M. E. Viollet-le-Duc […] dont la vente aura lieu du mardi 18 au lundi 31 mai 1880 […] (Paris: A. Labitte, 1880). 2 E.-E. Viollet-Le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (Paris: France-expansion, 1973); Microform, reproduction of the edition of 1854–1868 (Paris : B. Bance, then, A. Morel, 1854–1868), 10 vol., tome 6, 214–300. 3 See also: Françoise Arnault, Frédéric Le Play, De la métallurgie à la science sociale (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993), on typology, see 87–99.

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4 See also: Id., Le Play et son œuvre de réforme sociale (Paris: bureaux de la ‘Réforme sociale’, 1882). 5 Dr Henri Cazalis (Jean Lahor), Une Société à créer pour la protection des paysages français (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1901). 6 Le Bon is quoted, for instance, in: Georges Sorel, Les Illusions du progrès [originally: Paris, 1908] (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1911), 2nd edition, p. 332; Le Bon 143–5. 7 See also Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in: Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 79–154. 8 It is interesting to note that these same categories, under the ironic wording of ‘dolicho-blond’ (for dolichocephalic blond), would be used in the same year by the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Classes [1899] (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 134. See also Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought: 1860–1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945); revised edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Id., Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); and: Mark H. Haller, Eugenics. Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963). 9 See Walter Gropius, “Sociological Foundations of Minimal Housing for the Urban Industrial Population,” (Die soziologischen Grundlagen der Minimalwohnung für die städtische Industrielbevölkerung), Die Justiz 5, 1929; French translation by S. Deleule, “La ration raisonnée d’habitat, une sociologie du logement de Gropius,” Amphion, études d’histoire des techniques, ed. Jacques Guillerme, n. 2 (Paris: Picard, 1987), 59–68. 10 See: Count Harry Kessler, The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan, 1918–1937, trans. and ed. Charles Kessler (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 390. 11 On German naturism, see Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century. A History (New Haven, C. T.: Yale University Press, 1989), 177–94. 12 See also Ann P. Linder, Princes of the Trenches: Narrating the German Experience of the First World War (Columbia, S. C.: Camden House, 1996). 13 See “The Rise of the Social,” Gilles Deleuze’s postscript to Jacques Donzelot, La police des familles (Paris: Minuit, 1977); translated from the French by Robert Hurley, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979); paperback ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 14 On the works of this architect, see Norbert Borrmann, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, 1869–1949: Maler, Publizist, Architekt; vom Kulturreformer der Jahrhundertwende zum Kulturpolitiker im Dritten Reich, ein Lebens- und Zeitdokument, mit einem Geleitwort von Julius Posener (Essen : Verlag Richard Bacht GmbH, 1989); see: illustration N. 278. 15 On post-war photographs of Fachwerk constructions, see Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher, Fachwerkhäuser des Siegener Industriegebietes; Framework Houses of the Siegen Industrial Region (München: Schirmer u.a., 1977); Id., second edition (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 2000); and, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Fachwerkhäuser, ed. Martina Dobbe (Siegen: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2001); and, Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher, Framework Houses (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

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16 See George L. Mosse, Masses and Man. Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980, 1987), 275–9; Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Chapter IV; Marcus Paul Bullock, The Violent Eye: Ernst Jünger’s Visions and Revisions on the European Right (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), see 43, 67, 83, where Jünger’s 1963 essay is discussed: Ernst Jünger, Typus, Name, Gestalt (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1963); French translation by François Poncet, Id., Type, nom, figure (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1996); Thomas Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany. Into the Abyss, 1914–1945 (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1996), on Jünger’s notion of “type” (Typus), see 134. 17 Another comparison could be Colonel (T. E.) Thomas Edward Lawrence (“of Arabia”), as suggested kindly by Prof. Bridget E. Orr (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN). 18 See Der Tod als Maschinist: Der industrialisierte Krieg 1914–1918; eine Ausstellung des Museums Industriekultur Osnabrück im Rahmen des Jubiläums “350 Jahre Westfälischer Friede”; 17. Mai–23. August 1998, Catalogue of the Exhibition, ed. Rolf Spilker, Bernd Ulrich (Bramsche: Rasch, 1998), 241–57; and Modernität und Trauma: Beiträge zum Zeitenbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach (Wien: WUV, Edition Parabasen, 2000). 19 The maps are reproduced in Martin Marix-Evans, The Battles of the Somme (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996); see also Mike Chappell, The Somme, 1916: Crucible of a British Army (London: Windrow & Greene, 1995); and Jay M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 20 See Jay Winter and Balaine Baggett, 1914–18. The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century (London: BBC Books, 1996): for Ernst Jünger, see 252–3. 21 In a similar way, the writer Jean Giraudoux, spokesman for the “planning” party and author of the “Discours liminaire” in the first French edition of the Charter of Athens, wrote about the French political crisis in a book requesting Total Power (Pleins pouvoirs, Paris, Gallimard, 1939), and asking for an emergency dictatorship for France. 22 Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch die Menschen, 2nd ed. (München: Callwey, 1922), series “Kulturarbeiten,” N. 7; Id., Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch die Menschen, 3rd ed. (München: Callwey, 1928), 3 vol.; contents:—Vol. 1. Wege und Strassen. Die Pflanzenwelt und ihre Bedeutung im Landschaftsbilde.—Vol. 2. Der geologische Aufbau der Landschaft und die Nutzbarmachung der Mineralien. Die Wasserwirtschaft.—Vol. 3. Industrielle Anlagen. Siedlungen. The first edition was issued as vol. 7–9 of the 1902 edition of the author’s Kulturarbeiten. The three volumes were published in a single binding as well as separately. The one-volume issue in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, has a presentation inscription by the author for Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), dated Nov. 1930. For his—reactionary, racist, and völkish—position within the “Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur,” influenced by Alfred Rosenberg, see his book on Art and Race: Id., Kunst und Rasse (München: Lehmann, 1928); 3rd edition (München, J. F. Lehmann, 1938); and his famous lectures on German Art and Architecture, Race, Blood and Soil: Id., Kampf um

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die Kunst (München, F. Eher Nachf., 1932), published in the series of the “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek,” (Vol. 36); and, Id., Kunst aus Blut und Boden (Leipzig: Seemann, 1934). Paul Schultze-Naumburg was a close friend of Walther Darré, who will become Minister of Agriculture under the Nazis from 1933 to 1942, and was a populizer of the slogan “Blood and Soil”; they both belonged to the Nordic Ring, and it was Paul Schultze-Naumburg who presented Darré to Adolf Hitler; see Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil. Walther Darré and Hitler’s Green Party (Bourne End, Bucks., UK: The Kensal Press, 1985), 49 and 75–7. It was in Schultze-Naumburg’s house, Burg Saaleck in Thuringia, that Darré met Ernst Jünger and, later, Martin Heidegger. The theme of personal beauty will be taken up again, now as the beauty of the Nordic, Teutonic race: Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Nordische Schönheit: Ihr Wunschbild im Leben und in der Kunst (München and Berlin: J. F. Lehmann, 1937); and, 2nd edition (München and Berlin: J. F. Lehmann, 1943).

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Settlers on the Edge, or Sedentary Nomads: Andrei Platonov and Steppe History Donna Landry University of Kent

Dvanov and Kopenkin left late that night after once again warning Dostoevsky about the schedule for building socialism. Incomplete’s pacer walked beside Proletarian Strength. Both riders felt easier when they sensed the road and distance drawing them outwards from the crush of population. The power of melancholy built up within their hearts from a sedentarization of even one day, and so both Dvanov and Kopenkin feared the ceilings of the huts, yearning rather for the road which blotted up the superfluous blood in their hearts. (Platonov 1978: 100) In far off Khorasan, beyond the Kopet-Dagh mountains, among gardens and ploughed fields, lived the pure god of happiness, fruit and women—Ormuzd, protector of agriculture and of human reproduction, lover of peace in Iran. But to the north of Iran, beyond the mountains, lay empty sands; they stretched out in the direction of the middle of the night, where there was nothing but sparse, feeble grass—and even this grass was torn up by the wind and driven to the black places of Turan where the soul of man aches without respite … And once again the horsemen of black Turan would appear in Khorasan, beyond the Atrek river, in Astrabad—and there, among the estates of fat, hateful man who lives his life in one place, they would destroy and find pleasure. (Platonov 2003: 32) When within a national narrative, “history repeats itself,” what is obsessively reenacted? In Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur (written 41

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3

1927–1928 but not published in its entirety in Russia until 1988), haunting the characters’ imaginings of a socialist future is a specter with two faces: the nomadic horseman of the steppe who is both their dream of liberty and their greatest terror. The specter of the mounted nomad, the perpetually mobile horseman, haunts the Russian national narrative as it erupts in the October revolution, civil war, and the struggle for socialism. It also haunts the Soviet narrative as it strives to incorporate Central Asian peoples into the dream of a new plenitude, as in Soul-Dzhan (written in 1935, but not published in an unbowdlerized Russian edition until 1999). In this fable about both “a soul in search of happiness,” as Platonov himself described it, and a people, the wandering Dzhan, whose souls are their only possession, Stalin’s Sovietization of Central Asia offers hope (Platonov 2003: x; 151, note 13). The word dzhan—“soul, or dear life”—is a Persian word in the Turkic languages of Central Asia and modern Turkish (Platonov 2003: 24). These wandering souls are linguistically and materially a difference uneasily incorporated within the Soviet, just as the horsemen of “black Turan” who raid the gardens of the fat men of the lowlands are for a time incorporated into that land of plenty, both destroying and dwelling there. Marx famously quipped that past events of tragic greatness would, by being reenacted, consciously invoked as historical precedents for present changes, come to seem farcical. Platonov appears to have taken Marx at his word. In Chevengur, Platonov’s characters’ earnest striving for socialism leads to farce at every turn. Platonov may be master of “the most quintessentially Soviet prose of the century,” as Thomas Seifrid has suggested (quoted in Wood 2005: 131). With his ironical deployment of “peasant speech and Soviet slogans, utopian speculation and industrial terminology, of harsh socio-historical fact and deep-seated existential yearning,” as Tony Wood observes, Platonov is nothing if not radically experimental and heteroglossic in the very texture of his prose (Wood 2005: 131). Allegory, utopian longings, absurdist gestures frequently jockey for position within a single sentence. And yet the characters’ desire for a just world is never fatally undermined by the narration, which aligns itself with the characters’ utopian idealism while ruthlessly exhibiting its sometimes comic or grotesque consequences. This utopian commitment is why Fredric Jameson hails Platonov as a key to uncovering those complexities of Second World modernism that might yet foil First World certainties about both postmodernism and post-Soviet society. Platonov’s writing has much to teach postmodern audiences, Jameson comments, because it has arrived “fresh as though out of a time capsule, owing to its recent discovery as well as to the his-

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42 Settler and Creole Reenactment

toric omission of any specifically modernist moment from Soviet history, an anachronistic survival with its hair and fingernails still growing as it were” (Jameson 1994: 122). That the past might have important lessons to teach the present is part of the collective project of reenactment history as well as the project of materialist historiography. The October revolution, like the expansion of the early Ottoman and Muscovite states, was in an important sense conducted on horseback. In Eurasian space, steppe horsemen hover ambiguously on the horizon, sometimes signifying nomadic business as usual, sometimes a great change or a violent cataclysm. The “Scythian marauder” appears in Russian popular consciousness when the revolution conjures “past ghosts of mounted chaos sweeping into ‘European’ Russia from the East” (Bethea 1989: 54). They represent the antithesis of settlement, but settlement itself is hardly to be achieved. On the steppe, no one is so much settled as sedentarized, only temporarily not-a-nomad. Platonov’s fiction resists the property-owning settler imaginary, substituting for more settled structures of feeling a melancholia (longing, desire, affect of attraction, not possession)—in Russian, toska, similar to the Turkish hüzün—that asks to be shared and revelled in, and can only be relieved, in so far as that might be desirable, by perambulating movement and friendship (Flatley 2001: 75–102; Flatley 2008: 158–90). According to Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish hüzün is a “melancholy that is communal rather than private” (Pamuk 2005: 79, 81–96). The sharing of toska (or hüzün), especially in a roving existence, fills the space vacated by property relations. As two of the most central characters, Stepan Kopenkin and Alexander Dvanov, experience this dynamic, the mechanism of affect that makes the most of toska while relieving its heaviness operates like a rider or a horse on the vastness of the steppe, seeking a fellow being. One’s melancholy meets the other’s, relieving in mutuality, once they have met, what felt like a burden before. Kopenkin muses that “out in the open fields, where no organization at all was possible,” he feels better: “Out there he had been riding beside Sasha Dvanov, and when he felt melancholy, so did Dvanov, and their senses of melancholy had rushed towards one another, met head on, and stopped each other dead in their tracks” (Platonov 1978: 249). “Socialism as anti-depressant” is Jonathan Flatley’s diagnosis of what Platonov proposes in Chevengur (Flatley 2008: 158). This structure of feeling could be understood as a Eurasian alternative to Western capitalist imaginings of space, place, subjectivity, and affect, in which settler ideology has proved so potent a force.

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A Eurasian poetics of space involves a dialectic between nomadism and settlement, between the steppe and the village. The village, imagined from the point of view of the steppe, is a place of sedentarization, of the settling of the previously nomadic. And as a result the villagers are haunted by nomadic specters, in both a good way and a bad way. The bad specters threaten to swoop down on the peasants from out of the steppe and do them harm. The good specters provide the peasants with hope of a future state in which they might enjoy a holiday from labor, for the steppe is the realm of freedom. The steppe is the realm of freedom of movement; the village is the realm of settlement, of agriculture and the artisanal labor attendant upon growing crops and livestock keeping. The peasants are settlers on the land, but in the Eurasian imaginary that does not constitute any inalienable right of entitlement to the land itself. The peasants may have been dwelling on this land for generations, but they somehow are not quite of it. The land itself is portrayed by Platonov as a vast openness, relatively empty of human habitation, except for sparsely populated villages like Chevengur. These villages are connected by roads that traverse the empty steppe. The steppe is empty, and yet not quite empty. It is a wilderness out of which nomads come. “We don’t have any enemies to speak of,” one character observes, “but there’s nothing but empty space all about. They could just come galloping up, and you know a thief thinks my kopek is bigger than his ruble” (Platonov 1978: 130). A Eurasian perspective reveals something striking about other forms of settler ideology. The emphasis on settlement as a pause in nomadic movement, as a form of sedentarization, exposes how often settlers by definition might see themselves as having a tenuous entitlement to their property, or even a lack of entitlement, however powerful the ideology of settler-entitlement might be. In other contexts, where settlement is meant to be synonymous with possession of the land, if necessary achieved by elimination and expropriation of the indigenous population, settlers—as settlers—no matter how fiercely they might fight to claim or retain their land, may discover that no settlement is assured, no land guaranteed. D. K. Fieldhouse notes interesting parallels between Russia and the United States, which by 1914, “significantly believing in full incorporation of colonies with the metropolis, were the only colonial powers in which there was no colonial office”; as “professedly anticolonial powers,” both were “uniquely successful in evading decolonization by incorporating colonies into their own territories” (Fieldhouse 1966: 375–6, 403, 380).

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Yet both presented varieties of settler colonialism, the less racialized form of “mixed settlement” in the case of Russian Central Asia and Siberia, and a combination of ideologically strident northern “pure settlement” and southern “plantation settlement” in the United States (Fieldhouse 1966: 372; Frederickson 1988: 216–35). Hilton Obenzinger remarks that when United States citizens commented on the settlement of Palestine, for example, they viewed “Palestinian reality through American eyes, through the ‘window’ of the New World experience of the rawest, most extreme, most violent settler-colonial expansion in the New World, as well as through the lens of the Bible, Crusader myths, and Arabian Nights” (Obenzinger 1999: xvii, 9–11). The imagining of socialist settlement on the steppe could never be so self-assured. And yet one of the formative images in Zionist settler ideology was that of the Cossacks, who became a possible pattern for the combination of herding and guarding that distinguished embattled Jewish settlements in Palestine: “[Y]oung Russian Jewish immigrants were well aware that the Cossacks, who led a semi-nomadic equestrian life, served the Russian Tsars as an elite corps of border guards and, subsequently as advance troops for the extension of Russia into the northern Caucasus, which brought the whole of the Ukraine beyond the Dnieper under the rule of the Tsars” (Shafir 1989: 137). From the beginning of Chevengur, revolutionary aspirations appear threatened by both counter-revolutionary violence from without, and by backsliding from within. Embodied by the Bolshevik soldier on horseback, the revolution itself is hardly violence-free. And violence has a long history on the steppe, especially at the edge where nomadism gives way to sedentarization. As Dvanov and Kopenkin ride to spread the socialist word, they encounter a world that has been affected by the revolution, but how thoroughly that world has been revolutionized remains an open question. Meeting a man carrying a sack, Dvanov and Kopenkin behave politely and fraternally, as does the man. He took off his cap and bowed to the men on horseback, in accordance with the ancient memory that all men are brothers. Dvanov and Kopenkin also answered with bows, and all three felt good. ‘The comrades have come to loot, but they won’t find a whole hell of a lot,’ the man with sack decided quietly, after getting a careful distance away (Platonov 1978: 121). Violence is always possible on the steppe and when it does not happen, all three men “feel good.” Asked only moments later who or

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what they are by two muzhiks, armed with a pruning hook and a fence post, Kopenkin and Dvanov respond in a way that is both slapstick and sinister: “‘We’re internationalists!’ Kopenkin said, recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s profession, international revolutionary. The sentries thought for a bit. ‘Jews, you mean?’ Kopenkin coolly bared his sword, so slowly that the sentry muzhiks did not believe it was a threat… Within him Kopenkin had the gift of revolution” (Platonov 1978: 121–2). Once again, violence is averted, but archly, and only just. Revolution in its utopian form repudiates both violence and ethnocentric prejudice, but the culture of the steppe has a violent history, especially where perpetual motion gives way to settlement. Violence, including the violence precipitated by ethnic antagonism, may overtake the revolution at any time. Soul is similarly haunted by this possibility of attacks from over the horizon, while utterly preoccupied with the struggle for survival on the steppe and in the deserts—human and animal existence at ground zero, as it were. Soul is a revolutionary fable in which Stalin is perceived by the steppe characters as a benevolent but distant father, and the Soviet promise of a better life for the Dzjan people presents their only hope. The wandering Dzjan represent a dying remnant of the fearsome horsemen of the Turan, the Turkic horsemen who haunted the imaginations of Iranians just as they haunted the imaginations of peoples further west. What appears in Chevengur as a dream of the socialist International—incorporating into Soviet progress those masses of humanity who have less than the nothing that Russian peasants have—is realized, at least in miniature, in Soul. Platonov’s fiction presupposes the steppe as both a realm of freedom and a realm of necessity, just as post-Soviet society presupposes a Soviet world that was both great in collective rhetoric and bare of commodities. Since nobody is sure what it is, socialism appears doomed to resemble the peasants’ previous existence in order for them even to begin to imagine it. Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii report that peasant difficulties with new abstract words and concepts were a constant feature of public and private discourse during the Russian revolution (Figes and Kolonitskii 1999: 128–31). And yet the promise of socialism is precisely that it will deliver peasants, or those even more disinherited and disenfranchised than peasants, the wandering souls—the Miscellaneous in Chevengur (Platonov 1978: 210, 226 and passim), the Dzhan in Soul—from their everyday lives of hardship and near starvation. Figes and Kolonitskii also report how invested peasants appear to have been in making the revolution in their own image (Figes and Kolonitskii 1999: 144–52).

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Conceiving socialism on the steppe presents problems of settlement that are in fact problems of sedentarization, products of the cessation of pastoral nomadism. Hence that specter with two faces: the nomadic horseman of the steppe who emblematizes both freedom and the dark side brought about by scarcity and necessity, both liberty and violent threats to social order. A man riding on the horizon may be a respectable peasant, or a bandit. The Bolshevik on horseback falls somewhere in between. Whenever possible, Bolshevism travels on the hoof. Stepan Kopenkin, the quintessential steppe-man, rides a horse called Proletarian Strength, quixotically quests in the name of his beloved, the late lamented Rosa Luxemburg, and proposes policies on the basis of “revolutionary feeling” (Platonov 1978: 97). In keeping with proletarian ideals, Proletarian Strength is a huge cart horse whose gender is somewhat ambiguous in Anthony Olcott’s translation, and who sometimes expresses on behalf of his (or her) master what Kopenkin cannot articulate, including homoeroticism and a longing for an impossible heterosexual connection. Olcott is likely to be playing with the gendered possibilities of the two Russian words for horse, both of which Platonov uses—kon’ (“steed,” masculine) and loshad’ (“horse,” feminine) (Borenstein 2000: 318, note 8). The bond between horse and horseman might constitute steppe therapy in its oldest form. Mutuality between horse and rider enables articulating complex emotions, including the charged melancholy that friends and comrades share. Harnessing the forces of animal nature as well as peasant energies, the revolution in its utopian aspect, according to Platonov, responds to the call of the steppe as a realm of freedom as well as an agent of socialist transformation. This perpetual road trip brings the peasants welcome revolutionary news, but it also staves off depression for the riders, as in the passage above and in the first epigraph. Ironically for those trying to build collectivity, centers of population are crushing, and sedentarization “even for one day” causes the two comrades’ and the horses’ hearts to swell with melancholy. The structure of feeling proposed by Chevengur and reiterated in Soul is one in which this melancholy itself moves, as we have seen, seeking relief in movement but also in fellow-feeling. The sharing of melancholy on the hoof relieves toska, as if tapping into a previous state of nomadic existence righted a balance disturbed by peasant attempts at settlement and its attendant property-led proprieties. I am going to propose that this recurring image of the mounted horseman who prefers to be perpetually on the move is a figure for the Eurasian tensions of Russian and Soviet belonging, the fraught matrix

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of these, in some sense nationalist, identities. These tensions belong to a broader canvas of Eurasianism, insofar as there appears to be an uncanny consonance between this Russian image and an equally common trope from Ottoman historiography. Ottoman historiography, like the events of Ottoman history, is also a profoundly Eurasian story. In the Ottoman case there is an obsessive returning to what Gabriel Piterberg calls an “Ottoman poetics,” in which one particular trope encapsulates an animating myth: the “garden,” which represents the city, and specifically the capital city, Istanbul, that lies in Europe, exists in potentially violent tension with the “frontier,” the Anatolian plain or steppe that lies to the East of it, in Asia (Piterberg 2003: 191–200). Replaying this trope not only led Ottoman history-writers to represent events in the way they did, Piterberg argues, but also shaped events. Taking as his example the seventeenth-century events known as the Hailye-i-Osmaniye, or tragedy of Osman II, Piterberg shows how the garden versus frontier or Europe versus Asia trope influenced the motivations and appears even to have dictated the behavior of some of the participants in this drama of state power. For the Ottomans the concept of migration further westward from Istanbul, rather than turning eastwards toward Anatolia, was of enormous significance. As Piterberg observes, the foundation myth of the Ottoman dynasty—the Osmanlı, the house of Osman—stressed the crossing by sea from Asia Minor into Europe, “perhaps with the first meaningfully recorded crossing to Gallipoli in 1354 as a focal point… It was, after all, the southeastern European venture that was the marginal advantage of the Ottomans, and their success there distinguished them from other Turkish-speaking frontier principalities and made them a world empire” (Piterberg 2003: 199). And so when the young sultan who bore the dynastic founder’s name was thought to be preparing “to go in the direction of Anatolia” (Anadol[u] semtine gitmek), to shift power from the capital to the Asian provinces, this movement towards the frontier from the garden threatened the deep structure of the state (Piterberg 2003: 191, 178–84). Piterberg concludes that Osman’s fall resulted from the Ottoman sense that, “at the level of mythic consciousness,” what the sultan intended to do “signified a countercrossing, a crossing ‘in the wrong direction,’ and hence a countermyth” (Piterberg 2003: 200). To go in the direction of Istanbul, the European capital, or in the direction of Anatolia, to move further towards Europe or turn eastward towards Asia: today’s debates about whether or not the republic of Turkey should join the European Union replay this conflict. Is Turkey

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European, or is it Asian and Muslim, however ostensibly secular a state it may be? Tunç Aybak has recently proposed an alternative to this conundrum, which is, after all, largely a response to Western concerns and to the pressure of U.S. geopolitical hegemony in particular. Aybak describes Turkey, the remaining core of the former Ottoman Empire, as precisely neither European nor Asian, but Eurasian. In this respect it is like Russia, the core of the former Soviet empire. What Turkey and Russia share, according to Aybak, is the possibility of resisting USdominated globalization through “Eurasianism,” a counter-hegemonic formation (Aybak 2006: 71–86). And this political formation has a deep mythic structure that refuses to relinquish either the frontier or the capital, the wilderness or the garden, the steppe or the settlement. “To go in the direction of Anatolia” could not be countenanced by the seventeenth-century Ottoman establishment because it was a “countercrossing,” as Piterberg argues. But if perpetual movement is the animating mythic structure, then sedentarization—even in order to enjoy plenitude, the happiness of feeding rather than starving—means being deprived of freedom—freedom experienced as liberty in mobility—and that is surely antithetical to happiness. Images structure modern historical scholarship as well as foundation myths and antique chronicles. The events of history and the writing of history can only be grasped or constructed through representation. An Ottoman or Russian “poetics” is unavoidable, as Piterberg shows, however hetereogeneous and historically shifting it might be. If the steppe figures within Platonov’s writing as a source of intense lyricism, even modern revisionist historians of the Ottoman empire find themselves having recourse to the same tropology when it comes to conjuring the origins of the Ottoman state. To see Eurasianism at work as an image, as a congealed concept-metaphor that struggles to capture the dynamism of a society and culture based on perpetual expansionmigration in tension with settlement-rule, we have only to look at some very recent historiography as well as Platonov’s fiction. Heath W. Lowry’s scrupulously revisionist study of The Nature of the Early Ottoman State repeatedly uses the images of “a predatory confederacy” or “the Ottoman juggernaut” to describe the state’s expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when accommodation with local populations, rather than forced conversion to Islam or force of arms, was critical to its success (Lowry 2003: 95, 99, 101, 139). In Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923, a definitive work striving to capture the internal dynamic of the empire’s history rather than recycle Western stereotypes, Caroline Finkel cannot not

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describe the Ottomans as late members of the “waves” of Turcoman tribes who “had been bold raiders on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire for centuries” (Finkel 2005: 3). Once again we have the agency of history as the movement of men on horseback, “pastoralist nomads” participating in a “prolonged migration” (Finkel 2005: 3). This equestrian figure signifies at once actual nomads in movement, and, more abstractly, the movement of historical forces. Change comes from out of the steppe. This is how Heath Lowry’s “predatory confederacy” or “Ottoman juggernaut” operates—keeping on the move, while incorporating into the confederacy those whose lands are encompassed by Ottoman migration. Lowry’s point is that the Ottomans succeeded in holding so much territory because they did not conquer so much as join forces with those whose lands they occupied. Neither conversion to Islam nor abject capitulation was a requirement for incorporation into the confederacy, at least in the early years of the Ottoman state (Lowry 2003: 96; Finkel 2005: 110). This reversal of the swoopingin-and-conquering model of predation resonates interestingly with Platonov’s description in Soul of “the horsemen of black Turan,” who arrive from time to time to plunder the plentiful gardens of the lowlanders, and then appear to dwell for a time in sedentary luxury. Black Turan is always in danger of being absorbed and sedentarized by Ormuzd, however much fat Ormuzd may fear incursions from Turanian horsemen. The horse and the horseman figure powerfully in Russian and Central Asian as well as Ottoman history, literature, and art. From the early modern Western European point of view, the aspirant empire of Muscovy became imaginatively linked with the Ottomans as Eastern, Oriental. It was recognized that the steppe bred formidable cavalry as well as resilient nomadic peoples and resourceful peasants. What the early steppe migrations and conquests of previous centuries had achieved, the Bolshevik revolution sought to reenact, reanimating through equine and equestrian imagery cavalryman and peasant alike (Kleimola 2005: 45–62). From the early modern period onwards, the formidable toughness of the cavalryman of Muscovy was bound up with European imaginings of the harshness of life on the Asian steppe. In A Brief History of Moscovia, John Milton exhibits the very tropes that not only function as the mainstay of subsequent visitors’ views of Russia but become the stuff of Russian fiction itself. The Muskovite cavalryman makes shift in the harshest conditions imaginable, while his horse, “fed with Green Wood and Bark, stands all this while in the open Field, yet does his service” (Milton 1682: 16–17). The concluding phrase in the passage above seals the partnership between man and beast with a steadfast

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subordination that Milton might well have envied. The horse “stands all this while in the open Field,” an image of brutal exposure, yet remains not only healthy enough to be serviceable, but apparently does his job willingly and obediently: “yet does his service.” The horse does not “serve” the rider as a mere instrument, but “does his service,” a neatly courteous expression. “They also serve, who only stand and wait,” wrote Milton in another more famous context. The horse is servant to the man but the serving is not servile. The equestrian partnership is a dignified relation between non-identical but similar beings bound together by mutual feeling, by attachment—each becomes a metonym of the other. In this image of the traditional steppe horseman, the relation between human and animal can best be grasped as what Walter Benjamin called a mimetic relation, a relation of similarity. For Benjamin, the mimetic faculty is fundamental to experience: “Experiences are lived similarities” (Benjamin 1999: 553). Yet the mimetic faculty appears to be less operative in the modern world than it once was in the past. Human beings’ ability to perceive similarities or find “magical correspondences” between themselves and the stars of the sky and other natural objects, and to engage in mimetic behavior with these objects, appears to be growing increasingly fragile, Benjamin speculates, but he also suggests that perhaps it is not so much dying out as undergoing a transformation (Benjamin 1999: 695, 720–2). In Chevengur, Platonov makes relations between man and horse explicitly mimetic, while thematizing that a liking for journeys, mobility, movement are what bring these similar but not identical beings together. The relation the peasants perceive between man and horse is an affective relation, but it is not a relation of equivalence or identity. In this respect the mimetic relationship of similarity harks back to a pre-capitalist state of being and belonging. Marx’s theory of the commodity makes clear how the commodity form introduced relations of perpetual equivalence and exchangeability into social activity. The abstract exchangeability or identity of the commodity form became the model for all social relations as such. Marx argued that the exchange value of commodities was predicated on their equivalence, their complete interchangeability. In the process commodities become animate, taking on a life of their own, even as human social relations become reified, deanimated, in their production and exchange (Marx 1977b: 49; Marx 1977a: 125–77, 163–77, esp. 164–5). As Jonathan Flatley has brilliantly shown, relations of similarity and not identity offer the possibility of other kinds of experience not contained within the commodity form. The mimetic faculty indicates how for Benjamin “emotion is a mechanism of

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attachment to the material world,” and this regard for affective relations makes Benjamin unusual in Western thought (Flatley 2001: 90). Flatley suggests that, “For Benjamin, the ability to perceive similarity—the way that things are alike but not the same as each other, as opposed to the identity equivalence of the commodity economy—is the basic element of play and experience” (Flatley 2001: 101, note 15, quoting Benjamin 1999: 695). According to Benjamin, the mimetic faculty and the affective attachments it promotes are subject to historical erosion, but also to transformation, “disclosing to us the historicity of our own subjectivity,” as Flatley puts it (Flatley 2001: 90). In the terrain of the pre-capitalist past lies a repository of disused but still usable sources of feeling and attachment that might prove productively oppositional for the historical materialist. In a similar vein, Miriam Hansen has evocatively explicated Benjamin’s theory of the mimetic faculty as exploring “forgotten futures,” strange conjunctions in which artifacts of the past articulate as yet unrealized future possibilities with which subjects connect affectively in the present (Hansen 1999: 338, 343). According to Hansen, Benjamin was interested by “the index of a temporality that he considered key to capitalist modernity: the return of archaic, cyclical, mythical time in the accelerated succession of the new (fashion, technology), the mingling of the recently obsolescent ‘with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world’” (Hansen 1999: 331, quoting Benjamin 1968: 131). We might productively compare the acceleration of the new within capitalism, which preoccupied Benjamin, with the acceleration of the new within a revolutionary situation, which exercises Platonov. When the archaic, cyclical, and mythical return under the pressure of the accelerated succession of the new, what recurs? If in the revolution’s beginnings lies its inevitable end, Chevengur’s violent ending suggests how steppe nomadism as Ur-Russian and Eurasian foundation myth creates problems for sedentarization and community. Incorporating bandits into the sedentarized commune must be the ultimate goal of building communism on the steppe. If, however, settling bandits constitutes a counter-myth, in Piterberg’s terms, the forces of revolution and reaction may be impossible to disentangle, and revolutionary violence, once unleashed, may know no end. Counter-revolution is the daemonic double of Bolshevism. Cossacks on horseback attack Chevengur. From where or whom the Cossacks have been dispatched remains purposefully vague, as Flatley observes. It is not out of the question that the government might have unleashed them to bring the offbeat town into line (Flatley 2008: 162–3, 189–90). The carnage is

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graphically and dispassionately described. The Chevengurians defend themselves creditably with their few guns, but they are finally overwhelmed by the invading forces. Steppe history prevails, repeating itself seemingly without end. There can be no settlement without violence. Sedentarization brings death. Revolution as a recreation of steppe history is recursive. The revolution turns on itself insofar as Dvanov’s haunted anticipation of the consequences of stoppage, of settlement, is unfortunately confirmed. Sedentarization beckons violent incursions from the steppe, and only by keeping perpetually on the move can the violence fostered by the steppe be kept at bay. Although the text may be read as arguing for the necessity of something like permanent revolution, Chevengur nevertheless resists being read as an endorsement of violence. Much more powerful are those lingering images of mimetic relations between humans and other living inhabitants of the steppe. From that hoped for harmony and universal fraternity the novel draws its affective power, as does the more programmatic Soul. This essay has been primarily concerned with reenactment insofar as it occurs within the unfolding and representing of historical events themselves. Reenactment for Marx appears as an irresistible tendency, an inevitability attendant upon the ransacking of the past when struggling to imagine the future. Revolutionary moments present particular problems of imagination and representation. When social actors attempt to break with the past and bring into being something socially new, an irresistible recourse to the past shadows their every move. We might call this process inadvertent reenactment. Reenactments undertaken to investigate the past, on the other hand, with the aim of gaining new historical insights, represent a deliberate endeavor to bring a vanished past back into being. Reenactment in this sense, as an historically investigative practice and a narrative strategy, approaches—moves toward, seeks to reinhabit—the past by means of immersion in an artificially constructed, however “faithful,” recreation in the present (Cook 2004: 488). Katie King calls the knowledge produced by such reenactments “pastpresents.” Like Donna Haraway’s coinage of “naturecultures” (one word), King’s term “pastpresents” (one word) sets to work the thinking of Bruno Latour and aims to account for the “palpable evidences” to be found in today’s reenactments “that the past and the present cannot be purified each from the other” (King 2004: 459). Reenactments as pastpresents serve a potentially redemptive agenda, presupposing that sympathetic mimesis on the part of reenactors might

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recover significant traces of what has otherwise been lost or reveal something previously neglected or overlooked. Such reenactments draw upon what Benjamin saw as a receding cultural capability, the mimetic faculty. Where capital and commodities presuppose universal equivalence—identity—in the interests of limitless exchangeability, reenactment harks back to an older economy of sympathy and perceived similarity. Reenactment, then, in its playing out of similarities, might tend toward oppositionality; it will have a tendency to interrupt and defamiliarize things as they are. Like the Muskovite cavalryman and his horse, reenactor and reenacted become bound by an ethic of mutuality in adversity. In Milton’s description the Russian horse does not “serve” instrumentally but “does” his rider’s “service.” This bond is not one of slavish servitude, but rather a willing being-of-service to another, a dignified relation between nonidentical but similar beings bound together by affective attachment. Such imagined affinities lie at the heart of reenactment. What Platonov reveals so compellingly is how the combination of freedom of movement, countering ideologies of settlement and colonization, and freedom of service, countering self-interest and the politics of identity, might exercise the mimetic faculty to good affect. As Caroline Rooney puts it, “Ultimately, there’s no such thing as self-emancipation. There’s only socialism” (Rooney 2007: 74).

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4 Christopher Pinney University College, London

There is a delicate empiricism, which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory —Goethe (cited by Walter Benjamin in “A Short History of Photography”) There is no false sensation —E. M. Cioran (in The Trouble with Being Born) In the introduction to his first book, Place, Taste and Tradition, Bernard Smith noted that Winckelmann wrote up the results of his explorations in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the same year that, “Wolfe captured Quebec and Clive consolidated the gains of the battle of Plassey” (Smith 1945: 16). Smith then suggested that “the relation[ship] between the commercial policy that led to imperialist expansion and the archaeological investigations that led to Classicism” remained to be investigated. Almost 60 years later we might conclude that this connection still remains unexplored. With the passing of the Rococo, which Smith described as its last “original art style,” European art modelled itself on others, in the form of the past, or the exotic. “In European colonies settled during the nineteenth century,” Smith concludes, “art was the reflection of a reflection” (Smith 1945: 16, emphasis added). One way of comprehending this reflection of a reflection is in terms of the refracted nature of colonial enunciation. We have come to accept this enunciation as split by a process of hybridization, partialization, or creolization but have yet fully come to accept, I think, that this colonial enunciation is a double splitting of an originary Europe that is itself already creolized or hybridized. 55

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Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection1

Just why it has been so difficult to concede the hybridized nature of Europe is the subject of what follows. I shall argue that the fiction of an originary Europe has been most easily deliverable linguistically and discursively. The privileging of a particular ideational Platonic model of culture, rigorously enforcing the division between humans and nonhumans and valorizing human agency has rendered it almost impossible to recover and interpret the traces of those material flows and practices which are the evidence of a quite different Europe than the one that usually prevails. Writing about the history of what he terms “creole designs” within New Zealand, Nicholas Thomas has concluded that “In no other settler culture have indigenous art forms been mobilized so consistently” (Thomas 1999a: 106). This paper explores a much earlier, but parallel, concern with what might be termed “xeno-figure” in Europe. Ian McLean has recently argued that the painter John Glover’s Tasmanian arcadias are not as secure as they might at first appear. Redemption falters in his paintings, McLean suggests, because of “Aboriginal ghosts in the landscape.” “In most of the [Tasmanian] landscapes,” McLean writes, “there stirs the unhomely (uncanny)—Glover is unable to forget the Aboriginal presence which shadows his paradise.” McLean refers here not only to those images which depict Aboriginals as inhabitants of the land, suggesting that this “haunting is at its most palpable in the melancholy solitude of the wooded ranges that frame his scenes like a looming amphitheatre that watches over him with all the sublime terror of an absolute unbounded other” (McLean 1998: 44). My aim in this paper is to reveal the parallel, uncanny, presence of exotic objects within a materially creolized Europe. Just as the ghostly presences within Glover’s paintings suggested a land that could never be “fully” settled, so the shadowy presence of xeno-figure reveals a Europe that was always a reflection of other times and places, never a self-present unity awaiting its replicatory colonial enunciation.

Material world history What options does the history of our relationship with objects that have passed across cultures bequeath us?—objects such as those we can see in the frontispiece of the 1703 English edition of Philip Baldeus’s 1672 account of the “Traffick and Commerce” between the Portuguese and the Dutch, and the inhabitants of Malabar and Coromandel? The route to a material world history lies broadly in the direction mapped by Asia in the Making of Europe, to invoke the title of a monu-

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mental work by Donald Lach, and the nature of the East in the West to recall the title of Jack Goody’s book. However, materiality (conceived as a kind of figurality) cannot be grasped simply through the empirical occurrence and recurrence of particular objects, styles and influences (e.g. how often elephants appear in early modern European paintings, or the wider economic or conventionally sociological impact that particular cultural interactions may have had). Rather, I am much more concerned with the unquantifiable and more profound textural change in European lifeworlds effected by this cultural flow. Spiridione Roma’s mural The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, painted in 1778, was a central feature in the East India House in London. Recent critical thinking encourages us to see such riches as signs on the verge of a recontextualization by the appropriating culture. By contrast I am interested in what those riches brought with them and the ways in which Britannia was “materially” reconfigured by this transaction. The argument developed here is not that “we” entangle objects but that objects entangle us. And the way to explore this is through attending to the transactional network that Roma depicts, rather than the false abstraction of culture (e.g. the East, or Britannia). I am interested in what Lyotard would term the figural qualities of this phenomenon. It was the desire for new tastes, new tactilities, and new special vibrancies which created the modern world. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch noted, “once habituated to the spices of India, Europe was ready to do anything to gratify its craving” (Shivelbusch 1992 [1980]: 12) and the European encounter with the Americas was an accidental by-product of the European lust for pepper. The interesting point is why we keep forgetting this banal and fundamental truth.

An archaeological report (anywhere in Europe, the year 2003) A spade thrust into the soil cracks against some unknown object. Churning the earth, a bright blue and white fragment is revealed (Figure 4.1). Rubbed clean of its accreted dirt, the fragment sparkles through its crackled patina. Underneath lies the unmistakable tracery of the willowpattern: a fragment of a zig-zag bridge, a willow tree or an ornate pagoda stare at the excavator who instinctively recognizes this ubiquitous deposit—so familiar, and so strange—in the sediment of Europe. A linguistic history of conversion is easy to establish for this object (linguistic, that is, in Lyotard’s sense of striving for linguistic-philosophical closure): the willow pattern was an adaptation of the sort of conventional

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Figure 4.1

Willow-pattern fragment.

river scene to be found on Chinese export porcelain of the eighteenth century and is first produced by the Caughley porcelain factory in Shropshire around 1780. Soon after this numerous other factories produced a plethora of other exotic landscapes with buildings. John Rogers and Sons, for instance, issued a plate in the late eighteenth century based on the acquatint “Remains of an Ancient Building near Firoz Shah’s Cotilla, Delhi” from Thomas Daniell’s Oriental Scenery. The Ottoman Empire also featured widely.

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The Caughley factory’s output is one relic of a convulsive frenzy of chinoiserie that gripped much of Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. An infatuation with Japanese and Chinese decorative styles became intimately fused with Rococo and transformed the interior decoration of many elite, and not so elite, European homes. Key moments in the development of Europe’s desire to constitute itself through this xenofigure are 1688, the date of publication of Stalker and Palmer’s Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (describing techniques which would allow Europe to literally “resurface” itself) and the Amsterdam artist Peter Schenck’s publication in 1702 of Picturae Sinicae, a folio of 12 plates of Chinese landscapes. Shortly after this the Nuremberg artist Paul Decker designed and produced porcelain and lacquer in this emergent “Chinese” style. In the case of willowpattern this hybridized creole form spread rapidly from Caughley, was mass-produced by other factories in Shropshire, and then throughout England and Europe, achieving such a saturation of the market that the whole of the literal ground of Europe came to be impregnated with a hundred million fragments of this embodied cultural translation.

Figure/discourse However, it is not this sort of history that interests me primarily. Much more challenging, and much more productive is a material, “figural” history of this encounter and the everyday material creolization of Europe of which it is a part. Here the problem of conversion appears not simply in the form of a movement from one zone of cultural value to another, but also in how we might understand the complex “network” of which it is a part, and the field of effects around the object that respects its own alterity in the flesh of the world. A productive problem arises from the doubled alterity of, say, the willowpattern fragment itself; firstly as a translated xeno-trace or xenofigure, originating—in some sense—in China; but also from its alterity as a figural object resistant to any easy capture by a discourse of reason. We need to resist what Thomas Docherty perceptively locates as the “consistent inability to accept the alterity of the world as alterity” and the desire “to see it (instead) as a comprehensible sign, a sign whose evidential value and truthful meaning is located less in the (self-evidential) object itself and more in the linguistic subject of consciousness” (Docherty 1996: 157). In other words we need to resist the “premature translation of things into signs” and the triumph of semiology over corporeality.

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The term xeno-figure appropriates some aspect of Lyotard’s use of “figure” as a field of affective intensity. Escaping some of the demands of meaning as signification, “figure” stands in a relation of “radical exteriority to discourse” (Carroll 1987: 30). Contrasting “figure” with “discourse” which strives for “linguistic-philosophical closure” and which is “limited to what can be read, identified, and given meaning within a closed linguistic system” (Carroll 1987: 30), Lyotard evokes through “figure” a realm not of decodable meanings, but a zone where “intensities are felt.” Paraphrasing Lyotard I want to explore whether there is “always something happening in [figure] that incandesces the embers of society.” A linguistic history of the willow pattern’s conversion would stress its assimilation—its capture by (and readability within) a European cultural frame—such that the singularity (the figural resistance) of the willowpattern’s materiality would be dissolved into the discursive “solution” of its new domain. And yet—as you will soon discover if you pick up a fragment (in the spirit of a delicate empiricism)—the object retains its distinctiveness. Although leaching from the soil may have started to invade the crackles in the glaze, producing a partialized patina (not only porcelain, not only English soil but some new third zone of difference), the fragment retains its hard edges, its figural ability to crack against your spade, to signal its presence as an ineradicable particle in a cultural/chemical “suspension” that still resists the dissolution of the discursive cultural/chemical “solution.” The European adoption of chinoiserie resulted in an economically important industry that took as its sign a “Chinese look.” Just as the sediment of Europe is impregnated with traces of the domestic manifestation of this craze, parts of Europe’s public landscape also bear testimony to this. One such trace is the Chinese-style pagoda built in the 1760s in the botanical gardens at Kew. Public creole styles in turn fed into domestic material culture. For instance, the pagoda appeared in a design on plate-printed linen and cotton, manufactured in 1766 by John Collins of Woolmers, Hertfordshire, copied from illustrations in William Chamber’s 1763 book on Kew (Desmond 1995: 111). Perhaps the household that used the cloth also had hanging on its walls Joseph Dufour’s Views of India panoramic wallpaper, and perhaps its mealtimes were similar to those described in William King’s early eighteenth-century poem The Art of Cookery: Make your transparent sweet-meats truly nice, With Indian sugar and Arabian spice:

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The South Asia historian Joanne Punzo Waghorne has written about what she terms the “ontology of ornamentation.” Describing the relationship between the material culture of Indian divine kings and EuroAmerican domestic furnishing (which often appropriated elements of divine regalia), Waghorne notes that “in the greater empire, decoration was given the ardor, the passion, frequently reserved for divine matters” (Waghorne 1994: 251). A similar point was made by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton in their classic The Meaning of Things in which they noted Henry Adams’ observation that French Gothic Cathedrals were the “medical equivalents of the large electric turbines of his times” (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton 1981: 35). Domestic decoration and industrial technology are inseparable from cosmologies. The greatest cathedrals in Victorian Britain (which according to the young Ruskin were its railway stations) frequently adopted an architectural style that directly referenced its own fantastical vision of Chinese and Islamic architecture. London’s Paddington railway station, one of Brunel’s greatest structures, owes much of its design to Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–77). He was responsible for what John Sweetman has described as the “wroughtiron tracery of enigmatically Saracenic-looking type,” some of which seems to have been inspired by the Indian “bent leaf” or Paisley design with which Wyatt would have been familiar through his work on the Eastern exhibits in the 1851 Great Exhibition and his subsequent work as a surveyor for the East India Company. One might chose to see a parallelism in the idea that these motifs are “mere decoration” and a discursive stress on the recontextualizing power of Victorian London to culturally refigure this Saracenic tracery. Both positions would grant the bent leaf a second-order significance as a mere reflection of some other more important determinant (i.e. the engineering structure of the station, or the wider context of “English” culture which is deemed to have appropriated and translated this sign). But Mark Wigley’s reading of Gottfried Semper and his claim that “architecture begins with ornament,” and more precisely with the texture, sensuous play, and the “folds, twists, and turns of an often discontinuous ornamental surface,” helps us to start to liberate the bent leaf from its subaltern position.

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And let your various creams encircled be With swelling fruit just ravished from the tree. Let plates and dishes be from China brought, With liveley paint and earth transparent wrought (1973: 168).

The power of Renaissance Italian cities was sometimes performed through the display of Oriental carpets draped over the parapets of buildings (as is recorded in Carlo Crivelli’s 1486 painting The Annunciation with St. Emidius (cf. Jardine 1996: 5–10). Perhaps it was a similar “dressing” of the railway terminal that contributed to its recognition as what Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton call a “giant store-house of power [reflecting] the goals of the age” (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton 1981: 35). The modern equivalent of the Kew pagoda, or Paddington Station, might be the Quantas 747 covered from its nose (almost) to its tail in a pastiche of post-Papunya Aboriginal central desert designs by the Balaranji co-operative. The domestic parallel would be the collection of artefacts which the art historian and activist Vivienne Johnson scathingly collated in her “House of Aboriginality” and whose longer history in an Australian context has been so perceptively analyzed by the painter Gordon Bennett, who has elaborately transposed different cultural and historical styles between different events and topoi in what he describes as “psychotopographical map[s].” In paintings such as Home Décor (Algebra) Daddy’s Little Girl (1998), Bennett explores Cook’s mythic foundational moment of perception through a juxtaposition with Margaret Preston’s neo-Aboriginal aesthetic, Mondrian, and the different forms and textures they mobilized (Jantjes & MacGregor 1999: 37). A key theme in Gordon Bennett’s work is the resistant identities of material style, which are dramatized by the startling nature of his transpositions. Material style is resistant in the sense that it is never simply “form” whose only function is to cleanly deliver a detachable “content”; it is never fully assimilable to a discursive narrative. In this sense, Bennett’s critical position appropriates the assumptions of High Modernists that style was agentive and transformative. Bennett’s particular target was Mondrian’s quest to utopically harmonize a contrasting verticality and horizontality (Jantjes & MacGregor 1999: 19). This concern with style (of a look and its transformative power) finds a more politicized parallel in recent declarations by First Nation peoples. Thus the Inter-Apache Summit—a consortium of Apache tribes—in 1995 issued a demand that it should have exclusive control over all Apache “cultural property” in which category it included “all images, texts, ceremonies, music, songs, stories, symbols, beliefs, customs, ideas and other physical and spiritual objects and concepts” (Brown 1998: 194). The perplexed liberal anthropological response noted that such a broad definition of cultural property would encompass “ethnographic fieldnotes, feature films (e.g. John Ford’s Fort Apache), historical works, and

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any other medium in which Apache cultural practices appear, whether presented literally or as imaginative, expressionistic, or parodic embellishments of concepts with which Apache identify” (Brown 1998: 194). This anthropological response has then frequently gone on to decry the impediments which such a stipulation would place in the way of the free flow of knowledge and hence the efficient functioning of liberal democracies. What these declarations also say about person/things and their agency has, however, been ignored.

“So you got the brain but have you got the touch?” The linguistic conversion of chintz, that quintessentially English textile patterning, is on the face of it even more straightforward than that of the willowpattern. “An old English house without a chintz room,” wrote Maciver Percival in 1923, “is rather like Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark omitted.” Percival then went on to figurally position chintz within a repertoire of looks, textures, and grains: chintz: “bring[s] at once to mind visions of colour bright and gay, yet soft and subdued withal, of dark gleaming mahogany, honey-coloured oak, walnut of mysterious grain, reflecting in the polished surfaces the tints and hangings, of sunlit parlours scented with rose and lavender in quiet country personages and picturesque manor houses—in a word, all the surroundings of a typical country house” (Percival 1923: 1). Chintz had first entered Britain in 1631 when permission to import it was granted to the East India Company. Chintz is a corruption from chint, the Hindi-Urdu word for a spotted cloth; Pepys, purchasing an East Indian callico to line his wife’s study in 1663, uses the term “chint” (Percival 1923: 19). So intense was European enthusiasm for chintz (especially for the brilliance and fastness of its colors, a spectral vibrancy facilitated by indigo and madder red) that various governments were threatened by the economic crises that the trade precipitated. In 1686 the French banned its importation of all decorated stuffs from the East Indies, Persia and China to Britain. However, a loophole, which permitted importation for re-export, meant that the ban was ineffective. Irwin and Brett (1970) have exhaustively documented the circularity of chintz production, demonstrating that it represented Indian artisans’ interpretations of the design commissions given to them by the East India Company which, through a process of partialization, threw up a new hybrid product that was attractively exotic to European consumers. In this respect it was rather like the Venetian trade beads

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exported to African in the sixteenth century and now re-exported to the West as a sign of an African authenticity. There already exists an extensive (and extremely useful) literature on chinoiserie and chintz. It is not, however, concerned with these as embodied practice, or figure—as part of an everyday corporeal aesthetics (what elsewhere I’ve neologized as “corpothetics” (Pinney 2001). Rather, existing accounts approach these genres in their purely “readerly” aspect (as something which like Lyotard’s discourse “can be read, identified, and given meaning within a closed linguistic system” (Carroll 1987: 30) and the conventional patterns of intention and effect of art historical analysis. Any understanding of these as embodiments of a doubled alterity needs to locate such material artefacts in a realm of figural affect and place the “skins” of these objects in the flesh of the world.

Wavy meaning: or what is desire? Annie Le Brun has argued that the importance of the surrealists lay in their taking seriously De Sade’s proposal that the key question was not “what is man?” but instead, “what is desire?” In so doing, she argues, existence was recognized as a question of interplay, or processes and networks, rather than essences and ontologies. We might see in this a partial solution to Latour’s question as to whether anthropology will be forever condemned to inhabit territories rather than explore networks. Desire implies flows. For a specific example we might turn to Roland Barthes’ brilliant and strangely ignored reading of Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1982 [1963]). This pornographic narrative was first published in 1928 and, as Barthes explores, elaborates a fluid transubstantiation between a common network of objects constellated by a saucer of milk, a human eye, a skinned bull’s testicle and the moon. Barthes’ insight is to recognize this object narrative as something different from the familiar eighteenth-century tales about which Jonathan Lamb has written so brilliantly (2001). These stories, with titles such as The History of my Pipe, Memoirs of an Armchair, are, Barthes writes, about objects “passed from hand to hand” (Barthes 1982: 119). Narratives of the social lives of things, they reaffirm the agency of those humans between which they pass. The Story of the Eye by contrast is a true object-tale in which the narrative itself is a mere mise-en-scène for the appearance of various avatars (or declensions) of the central eye/testicle/moon object. The “vibrations” of this object (though perhaps, following Serres and Latour we should say “quasi-object”) create a new “wavy meaning,” a new indeterminate object

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agency, as it passes “down the path of a particular imagination that distorts but never drops it”: Its sound remains the same (Barthes 1982: 119).

Emergent sensory/figural histories concerned with wavy meaning might facilitate a new understanding of the “aesthetic” precipitation of cultural and colonial history (I mean here aesthetic in its original sense of aisthitikos, “perceptive by feeling,” and as inseparable from bodies). This new form of history might relocate vision not as the single modality of modernity, but as part of a unified sensorium in which a re-carnalized eye was but one element (note chintz’s incarnation as a “texture”). This new form of history would have as one of its pressing goals the desire (by, as Bruno Latour says, “making anthropology symmetrical” [Latour 1993: 91ff.]), to undo those European subject/object distinctions that have insisted on the triumph of discourse over figure as part of its strategy to degrade the agency of objects. Current histories articulate parallel trajectories that differ only in details. Hence Lyotard stressed Judaism’s and Hellenism’s strategic disparagement of a figural Eastern “irrationalism.” William Pietz (1985) and Peter Stallybrass (1998) propose a similar but much later differentiation via the trope of the fetish from the sixteenth century onwards. The demonization of the West African fetish provided the means for Europe to define itself through its absolute person/thing and subject/object distinctions. Freud emphasized Judaism’s invocation of a god one could not see (and hence, as Lyotard argues, the “victory of intellectuality over sensuality”). Heidegger described the rise of the “world as picture” in which man increasingly constructed the world as an object given over to man’s mastery and measuring. Jay’s (1988) concept of a “Cartesian perspectivalism,” deploying a cold vision to enforce a distance between subject and object, echoes this very closely. Finally, Foucault’s epistemic trajectory from Renaissance analogy to the classical and modern triumph of man maps out the same history of disenchantment. However, as Latour notes, there have been some “small mistakes concerning the disenchantment of the world” (Latour 1993: 114). If we combine Lyotard’s concern with the ineradicable presence of figure—the persistence of the sensuous in the face of abstraction—with Latour’s brilliant insight that we have never been modern, we can recast most of these histories as records of a tenacious aspiration for the autonomy of the self which was always incompletely realized.

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“Small mistakes concerning the disenchantment of the world”

Foucauldian approaches in particular have produced a consensus that xeno-figure has always been controlled by museological structures of knowledge and display—abstracted in a space beyond touch—rather than part of an everyday tactility and sensuousness. In understanding the volatility of figure, however, Alphonse Daudet’s late nineteenth-century Tartarin of Tarascon may well be a better guide than Foucault. Whereas Foucault frequently assumes the triumph of discursive practices and linguistic-philosophical closure, Daudet addresses the anxieties that objects provoke and the fragility of our attempts to constrain and imprison them: You are to picture [Daudet tells us], a capacious apartment adorned with firearms and steel blades from top to bottom: all the weapons of all the countries in the wide world—carbines, rifles, blunderbusses, Corsican, Catalan, and dagger knives, Malay kreses, revolvers with spring-bayonets, Carib and flint arrows, knuckle-dusters, lifepreservers, Hottentot clubs, Mexican lassoes…Upon the whole fell a fierce sunlight, which made the blades and the brass buttplate of the muskets gleam as if all the more to set your flesh creeping. Still, the beholder was soothed a little by the tame air of order and tidiness reigning over the arsenal. Everything was in place, brushed, dusted, labelled, as in a museum; from point to point the eye descried some obliging little card reading:— POISONED ARROWS! DO NOT TOUCH! Or, LOADED! TAKE CARE PLEASE! If it had not been for these cautions I never should have dared venture in. (Daudet 1910: 1) This is a model not of the enduring capture and suppression of objects, but rather, of their fleeting habitation within fragile discursive categories from which they seem ready, at any moment, to escape, like a bullet, or an arrow, prefiguring Benjamin’s observation that “it hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality” (Benjamin 1992: 231). If for Foucault the horror of the European tradition lies in the triumph of “the absolute eye that cadaverizes,” Daudet marks the limits—the failure—of this cadaverization, and in stressing the tactile, bullet-like, quality of the objects of European knowledge transposes its power so that they acquire the power to cadaverize us. The museum

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of “them,” far from being “our” means of surveillance and control, becomes “their” threat over “us.”

We can see a similar Latourian tension—produced by discourse’s inability to fully convert figure—at work in Roland Barthes’ discussion of Dutch still-life painting in his essay “The world as object,” which takes as its central problems the question of why so much effort might have been invested in the painting of (what Barthes describes as) “these meaningless surfaces” (Barthes 1982 [1953]: 3). On the one hand there is evidence of a routine “possessive individualism”—the concatenation of objects signifies “man’s space; in it he measures himself and determines his humanity” (1983 [1953]: 5). But this museum (and here I read Barthes against his own grain) also betrays man’s anxieties about the object-world and its ability to ensnare him with its “secondary vibrations of appearance.” To avoid entrapment and the collapse of fragile subject/object polarities, objects have to be coated with a sheen in order to “lubricate man’s gaze.” “Oysters, lemon pulp, heavy goblets full of dark wine, long clay pipes, gleaming chestnuts, pottery, tarnished metal cups…grape seeds” (to recall Barthes’ catalogue) are given (what he terms) an “easy surface” to avoid any leakage into man’s identity. Sheen operates as the inverse of stickiness—the quality, which for Sartre was so repulsive because it heralded the dissolution of linguistically-inculcated self/other identities. Whereas stickiness dissolves or blurs bodies, sheen helps maintain the fiction of separation within an engine where the similitude of moving parts always threatens a potential seizure through self-identity. Le Corbusier was motivated by a similar fear of entanglement by objects. Noting that he (Le Corbusier) appropriated much of Adolf Loos’ earlier paranoia about ornament, Wigley suggests that whiteness was praised because it permitted the fiction of a self detached from the world around it (and hence “civilized”). The problem with decoration was that “the body of the building and the body of the observer disappear into [its] sensuous excess” (Wigley 2001: 9). This is MerleauPonty’s chiasmatic imbrication of subject and object in perception, but negatively coded. As Wigley continues, “to look at decoration is to be absorbed by it. Vision itself is swallowed by the sensuous surface.” From this perspective, Le Corbusier’s declamation on behalf of Ripolin sounds exactly the same as those missionary directives to heathens to free themselves from the non-modern attachment to fetishes.

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The sheen of the object: or, slippery eyes

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Imagine the results of the Law of Ripolin. Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wallpapers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanness, for the course adopted leads to a refusal to allow anything which is not correct, authorised, intended, desired, thought-out: no action before thought. When you are surrounded with shadows and dark corners you are at home only as far as the hazy edges of the darkness your eyes penetrate. You are not master in your own house. One you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of your own house (cited by David Batchelor, Chromophobia 2000: 46). Note the directionality of transformation proposed in the Law of Ripolin: it is not that the ideal citizen/subject will happen to use ripolin, rather s/he will come to be constituted by it—as its after-effect. Ripolin will create the subject just as previously damasks and wallpapers have created the pre-modern anti-citizen.

Entangling objects The model of aesthetics that I am attempting to challenge is surely now revealed as an epiphenomenon of that passing moment of reason’s selfdelusion (and here I draw on Heidegger, Adorno, Lyotard and Latour). A rational cogito at the center of a world as picture strove to relegate the aesthetic to a mere superstructural reflection of some deeper infrastructural self-willed linguistic reality. With the disintegration of the historical fiction of western reason the aesthetic returns to its primary place (“impressing itself upon man”). Increasingly what we think we have created presses down upon us and creates us. Our cities, our technology, its textures and patterns, forces us to will: we live out its life convincing ourselves that it is simply some minor affective irreality. “Do not knock,” Adorno labels his discussion of what he calls the “implacable…demands of objects” in Minima Moralia. “What does it mean for the subject,” he asks, that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt,

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The missionaries’ fear of the fetish as a person-thing is mirrored in Le Corbusier’s anxiety about not being “master of your own house”:

Christopher Pinney 69

Technology, Adorno argues, subjects men “to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects” (Adorno 1978: 19). This claim for “ahistorical demands” will doubtless be greeted by many with amazement for it contradicts in some fundamental sense our investment in human/object distinctions: we think we know that objects can’t have demands—it is human agency which attributes imaginative demands to them. Similarly, it has become part of academic doxa that (to quote Nicholas Thomas) “as socially and culturally salient entities, objects change in defiance of their material stability. The category to which a thing belongs, the emotion and judgement it prompts, and the narrative it recalls, are all historically refigured” (Thomas 1991: 125). Within a striving for linguistic-philosophical closure this can only be true, although as Latour argues, science itself invokes “quasi-objects” (like the vacuum) which are “inert bodies incapable of will, but capable of showing” (Latour 1993: 23). However, discourse is only one possible world or domain, and in the domain of figure—I am arguing—objects assert “implacable demands.” For Adorno these were “as it were” ahistorical and the subjunctive caution is surely crucial to the acceptability of this claim. Objects’ demands are not ahistorical in any direct sense: clearly this would be absurd. But subjunctively (as relating to a contingent, hypothetical or prospective event) objects’ demands are “as it were” ahistorical. Or so I hope to convince you. Arjun Appadurai’s stress on the “social life” of objects and Nicholas Thomas’s investigation of objects’ promiscuity (for all their insight) might be seen—with the benefit of Latourian hindsight—as the outcome of a particular obsession with the figure of man, with a man-besotted vision of reality (I should note, however, that in a recent article [1999], Nicholas Thomas revises his earlier position in favor of a view of artifacts as “technologies that created context anew” [Thomas 1999b: 18], an argument that resonates with the one expounded here). Although in Appadurai’s case an attempt was made to endow objects with quasihuman characteristics by conceding them a “life” and multiple careers, ultimately culture’s potency is reinscribed through its ability to infinitely recode objects. The discovery—thanks to Latour—that we were never “modern” after all has set “nonhumans” free from being, as he says in Pandora’s Hope, “clothed in the drab uniform of objects,” objects whose

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no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden?…The new human type cannot be properly understood without an awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations (Adorno 1978 [1951]: 40).

fate in the Appadurai and early Thomas accounts was always to live out the social life of men, or to become entangled in the webs of culture, whose ability to refigure the object simultaneously inscribed culture’s ability to translate things into signs and the object’s powerlessness as an artefactual trace. Latour’s suggestion that culture (and cultures) are simply an epiphenomenon of the sign of man created by the bracketing off of Nature (and that consequently cultures do not exist) clearly poses a dramatic challenge to conventional cultural histories and anthropologies. Frequently the Latourian problem of what to do with the “nonhuman” is resolved by the granting of personhood to objects: paintings are granted faces (Michael Fried, W. J. T. Mitchell, David Freedberg) and late industrial technology revealed to be a complex form of animism (Alfred Gell). Another (and to my mind more satisfactory) strategy involves a mutual dissolution of human/non-human distinctions through the emergence of a new space of mutual interaction (I propose we call it “transhuman corpography”) and an exploration of the space of contact in which these different sorts of objects (or transhuman corporealities) interact, where Merleau-Ponty suggested “things arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence” (cited by MacDougall 1998: 53).

Devilish Indian diamonds I have suggested that within the domain of discourse, objects cannot have “ahistorical” demands. If we read Adorno with a desire for linguistic-philosophical closure we must necessarily disagree with him for our entire linguistic-philosophical repertoire has been configured by the denial of such a possibility. If we switch domains, to the figural, and recognize Adorno’s subjunctive framing of his claim, it starts to become useful. Although it may well be true that discourse has internalized a view of humans as subjects forged through the demonization of “other” cultural practices such as fetishism (Pietz, Stallybrass), the literary and figural productions of a putatively disenchanted Europe strip away the foundations of this subject/object distinction through their imaginative exploration of a complex transhuman corpography. Fiction makes its own world, and a world in which the intentionality of objects does not need to be established, only their capacity to “show.” I mean “worlds” in the sense that Nelson Goodman proposes of domains which are structured by internal “rightness of fit” (Goodman 1978: 3–5) that are relative to any one world, rather than

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transcendental claims to a master truth. In the light of this the fact that fiction’s subjunctive “world” might be contradicted by—and indeed be incompatible with—reason’s “world” is hardly surprising. Fiction’s world of figure creates a medium in which the carnal presences objects are able to produce are addressed in their own terms, rather than living under the shadow of an impossible rationalism. Like De Quincey’s opium, which induced dreams in which the east became an immediate and threatening presence, the figural is a kind of drug that grants us access to domains beyond the narrowly linguisticphilosophical and that lets us live inside the corporeality of objects. Alethea Hayter suggested that De Quincey’s experience of being “stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos” and being trapped for centuries in secret rooms within pagodas was as though “he had got into a Chinoiserie panel by Huet or Pillement” (Hayter 1968: 88). Or, phrased differently, De Quincey was able to experience the subjunctively ahistorical demand of the panel through the drug/dream/writing. A cosmology with animate objects has a powerful sublimated Latourian presence in the popular fiction of modernity. Indeed in the new nineteenth-century detective genre we can trace a preoccupation with the identities and boundaries of persons and things in an emergent semiotics and phenomenology of Empire. In Edgar Allan Poe we can see an anxiety about the power of objects within a corpography. The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Oval Portrait systematically explore the permeability of human/animal and human/artefact divides. The exotic was a privileged state of liminality and anxiety and it is no surprise that it is exotic objects that frequently explore the personthing or quasi-object in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. The anxious agency accorded to transcultural artefacts finds one of its fullest literary articulations in Wilkie Collins’ 1868 “sensation novel” The Moonstone where the troubling presence of an exotic object is expressive of an agency that exceeds the classificatory abilities of colonial structures. “Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond—bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues” (Collins 1998: 46). The moonstone is of course a diamond looted from Tipu Sultan’s palace after the storming of Seringapatam in 1799 and its agency is repeatedly testified to: When you look down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it, so that you saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your fingers

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We might also connect the moonstone to David Batchelor’s account of the role of gems as exemplary of an eastern “color” (for instance in Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell where sapphire and lapis lazuli “seemed to possess an interior light” [2000: 74]) which was disruptive of a dominant “chromophobia.” Batchelor’s brilliant insight is that color “looks at you”: chromophobia expresses a discursive desire to render the world as (subfusc) picture, an object distinct from the viewing subject. Figural color—returning the gaze—recorporealizes, recarnalizes this axis and causes the world to presence itself again as part of a corpography. The agency of Wilkie Collins’ stone is mirrored by an earlier objectification of Tipu Sultan himself. A common theme of paintings produced immediately after Tipu’s death concerns his thingness and his darkness, his location within a liminal corpography. Commenting on Arthur William Devis’ “Major General David Baird Discovering the Body of Tipu Sultan,” Mildred Archer notes that “the tiny figures crouch below the archway engulfed by a black and yawning emptiness” (Archer 1979: 266) and Tipu’s body is checked to ascertain that it is completely devoid of life. Jean-Pierre Naugrette has suggested that the agency of the moonstone is replicated by the way in which the Indian theme “gradually pervade[s] (and even pervert[s]) the English narratives of Betteredge, Miss Clarke” and so on. The whole narrative is framed—through its prologue and epilogue—by Indian experiences: the putatively humdrum Victorian England that lies in the center of the text is determined by this Indian frame. Twenty-six years later, in the Sherlock Holmes case of The Speckled Band, another animate Indian object is wreaking havoc on the sleepy interior of England. This should not surprise us for the story is part of the reminiscences of Dr. John Watson, late of the Indian Army (a brief biography of whom Conan Doyle considerately provides at the start of A Study in Scarlet). It is also salutary to recall that Holmes himself was a member of the Anthropological Institute and, as he tells us in The Cardboard Box, had recently written a short anthropological monograph on the outer morphology of the ear. In The Speckled Band Watson and Holmes are woken early by the arrival of a terrified Helen Stonor, whose stepfather is “the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England”—the Roylotts of west

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and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark.

Surrey. After a medical career in Calcutta, her stepfather—Grimesby Roylott—had returned to England a “morose and disappointed man” whose hereditary mania had been “intensified by his long residence in the tropics” (Conan Doyle 1994: 177). In rural Surrey, Roylott’s only friends were groups of wandering gypsies whom he would permit to camp on his land and would “accept in return the hospitality of their tents, wandering away sometimes for weeks on end” (Conan Doyle 1994: 178). His only companions were a baboon and a cheetah who were “feared by the villagers almost as much as their master” and whose occasional presence in the Roylott mansion forced his two stepdaughters to lock the doors to their bedrooms at night (note how this Surrey village has assumed all the characteristics of a colonial Indian village). Helen Stonor’s visit to see Holmes was precipitated by the recent murder of her sister who, dying in Helen’s arms, “her face blanched with terror,” had exclaimed, “it was the band! The speckled band!” (Conan Doyle 1994: 180–1). Key to Holmes’ understanding that Grimesby Roylott was intent on killing his two stepdaughters (whose impending marriages would have depleted his diminishing resources) was the fact that shortly before she died the sister had been troubled by the “smell of the strong Indian cigars” which Grimesby smoked, thus indicating that there was some sort of passageway between his room and that of the sisters. This turned out to be a ventilation shaft and it was this that permitted the ingress and egress of a trained Indian swamp adder which was in the final twist of fate to end up killing Grimesby Roylott himself, whose body is found at the conclusion of the story wearing “strange headgear” that is the speckled band, or adder coiled around his head. If this transhuman corpography works on the unconscious, it is at a phenomenological level of bodily reaction that we might expect its effects. Exactly this point is made in The Moonstone when, having explained the anxiety that the “devilish Indian diamond” had brought to a “quiet English house,” and the improbability of this in “an age of progress,” Gabriel Betteredge explains that “whenever you get a sudden alarm of the sort that I had now, nine times out of ten the place you feel it is in your stomach” (Collins 1998: 46). Betteredge seems to be agreeing with Latour that we never were modern. If detective and ghost stories (and the genre significantly known as Sensation novels) were concerned primarily to invoke a negative physical thrill, aesthetic style produced more positive effects, but the phenomenological history of the reception of these genres has yet to be

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“Bangalore Brings the Uncanny” If Pietz and Stallybrass are correct, and early European cultural encounters in West Africa with what becomes coded as “fetishism” are a foundational episode in the fragile definition of a Europe as unlike West African because it had person-thing distinctions, one could point to later moments of cultural encounter in which one can see this fragile construction decaying. Take for instance nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Orientalist concerns with the position of Indian objects within a transhuman corpography and the complementary fixation with persons’ abilities to become objects. Perhaps the most celebrated instance is Kim’s journey through the entrance-hall turnstile of the Lahore “Aijab-Gher” (ajab = strange, peculiar)—the Lahore wonderhouse, or museum—into a space of encounter with (in the lama’s case “open-mouthed”) wonder that inscribes a paradigmatic conjunction of object and agency. Parallel accounts of ascetic renouncers’ practices (such as the inscription on a photograph in London’s Royal Anthropological Institute Photographic Collection, “bystanders said the yogi had been in a trance for a week”) explore the suspension of the conventional signs of being “human.” Almost any travel account or memoir of India might be mined for an exploration of person/animal and person/thing dichotomies that construct India as a laboratory where the person might be experimentally put under erasure. “Bangalore Brings the Uncanny” is a chapter heading in Mark Channing’s Indian Mosaic (1936). Having spent two years soldiering in India, Channing is disappointed by its routine rationality until he transfers to Bangalore. Initially the cool air of the Mysore plateau makes him sleep soundly until one night when he awakes suddenly with the sensation that somebody is in the room: Dimly seen and tired-looking, he was bending over me, and appeared to be smiling, for I could see a gleam of teeth. But his hands were crossed upon his breast, and that made the smile look uncanny. (“Keep clear of the uncanny!”) My heart began to thump. There was no light in the room; the night was moonless; and yet I could see him!

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written. What already exists in fragmentary form are semiological accounts of aesthetic styles, for example, which cryptologically (to use Dan Sperber’s term) decode images and pattern, but have nothing to say about xeno-figure.

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Bodies that glow in the dark, that have cyborg abilities to move through barriers (Channing’s scene recalls Terminator II), and the thousands of levitating sadhus, gyrating ropes and other person-things that populate (note this term) a plethora of popular Orientalist texts, participate in the elaboration of a new theoretical terrain which attempts to escape what Latour terms the “despair and self-punishment” of a disenchanted world.

The object creates its own context The classicist Mary Beard has documented that images of the Rosetta Stone are one of the consistent best-sellers in the range of postcards offered for sale by the British Museum, along with images of the portico by day and by night. The latter Beard explains with reference to the fact that in visitor surveys an overwhelming number of respondents when asked what they expect to find in the British Museum reply, “everything”: postcards of the portico might thus be seen as the lid to the box that contains all possible knowledge. The Rosetta Stone is very popular indeed: the present British Museum Gift Catalogue advertises a reduced size resin copy with wall hook (“gift boxed”), a luxurious silk scarf (“dry clean only”), and a Rosetta Stone Umbrella (“practical and stylish”). This popularity Beard attributes to its embodiment of the putative decipherability of the past, and of the object in general. The stone with its parallel inscribed texts stands in a compressed way for the textualization of the visual (the stone’s hieroglyphs were given a Greek translation), but also more abstractly for the possible decoding of materiality in general since the stone is an object that has its own label. As Beard writes: “Language and writing is seen to take precedence over the artefact” (Beard 1992: 521). The Rosetta stone emerges as the totem of “discourse”—the fantasy triumph of a linguistic-philosophical closure—and in conclusion I want to juxtapose this apparent meta-conversional text, the supreme translational artefact of modernity, with a parallel though very different object: the sherd of Amenartas in Rider Haggard’s She (Figure 4.2). The parallels and differences are strangely precise. The three languages of the Rosetta Stone find a parallel in the Sherd of Amenartas in the three keys which are required to unlock the casket which contains it. The keys (a comparatively modern one, an exceedingly ancient one,

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A second later I realized something that made my skin prickle: half of this man’s body was outside the mosquito curtains, and half of it was inside them (Channing 1936: 95).

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Figure 4.2

The sherd of Amenartas in Rider Haggard’s She.

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and “the third entirely unlike anything of the sort that we had ever seen before”) are then deployed in a set of movements that as they open different elements of the casket simultaneously strip away language to the irreducible core of the object. The appearance of this remarkable object—the sherd of Amenartas—is presaged by the disturbance of the ordinary object-world and its secure uses and classifications: So occupied was I with my own thoughts that I regret to state that I put a piece of bacon into Leo’s tea in mistake for a lump of sugar. Job, too, to whom the contagion of excitement had, of course, spread, managed to break the handle off my Sevres china teacup, the identical one, I believe, that Marat had used just before he was stabbed to death (Haggard 1918: 23). Space does not permit me to give a detailed reading of the remarkable appearance of this object but suffice it to say that one of its consequences is the eruption of one of the most significantly material texts in popular fiction, producing a dramatic pictorialization of the narrative through its reproduction of the different texts (and their translations) which are inscribed in the text. The entire trajectory of She is, however, quite different from that of the Rosetta Stone. Whereas the latter was used in the cause of semiological closure (for after about 1820—largely with the benefit of the clues from the stone—scholars were also to decipher hieroglyphics), the casket containing the sherd of Amenartas is a veritable Pandora’s Box unleashing the full narrative and figural complexity of the following 300 or so pages of the novel. The agentive centrality of the casket and its contents reminds me forcefully of the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s account of Melanesian artefacts which are deemed to be capable of creating their “own context.” Strathern suggests that many Melanesian societies may see images as compressed performances requiring little or no additional contextual information: “the very act of presentation [constitutes] the only act that [is] relevant” and talk is resisted because of the inevitable distortion that such a reframing, or translation from figure to discourse will entail (Strathern 1990: 33). One powerful consequence of the dominance of a model of modernity as disenchantment configured by subject/object distinctions has been the attempt to discursively capture the corporeal and artefactual. Euro-America’s desire to convert figure into discourse has resulted in

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the material realm being forced into a subjugated periphery, always seemingly fully determined by more significant and more powerfully metropolitan epistemic discourses which material culture is only ever permitted to exemplify, or illustrate. Xeno-figure has, as I have suggested, been characterized by a double alterity by virtue of its nonmetropolitaness and also because of its figural alterity. I have suggested that it is surely no coincidence that exotic subjects play the supreme role of person/thing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and that transhuman corpographies are so frequently given a colonial backdrop. The task now is to develop new languages which challenge this conversional meta-narrative and articulate pathways that will allow objects and material practices to manifest their own primary role as instantiations of significance (what Edward Said has termed their “sensuous particularity”), rather than being subjugated as the expression of some higher order of meaning whose primary form is located elsewhere. To conclude: creole designs emerged strongly in New Zealand from the 1880s onwards and were given a decisive impetus with the publication of Augustus Hamilton’s Maori Art in 1896. Here I have tried to suggest that a parallel creolism characterizes much European design from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It is in this sense, to recall Bernard Smith, that colonial art is “a reflection of a reflection.” But in addition to seeking to establish the enduring presence of a creole materiality, I have also attempted to explore a framework through which this materiality might be addressed on its own terms, rather than as a mere shadow of a linguistically envisaged form of culture whose “immateriality” is more important. Key to the displacement of this model of culture, I have suggested, is Latour’s notion of the network and Barthes’ model of wavy meaning. The notion of “settlement” implies a stasis and the consolidation of this problematic notion of culture. Much as McKim Marriott urged the replacement of the “solidarities” of European sociology (at least in the context of the understanding of India) with the “fluidarities” of Indian cultural realities, so the time now seems ripe to unsettle settled ideas of the relation of culture and materiality through the exploration of the pathways of fluid, wavy meaning that I have attempted to delineate in this paper (Marriott 1990: 3). Note 1 This article first appeared in Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2003), pp. 125–61.

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Section 2

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America

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5 Sean Goudie Pennsylvania State University

During the past few decades, scholars of American literature and culture have had much to say about Thomas Jefferson’s iconographic status in the national imaginary, specifically about Jefferson’s mythic vision for the United States as an “empire for liberty” as expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and later writings. This chapter will not argue against the significance of a Jefferson-centered understanding of national character and literary and cultural formation in the New Republic. Rather, it intends to complicate such an understanding by providing an alternative locus for situating such discussions, one centered on Jefferson’s arch-rival, Alexander Hamilton. About Hamilton there has always been an aura of sacrificial mystery that transcends the tragic circumstances surrounding his death as a result of a notorious duel with Aaron Burr.2 More than any other figure in the early national period, Hamilton embodies the manifold ambivalences and contradictions, as well as the energies and potential, that the new nation evinces as a result of, I argue, its creole complex. In invoking such a notion, I mean to signal the ways in which the New Republic capitalizes on, and disavows, its conflicted commercial relationship to the plantation economies of Europe’s West Indian colonies. This chapter treats Hamilton’s bold design for the United States as a hemispheric empire for commerce, a plan he advanced as the most powerful—and controversial—member of Washington’s cabinet. Defined most succinctly in The Federalist (1787), Hamilton’s empire vision reveals his and the emerging United States empire’s indebtedness to their actual and imagined West Indian origins—Hamilton worked until age 18 as a West Indian merchant clerk on behalf of New York shipping conglomerates, an occupation that uniquely prepared him to function as the new nation’s chief economic strategist. At once sacred and profane, the 81

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Alexander Hamilton and the New Republic’s Creole Complex1

contradictory figures of Alexander Hamilton as abject West Indian creole and heroic American statesman make manifest the mutually transformative encounters between the West Indies and the United States in the turbulent commercial cross-currents of the Americas in the late eighteenth century. The chapter concludes by suggesting the potential benefits awaiting scholars willing to situate literary and cultural production in the New Republic in relation to Hamilton’s and his opponents’ persistent anxieties about their creole origins. More precisely, I argue that the New Republic’s creole complex is at once symptomatic and productive of efforts by writers, artists and intellectuals to respond to, critique, and contain the harmful effects of European efforts via superior military power to undermine the political economy of the still vulnerable nation. European empires’ ability to render US participation in the lucrative West Indian trades treacherous proved profoundly destabilizing on the national character, a condition registered by the former colonists’ lingering sensitivity towards eighteenth-century European discourses about New World creole degeneracy. Ultimately such developments belie claims for US American exceptionalism in regards to Europe and the hemisphere’s “other” creole colonial societies and cultures as betokened by the nation’s unprecedented revolutionary victory over the British empire and its putatively superior republican values and institutions. *** Jefferson’s empire for liberty hinges on the desire to expand to new lands, made manifest by Jefferson’s recurring stylization of the North American husbandman as a figure of man’s equality. Accordingly, Jefferson’s eye for empire is, as a matter of course, focused on the West and turned away from Europe, the stage of corruption and immorality. In such a way, Jefferson’s cartography figures a divinely inspired farmer on a westerly track cultivating freedom, justice, and equality amid a sentimentalized North American landscape.3 Like Jefferson’s, Hamilton’s view of empire, which he first elaborates in The Federalist, responds in explicit ways to European notions of creole American degeneracy. Indeed, in Federalist 11 he admits that such theories motivate his will to empire: The superiority [Europe] has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the mistress of the world, and to consider the rest

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of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have in direct terms attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America—that even the dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation (Hamilton 1961: 91). Thus Hamilton is in concert with Jefferson when he acknowledges the force and sway of European discourse about New World creole degeneracy, and the tendency of US Americans in their minds and actions to manifest the deleterious effects of European environmentalisms. Nonetheless, Hamilton’s notion of political economy—formed, in part, by chasing down debtor plantation owners like Jefferson—remained sensitive to the ways in which the British empire had drained West Indian plantation economies of their wealth and resources. Thus he eschewed the concept of a US empire that emphasized agriculture for its political and economic well-being. For Hamilton, the model US empire flows south and east: his notion of empire is not bent on geographic expansion and conquest but on command of the hemisphere’s tradeways: its oceans, rivers, and especially the Caribbean Sea. As Hamilton envisions the future time/space of US American empire, the new nation is figured as the “heart” of hemispheric influence and power, enriched by a vigorous circulatory system of commerce whose “veins” and “arteries” have been purified of Europe’s clotting influence. The purifying force will be a compact, potent federal republic that Hamilton exhorts his readers to endorse: “Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!” (91). Accordingly, Hamilton’s imperial gaze is focused steadfastly on the West Indies and Europe; he implicitly dismisses the westward orientation of Jefferson’s expansionist vision when he notes how the territories of the West “stretch far into our rear” (60; emphasis added). Instead, Hamilton seeks to reterritorialize the hemisphere’s commercial pathways according to the pulsating force of “one great American [circulatory] system” of commercial empire.

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As with the figure of commerce as circulatory system to the federal “body,” Hamilton deploys a series of interrelated, layered figures in his empire writings that are repeated for effect. All these terms are contained in one form or another in Federalist 11. At once an economics lesson, a treatise on empires past and present, an exhortation to control the hemisphere in the spirit of republican liberalism, and a strongly worded defense against European claims of American degeneracy, Federalist 11 is an especially prescient document in early US discourse about empire. It anticipates and predicts the present appetite for economic communities, the triumphal tone of US global capitalism, and the attendant sway of the United States over the cultural condition of the Western Hemisphere. Federalist 11 establishes the proposition that the United States, rather than remain hostage to European colonial and imperial desire, might one day “become the arbiter of Europe in America,” replacing European New World despotism with a powerful, commercially driven federal republic (87). By so doing, Hamilton feels the nation might dislodge the exploitative political and economic relationship between Europe and the Americas that undergirds the hierarchy of values articulated by discourses of creole degeneracy. What is so singular about Hamilton’s pronouncement in Federalist 11 is his protomodern suggestion that the pursuit of wealth through trade and industry might be integral to an empowered, regenerated national character, rather than a source of guilt and anxiety. As Hamilton notes, even without the backing of a united nation and strong federal government, US traders and merchants had inculcated a profound sense of uneasiness in the empires of Europe about their potentially diminished role in the Western Hemisphere. Writes Hamilton, European nations have become “apprehensive of our too great interference in that [West Indian] carrying trade, which is the support of their navigation and the foundation of their naval strength. Those of them which have colonies in America look forward to what this country is capable of becoming with painful solitude” (85). Hamilton suggests there is something irrepressibly powerful about US commerce that unsettles, agitates, and frightens European colonial forces such that they apprehend the demise of their influence in the Western Hemisphere at the moment of their greatest naval strength and the new nation’s military puniness. Hamilton’s manifesto thus pivots on the formation of a vision, to be espoused by politicians and the various commercial interests, of the US American as a hemispheric man of commerce, a sort of Colossus of Rhodes striding across the ports of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The avocational sense of hemispheric man is dependent on Hamilton’s

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notion of “spirit.” For Hamilton, “spirit” is the zeitgeist of commerce and empire that operates to recuperate, and thus regenerate the United States—its vocational men of commerce, its political institutions, and the creole character of the nation and its people. Jefferson relies on an apotheosized landscape to elevate the condition of the creole American farmer to exemplar of pure republican virtue. In contrast, Hamilton’s “spirit” symbolizes the ways in which the merchant man or trader as hemispheric man is transformed in the crucible of an ever-expanding US hemispheric commercial influence into an energetic, enthusiastic “Son of Columbia.” Hamilton believed that it would take 50 or more years to amass the commercial and military strength necessary to “incline the balance of European competitions in this part of the world as our interest may dictate” (87). In the meantime, efforts to decolonize the mind and body of US Americans in the face of ongoing European predations on the nation’s sovereignty meant depending on uniquely creole strategies of resistance. More precisely, the “spirit” summoning forth the US commercial empire was inextricably bound up in the patriotic spirit of nationalist resistance that precipitated revolution. One mercantile figure that embodies the revolutionary origins of the “spirit” guiding the hemispheric man in his navigation of the treacherous waters of the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea is the smuggler. An especially dangerous smuggling practice that Hamilton endorses in Federalist 11 involved ships “losing their identity.” According to this practice, North American vessels would temporarily change their “bottoms,” or national affiliation, in foreign ports like Martinique—from American to French, for example—in order that they might trade freely with the French colonies without fear of seizure by British naval vessels. Figuratively, practices like the losing of a ship’s identity reflect the ways in which the Hamiltonian creole merchant might exploit his outlaw status for maximum benefit. If Jefferson’s US farmer accrued virtue in proportion to his ability to adapt to the hospitable North American landscape, Hamilton’s hemispheric man drew on the tradition of creole-as-rebel-trader to suggest the ways in which “virtue” itself could be made to respond and adapt to an environment rendered hostile by European aggression. Fluidity of identity, even the momentary losing of identity, might be necessary in order to protect the higher virtues of freedom and liberty underwriting the empire for commerce. Far from realizing Hamilton’s utopic vision for an empire for commerce, the United States remained a commercial dystopia in perpetual crisis throughout the 1790s and early 1800s. Historians Stanley Elkins

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and Eric McKitrick chart a series of foreign relations crises in the 1790s that thwarted attempts by the New Republic’s leaders to realize what the authors identify as Hamilton’s vision for the United States as a “mercantilist utopia.” In almost every instance, these crises pivot in crucial ways on the US government’s persistent efforts to persuade the British or French to enter into, and abide by, financial and/or military pacts or trade agreements granting the United States more substantial, unfettered access to the West Indian trades.4 The creole complex, which I gestured to at the outset, thus provides a framework for understanding the West Indies as the New Republic’s creole shadow. Such a creole complex might be situated in relation to influential arguments set forth by Edward Kamau Brathwaite in The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (1971). In a compelling remark that he repeats in slightly altered form several times, Brathwaite suggests that while Jamaican creole society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was “part of a wider New World or American culture complex, itself the result of European settlement and exploitation of a new environment,” it failed to achieve a more liberated society because white Jamaican creoles eschewed the more progressive creolization processes developed by their North American creole “cousins”: namely, establishing the republican principles that inspired the Revolution, and fostering independent mercantile and proto-industrial economies (xiii). Accordingly, Brathwaite contends, “The American Revolution … isolated [Jamaica] from any chance of a wider or alternative British American development, possibly leading to constitutional independence, and placed the island firmly within the mercantilist spider-web operating from the Mother Country” (306; emphasis added). Yet the US political economy itself, far from being independent, remained to a considerable degree ensnared in the British “mercantilist spider-web” during the nation’s first decades of existence, thereby miring the New Republic in a creole complex not wholly unlike that which Brathwaite suggests forestalled the emergence of independence movements and empowered creole identities in the British West Indies. Accordingly, the United States remained a commercial dystopia in perpetual crisis throughout the 1790s and early 1800s, resulting in a paradigmatic creole complex that Hamilton himself came to embody in the national imaginary. To cite one prominent example, in his correspondence, diaries, and autobiography, fellow Federalist John Adams found it difficult to contain himself at the mere mention of Hamilton’s name. In his writings, Adams does not identify Hamilton as a patriot or founding statesman, but as a “bastard Creole.”

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Adams’ obsessions with Hamilton’s creole West Indian origins reflect deeply ingrained anxieties not only about Hamilton’s “body,” but also about the material realities shaping Hamilton’s vision of the United States as an empire for commerce.5 As such, the creole complex operates on several mutually related levels.6 The first level concerns the nation’s postcolonial relationship with Britain. Despite the nation’s independent status, US commerce remained highly vulnerable to British (and French) attack. Such a paradox manifested itself in Federalist leaders’ (like Hamilton) ambivalent attitudes—alternately apologetic and resentful—toward the ways in which Britain persisted in dictating the terms of US commercial relations with the West Indies and Europe. It also precipitated Republican charges that Federalists were conspiring to sacrifice republican principles and the national character by effectively returning the nation to a state of colonial dependency on Britain wherein West Indian and Southern planters are beholden to not one but two “metropolitan centers”: the urban North and Middle Atlantic, controlled and governed by paracolonialist Federalist elites, and London, on whose behalf Federalist colonial mimic men like Hamilton are said to function. The second aspect of the creole complex centers on charged debates about the strategies of resistance that US traders employed to evade British imperial dominance in the West Indies, including dangerous trading practices endorsed by Hamilton in Federalist 11 that US merchantmen relied on in order to subvert the predatory practices of the powerful British and French navies while the new nation attempted to amass a respectable Navy. Yet given the vulnerable status of US merchants plying the West Indian trades to British and French attack and spoliation, such parasitic practices tended to make the US look like, rather than distinct from, the “debased” European empires and West Indian colonies that it relied on for its economic well-being. The final feature of the creole complex militates against the notion that the US Revolution marked an absolute break in the creole condition and character of US Americans. Ongoing mercantile participation in the West Indian plantation economies, on which the US political economy remained reliant for its economic and social prosperity, undermined the would-be model Republic’s claims to hemispheric exceptionalism and contradicted the notion that the nation had, in the New World’s embrace, redeemed the degenerated political, economic, and cultural institutions of Europe. In such a way, Federalists themselves, many of whom, including Hamilton, were avowed abolitionists, might be said to have perpetuated hemispheric slavery, despite their impulse to charge

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Southern Republican adversaries with the primary responsibility for doing so. Against claims for US exceptionalism in the hemisphere, the creole complex thus highlights the ways in which the early national period is characterized by not so much a departure from, as an ongoing process of refiguring, creole conditions in the former North American British colonies. Crucial to such an understanding, I have argued, is the formative influence of West Indian immigrant Alexander Hamilton and his vision for the US as an empire for commerce. *** The question remains as to how viewing the United States in unexceptional terms consequent to the comparative creole Americas framework that has been suggested here—specifically by attending to the generative energies of the New Republic’s creole complex—alters our perception of literary and cultural production in the early national period. In their creolizing and anti-creolizing tendencies, essays authored by Massachusetts Federalist statesman Fisher Ames suggest the potential rewards awaiting critics willing to submit New Republic writings to examination according to a creole complex matrix. One such essay is “American Literature” (1803), a pioneering work of US literary and cultural criticism. A powerful advocate in Congress for Hamilton’s empire for commerce, Ames authored “American Literature” in the aftermath of the Federalist defeat in the election of 1800 and on the eve of the Louisiana Purchase amidst fears espoused by secessionminded, “enlightened” New England Federalists that the acquisition of creole New Orleans and the Western Territories by Jeffersonian Republicans might fatally contaminate the white American empire. They worried as well that the proposed expansion might alter the political balance of power, leading to the decline of the commercial North and the ascendance of the slave South and frontier West.7 According to Ames in “American Literature,” the debased condition of the national character in the post-Federalist period of government is attributable to gross excesses in two areas: commerce and republican democracy. Against European intellectuals, Ames explicitly contests the idea that the US nation-space is an inherently degenerate environment: “Nobody will pretend that the Americans are a stupid race” (Ames 1983: 24). Even so, he suggests throughout the essay that literature and culture produced by, and responsive to, the nation’s creole complex creates the conditions sustaining such charges.

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Few speculative subjects have exercised the passions more or the judgment less, than the inquiry, what rank our country is to maintain in the world for genius and literary attainments. Whether in point of intellect we are equal to Europeans, or only a race of degenerate creoles; whether our artists and authors have already performed much and promise every thing; whether the muses, like the nightingales, are too delicate to cross the salt water, or sicken and mope without song if they do, are themes upon which we Americans are privileged to be eloquent and loud (22). Neither Ames nor Hamilton supported New England Federalist secessionist schemes, yet in Ames’ response to the above questions, he does secede figuratively from what he perceives is the nation’s insatiable appetite for wealth, land and property. Commercial striving—a key tenet of Hamilton’s empire for commerce—is perhaps the most powerful evidence to support, Ames asserts, charges of US creole degeneracy. “Of course the single passion that engrosses us,” he bemoans, “the only avenue to consideration and importance in our society, is the accumulations of property; our inclinations cling to gold, and are embedded in it, as deeply as that precious ore in the mine. Covered as our genius is in this mineral crust, is it strange that it does not sparkle?” (36). Rather than interrogating, like “American Literature,” the causes of national corruption, New Republic intellectuals, in fits “of excessive national vanity,” publish writings preoccupied with defending the nation against charges of creole degeneracy that ironically exhibit such tendencies, such remonstrations being “worthless the moment they are found to need asserting” (23, 22). Notable for its own anxious assertions about such authors and their works’ counter-creole assertions, “American Literature” suggests texts authored by Franklin, Jefferson, Webster, and others are failed exercises in creole American nationalism, “pretensions to literary fame” full of “mediocrity” masquerading as genius (24). “It will be useless and impertinent to say, a greater proportion of our citizens have had instruction in schools than can be found in any European state” a derisive Ames suggests, “… The question is not, what proportion are stone blind, or how many can see, when the sun shines, but what geniuses have arisen among us, like the sun and stars to shed life and splendor on our hemisphere” (23).

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The oft-cited opening paragraph of Ames’ essay poses a related set of questions framed by a governing conceit—New World creole degeneracy:

Accordingly, Ames searches in vain for a US American who might be said to serve as an exemplar of a truly “arisen” genius who transcends such “creole degenerate” hemispheric nervousness. In death, Hamilton became—and remains—signifier of competing national desires. Hamilton’s very body, in its creole confusions, functions in the New Republic and beyond as an unstable locus for debates about the national economy, character, and culture. As such, Hamilton emerges as circum-Atlantic denizen, a ghost in the New Republic ideological machine, defying any tendency to reduce or fix his image or to define with absolute surety his legacy. Ames nonetheless inaugurates a long tradition of retrospectively accounting for such things by penning a widely disseminated eulogy. Published just six months after “American Literature,” Ames’ eulogy can be understood as a direct response to that essay, for in the eulogy Ames claims to have located the earlier text’s elusive hemispheric genius. In more and less obvious ways, “A Sketch of the Character of Alexander Hamilton” (1804) alerts readers to the intersecting generative energies of Hamilton, the empire for commerce, and the New Republic’s creole complex. In Ames’ eulogy, Hamilton is said to have loved “his country better than himself, preferring its interest to its favor, and serving it when it was unwilling and unthankful” (Ames 1983: 511); he accrues genius in inverse proportion to his political adversaries, whose “excessive vanity” places love of self and party over country, dogma over truth, the passions of the multitude over the national interest, all virtues alien to the classical republican ones Ames privileges. Still, Ames’ indictment of commercial excess in “American Literature,” a logical outcome of a Hamiltonian empire for commerce, would seem to disqualify Hamilton for hagiographic status. Such a contradiction, however, is only seeming rather than actual for Ames. As William Dowling remarks, High Federalist notions of civic virtue, indebted as they are to classical republican antecedents, denounce the pursuit of wealth and popularity to the extent that such pursuits become objects in and of themselves. Dowling usefully explains, “The ideal of otium or ‘literary leisure’ … lies at the heart of Federalist values precisely as it operates to sustain virtue even while a republic is increasing in wealth and populousness. For otium, still carrying associations with Aristotle’s theory of leisure as the basis of genuine civilization, is the negation of wealth pursued for the purpose of appetite or ostentation”—the insatiable pursuit and ostentatious display of wealth being perhaps the chief stereotype of European discourse about West Indian creole degeneracy, a charge leveled by Jeffersonian Republicans against Northern US mercantile interests

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leading up to the election of 1800, and a grave concern in Ames’ “American Literature,” we have seen, for the ways in which it tends to confirm charges of US creole degeneracy (Dowling 1999: 40). Ames’ eulogy can therefore be understood as an act of mourning on behalf of not only Hamilton and his empire for commerce ideology and agenda coopted and transposed in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase by Republicans, but also a Federalist party in decline, no longer able to dictate the terms according to which the nation’s increasing affluence is converted into both political and cultural capital. Thus we encounter Ames’ somewhat despairing suggestion at the end of “American Literature” that only through an active suppression via despotism of the Republic’s democratic mob, or by the “restoration” of the Federalist party to national prominence, might the “augmentation of wealth … produce some men of genius, who will be admired and imitated” (37). Ames’ deployment of the trope of creole degeneracy in “American Literature” is thus much more than mere rhetorical flourish. Similarly, Ames’ commemoration of Hamilton transcends emotional or celebratory gesture. Poised to inspire a literary and cultural renaissance, the recently departed Hamilton in Ames’ eulogy emerges as the paragon of civic virtue sorely lacking in the post-Federalist era of government. In a complicated self-reflexive gesture, Ames predicts that Hamilton’s genius alone might one day inspire a writer capable of sketching his portrait. Even so, he laments the New Republic will likely not produce such a writer, for it could only have done so had it “produced two Hamiltons, one of them [who] might then have depicted the other. To delineate genius one must feel its power …” (512). This chapter has endeavored to respond to Ames’ challenge, to feel Hamilton’s “power” and “inspiration,” to spy out “two Hamiltons” and to demonstrate the ways in which the West Indian and US American Hamiltons were formed in the crucible of the New Republic’s creole complex. It has also attempted to do what Ames apparently was uninterested in doing or unwilling to do, namely, to “have stretched to the dimensions of his subject” (512). In rendering his verdict, Ames decides Hamilton’s “early life we pass over,” thereby obscuring—as Hamilton no doubt would have preferred—Hamilton’s West Indian origins, emphasizing instead his spectacular rebirth in North America during the Revolution and his subsequent accomplishments as “[u]nparalleled” statesman (514, 516). As such Ames may be said to repress, in contradistinction to fellow Federalist and Hamilton archenemy John Adams, the potentially contaminating effects of Hamilton’s West Indian creole origins on the national

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character. Further support for such a reading can be found in Ames’ repeated lauding of Hamilton as worthy of the memory of “the glory of Greece,” thereby according Hamilton the kind of glory, coherence, and stability he tirelessly pursued as author and executor of the plan for the US as hemispheric empire for commerce (518–19). Ames links Hamilton’s quest to the epic journeys of Odysseus and to the heroes of Homer’s Iliad. Like Greece itself, Hamilton’s glory is said to be “imperishable … it strikes an everlasting root, and bears perennial blossoms on its grave” (518; emphasis added). Yet unlike Ames and like Adams, if with contrasting purpose and effect, the chapter has urged that we return to Hamilton’s and the New Republic’s West Indian roots, productive as they are of the nation’s creole unconscious. To evoke Ames’ own eloquent phraseology, the West Indies are where we might properly begin “measuring the length of [Hamilton’s] shadow” over the formation of the national character, literature, and culture (510). *** With Brathwaite, the most recognizable theorist of creolization is perhaps Martinican writer Édouard Glissant. In establishing a roots/routes matrix of New World writing, Glissant overthrows conservative assessments of classical texts as “rooted,” in the process challenging “modern” impulses to view such traditions as stable and fixed, as unencumbered by the processes of creolization or unmarked by the messiness of empirebuilding. Writes Glissant, “[T]he great founding books of communities, the Old Testament, the Iliad, the Odyssey … were all books about exile and often about errantry. This epic literature is amazingly prophetic. It tells of the community, but through relating the community’s apparent failure or in any case its being surpassed, it tells of errantry as a temptation (the desire to go against the root) and, frequently, actually experienced. Within the collective books concerning the sacred and the notion of history lies the germ of the exact opposite of what they so loudly proclaim” (Glissant 1997: 15). Inspired in considerable measure by the theories of creolization espoused by Brathwaite and Glissant, this chapter has sought to account for the New Republic’s “errantry as temptation,” its successes and failures, its creole roots and routes; in treating “the great”—and less great—“founding books” of the New Republic’s multiple communities, I have endeavored to attend to the nuances, paradoxes, and contradictions attending such works’ contentious search for power, stability, and personal and national glory. Crucial to such an understanding, I have argued, is the formative influence of Alexander Hamilton,

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Hamilton’s vision for the US as an empire for commerce, and the countervailing energies of the creole complex.

1 This chapter is drawn from chapter 2 of Goudie, 2006. The author thanks the University of Pennsylvania Press for the permission to republish this material in this volume. 2 Recently published works that reexamine the Burr-Hamilton duel include Fleming, 1999, and Rogow, 1998. Especially noteworthy are Freeman, 2001, and Knott, 2002, both of which emphasize the complicated and even contradictory nature of how to “read” Hamilton. 3 See Boorstin 1993: 74. For a keen account of the racial politics informing Jefferson’s empire for liberty ideology, see Onuf 2000: 180. 4 See Elkins and McKitrick 1993: 92–114, 128. These crises include Hamilton’s private and public deliberations with British Major George Beckwith in 1789, in which Hamilton sought an arrangement allowing US vessels to legally trade with the British West Indies, in contradistinction to the US’s ongoing illegal trade relations with those colonies so as to, in Hamilton’s words, avoid “a system of warfare in Commercial matters” (125); the Washington administration’s follow-up efforts in 1790 to secure such commercial arrangements with Britain, including diplomatic missions by Gouverneur Morris; charged negotiations surrounding the Jay Treaty, in which the US sought, once more, to grant concessions to the British in exchange for formal admission to the British West Indies; the XYZ debacle with France in 1797, which resulted in a Quasi-War and an escalation of the spoliation of US merchant vessels in the West Indies by both France and Great Britain amidst ongoing trauma in the region owing to the Haitian Revolution; and Hamilton’s fantastic plan to establish US naval and commercial superiority in the West Indies as part of his failed military collaboration with Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan freedom fighter, and General James Wilkinson, a shady, power-seeking former officer in the Continental Army, in 1799–1800; their inter-creole arrangement aimed to rid the West Indies and Latin America of French and Spanish influence. 5 For examples of Adams’ use of the trope of creole degeneracy to attack Hamilton, see Adair and Schutz 1966: 35, 47–8, and 173. See also Adams 1962: 158. 6 I adapt the phrase “creole complex” as well from historian Lawrence S. Kaplan’s substantially more narrow usage of it. See Kaplan 1987. Kaplan uses the concept to account for the commercial crisis that led to the US War of 1812 with the British, a topic that he treats with great range and insight. 7 These anxieties and the subsequent acquisition of Louisiana and the Western territories spawned a set of Northern Confederacy schemes in 1803 and 1804 by ultra-conservative factions within the Federalist Party. For a discussion of the Northern secessionist controversies, and Hamilton’s role in suppressing them, see McDonald 1979: 355–63 and Emery 1982: 222–8.

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Notes

6 James Epstein Vanderbilt University

[H]e however recollected a recent trial (alluding to the trial of General Picton) where the sudden pang and shrug of horror upon seeing the representation of a witness’s former suffering, was dwelt upon by a most able and eloquent counsel (Mr. Garrow) as proof more strong than words can convey of the truth of the story that unhappy female was about to relate. So spoke Samuel Whitbread, Foxite reformer and wealthy brewer, in May 1806 at the trial of Henry Lord Viscount Melville for impeachment before the Lords of the realm. Melville, formerly Henry Dundas and always a close ally of William Pitt, the younger, had been impeached in the Commons for financial malpractice while serving as treasurer of the Navy in 1786. Whitbread led the parliamentary campaign to bring Melville down in what was the last ever impeachment of a British minister. Whitbread was, in fact, attempting to show that Melville’s hapless subordinate, Alexander Trotter, despite a disposition to tell the truth, felt a false indebtedness to the his lordship, possessing “a disposition to take upon himself … all the load of guilty which we charge upon the noble defendant.” According to Whitbread, a sudden illness, which had afflicted Trotter “might also be expressive” (Trial of Melville 1806: 291; Cobbett and Howell 1816–21: v. 29, cols. 1428–9). As in the “remarkable case” to which Whitbread referred, a witness’s demeanor might offer proof by which to judge the truthfulness of his or her testimony. As it turned out, the lengthy proceedings at Westminster Hall ended with Melville’s acquittal on all charges, although he emerged a ruined man. My concern, however, is not with Melville’s trial—although Whitbread’s supposition as to the truth bearing qualities of courtroom performance bears directly on my argument—but with the witness Louisa 94

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“The Shrug of Horror”: Creole Performance at King’s Bench

Calderon’s “sudden pang and shrug of horror” during proceedings which occurred at Westminster Hall several months earlier. Two days after the funeral of William Pitt, on 24 February 1806, the case of Britain’s first governor of Trinidad, General Thomas Picton, came before Chief Justice Lord Ellenborough and a special jury in the court of King’s Bench. Picton was indicted for a misdemeanor, “in causing the Torture to be inflicted upon Luisa Calderon, a free Mulata [sic]” in 1801.1 The case is notable for several reasons. As observed in the press, the case against Picton was “one of the most important to our national character and honour which has occurred for a vast number of years.”2 Second, Picton, an agent of the crown, was found guilty, although he was never sentenced. Third, the importance of the case was signalled by the role of William Garrow, a barrister renowned for his courtroom skills, who led the prosecution. The prosecution was officially brought and financed by his majesty’s government. Fourth, the case raised questions about whether Spanish or British law pertained following the British conquest of Trinidad in 1797. And if, indeed, Spanish law was appropriate, did the legal code sanction torture and under what specific conditions? Finally, the trial and earlier investigation back at Port of Spain, pose intriguing questions about relations of gender, sexuality, race, and the uncertainties of colonial rule. The trial itself was part of broader conflict over the future character of British colonial rule in the Caribbean. This paper leaves to the side this broader conflict, focusing instead on the specifics of Louisa Calderon’s courtroom performance and her reenactment of terror.3 The case against Picton had a complicated history. The case behind the case—the real case, as it were—was for 29 counts of death “unlawfully inflicted” brought against Picton in Privy Council by Colonel William Fullarton, a rival colonial official. Picton had been replaced as governor in summer 1802 by a three-man commission headed by Fullarton, with the former governor retained as second commissioner. Picton had been taken into state custody in November 1803, charged under a Henrician statute (33 HVIII, chap. 23) designed to try persons for either treason or murder committed outside the realm. Calderon’s case was quickly separated from the principal charges of murder and was directly brought to King’s Bench for trial. Among other crimes, Picton was accused of having burned alive, decapitated and brutally executed slaves suspected of practising the black arts, necromancy and casting spellings, results of the so-called “poisoning” commission appointed by Picton around the same time Calderon was arrested. Pursued under three different administrations, the case in Privy Council dragged on from

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December 1803 to January 1807, when Picton was finally released from all charges and from his enormous bail of £40,000.4 The Calderon case was a residue of this larger cause—all the more important because the most serious charges against Picton never came to trial. Trials are, of course, primarily occasions of the spoken word, and we have access only to the printed word. As well as full press coverage of the trial, we have at least four contemporary accounts of the trial published as pamphlets. Such publications were themselves regarded as “literary” texts; they were, for example, routinely reviewed in gentlemen’s journals. Trials were also social occasions; English courts were open to the public and courtroom galleries were places to see and be seen. King’s Bench was one of the three central courts lodged in Westminster Hall, open at one end to a busy interior courtyard full of hawkers and passers-by. On the occasion of Picton’s trial, the court was reported to have been “extremely crowded, among whom were a number of ladies”; the proceedings lasted from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.5 Garrow opened the prosecution’s case by expressing his outrage that Picton in his role as “representative of our sovereign, and governor of one of our colonial dependencies,” and thus “bound to protect his fellow-subjects … has disgraced the country to which he was born.” “British character” had been “stained” by the infliction of the cruelties of torture. Against Picton’s perversion of British character, Garrow carefully introduced the character of Louisa Calderon. At the tender age of ten or 11 she had been “seduced” by Pedro Ruiz “to live with him as his mistress.” Garrow explained that although such conduct “may to us in this country appear singular … yet in that hot climate where the puberty of females is much accelerated, it is common for them to become mothers frequently at the age of twelve; at that early period they either marry, or enter into a state of concubinage.” While living with Ruiz, Calderon “was engaged in an intrigue” with one Pedro Gonzalez. She provided Gonzalez access to Ruiz’s house, allowing him to rob Ruiz of a substantial amount of cash. Both Gonzalez and Calderon were taken into custody. Under questioning she refused to implicate Gonzalez in the robbery, and on the request of the interrogating alcalde or magistrate, Saint Hilaire Begorrat, Picton personally signed the infamous order, “Inflict the torture upon Luisa Calderon.” She was first brought to the room of torture, and shown two or three female slaves who “were to undergo the same severities, on a charge of sorcery and witchcraft.” Despite this demonstration, Calderon persisted in declaring her innocence. At this point, the punishment was applied.

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The mode of torture was that of “piqueting.” The victim was tied by one wrist to a scaffold, her other wrist was tied to her ankle, she was then lowered by means of a pulley onto a sharp wooden spike, the full weight of her body resting on her naked foot. The punishment lasted for 53 to 54 minutes, carefully timed by Begorrat’s watch. Louisa confessed, but her confession was deemed incomplete: she gave up Gonzalez, but claimed not to know where the money was hidden. The next day the torture was repeated, for 24 minutes. “Piqueting” was a British military punishment, but Garrow claimed that it would be a libel upon the military punishment to call the torture inflicted on Calderon by the same name; rather, the practice should be designated “Pictoning,” to indicate its horridness and disgrace to human nature. Garrow skillfully played on the image of the common law’s superiority over continental systems of justice, citing Blackstone’s Commentaries to show that judicial torture—the administration of physical pain to elicit proof of criminal action—was unknown to English law as an instrument for exacting truth. He concluded by promising to “present” the victim of Picton’s cruelty to the jury who will find that she still “bears about her the marks of the barbarity of the defendant”(Cobbett and Howell 1816–21: v. 30, cols. 451–6; Blackstone 1979: v. 4, 320–1; Langbein 1977). Louisa was the star witness. The Sun, in a typical newspaper report, found “Her appearance was extremely interesting, and her countenance, which was that of a Mulatto, extremely pre-possessing and agreeable.”6 Other reports added, that she was “dressed in white, with a turban tied on in the costume of the country. Her person was slender and graceful.” Now aged around 16, her testimony required two interpreters, one for Spanish and one for “the Creole corruptions” (Jackson 1818: vol. 7, 314).7 Garrow took her through the details of the case. She was unable to say in what year, 1799 or 1800, she went to live with Ruiz, replying that she was “not used to distinguish the years in this way.” She described her arrest and the circumstances of her torture. She was told that if she did not confess who had taken Ruiz’s money that “the hangman Ludovigo was to put his hand upon me.” She named the men present at her torture, including Begorrat who interrogated her, the gaol keeper, Jean Baptiste Vallot, and “his negro hangman” who administered the torture, and two lesser officials. Asked to give an account of her torture, “she accompanied her explanation by placing herself in the attitude she so described,” demonstrating how she was bound by the wrist to the pulley (“the left-hand, raising her”) and her right hand tied to her left ankle and her right foot lowered

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onto the spike. Garrow next showed her “a drawing in water colours … representing in striking manner her situation with the executioner and his attendants during the application of the torture” (Figure 6.1). She confirmed that it was an accurate representation. Turning to Ellenborough, Garrow remarked that he wished his lordship’s position could have allowed him to have seen “the involuntary expression of the sensations of the witness upon looking at the drawing.” According to the Times, when the drawing was shown to Calderon, “she gave a shudder expressive of horror, which nothing but the most painful recollection of her situation could have excited … conclusive evidence of the fact.”8 This was just the sort of theatrical move for which Garrow was renowned. However, Chief Justice Ellenborough strongly objected to “exhibiting drawings of this nature before the jury.” He only allowed it to be shown with the consent of Robert Dallas, lead defence counsel, instructing the jury that “nobody wishes that any improper impression should be made by the drawing.” Calderon told the court that she had twice fainted on the picquet, “I was totally insensible.” She was revived by Vallot applying vinegar to her nostrils. Suffering from excruciating pain, in her side and wrist, and from a badly swollen foot, she was placed in irons (“the grillos”) in a crouching position between sessions. She remained imprisoned for eight months without trial. Her testimony concluded with her exhibiting the permanent marks of her torture, in the form of “a seam or callus formed on both wrists” (Cobbett and Howell 1816–21: v. 30, cols. 456–60; The Trial of Governor T. Picton; McCallum 1806: 20). The rest of the trial need not detain us. Picton was convicted, although he was eventually granted a new trial, resulting in a perplexing special verdict: it found torture to be legal in Trinidad at the cessation of the island to Britain, and Picton not to have been influenced by malice against Calderon “independent of the illegality of the act” as based on British law. His full rehabilitation was signalled in June 1807, when Lord Castlereagh presented the former governor to the king at court. Picton is generally remembered not as a colonial governor, but for his role as a field commander during the Peninsular Campaign and as the highestranking British officer killed at the battle of Waterloo (Robinson 1835: vol. 1, 185; Havard 1996). What then can be said about Calderon’s creole performance? The trial rehearsed many of the general anxieties of critics of British colonialism in the West Indies. Louisa was not a slave, but she was a woman of color who, according to her sympathizers, had been forced into child prostitution. Much evidence had been produced the previous year at Port of

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Spain, where further investigation had taken place, in order to determine her exact age and stage of physical development at the time when she was tortured. So, for example, Juana Talavera, Gonzalez’s wife, who had known Louisa since she was two years old, testified that when she went to live with Ruiz, “she was not a woman, [she] had no breasts” (Picton 1806: 61). In contrast to the humanitarian view, Picton, his friends and supporters were outraged by portrayals of Calderon as an innocent victim of suffering. Picton protested that a “specious” appeal had been made to the “humanity of the public, in favour of a common Mulatto prostitute, of the vilest class and most corrupt morals” who had formed “a criminal connection with a Sambo, or Negro” whom she introduced into the household of her partner, “an industrious tradesman,” “to pollute his bed” and rob him of his life savings. According to her torturer, Begorrat, she was an artful poseur. He claimed that her fainting was affected; two days after her torture, she walked to the scene of the crime without trouble, “she was smoking a segar [sic] all the while” (Picton 1806: vi, 84). In the role of either prostitute or victim of pain, Calderon’s body became a site of contention, generating many of the terms of the case. In turn, the atrocities against slaves in Trinidad were condensed and displaced onto the spectacle of Calderon’s martyred body. “Sensation,” particularly the portrayal of intense or excited feelings, was crucial to producing humanitarian sympathy, a collective concern for distant others. As a commercialized genre, “sensation” came into its own in the mid-Victorian period, but as a politics of feelings, sensation had a long pre-history, one closely linked to colonial rule, helping to identify those subjects worthy of being regarded as human.9 It obviously shared overlapping meanings with the cult of sensibility, sentimentalism, humanitarianism, romantic notions of sympathy and the aesthetics of the sublime. Particularly important was the way in which Louisa “spoke” to the court. Although she gave formal testimony through interpreters, the spectacle of torture, the untranslatable, imagined measure of pain and human suffering, was perhaps more important to the jury than anything she said. The normal privateness of physical pain had to be made publicly visible. As Elaine Scarry has movingly demonstrated, intense pain is “language-destroying” (Scarry 1985: 4–5, 35; Canning 1999). In effect, at trial and through the publication of trial texts, the prosecution sought to recover the “voice” of pain through presence, the bodily presence of Louisa Calderon. Garrow had her reenact her torture, and then reengage her feelings when shown the drawing of the torture scene, generating her “involuntary” expression of “sensations.” By having Louisa perform her

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torture and by providing visual representation to the court, the inexpressible was given extra-linguistic expression, the unsharable was shared. As spectacle Louisa communicated directly to the court, her gestures required no translators. The spectacle of pain and violence testified to Picton’s barbarity. In fact, Garrow’s presentation of the drawing to the jury was among the most controversial aspects of the proceedings. Dallas had allowed the drawing to be presented in court against Ellenborough’s better judgment. Nonetheless, in his opening address, the barrister expressed his surprise at the altogether novel practice of introducing prints and “acting” to support a criminal charge, for “even with minds determined on impartiality” such exhibitions “occasioned sensations unfavorable” to the defendant. Not content with his powers of forensic oratory, Garrow “improved the effect by a sort of scenic display” (Cobbett and Howell 1816–21: v. 30, cols. 468–9; Crosby 1806: 34, 51). It is worth pausing to note the uneasy tension in court between the visual production of sensations and sympathy and what appears as a legal preference for the dispassionate spoken or written word. Yet spectacle and performance were hardly absent from British legal culture. Thus, within the visual register of the court wigs and sumptuous robes of ermine and scarlet distinguished authorized speakers, barristers and judges. The gestures of judges—donning a black cap before pronouncing a death sentence or wearing white gloves to signify a “maiden” assize session where no death sentence was delivered—were part of the ensemble of visual effects designed to inspire terror and awe (Hay 1975). The requirement that criminal defendants conduct their own cases, which prevailed until the eighteenth century, was rooted in the belief that truth was revealed by a defendant’s demeanor (Beattie 1991; Langbein 1999 and 1978). As Sir William Hawkins wrote in the early eighteenth century, concerning the obligation of the accused to defend himself, “the very Speech, Gesture and Countenance, and Manner of Defence of those who are guilty, when they speak for themselves, may often help to disclose the Truth” (Hawkins 1739, v. 2: 400). Whitbread, in effect, extended this logic to evaluating the testimony of witnesses, asserting that Calderon’s expression of horror constituted “proof more strong than words” of the truth of her story. Of course, the case itself turned on the legal means of eliciting proof, and whether in a territory under British rule—even if under the administration of Spanish law—judicial torture would be tolerated. Presumably, Chief Justice Ellenborough’s displeasure at Garrow’s exhibition derived from the way in which sensation was being appropriated and produced in court. He was, no doubt, mindful of the convention

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that attorneys exercised restraint in prosecuting criminal charges, although this was not as firm in prosecutions for misdemeanors. Moreover, Picton, unlike most criminal defendants, was represented by expert counsel (May 2003: 99–105). In certain respects, Garrow’s prosecution partook of what Sara Suleri, discussing Edmund Burke’s prosecution of Warren Hastings for his misrule as Governor General of India, terms an “idiom of excess” (Suleri 1992: 49). There was certainly nothing ordinary about Picton’s trial, as a state prosecution for colonial misgovernance. The seriousness of the crime, and the issues at stake, ran far beyond the actual misdemeanor charge. Ellenborough may also have been distressed by how the low culture of the street circulated in and out of King’s Bench. Picton had returned to London in October 1803 to find himself vilified in the street and in the public press, as “the blood-stained Governor of Trinidad.” Before the case came to trial, “coloured drawings were paraded through the streets, calling forth the public commiseration, by exhibiting the ‘picture of the girl, pulley, spike, and the grillos’” (Robinson 1835, v. 1: 139–42). Frontispieces to pamphlet editions of the trial depicted Calderon’s torture; the most complete version of the trial, published by Benjamin Crosby, reproduced the actual drawing that Garrow had presented in court (see Figure 6.1). The Anti-Jacobin Review decried this reproduction “as a contempt of court,” in light of Ellenborough’s expressed hope that the

Figure 6.1 Louisa Calderon on the piquet, from The Trial of Governor T. Picton for Inflicting Torture on Louisa Calderon.

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drawing not be shown out of doors. “Nor can we forbear noticing, the inflammatory and malignant placards which disgrace the walls of this metropolis, announcing the shop where this trial is to be sold.” As for Garrow’s performance, the Anti-Jacobin fumed: “If English law, and English reason, are to be superseded by the mimicry of Sadler’s Wells, farewell to all those advantages which have resulted to us from ability and learning, and to the unimpassioned deliberation of an English Jury.”10 One of Picton’s vehement supporters, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Alured Draper, told readers that he had rushed his Address to the British Public into print in order to counter the effect created by wide-spread circulation in London of the drawing of Louisa Calderon that “so irritated and prejudiced the temper and opinions of the larger part of the community, the middling and lower classes, and has been turned to such vulgar and dishonorable purposes by the enemies of Colonel Picton.” Moreover, the placards exhibiting her innocence and the cruelty of her torture were circulated outside the metropolis, having been “exported in wagon loads in octavos, duodecimos, and quartos cut down, in pamphlets, all at reduced prices, to wholesale and retail dealers in the country” (Draper 1806: ix, 159). Picton’s friends denounced Garrow’s theatrics as a disgrace to the court, serving to undermine its “decorous order.” Draper wondered sarcastically “at the wonderful art and dexterity” with which Garrow played the courtroom. As musicians speak, there was a firmness of finger in the elegant manner in which he first turned up this drawing; of which no adept in legerdemain need be ashamed. The finger and the tongue too moved in such perfect unison, that not a performer amongst them could rival him. The effect was so sudden, so unexpected, so electric, so full of all necessary qualities to call forth surprise, astonishment, and ‘delightful horror,’ that Burke himself, if he were alive, would have gone to school again, and taken a lecture from him to add to the next edition of his ‘Sublime and Beautiful’ (Draper 1806: xi–xii). Draper’s catalogue of terms—sudden, unexpected, electric, surprise, astonishment, “delightful horror,” “sublime and beautiful”—directs us to the Gothic. Calderon’s story was framed by familiar conventions of Gothic romance. Gothic elements were freely adapted to her case. Newspaper reports and trial texts appealed to Gothic sensibility. “While the unfortunate object of the defendant’s barbarity was giving her evidence,” the Edinburgh Advertiser commented, “an unmoistened eye was not to be seen, and in particular when the drawing was shewn

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to her, which gave a representation of her sufferings, she shrunk from it with a look of horror which excited the most lively sensations.”11 Reporting on her torture, the Sun noted, in order “to make this terror irresistible, they brought a negroe to practice upon to shew her what she was to expect.”12 As if to signal her innocence and virtue, Louisa appears “genteelly dressed in white”; in illustrations of the torture scene her complexion often appears “white.” In the complaints of Picton and his defenders, a concern can be seen about how, as well as for whom, sensations were being produced. Garrow should have reflected that while “he was seemingly only doing Punch in the show, and bringing out one of the puppets … to make people wonder and stare, he was producing sensations and effects of another, very different, and more dangerous nature” (Draper 1806: xi). Calderon’s cause was suspect because of its production of emotional excess, permitting intense feelings to overwhelm the intellect. According to its critics, this was precisely what was wrong with the Gothic mode. The period of the 1790s and first decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a craze for the Gothic, evidenced by the number of novels published and plays staged; a craze that can be related to the instability and momentous changes of these years (Miles 2002; Cox 2002; Backscheider 1993: pt. 3; Worrall 2000). The success of Gothic drama as mass art depended on spectacular stage effects, on new techniques of lighting, mood music and a particular style of acting. Louisa and her story were spectacular in design and effect. Poised between “high” and “low” culture—dealing often with confrontations between the high and the low—the Gothic possessed subversive potential; it was a contested genre or “domain” (Watt 1999: 6). Moreover, the emotions stirred by Calderon’s performance conjured excesses of a different kind and order. The defence of Picton in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin, and elsewhere, reflected a crisis of ruling-class legitimacy not only at “home,” but on a world scale during the period of the French and Haitian revolutions (Bayly 2004: chap. 3). In Calderon’s person might be seen not only a victim of colonial oppression, but a representative of the cause of liberty. Draper, in typical fashion, denounced Fullarton’s “air of great philanthropy” in presenting to the British public “a new victim for popular indignation,” a new libertarian hero to join Britain’s pantheon of celebrated martyrs: Patriotism had expended its masks—Wilkes is no more—the French Revolution is passed, and the civil and political liberty of England, disjointed by the shock, wanted the cement and fiery infusion of an

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Not only did Calderon threaten to pollute the purity of England’s political heritage, the libertinism of creole society also surfaced at Westminster Hall in her person. Within Caribbean society, the sexual economy of what Doris Garraway terms “colonial libertinage” not only underwrote the exploitative power of European creole elites, but also projected “the burden of culpability and punishment” for interracial intimacy and desire onto slave women and free women of color (Garraway 2005: xiii–xiv). As feminist scholars have argued, European discourses on sexuality cannot be charted without reference to a “racially erotic counterpoint” (Stoler 1995: 5–7; Wilson 2003; Levine 2004). While noted for their beauty, mulatto women signified a breaking down of racial and sexual boundaries. They were themselves figures of excess, often viewed in European travel writing as temptresses, distinguished by their lasciviousness, arrogance, extravagant tastes and unwillingness to work, and thus threatening the domestic virtue of British womanhood (Schaw 1921: 112–13). Two years before Calderon’s arrival in London, the radical journalist William Cobbett had raised a voice of racist alarm, concerned that while in America no white woman would dream of marrying a black man, in England she might strut through the Mall, “arm and arm with her sooty-faced spouse.” On his own return from America, one of the first things that attracted his attention was “a mulatto driving up St. James’s Street in a curricle with two English grooms behind him”; he concluded that he had “no scruple, to say, that, if this cannot be otherwise prevented, every colony of the nation ought to be instantly abandoned; for, it is a trait of degradation and infamy that no nation ought to live under.”13 As it turned out, Calderon was herself presented outside the court at Westminster Hall. Dining at the lord provost’s house in Ayr, John Downie, a gentleman from Trinidad, observed in a letter, “mark my astonishment when I was told that, along with Colonel Fullarton, there had arrived with his lady a ‘Mademoiselle Luisa Calderon,’ whom the Colonel and Mrs. Fullarton paraded about with them in their carriage, introducing her wherever they went as the ‘blessed innocent’ who was the devoted victim of Colonel Picton’s tyranny” (Draper 1806:

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inhabitant of a new and tropical region to support its weakness, and to renew its expiring strength. Louisa Calderon was to be brought from another world, and a hypocritical mulata prostitute … introduced to Westminster Hall, and associated with Hampden, and with Sydney [sic], to the edification and instruction of the present and succeeding generations (Draper 1806: 57–8).

184; Robinson 1835: 177–8). Archibald Gloster, Trinidad’s attorney general under Picton, commented similarly that the “injured innocent” was being introduced by Mrs. Fullarton to “select female friends in Scotland!” He added, “It must be particularly gratifying to Mr. Fullarton, that his virtuous young lady has insured a continuance of her fair race, by producing an heir to all her virtues, while under his philanthropic protection” (Gloster 1807: 23–4). The Anti-Jacobin noted sardonically that Fullarton’s “interesting protégé” had been introduced to friends and family, “no doubt, with the laudable intention of reforming her morals by the force of good example.” As for Mrs. Fullarton, not only had she “very much degraded herself” by associating “with mulattoes, and mulattresses” in Trinidad, but the journal disclosed that “the reputed father” of this “mulatto prostitute[‘s]” child was known to the lady who continued to tour Calderon around in her carriage “as you would have taken any peasant daughter.”14 In June 1808, Calderon again gave testimony before King’s Bench at Picton’s new trial. The St. James Chronicle reported, “she seemed to be much grown, and greatly improved in her knowledge of English, which she spoke with fluency and propriety.”15 Perhaps some of the good company she kept in Scotland and the Fullartons’ reform efforts had paid off. In the colonial office records, we find a letter addressed to Lord Castlereagh, requesting on Louisa’s behalf “that a passport may be granted for Trinidad with liberty to stay at Antigua in order to procure a passage to that island.”16 According to E. L. Joseph’s History of Trinidad, published in 1838: “She died here [Port of Spain], in poverty, on 25th June, 1825” (210). This leaves the question of what we are to make of Louisa Calderon and her metropolitan, creole performance. A victim of powerful men, certainly; tortured on Picton’s authority, manipulated by Fullarton. She became an object both of metropolitan empathy and scorn, as well as achieving minor celebrity in London and Scotland. Her courtroom performance suggests a young woman of considerable poise and self-possession. Her testimony, guided by Garrow, raised a fundamental question about how legal truth itself might be expressed and discovered. Most surely, within the highly restricted and mediated cultural space allowed a poor woman of color, she reenacted a truth most eloquently about the realities of colonial rule in the West Indies. Notes 1 Picton was charged under 42 G III, c. 58, the Criminal Justice Act, providing that any person in His Majesty’s service abroad who commits an offense in exercise of his official duties may be tried in England. Unless otherwise

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2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

stated, my account relies on the version of the trial published in State Trials. Daily Advertiser and Oracle, 26 Dec. 1803, 2. For a full discussion, see James Epstein, “Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the Cause of Louisa Calderon,” American Historical Review, 112 (2007): 712–41. This chapter represents a reworking of several sections drawn from this article. The Privy Council proceedings left a huge cache of documents at National Archive, Public Records Office, Kew, Privy Council 1/3557. McCallum 1806: 31; Edinburgh Advertiser (26 Feb. 1806): 133. (25 Feb. 1806): 3. Morning Chronicle (25 Feb. 1806): 3, describes her as “genteelly dressed in white”; Inhuman Torture!! Fairburn Edition of the Trial of Thomas Picton (n.p., n.d., but probably London, 1806): 8. Times (25 Feb. 1806): 3. The literature here is large, but see Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, M. D., 2006); Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2003); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, A History (New York, 2007), chaps. 1 and 2; James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: the Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, 2001), 11–13, for the shifting meaning of the word “sensation” in the early nineteenth century. Anti-Jacobin 23 (April 1806): 428, 417. Edinburgh Advertiser (28 Feb. 1806): 133. Sun (25 Feb. 1806): 3. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register (16 June 1804): cols. 935–7. Anti-Jacobin 25 (Oct. 1806): 201; vol. 30 (May 1808): 100–1. St. James Chronicle (11–13 June, 1808): 2. Public Records Office, Colonial Office, 295/20, James Pasmore to Castlereagh, 15 July 1808, fos. 134–6.

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7 Taxonomies of Terror Vanderbilt University

“But the past is past; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.” —Delano to Don Benito, Melville’s Benito Cereno, p. 103 The dogs of Hurricane Katrina, citizens turned refugees in the United States, disappeared “ghost-detainees” held incommunicado in prolonged detention, sick cows kicked and prodded in slaughter, nooses found in trees, in university offices, bombs dropped in residential areas of Gaza, the rationales and rituals of terror proliferate. The story I want to tell is not easily narrated, since the events do not move forward but keep repeating themselves, backtracking into a past that won’t quit. In this reenactment, random details, little things like spirits, pieces of wood or dirt, bones, blood, and skin matter. These remnants have a strange staying, or, to put it another way, saving power. I recognize again the force of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s argument in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History: “The Past—or, more accurately, pastness—is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past” (Trouillot 1995: 15). It is too easy, perhaps, to accommodate ourselves to what Trouillot called the “silences” of history, too comforting to claim that the facts of degradation no longer exist. “Taxonomies of Terror” is my title, and I will return to it, but I want to begin with another three-word phrase, “We, the people.” “We, the people” is one of the great rallying cries of our democracy, a call to decency, a reason for pride. “We, the people” of this country currently hold 285 people in jails in Guantánamo. Most of them have been there for years; none has any realistic prospect of release. A month ago Abdul Razzak, a 68 year-old Afghan detainee, died there, all alone, of cancer—and his death earned just a couple of lines in the papers, for a single day. 107

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Colin Dayan

“We, the people” of this country currently hold prisoners in supermax detention, in 23-hour lockdown, without any human contact other than violent cell extractions. “We the people” of this country execute the condemned by a protocol of lethal injection too painful, too prolonged, and too uncertain to be used on dogs. Strapped to the gurney, they suffocate. But since their skeletal muscles are paralyzed, they are unable to move or speak. They die in excruciating agony. In the current climate of hyper-legality, with Attorney General Michael Mukasey still unable to say whether waterboarding (at least for other people) is a form of torture or illegal, and with Justice Antonin Scalia in an interview with the BBC arguing that, “so-called torture” is okay, we need now more than ever to ask what we mean by terror. Since only cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited by the Constitution, but not cruel and unusual treatment used to get information about the proverbial ticking bomb, then why not, Scalia asked, “stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face.” On 8 March, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the CIA from using harsh interrogation techniques, what Senator Harry Reid called “horrific tactics” and Senator Diane Feinstein “torture.” “We the people” have also been discussing the possibility of executing some of those held on Guantánamo, six “high-value” detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. But we the people have a proud tradition, and we know that no one can be executed in this country unless and until he has been convicted and condemned to death. No one can be condemned in this country unless and until he has been put on trial in a duly constituted court with all the rights and privileges accorded by civilized countries. No one can be put on trial without evidence being brought forward and without his or her having the opportunity to rebut that evidence. Evidence, I do not need to remind you, is not testimony; and even testimony is not hearsay. And hearsay, as we all know, is not admissible in a United States court of law—except under the so-called MCA or Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress on 28 September 2006. So what is going on there—and here too, for whether we and our courts admit it or not, what is going on there is in very real and immediate ways certain to have an impact on what goes on over here. The 90 miles that separate us from (the United States’ bit of) Cuba do not separate the responsibilities of us the people to ourselves and our prisoners, whether here or there. The answer, in a word, is terror. Terror comes in many modes, and it would be easy to speak about the evil that terror represents—for

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example, in George W. Bush’s “war on terror”—about the fear and the danger and the damage that terror causes, about the need to combat terror wherever it is found. I want to try a slightly different tack, and to attempt here to offer a preliminary examination of the kinds and degrees of terror—hence the “taxonomies” of my title. I want to begin by distinguishing different sorts of terror. First, there is the simple sense of terror—that extreme fear that we all feel, instinctively and without any thought, on certain occasions of real or imagined danger. Jeremy Bentham’s design for his panopticon prison depended on the terror of the unseen: a surveillance all the more terrifying because invisible. America’s leading physician, Benjamin Rush, understood indefinite solitude in the penitentiary as a “benevolent” advance over public execution. In “An Inquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals, and Upon Society” in 1787, Rush argued against the criminal’s reformation through public punishment. Rather than abolishing punishments, however, Rush chose to change the place and manner of inflicting them. He urged his readers to replace “certain and definite evil” with incarceration that was of “unknown” and “indefinite duration” (Rush 1988: 86).1 The unknowability of the limits of punishment would, he wrote, in increasing “terror,” cure “diseases of the mind.” But as Charles Dickens observed in his American Notes, after visiting Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842: “the system here is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it in its effects to be cruel and wrong….I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body” (Dickens 1957: 99–100). But terror has other connotations and a more involved history than an extreme form of fear. For Edmund Burke—not in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, but in his earlier Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, published in 1757—“indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime” (Burke 1968: 55). Burke prophesied “The Terror” that Robespierre legislated in 1793. Robespierre defined terror as “nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.” In his Law of Suspects, he declared, “suspects shall be locked up… The proof necessary to convict enemies… can be any kind of evidence… If proof already exists there need be no further witnesses.” Robespierre’s definition of proof and the requirement for it in these cases matches almost exactly those of the Military Commissions Act. Not only does the act authorize Bush’s military commissions, but it also eliminates the right of habeas corpus for those detained as “enemy combatants.” Tried before military tribunals,

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terrorist suspects will not be told whom their accusers are or how they came to make their accusations. Incriminating statements can be introduced through hearsay testimony, and defendants will not be able to confront the witnesses against them. But one person’s terror is another person’s justice. Before the “reign of terror” in Jacobin France, white terror had spread in the French empire as colonists, especially in Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, devised harsher spectacles of punishment. Bodily tortures and the terror necessary to sustain the institution of slavery were not only projected onto the victims by their oppressors, but a proliferation of ordinances, decrees, and laws issued in the last years of Saint-Domingue renamed and redefined the human. There, the excesses of Jacobin codes and sanctions, soon unacceptable in Paris, resurfaced and found new blood. The disturbing of cause and effect, primitive and civilized, transformed a world of legal and sacred elements into the transatlantic domain of punishment and possession. In the lexicon I want to present today, some terms matter more than others. The traffic in words such as spirits, bodies, and minds forces us to consider the limits of that value-laden term humanity. How, then, do words act as revenants, certifying that cycles of terror can be perpetually reinvented in ever new landscapes of unfreedom? In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud recognized at the end of his life, how deeply the irrational haunts the civilizing claims of the reasonable. “What has once come to life clings tenaciously to its existence. One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primeval days are really extinct” (Freud 1937: 299). Old forms of terror maintain themselves as they find new content. Foucault’s metropolitan world of public torture, what he called “the great spectacle of punishment,” died out by the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the excesses of corporeal mutilation were resurrected in the colonies. Legally, it was asked, how much of a body could be dismembered? In the Jamaican Black Code, as in the French Code Noir a gradual removal of body parts was allowed: one ear for the first escape, another ear for the second, or sometimes a foot or a hand. The judicial code was preliminary to the utterance of guilt and essential to its efficacy. In the French code the soul remained, no matter the tortures, whether castration, flogging, roasting, branding, loss of ears, nose, hands, feet. The baptized slave could, however, as some Jesuits claimed, shake off the mutilated flesh and rise again incorruptible. In this penal logic, the rules of law and the exercise of spirit became reciprocal. In Jamaica, however, slaves were construed, in varying Acts

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of Assembly, as things without thought, nor was any attention paid to their souls. But the duppies or unquiet dead returned in varying guises. The relics and scraps of bodies, the slaves who had been called “ebony wood,” “pieces of the Indies,” or “heads of cattle,” returned as ancestor spirits, caught in the evil that had created them. Their metamorphoses record the rudiments of legal sorcery that converted humans into things or non-human animals. Whether we turn to the English or French Caribbean, or even the American South, these spirits returned as baka or lougawou, soucriants or vampires, the varying kinds of shape-shifters known to shed skin and suck blood. These evil spirits are the deposits of an institution that turned humans into chattels. In this reinterpreted and vengeful history, these bodily residues continue to haunt, reenacting the terrors of institutional degradation.

1.

Dead in law

How might we account for that iterative history that persists in engendering the stigma that justifies perpetual incapacitation? Security, legitimacy, reasonableness, necessity: these words recur in the Code Noir of the French islands, the West Indian slave laws of the eighteenth century, the black codes of the American South, contemporary prison law, and, here today, the global incapacitation of those merely labeled as “terrorists” or renamed “unlawful enemy combatants.” The ongoing disintegration of formal law and the increasing subordination of the judiciary to the current Washington regime continue to threaten the weak, the socially oppressed, and the racially suspect. How, then, should we speak about the archaic vessels for new terrors that we confront today? Blood sticks to new rules. The irrational haunts the claims of the civilized, but the worst cruelties belong to a politer time. What does it mean to consider an analytic of terror that takes seriously the law as its model, to look closely at the continuum between the slave, the prisoner, and the newly targeted “security” or “civilian detainee”? The ominous leeway of American legal rules—from slave codes, to prison cases, to the Bush administration torture memos has led to the redefining of persons in law. This redefining—the creation of new classes of condemned—sustains a metaphysics that goes beyond the logic of punishment. This legal metaphysics perpetuates a terror that is unique to the Americas: the civil death that condemned persons to be dead in law.2 In a sense, law is the protagonist of the narratives that follow. Its emergence, orchestration, and function became a kind of epistemological double whammy that redefined persons and property, spirits

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and things. When the state decided to punish criminals in indefinite solitary confinement instead of executing them, a bold reimagining occurred. Hell came into this world. The criminal was circumscribed by the walls of a cell, condemned to solitude, locked in torment. This psychic death is brought about without the death of the body. The inversion of the spiritual and material substituted the law of earth for that of heaven. In the fiction of civil death, broadly understood, the state reenacts what happens after literal death. The inversion—the civil death (i.e. imprisonment for life) that trumped the promise of spiritual life—triggered a magic that depends on the exchange between natural and supernatural.3 Instead of dying in the body to be reborn in Christ, one dies in the spirit. The soul is killed before the body dies. In the realm of the law’s authority, the change from what must be done to the body to what is thrust upon the mind becomes a new terror that adheres to radical states of non-belonging. All reigns of terror thus depend ultimately upon the law. The history of terror is played out over one terrain, and one terrain only: that place where the legal imagination subtends and becomes indistinguishable from a moral imagination. It is this merging of moral high ground and the legal facts on the ground that makes the global logic of torture so compelling. I am reminded of Carl Schmitt’s critique of the operations of liberal and parliamentary democracy in The Concept of the Political, written right before his conversion to Hitlerism in 1933: “When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent… To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.” (Schmitt 1996: 54) Schmitt’s condemnation of the highly politicized uses of the apparently non-political term “humanity” is especially telling in the current dickering with terminologies. When does abuse become torture? When is torture light? What is the meaning of cruel and unusual punishment? Who are the “terrorists”? In tracking the haunts or ghost-ridden traces of persons and property, I visit three sites of terror: Guantánamo Bay, the US mainland, and, finally, with some trepidation, but also urgency, Israel. Instead of turning to the past, locating sources for contemporary practices in a colonial history of deprivation and stigma, I examine how dependent are these sites on specific taxonomies. Although these classifications and labels

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have a history, they are part and parcel of the quotidian abuses, the daily cruelty, and senseless casual violence that accompanies in each case the call for security. In this reenactment, atrocities, once reclaimed, counter the monumental fictions of the State, the rational legal authority of a morally disenchanted world. Terror is not punitive. Obedience will not make it go away. Terror dissolves the link between transgression and punitive sanction. In the current war on terror, for example, the disappeared ghost detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, the military base on Diego Garcia, numerous CIA secret prisons or “black sites” inhabit a spectral world that has no political boundaries, where even geographical boundaries do not necessarily separate state from state and nation from nation. Yet this anonymity or generality is also the source of lethal distinctiveness for those caught up in the grip of the new classificatory procedures. Evidence for the legality of political action loses significance in relation to a general presumption of legality. What is decisive is the status the person holds in society: “innate character,” “the nature of their personality,” or “general disposition” largely replaces objective acts or deeds. The power of labeling and the range and gradations of ever-new categories of exclusion construct new persons in law, or rather, to be more exact, the legal anomalies of our new world order.

2.

Sewn up in a second skin

For prisoners sent from Afghanistan and other places to Guantánamo, terror begins during transport. The prisoners are shackled by the hands and limbs, made to wear ear cuffs, blindfolded by blacked-out goggles, and then hooded. The tendency, now rampant throughout US prisons, to use solitary confinement as a preferred management tool, even without any infraction of prison rules, is at Guantánamo extended into technologies of sensory deprivation that create a portable space of confinement. In this spectacle designed to enact exquisitely the unknowable that terrifies, prisoners are suspended within a living death—entombed, yet alive. Conventional torture is one means of dehumanizing the relation to the senses. It subjects consciousness to overwhelming if specific forms of pain, breaking down the mind and the body and usually leaving marks or evidence on the bodies of its victims. In contrast, these new devices of confinement affect every aspect of mental and physical existence and can be prolonged indefinitely without necessarily leaving evidence on the detainee’s body. These devices of invisible injury abandon

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the prisoner to the chrysalis of devices enclosing him. New techniques of sensory annihilation, now fixed on the body of the alleged terrorist, shrink a space of isolation into a second skin. Chains, shackles, dogs, humiliating acts, forced positions and restraint chairs, 23-hour lockdown, permanent solitary confinement. This cruel, inhuman, and degrading—degrading not so much to the victims as to the gaolers, that is to say we the people—this catalogue, once part of the history of supermax prisons in the United States, is now the fate of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. The language used to describe those in custody in the US anticipated the labels used for those offshore at Guantánamo. They are “the worst of the worst,” “incorrigibles,” and “bad men.” They carry designations that apparently warrant depriving them of their due process rights: “security threat groups,” (alleged gangs) in US prisons; “illegal enemy combatants,” (alleged terrorists) in the camps at Guantánamo. More unsettling are the claims made not only by those who manage supermaxes but by army doctors, the Pentagon, White House lawyers, the Department of Justice, the Secretary of State, and the President of the United States: “We do not torture.” “Our practices are humane.” “The United States operates a safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo.” The hunger strike that began in Camp Delta on 6 July, 2005, ending temporarily, only to start again on 11 August, was harrowing. In a cruel parody of medical care and in violation of the Tokyo prohibition against forced feeding, not to mention the Hippocratic Oath, army doctors fed prisoners with tubes pushed into their nostrils and shoved on down into their stomachs. They called this treatment “intensified assisted feeding,” another of the mendacious euphemisms characteristic of the current regime in this country. Dr John Edmondson, commander of the US Naval Hospital at Guantánamo at the time, swore an affidavit saying: “The actual feeding process, both at the detention hospital and on the cell block, is very voluntary.” We have to assume that this statement, made under oath, represents his understanding of the truth. (Edmondson left Guantánamo in early 2006. On his departure he was awarded a “Legion of Merit Medal.” The citation read “Captain Edmondson’s inspiring leadership and exemplary performance significantly improved the quality of health care for residents of Guantánamo Bay.”) Brutal humor accompanies the unspeakable. It seems to be the American way. A month before the widespread hunger strike at Guantánamo and following Amnesty International’s description of the camps there as “the gulag for our times,” Representative Duncan Hunter, a California

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Republican and Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, described a Sunday dinner menu at “Gitmo” on Fox News. The “gourmet fare” included Orange Glazed Chicken, Fresh Fruit Roupee, Steamed Peas and Mushrooms, and Rice Pilaf. Inspired by this report of good eating, the contributing authors of www.Dummocrats.com put together The Gitmo Cookbook. With over a hundred pages of recipes, cooking tips, and quotations by the likes of John Adams, Thomas Paine, Winston Churchill, Shirley McLaine, and Osama bin Laden, the editors wanted to encourage readers to “support the troops, mock the mainstream media, and eat like a Gitmo detainee!” They also wanted to make a point about alleged torture. “We feel that the word ‘torture’ is a serious abuse of the language when applied to what goes on at Guantánamo.” After testing the recipes, one of the editors claimed to dislike the glazed carrots, they “did not sink to the level of torture.” In December 2005, the number of hunger strikes dropped after mobile restraint chairs (called “torture chairs” by prisoners) were introduced. Besides straps for the prisoner’s arms and legs, the Guantánamo chairs had been modified to add two additional straps for the head and the chest. A new ritual, repeated twice a day, began. Instead of leaving the tube in, now a soldier forced the tube in before each feeding, then pulled it out and walked away, dragging behind him all 43 inches. When the torture chair operations began, there were roughly two dozen prisoners who had been on strike for five months, within days the number dropped to six. The non-violent protests at Guantánamo recently inspired hunger strikes by a dozen death-row inmates at a Texas supermax in the US. “Either conditions will improve, or we will starve to death,” insisted Steven Woods, one of the prisoners. On 10 June, 2006, three detainees at Guantánamo committed suicide. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the camp commander, accused them of having “no regard for life, either ours or their own.” And he added, with impressive acuity, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” For those locked down in Guantánamo, supermax imprisonment is a death sentence. In the hunger strike that began in April 2007, reported by The New York Times, lawyers noted the desperation of those moved to the $38 million dollar supermax Camp VI. “My wish is to die… We are living in a dying situation,” Adnan Farhan Abdullatif told his lawyer. After denying the existence of yet another new supermax out of bounds for both media and military defense lawyers, officials at Guantánamo have now confirmed the existence of Camp 7, run by a special unit code-named Task Force platinum, where 15 “high-value” prisoners are held.

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Exquisite torments

How can corpses be legally fabricated? In June 2000, The New Yorker ran an ad that I tore out and carried with me as I moved from Tucson to Philadelphia and then to Nashville. Toyota advertised their new Avalon—“The most spacious, luxurious sedan we’ve ever created”—picturing the interior, seats in luxurious leather and a man sitting comfortably behind the wheel. Along the top of the two-page spread were the words, “CONFINE THE BODY AND YOU SHRINK THE SPIRIT.” When the ad appeared, I had been visiting Special Management Units I and II in Florence, Arizona—just about an hour’s drive from Tucson—for four years. I had been helmeted and vested, warned about paper darts, urine, and feces thrown out of cells by prisoners. I had been prompted to try out leather shackles made by the “Humane Restraint Company.” It seemed unlikely that I would be threatened by inmates, since the cells where “the worst of the worst” were locked down for 23 hours a day, had doors covered with thick steel plates perforated with small ventilation holes, and were described by one officer as “irregular swiss cheese.” Nothing ever happened to me. I walked down the corridors on impeccably clean floors. No dirt anywhere. There was no paint on the concrete walls. The light seemed too bright, forcing me to blink uneasily. Although there were skylights in the corridors, the cells had no windows. Nothing inside the cells could be moved or removed. There was nothing inside except a poured concrete bed, a stainless steel mirror, sink and toilet. What the Toyota ad described as the, “elegantly appointed cure for claustrophobia” seemed timely, if obscene. The ad appeared at a time when prison administrators and politicians were urging the public to support these very expensive and cramped high-tech units. A deputy warden joked about “freeze drying” inmates, keeping them sealed off from the rest of the population. I kept thinking that “shrinking the spirit” seemed an appropriate euphemism, since everyone knew how extended isolation could drive prisoners crazy. Not only because of the stressful environment of solitary confinement, but also because of excessive harassment and abuse by officers wound as tightly as those they confined. I corresponded with inmates whose experience in Special Management Unit I and Unit II made me understand what it meant to live with minimal physical requirements—food, clothing, warmth—but without much else. This lack included other personal, perhaps more devastating, forms of dispossession. One inmate lamented the loss of his own paintings and the photos he had never received from family and friends. An

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3.

officer from SMU I showed me a room in the Special Security Unit set aside for “confiscated gang art,” and “contraband boards”: darts made from paper clips and wrapped in paper rockets, weapons made from typewriter bars, razors melted onto toothbrushes. On one wall of the SSU were charcoal drawings, watercolors of fiery women, delicate etchings of flowers or forests. The officer told me, “they beg to send this stuff home to their families. Maybe they spent a month or two doing it. But we take it and hang it on this wall. Once they’re in SMU, it’s not their property. On the other wall was a sign set above the photos of prisoners who had mutilated themselves—row after row of slit wrists, first-degree burns, punctured faces, eyes emptied of sight and pouring blood. The sign read: ‘Idle Minds Make for Busy Hands.’” There is a new trend in the United States for those condemned to death. In Arizona and Texas, death row has been moved from an older, more open facility to a supermax. None of the inmates there had exhibited threatening behavior. Now the psychological deterioration caused by supermax detention is added to the anxiety of waiting for death. As one inmate explained to me, “we are dead twice-over, killed in our mind, tortured as we await the death of our bodies.” How much, I wondered, can you take from a person without running afoul of the law? This game got very depressing. As long as prisoners are deemed too dangerous for the general population, in other words, as long as officials classify them as such arbitrarily, the courts do not judge indefinite isolation cruel and unusual punishment, nor do they find this confinement “atypical and significant” enough to satisfy the need for due process protections. Once officers substitute the word “administrative” for “disciplinary,” they invent a way of life. Not simply the practice of “solitary confinement” or “disciplinary detention,” which has legal limits of duration, but a tough regimen of enforced idleness and monotony that supposedly answers the needs of security. “Security,” a deputy warden remarked, “is not convenient. But,” he added, “terror makes it possible.”

4.

Territorial terror

Collective isolation, zoning, the dividing up and stringing together of serial spaces, this regime of discipline and force provides terror with its platform. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, terror is in the eye of the beholder. We are taking the “settler road” to Ramallah. The good roads lead to the Jewish settlements. But we are heading to er-Ram, the first checkpoint. The highway ends. When the new road ends, then the landscape of loss begins. The elegiac tone is wrong, but the words are

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right. Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the occupied territories, the settlements, every site has a story to tell, and it is told through the landscape. The journey is as crude as a medieval allegory, with the up and the down, the angels and the devils, the clouds and the flames, the hill and the pit. The drive to the places that Israeli guidebooks do not include, away from West Jerusalem to places rooted in Palestinian memory even as they are erased, whether by bulldozers or neglect, feels like a terrible and novel take on Bunyan’s pilgrimage. In Israel and the occupied territories, there are everywhere signs of the intent to create the impassable, the unbearable, the unalleviated site of debris. Uprooted olive trees. Piled-up trunks of fruit trees. Slabs of concrete standing out of the ground like tombstones surrounded by immense coils of razor wire. We’re on route 443 to Tel Aviv. The wall rises and keeps going along side us. “There’s another wall.” Is it a security area, or a prison? I wonder. “Maybe it’s a military camp. Oh, it’s a prison.” Fence after fence, wall after wall, and then we go through what is called a “tunnel,” but that simply means a road cut through the West Bank wilderness of barriers that leads to another gated city. This is a Jewish settlement, surrounded by newly planted trees, with good roads, lawns, and satellite dishes. The three billion dollar system of highways and “by-pass roads” integrates the settlement blocs into the metropolitan areas of Tel Aviv, Modi’in and Jerusalem. Yet each Palestinian city, town, or village forms part of a truncated landscape, with cantons divided and defined in terms of Israel, with only tenuous connections one to the other. The closure system in the West Bank, an elaborate series of restrictions placed by the Israel Defense Forces, controls the movement of more than 2.3 million Palestinians living there. Not only enclosing Palestinians in ever more constricted areas, the restrictions on movement extend to the deliberate channeling of Palestinian traffic onto small, rutted local roads that leave the main routes reserved for Israeli settlers traveling to their new homes inside the West Bank. The territorial fragmentation of the West Bank is a spectacle of obstruction, as if some crazy wizard decided to get as many different kinds of boundaries into the smallest bit of space. Not only manned checkpoints, but also the random, unpredictable so-called “flying” checkpoints that average more than 160 a week. Other physical obstacles such as road blocks, road gates, earth mounds, and trenches have steadily increased, further isolating residents of the West Bank from each other and from East Jerusalem, the traditional hub of religious and cultural life. Although I can walk through the Old City to the

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al-Aqsa mosque, one of the most holy sites for Muslims, most West Bank Palestinians cannot. As a result of the “fence” built in and around East Jerusalem, the government provides no vital services to the nine Palestinian villages located within the municipal boundaries but outside the wall. Only seven per cent of the area of East Jerusalem remains available to Palestinians. Bulldozers tear up the yards. The upturned earth, the shards of glass, stones and concrete, remain in piles. A constant reminder that nothing is safe, nothing is certain. The demolition of “illegally” built houses continues and coincides with new land expropriations and plans for the development of new Jewish settlements in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods such as Ras al-Amud and the Mount of Olives. The dread so necessary to state-sanctioned terror accompanies the broad process of displacement, euphemistically dubbed “transfer” or “quiet transfer” by Israelis. The politics of “closure” and “separation” takes to extremes our commonplace ideas of “incapacitation” or “deterrence.” I named the book I am still writing, Held in the Body of the State. When I began my work on prisons, punishment, and the law, I had not been to Israel. Now that I have seen the practices of demolition, land expropriation, by-pass road construction, and the daily strangulation of towns and villages, I have a new understanding of the State, an unexpected revelation of what it means to be “held” not by the construction of ever more technologically sound, state-of-the-art prisons, but by the conversion of one’s own land, one’s entire landscape, into the means of one’s undoing, the place of incarceration, the very source of terror. The soil of the ancestors turns into the earth mounds that block travel. The sand of the desert fills the sand bags by the checkpoints. When the olive trees are bulldozed, their remains are left behind to form blockades. Terror is regulatory, schematic, and its absoluteness lies in its power to differentiate, stratify, and exclude, even as it renders increasing numbers of Palestinians so much human material exposed to violence: anonymous and undifferentiated.

5.

Conclusion

In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, in an unusually talkative moment, Antoinette explains, “There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about” (Rhys 1966: 77). Terror comes in many forms: the state-sanctioned terror I have been discussing, the threats too often embodied in the poor and the dispossessed, as well as the innocent victims of barbarism variously disguised. Terror threatens both the

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body and the mind: it is all encompassing, and as Burke recognized, sublime—because infinite and unstoppable in its effects. We, the people are all living in terror, even though we think our government is protecting us from it. New taxonomies are evoked by the somehow benign, pseudo-friendly “threat level indicator” of the Department of Homeland Security: yellow, orange, and red—woolly definitions that allegedly categorize the threats to our “enduring freedom.” The much-touted war on terror masks the legislated terror at home: constant surveillance, wiretapping without warrant, and labeling by which the President can mark anyone, even a citizen, any American citizen, an enemy of us “the people.” Notes 1 For a fuller discussion of Rush and the curing terrors of solitary confinement, see Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” Representation 92 (Fall 1995): 51–2. 2 For my earlier discussions of civil death—its legal history and gothic turns between tangible and intangible, life and death—see Joan [Colin] Dayan, “Poe, Persons, and Property,” American Literary History 11, No. 3 (Fall 1999): 405–26; Joan [Colin] Dayan, “Held in the Body of the State,” History, Memory, and the Law, eds Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999): 224–47; and “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies,” Materializing Democracy, eds Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002): 53–94. 3 For a full discussion of civil death as the sorcery of law, see “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies” and “Legal Terrors.”

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Section 3

Africa

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Voortrekkers of the Cold War: Enacting the South African Past and Present in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples1 Monica Popescu McGill University

“Communism [is] the highest form of capitalism”—the head of the South African Security Branch, Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh declared in 1966, in a nonchalant statement that short-circuited the staple binaries of Cold War discourse (Bunting 1969).2 The officer’s political illiteracy aside, his oxymoronic formulation may actually unwittingly reveal points of convergence in the discursive strategies churned out by communism and capitalism supporters alike. Singular as it might seem, this curious little sentence speaks of a larger conundrum that placed South Africa in an uneasy ideological spot between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Cold War. With its uncomfortable position in relation to western capitalism and Soviet communism, South Africa becomes a privileged site for exploring Cold War contradictions. These contradictions become most explicit in the simplified ideological positions distilled for young Afrikaners, who were trained into proper citizens of the nation during the apartheid years. Surprisingly, there are not many literary texts written after the fall of the Iron Curtain that engage with the impact of the Cold War in South Africa. During the early 1990s, with the effects of Perestroika and Pretoriastroika in full swing, the binaries that had haunted political thinking across the globe for more than four decades were dismissed as selfevident positions or silenced as uncomfortable memories of a too recent past.3 In search for answers to this prolonged silence, in this essay I discuss Mark Behr’s 1993 novel The Smell of Apples and its engagement with educational models intended to respond to the Cold War context. Its protagonist, Marnus Erasmus, is enrolled in the Voortrekker Youth Organization, a movement intended to create proper white citizens. First fleshing out the history of this group, I then consider the political 123

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training Marnus receives at home, at school, and with the Voortrekkers. In enacting strictures of Afrikaner culture, the novel’s youthful protagonist unwittingly reveals contradictions that his culture and his government faced in their battle with enemies imagined and real. The trajectory of Marnus Erasmus, from Voortrekker camps and seemingly innocent childhood games, to service in the army and death in combat during the Angolan War, is supported by Cold War slogans which, far from clarifying and demystifying the identity and values of the opposing camps, complicate these positions to such a degree that they become iconic of larger ambivalences. Where a plain dichotomy (capitalists against communists, Americans against Russians) is supposed to be at play, an uneasy triangulation emerges in its stead. White children in South Africa are usually assumed to have lived innocent, peaceful, and largely de-politicized lives; however, children’s literature, Boy Scouts, the Voortrekker Youth Organization, and adult role models aimed to transform them into obedient citizens of the apartheid state. An anecdote from J. M. Coetzee’s memoir Boyhood testifies to the strength and coerciveness of dichotomies imposed equally by the apartheid culture and the global Cold War structures. Playing with lead soldiers and “spring loaded cannons that fired matchsticks,” the young John Coetzee discovered with stupefaction that certain choices are heavily codified and polarized: When the Russians and the Americans were first set before him as antagonists between whom he had to choose (‘Who do you like, Smuts or Malan? Who do you like, Superman or Captain Marvel? Who do you like, the Russians or the Americans?’), he chose the Russians as he chose the Romans: because he likes the letter r, particularly the capital R, the strongest of all letters… Then came the realization, from the disapproval of his parents, from the puzzlement of his friends, from what they reported when they told their own parents about him: liking the Russians was not part of the game, it was not allowed (Coetzee 1998: 27–8). If the child Coetzee stubbornly insisted on having his own private rules of the game which were not restricted by the politicized dichotomies of historical contingency (he secretly preserved his collection of snapshots representing Soviet soldiers), this was not the case with most white children. Those co-opted by youth organizations such as the Voortrekkers were indoctrinated in the spirit of nationalism, and, according to the movement’s statute, were educated to “accept authority” and “the virtues

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of a Biblical Christian life” (Constitution of the Voortrekker Youth Organization).4 Releasing children from school for Friday afternoon training and summer camps, the Voortrekker Youth Organization seemed to break patterns of authority, give full reign to the children’s spirit of adventure, fair-play, and comradeship. However, the quasimilitary structures of the organization and its involvement in public celebrations and histor-ical commemorations with an explicit nationbuilding character make obvious its ideological patterns. Milestones of Afrikaner history were lavishly commemorated with pageants, festivals, and parades. These elaborately staged historical reenactments that I shall discuss later in the essay, have predictably resulted in the creation, modification, and reenforcement of national mythologies: they articulated a central role for Afrikaner settlers in South Africa’s history. Yet from the 1970s onward, they also took on a more improvised character, as they enacted the country’s position within larger global structures. In other words, the diachronic national vector of cultural memory at work in such public ceremonies intersected with a synchronic, trans-national counterpart that addressed South Africa’s position within the dichotomies created by the Cold War. It is this latter shaping force that reveals a triangulation of positions instead of the expected binaries of political thinking on one side and the other of the Iron Curtain. The role models handed down to Afrikaner youth both by such extraordinary ceremonies and by quotidian cultural narratives were overlaid with anti-communist features sometimes at odds with the national epic they originally set out to mould.5

1.

Cold War silences

Historians and political scientists alike rightly complain of insufficient attention being paid by their disciplines to Cold War relations in Southern Africa. In literary criticism and cultural studies the picture is even more desolate: there is an outright lack of interest in the tensions and biases generated by the descent of the Iron Curtain.6 A search in academic databases for the relevance of the Cold War in studies addressing contemporary South African literature leads to few results. The Cold War does not figure as the structuring thread or overarching explanatory principle for recent articles written on apartheid-era literature. After decades of internal colonialism—as the apartheid regime has rightly been termed—a great deal of energy needed to be invested in dismantling knowledge structures that reinforced white supremacy, in recuperating alternative histories, in giving a voice to the silenced. Yet this post-1990 omission

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resonates with the apartheid regime’s own uneasy position within the binaries created by the Cold War. The dilemma posed by communism and capitalism to the old Pretoria government arose from the National Party’s economic and cultural values. On the one hand, South Africa had the highest percentage of state-owned economy outside the socialist bloc, making the country dangerously akin—in strictly econometric terms—to communist polities (Sparks 2003: 170). On the other hand, the Afrikaner abhorrence of leftist atheism and their embrace of the cultural values of the West (the government saw itself as a last bastion defending Occidental values in Africa) made it reject the USSR and its allies as the ultimate enemies. The Marxist bent of many freedom fighters provided sufficient ground for labeling the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) as puppet extensions of the Kremlin authorities. The conundrum was not solved, but merely deferred, by the options opened up in the 1990s. White people’s initial fears of a socialist revolution were allayed by the ANC’s decision to integrate the country in the global market economy. As the so-called Second World bid farewell to communist utopias with previously unsuspected alacrity, there was no credible socialist model left standing after 1989 for the leftist members of the post-1994 government. Under pressure to make the South African economy viable and to garner western support, the ANC changed its leftist discourse to open up to the requirements of a global economy.7 As the ANC deftly bypassed some of its former political goals, the South African society as a whole deferred the debate on the impact of the Cold War. Concerned with the more pressing goal of decolonizing knowledge systems previously controlled by the apartheid regime, cultural and literary criticism left Cold War tensions and incongruities brewing below the surface. The silence surrounding Cold War discourse could have an easy explanation in the apparent explicitness of its dichotomies. After the Iron Curtain descended and divided not only Europe but political allegiances throughout the world, the two camps were taken for granted if not as the absolute representatives of good and bad political and moral choices, at least as necessary positions that even sophisticated writers were forced to take. Under the added pressure of a polarized Cold War situation, in South Africa any opinion not associated with the leftist forces was automatically relegated to the opposite camp. At the beginning of the 1980s, Nadine Gordimer decried this Manichean dynamic that forced intellectuals into unsubtle choices. In her essay “Living in the Interregnum” (1989), Gordimer points to an impasse of categories,

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an impasse generated equally by apartheid dichotomies and by even larger Cold War binaries. In a political world where to win is to drive a simple and simplified message home, there is sadly little room for nuances, concessions about inadvertencies, and elaborations on exceptions. Admitting to nuances of grey in a black and white world can unwittingly betray the cause one supports. “Manichean poisons” (a terms Gordimer borrows from Czeslaw Milosz) had to be absorbed in order to ensure a safe and direct sailing into the home provided by the future (Gordimer 1989: 285–300). Yet, it was these “Manichean poisons” that gave Gordimer much trouble and forced her to explain her position. Why would a well-read, intellectually-keen, politically-savvy writer lean towards “an alternative communism” as the political solution in South Africa? Was Gordimer not aware of the troubles African adaptations of socialism had encountered? Was she not in the know of atrocities committed in the name of communism in the Soviet Union, China, and the eastern European states? On the contrary, Gordimer has been a passionate reader of Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera, and other dissident writers from eastern Europe, and was fully aware of the mechanisms of censorship set in place throughout the USSR and its eastern European satellites. Yet on a globe polarized by Cold War binaries, criticism directed at communist regimes was interpreted as collusion with capitalist exploitation: It is difficult to point out to black South Africans that the forms of Western capitalism are changing towards a broad social justice in the example of countries like Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and Austria, with their mixed welfare economies, when all black South Africans know of Western capitalism is political and economic terror. And this terror is not some relic of the colonial past; it is being financed now by Western democracies—concurrently with Western capitalist democracy’s own evolution towards social justice (82). Gordimer thus recognizes the intellectual’s conscription into one or the other battling camps, she acknowledges the ambiguities ready to explode out of this forced dichotomization, and defends her choice to dream of an ideal form of communism that South Africans black and white alike would be able to call home, in the temporal dimension beyond apartheid. Yet she pushes her exploration of Cold War tensions no further. After the 1989–1990 moment, writers’ and critics’ energy alike went into debunking apartheid ideology, and almost nothing was done

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towards analyzing the discourse patterns produced by the Cold War. The anti-colonial rhetoric of the liberation struggle turned into the postcolonial discourse analysis deployed essentially to identify the mechanisms of oppression under the apartheid regime. There was a strong need to recover the voice of the silenced, to disclose the epistemological structures which favored the whites, to identify the many ways in which the black and colored population had been marginalized, discounted, and disempowered. Thus during the 1990s the past decades still seemed too close for scholarship to reveal not only the apartheid government’s involvement with Cold War rhetoric, but also the freedom fighters’ indebtedness to the same discursive patterns. Marc Behr’s novel The Smell of Apples is among the few texts that directly engage the Cold War discourse. A bildungsroman, Behr’s work has been celebrated for revealing the structures of indoctrination that transformed South African white children into subjects that acquiesced in state ideology.8 The quasi-military rhetoric of the endangered nation is reflected by the family and social structures within which Marnus Erasmus, the narrative voice in the novel, is enmeshed: he has to display soldier-like patience and endurance while fishing with his father, he is enrolled in the Voortrekker Youth Movement, he receives military epaulets for his birthday, and, of course, when he grows up he participates as a lieutenant in the Angolan war. The rites of masculinity into which both the state and the father attempt to initiate Marnus are revealed as physically and psychologically violent processes aimed at creating obedient citizens and future soldiers.

2.

Voortrekkers of yore and of today

Established in 1931, the Voortrekker Youth Organization was baptised after the nineteenth century Boer pioneers and therefore was meant to reenact their trail-blazing role and speculate (on) their core values, in the double sense of mirroring and deriving ideological profit from these values. It was intended as an Afrikaner counterpart to the Boy Scouts organization. In the 1930s, the latter had attempted without success to bring the young descendants of Dutch settlers into their organization; yet the required allegiance pledged to the King of England was a deterrent for the Afrikaner nationalist spirit on the rise, as was the suspicion that the Scouts and Guides movements would grant full membership to the colored and black Wayfarers and Pathfinders groups (Proctor 2000: 618). During the latter half of the twentieth century, the Voortrekker organization focused on preparing proper citizens of the apartheid state:

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biblical values and patriotism were inculcated in the same breath during camp training, with uniformed parades, flag raising, skriflesing en gebed (scripture and prayers) every morning and evening.9 There is a striking scarcity of documentation on the Voortrekkers, despite the organization’s continued existence beyond the end of apartheid. Their acknowledged goal of inculcating, developing, and spreading Afrikaner cultural values explains the slim number of publications in English, but does not account for the equal shortage of resources in Afrikaans. The Voortrekkers are tangentially mentioned in studies on white youth culture and education that critically engage the formation and perpetuation of apartheid mentality. These mostly post-1994 studies are matched in the previous decades by the odd enthusiastic essay that actually praises the ideological apparatus underlying the organization. For instance, in an educational treatise on the role of the Voortrekker Youth Organization as a therapeutic measure for the improvement of the mental health of youth, J. P. C. Meyer praises the organization as a palliative to “behaviour deviations” in teenagers and demonstrates that, once enrolled in the movement, the school children improved their “discipline and sense of duty” and “developed a healthier attitude towards the church, fellow beings and parents” (Meyer 1960: 103). If the core of the Voortrekker movement’s activities consisted in learning nature skills twined with leadership abilities and patriotic feeling, these young pioneers also participated in events carrying an overt ideological component. Accompanying ox wagons loaded with settler nostalgics, these young pioneers marched into Pretoria during the 1938 centenary celebrations of the Great Trek, where the foundations of the Voortrekker monument were laid. The grandiose festivities for the inauguration of this edifice in December 1949 gave the young Voortrekkers the opportunity to hoist and strike the flags, carry the torch, while the adults enacted historical tableaux and gave ardent thanks to God. More flag-carrying and torch-bearing opportunities were generated in 1988, with the 150th anniversary of the Great Trek. However, these occasions did not lend themselves only on round figure anniversaries: more mundane activities, such as waving little orange, white, and blue flags on parliament opening day through the 1980s kept the Voortrekkers initiated into the continually adjusted narratives of nationhood shaped in South Africa.10 Several excellent studies, most notably Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts by Leslie Witz (2003), as well as articles by Peter Merrington (1997) and Loren Kruger (1996) have shaped the field of research on historical reenactment in South Africa. Yet instead of

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focusing on the Voortrekkers’ participation in parades and ceremonies, I would like to take a more textual approach and point out the wide variety of cultural texts (literature, children’s books, educational tomes, and visual texts) that directly or implicitly prescribed the normative behavior of Afrikaner youths. If Voortrekker commandos participated directly in historical reenactments of crucial moments of Afrikaner history, the majority of the white youth were also involved in daily enactment and reenactment of the roles prescribed for them by the apartheid state. These roles did not only solidify the concept of Afrikaner nationhood based on a reinterpretation of past events but also shaped and modified it in accordance with the larger global political context of the latter half of the twentieth century. With the advent of the Cold War, a new feature was thus added to the already palimpsestic Afrikaner sense of nationhood: this was its anti-communist identity, with South Africa projected as an anti-Soviet bastion and embracer of western values. In this way Voortrekkers, with their seemingly innocent emphasis on natureskills, provided excellent training grounds for later participation in the compulsory military service and preparedness for the anti-red war as national service conscripts deployed to Angola attested: My best preparation for the army was the Voortrekkers…. During school holidays in the autumn and spring they offered camps, mostly teaching fieldcraft and campcraft. This was a[n] introduction to living in tents, queuing for food, and sharing bathrooms. I was never taught to pitch a tent in the army, but it wasn’t needed, for I already knew. (The easiest way to pitch a tent is the way I was taught in the Voortrekkers….) Voortrekker leaders had often been to the army and applied what they had learned at these camps. The Defence Force knew that, and readily supplied tents and water carts for these camps. It was part of the total defence against the total onslaught (Daniel 1997).11 Feeling increasingly trapped among countries with Marxist sympathies, by 1975 South Africa secretly sent troops to Angola. This anticommunist emphasis in foreign policy resulted in an adjustment of the good citizen model that the youth were supposed to internalize and emulate. Thus, the Biblical Christian lifestyle that Voortrekkers, like the nineteenth century Boer pioneers, pledged to enact in their day to day life was expanded to include anti-communist values. But this moral and physical preparedness for the so-called “total onslaught” unleashed by the Russians did not come without its inherent selfcontradictions.

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Uneasy binaries

Marc Behr’s novel The Smell of Apples is one of the very few texts that explicitly foreground the impact of Cold War rhetoric on children’s imagination. Marnus Erasmus, its central character, takes the already mentioned route from Voortrekker camps to service in the army, from internalizing the values of Afrikanerdom to acting them out in the war against MPLA and Cuban forces in Angola. The narrative strides two timeframes: while most of the events take place in December 1973, as 11-year-old Marnus prepares for the end of the school year and the Christmas vacation ahead of him, this storyline is interspersed with 1988 episodes from the main character’s service in the army during South Africa’s secret war in Angola. Much of the novel’s narrative energy is directed at unmasking the nationalist and masculinist culture in which Afrikaner children were raised. As Rita Barnard has argued, both the Erasmus family microcosm and the Afrikaner macrocosm rely on a code of secrecy that binds characters together. The novel’s climax is reached when Marnus peeps through the chinks in his floor and witnesses his father sexually assaulting Frikkie, the boy’s trusted friend and playmate. Far from bringing the expected rebellion, this shocking revelation leads to collusion between the father’s values and the son’s goals for the future. The child of the youngest general in the South African Defence Force and of a beautiful opera singer turned dedicated housewife, Marnus trusts the political knowledge he imbibes from his parents and never fails to reproduce it for the benefit of the readers: “Dad says things are looking bad up north. They’ve even started planting bombs in Southwest Africa. Things are worse than when dad was in Rhodesia. The Communists muddle up people’s brains so that in the end you can’t trust anyone. The Communists indoctrinate everyone” (Behr 1995: 81). Indoctrinated himself with the values of Afrikanerdom, Marnus is less a self-determined agent than a performer of the role of obedient, respectful, and hard working child assigned to him by his parents. “Quietpoliteandinthebackground,” Marnus repeats over and over again and internalizes the conduct rules set out by his mother, which are echoed by school instructions and Voortrekkers strictures. Social roles are established and rehearsed in subtle ways. For instance, there is a lot of emphasis on sartorial codes. Marnus and his sister enjoy watching their mother getting dressed for social occasions and they are full of admiration for their dashing father in his officer uniform. The young protagonist loves to leaf through lavishly illustrated books with

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military uniforms from Europe and South Africa, which tell a beautified and de-historicized story of centuries of violence. This fascination with clothing emphasizes the performative character of social roles, which the children are supposed to internalize and reenact: daughters are taught to be decorative and dedicated to the family, while young boys are moulded to become future soldiers. Social institutions—the family, the school, the church, the military—join hands in order to reinforce these roles. In proposing national narratives and devising role models for the youngsters to enact, state ideology reveals its inner contradictions. To oppose communism during the Cold War meant to embrace the western capitalist culture. Yet the conservative Christian nationalist outlook of the Erasmus family rejects the West as debauched and immoral. American politics are regarded as muddled backwaters, with leaders lacking the vision they preach to their allies: Dad says Nixon will be out of the White House before Christmas and it looks like the Americans are going to lose the war against the communists in Vietnam. Dad says it’s typical of the Americans to try and prescribe to the Republic how we should run our country while their own president is such a rubbish. Dad says you don’t tell someone else how to make his bed when your own house looks like a pigsty (12–13). Aside from the repeated assertion of paternal authority, as Marnus argues by means of quotation, what transpires from this fragment is South Africa’s imperfect alignment with the American camp within the binaries established by the Cold War. This uncomfortable relation with American values is related to an older Afrikaner suspicion of imperial powers. The Great Trek expressed the pioneers’ decision to break away from British domination at the Cape and to forge their own forms of political organization; this event’s reenactment during the latter half of the twentieth century celebrates the assertion of Afrikaner independence, as the establishment of the country as a republic in 1961 broke the ties with the British power and the other Commonwealth realms. Once the influence of this imperial power was removed, Afrikaners became suspicious of the new superpower, the United States of America, which was perceived as equally meddling and dictatorial in its approach to South African political interests. Religious values, contradictory as they may appear from the main characters’ behavior, establish further differences between the Afrikaner and American cultures. General Erasmus treats “communist terrorists” like hunting trophies (he tortures,

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murders, and displays them for photo shoots) without any signs of uneasiness, while his Christian morality shivers at the thought of entering a jazz bar, considered to be a site of American depravity. However, the most powerful textual subversion comes from the identification of signifiers supposed to belong uniquely to the Afrikaner culture in the discourse of the opposing camp. Afrikaner culture shared strategies and discursive patterns with the very ideologies it combated most fiercely. Thus, many of its authoritative patterns are characteristic not only of patriarchal, militarist systems, but of the communist dictatorships they despised and feared so much. Similar uprooted forms of language have circulated both under apartheid and communist dictatorships. The inflexible langue de bois of totalitarian national ideologies thrives at the expense of children, who are both optimal surfaces, ready to be inscribed, as well as enactors and disseminators of a rhetoric they cannot fully comprehend. For little Afrikaner boys such as Marnus and his friend Frikkie, to be a Voortrekker was cool, while the English-speaking Boy Scouts was deemed unpalatable: On Friday afternoons we have Voortrekkers. I’m the team leader and Frikkie is my deputy. Our team is the Lions and our motto is: Voorwaarts. The Spiro twins are Boy Scouts and we always fight about which is better: Voortrekkers or Boy Scouts. We always say the Boy Scouts is naff. Ilse used to be a Voortrekker until last year. But when she came back from Holland, she said she was lagging behind in her school-work because of her activities. When she stopped Voortrekkers, Dad was very disappointed, because Ilse would definitely have become a Presidentsverkenner; only the top Voortrekkers become Presidentsverkenners (46). The moral and intellectual distance between reader and narrator upon which the effectiveness of this episode is based, displays a gradation of levels of ideological awareness: from the fully naïve Marnus, who takes the organization’s award structures as tokens of success, to the awakened yet dissimulating older sister, who does not want to worry her parents with her newly gained political insight, to the reader, who is supposed to decode the ideological charge of the seemingly inconspicuous movement. As part of his Voortrekker training, history is passed down to Marnus in the abstracted form of military uniforms displayed in museums, which masquerade the violence of the wars against the Zulu as tales of Afrikaner valor. Voortrekkers dressed up national ideology as attractive tales of courage and resourcefulness, and braced the youth

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organization with quasi-military structures. Even from the cultivated and more aware, these structures elicited an ambiguous response: Mark Behr confessed to have “both loathed and adored” these masculinist codes (Behr 1996: 13). The conflation of contradictory ideologies under one heading is a characteristic strategy of monoglossic discourses, which reduce everything to a set of binaries. For Mrs. Erasmus liberals and communists are the same anti-Christian anarchists ready to destabilize her family and nation. For General Erasmus jazz and hippie clothing, such as bellbottoms and platform shoes, are communist instruments that attract and corrupt the serious Afrikaner youth. According to General Erasmus, Tannie Karla, Marnus’s nonconformist aunt, got mixed up with the liberals while attending university. “When she started wearing platform shoes and jeans,” the Erasmus family suspected her to have been influenced by a “Moscow on the Hill” fashion, a fad arising for the rebellious University of Cape Town (Behr 1995: 105).12 What (American) jazz, jeans, and platform shoes had to do with the eponymous Soviet style—which, quite contrarily, was fond of drab asexual clothing—would be difficult to fathom beyond the pseudo-logic of these conflations. In search for ironic moments when the well-entrenched binaries of Cold War discourse are dismantled as lacking a real referent, I find the final touch in the interchangeable and free-floating signifiers between the opposing camps. A simple process of substituting “communism” for “capitalism” would show that the following slogans in The Smell of Apples could easily change camps: “Communism is raising its ugly head everywhere” (172) contemplates General Erasmus with the determination to help get “rid of this cancer” (116); for the Eastern bloc the same “ugly head” belonged to capitalism. Terrorists have “Moscow training,” while at the same time “the destabilizing elements” held responsible by the Eastern Bloc for infiltrating and subverting the socialist economies were raised and trained by American imperialists. All the dangers seem to be lurking from the opposing camp and the first targets are the readyto-be-lured youth. Marnus is repeatedly told that, “pop music can cause you to become a drug addict. Before Lucifer was thrown out of heaven, he was the angel of music, and so it’s only logical that the Communists will use pop music to take over the Republic” (67). The same laments were simultaneously heard from the communist camp, where party propagandists pontificated about the dangers of pop music, associated with drugs, hippies, and the corrupt American lifestyle. Although Behr is a controversial figure in South Africa (he confessed that he was co-opted as an informer by the police force) his novel has

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nonetheless been celebrated for unmasking the ideological structures that transformed young children into docile subjects of the apartheid state.13 However, the novel is equally important in conveying the interrelations between apartheid and Cold War structures. It reveals the similarity of discursive strategies between the capitalist and communist camps during the Cold War, while displacing South Africa from the well-entrenched dichotomies established by the descent of the Iron Curtain. With their equal fear of the red atheism and capitalist debauchery, Afrikaner culture as presented in the novel short-circuits the gap between East and West. It conveys the inherent contradictions of the good citizen model that Afrikaner youths were supposed to enact on a daily basis. The triangulation that shows South Africa as falling between the discursively neat yet practically inaccurate dichotomous positions occupied by the American and Soviet camps could also provide the explanation behind the many silences that mark this field of study. The absence of the Cold War as a topic of interest in recent literary texts and scholarship on South Africa reveals less its self-evident character than its many tensions and ambiguities that still need to be comprehensively engaged. Notes 1 This article originally appeared under the title “Mirrorings: Communists, Capitalists and Voortrekkers of the Cold War” in Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late-Cold War Conflicts, ed. Gary Baines and Peter Vale (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2008): 42–55. ISBN 9781868884568. Reprinted with permission. 2 The head of the Security Branch made this statement at an international congress on the dangers of communism; he intended it as an explanation for the high number of Jewish members attracted by the South African Communist Party. What it demonstrated, in fact, is the kinship between German Nazi ideology and apartheid politics. 3 Pretoriastroika is a term Rob Nixon borrowed from journalism to describe the new orientation brought by Frederik de Klerk’s administration in South Africa, a current that eventually led to the first democratic elections in 1994. 4 These values are still reflected by the Constitution [Grondwet] of the Voortrekker Youth Organization, which can be found on the movement’s website: . For instance, one of the many repetitive promises [beloftes] that members have to pledge is phrased as follows: “Ek sal oral en altyd probeer om ‘n Voortrekker te wees, om gehoorsaam te wees, om my volk, my land en my medemens te dien en bo alles die Here lief te hê.” (“I will always and everywhere try to be a Voortrekker, to be obedient, to serve my nation, my country and my people, and above all, to love God.”) I am indebted to Henk Rossouw for this translation. 5 Certain terms mentioned above need to be contextualized. I obliquely invoke a terminology introduced by recent scholarship on historical reenactment,

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6

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which highlights the problems arising from the reduplication of events long past. The ideological benefits of making history come alive are obvious: such commemorations establish historical landmarks and settle ways of interpreting them while at the same time they persuade the public that something useful and authentic can be learnt about history. (See Cook 2004; Agnew 2004; McCalman 2004). In this essay I give a wider interpretation to historical enactments to include the emulation of tacit or explicit role models in the day-to-day life of Afrikaner youth. With respect to The Smell of Apples, this model allows, first and foremost, for an understanding of the political orthodoxies absorbed by children, while avoiding the already explored field of established theories of ideology. Secondly, these slogans reveal the ambiguities contained by these narratives handed down to children to be internalized and replicated. The most notable exceptions are the interdisciplinary collection Beyond the Border War (2008), where this article was first published, the volume of essays on Cold War Literature edited by Andrew Hammond (2006), and Gary Baines’ articles that inventory and discuss the South African literary texts concerned with the war in Angola. This orientation brought the ANC criticism from its political allies; frictions between the leading party and the SACP and COSATU became more and more visible under Thabo Mbeki’s second mandate. Several articles that discuss this novel stand out for their innovative approach. Rita Barnard’s “The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology” (2000) provides a compelling analysis of the process through which Marnus Erasmus and other characters in the novel are interpellated by the state and turned into obedient citizens. In “The Whole Country’s Truth: Confession and Narrative in Recent White South African Writing” Michiel Heyns (2000) engages the theme of confession and absolution within the national frame set up by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, while in “Fathers and Sons: Structures of Erotic Patriarchy in Afrikaans Writing of the Emergency” (1996) he revises the Oedipal triangle as one involving the father, the son, and the fatherland, in a homoerotic relationship based on an “erotic short circuit that fuses rivalry and love.” Jacques Malan, SADF National Service (1989–90). Several sources attest to the Voortrekkers’ participation during commemorations and parades. In The Official Programme for the Inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument: December 13 to 16, 1949, the Voortrekkers are listed in the program with flag carrying and flag striking tasks. Movietone’s Online Newsreel Archive (<www.movietone.com>) contains two brief films covering the preparations for the 1938 centenary of the Great Trek (Stories 35024 and 35190). Finally a South African photo database contains snapshots of members of the movement taking part in public commemorations. See, for instance, <www.iafrikaphotos.co.za/site/AddToLightBox.asp?pic=25505&Dealer=5606& showcat=959> “Total defense” and “total onslaught” were governmental terminology to justify the militarization of the country in order to withstand an allegedly imminent communist invasion. This account of a former soldier on national service during the late 1980s is signed with the family name Daniel and posted on a website of South African conscripts entitled Sentinel Projects Presents “Bad Guys”

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(). The cited paragraph can be found at . The connection between Voortrekker training and anti-communist preparedness is taken over and re-emphasized in another account posted on the same website by Jacques Malan: “I was a member of the Voortrekkers. It was very nice paramilitary organization, supposed to be the Afrikaans version of the Boy Scouts, with very much the same uniform, but by the time I was there the uniform was brown shoes, knee lenght [sic] socks, brown shorts, a dressy sort of shirt with all your badges you could earn sown to your sleeve, a brown tie and a beret. At all the camps there was flag raising parades with skriflesing en gebed (scripture and prayers) every morning and evening. Sometimes when they were feeling generous the parade was in normal clothing, but mostly it was in uniform. We had lectures in fieldcraft and survival, slept in army tents (on the ground of course), and had inspection every morning. I didn’t think those camps would have been possible without the logistical support of the army because all the catering equipment, the tents, generators and lights were supplied by the army. In 1983 my father was called up for the Buttermilk camps, when all the older men who weren’t drafted or did military service were militarised. A two week camp with some drill training and lectures and they were all given R1’s to take home and a set of browns, ready for the ‘rooi gevaar.’” (See ) 12 The University of Cape Town was nicknamed “Moscow on the Hill” due to its rejection of apartheid orthodoxies. 13 At a conference held in Cape Town in 1996, Mark Behr confessed that as a student at the University of Stellenbosch he was co-opted as an informer by a high-ranking officer in the South African Police Force: “From the end of 1986 to 1990 I received money for reposting mostly on the activities of the student organization, NUSAS, at the university of Stellenbosch. In 1990 I brought this to the attention of the ANC in Lusaka and from then, until the end of 1991 I gave the ANC whatever information I gained access to” (2005). His disclosure raised new questions about the confessional structures of The Smell of Apples and their persuasiveness.

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History Below the Water Line: The Making of Apartheid’s Last Festival1 Leslie Witz University of the Western Cape

South Africa, at the beginning of 1988, has been characterized as a society at war (Cock 1989: 1). In response to sustained, organized and widespread popular rebellion from the early 1980s, the apartheid state had declared a state of emergency, set in place a series of measures to remove community leaders (through assassination or imprisonment), made attempts to silence the opposition press, and simultaneously provided for limited social and political reforms. These reforms, the state envisaged, would be the basis for the emergence of leaders who would cooperate with its structures as well as have community support, thereby ensuring the continuance of white minority rule (Cock 1989: 144–7). The South African Defence Force (SADF) was also involved in wars against the Angolan government, which had been going on for almost 13 years, and the anti-colonial liberation forces in Namibia. In the midst of war, the National Party government, headed by a leader who in 1983 had assumed the office of executive state president (which in effect made him commander-in-chief of the SADF), P. W. Botha, sponsored a series of anniversary commemorations. These included the 75th anniversary of the formation of the South Africa Police, the Great Trek 150 commemoration (Grundlingh & Sapire 1989: 19–37), the 300th anniversary of the arrival of Huguenot settlers from France and, arguably the most elaborate, the quincentenary of the rounding of the Cape by the Portuguese captain, Bartolomeu Dias. According to South African Panorama, an official publication of the government’s Bureau for Information, the latter event included “colourful street parades and folkdancing and song, gymnastic displays [and] lectures on the importance of the Portuguese discoveries.” It claimed that Mossel Bay, the southern Cape town which was the main commemorative arena of the Dias festival, reverberated to “the sounds of music” (Maree 1988b: 5). 138

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The highlight of the festival was the construction of a caravel that sailed from Lisbon in November 1987, stopped en-route at Madeira, and arrived at Mossel Bay, the presumed sight of Dias’ landing in 1488, precisely on time for the pageantry of 3 February 1988. Surrounded by a navy flotilla, the caravel made its way into the bay in a scene that South African Panorama described as “moving and unforgettable,” taking “spectators five centuries into the past” (Maree 1988a: 2). After the caravel dropped anchor, Captain Emilio de Sousa and his crew stepped ashore. A tableau was performed in which Dias (played by Manuel Escorcio) was greeted by a group of actors portraying the indigenous inhabitants.2 After the pageantry on Santos beach De Sousa was greeted by a host of dignitaries including P. W. Botha and his wife, Elize Botha, Gene Louw, the administrator of the Cape province and his wife, Hantie Louw, and the Minister of Constitutional Development and Planning, Chris Heunis. P. W. Botha and Eduardo Henrique Serra Brandão, president of the National Board for the Commemoration of the Portuguese Discoveries, made the keynote speeches. The former referred to Dias as establishing a legacy of “civilisation and Christian conviction” that was being upheld by South Africa, while the latter maintained that the voyage of 1488 was “one of the greatest achievements of all time,” opening up “new worlds” and bringing “divergent cultures into contact with each other” (Maree, 1988a: 3).3 That the caravel set sail and arrived in Mossel Bay on time for the Dias festival was an occurrence that, for a long time, did not seem likely. There was a problem of raising money for the project, with an estimated budget of 1.3 million rand.4 A further difficulty was deciding what the caravel should look like, as there were no contemporary existing plans on which to base the reconstructed vessel.5 What compounded matters was the fact that the caravel had to keep to the schedules set by the festival organizers. It could not depend upon the vagaries of the weather. The Caravel SubCommittee of the National Dias Festival committee therefore took the decision that the caravel hull, below the water line, was to be designed according to modern technology but with appearance of an old-time caravel above water line. An auxiliary engine was be installed to maintain the scheduled times of arrival.6 An engine below the water line provides a most appropriate metaphor to analyze how Dias was produced in 1988. The central concern of the various individuals and committees involved in the planning was to ensure that the key elements that went into the making of the festival remained hidden. With the National Party government proclaiming that it was reforming apartheid, this festival, could not, as had been the case

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with the Van Riebeeck Festival in 1952, assert the primacy of South Africa as white settler nation (Witz 2003). Although Dias’ arrival was one that could, without doubt, contain all the elements necessary to script a performance of “white founding” and settlement, the emphasis in 1988 was on apartheid South Africa as being constituted by a “rich diversity of cultures” that emanated from the contact and interaction “between Eastern, western and African cultures in this part of the world.”7 The festival organizers also asserted that Dias’ significance reached far beyond national significance, claiming that what was being commemorated was a “wonderful discovery” that ranked “as equal to modern space travel” (Saunders 1987). To make Dias appear in South Africa in 1988 as both a symbol of international importance and of multicultural nation, the participation of the apartheid government had to be actively concealed. Assertions that Dias commemoration was “a festival for whites” had to repeatedly denied (Saunders 1987). This article tracks some of these moments of disavowal and concealment that went into the endeavor to produce a multicultural Dias for late apartheid in 1988. Yet staging such a history turned out to be fraught with problems, not least because the stage on which Dias was set to land in 1988 was a beach that was designated for “whites only.” This provided the spark to a campaign to boycott the festival proceedings in Mossel Bay. In addition, one the eve of the festival, a group of black policemen, who were scheduled to render performances of mass rhythmic gymnastics at the Van Riebeeck Stadium in Mossel Bay, were involved in a bus accident. Late in the day the problem which confronted the festival organizers was whether and how to sustain the image of a multicultural event. The paper analyzes how, in addition to denial and concealment, racial substitution and masquerade was utilized in an attempt to ensure that the history on stage was “a spectacle of colour” (Maree 1988b: 4).

Making a multicultural festival In expressing his dislike of historical reenactments Greg Dening (2004: 19) has argued that what these performances do is to hallucinate us into seeing the past as us in funny clothes. Not any “us.” An abstracted “us.” An “us” reduced to an ideal. An “us” identified with the past as myth. But who is this “us” and what are the processes of abstraction? While in the late 1980s those who were involved in organizing the Dias festival were constructing a collective with multicultural aspirations within the bounds of apartheid South Africa, this was not the

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way that the limits of association were initially defined. To begin with, the concept of a festival in 1988 contained much more of an assertion that what was being contemplated was a commemoration of white discovery and founding. It was the constant tension between these two notions that went into forming the “us” whose history was reenacted in Mossel Bay in February 1988. When members of the Mossel Bay Town Council, met, in 1978, together the local Member of Parliament, Helgaard Janse van Rensburg, and the Provincial Councillor for the area, Piet Loubser (both of them members of the ruling National Party), the quincentenary was conceptualized as “the occasion of the first stepping ashore of a white man on the South African coast.”8 Three years later another initiative began to take shape in Cape Town, with a greater emphasis on proposing a reenactment of Dias’ voyage as a symbol of Portugueseness within a domain called world history. The primary instigators were the retired King George V chair of History and former Assistant Principal of the University of Cape Town, Eric Axelson, whose work since being a student at the University of Witwatersrand in the 1930s had been on Portugal in Africa, and the Portuguese Ambassador, Manuel Almeida Coutinho (Harries and Saunders, 1998). Through correspondence between them and a series of meetings, ideas began to coalesce around organizing commemorative events that would link South Africa and Portugal and the possibility of reconstructing and sailing a caravel from Portugal to the Cape.9 Axelson called for the commemoration to have a “predominantly cultural and historical nature.” His opinion was that the South African government should not be involved in planning the commemorations, and only be called in at a later stage to provide financial assistance and ensure the participation of the navy. The ambassador concurred and his advice was that only “scholars and academics” be involved in the preliminary stages of organization.10 The category of history was constantly being invoked as the antithesis of politics, “the former being identified with objectivity and neutrality, the latter assuming notions of being tainted with partisan affiliations” (Witz 2003: 110). The starting point of the first meetings of the Steering Committee of the V Centenary Commemoration of Bartolomeu Dias, convened at the offices of the Portuguese Consul General in Cape Town in early 1983, was of “us” being constituted as products of world history (rather than as a nationalized and racialized citizenry). Most of the representatives were either academics from universities or were religious figures. There was also an attempt to lay claim to a greater sense of multiculturalism by including a Muslim cleric and representatives from the

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University of the Western Cape (UWC), a university constituted under apartheid for people who were racially designated as “coloured.” The rector of UWC, Richard van der Ross, was elected to chair the committee. In keeping with a tone of gravitas and international significance the key events for a proposed quincentenary program were a church service, a naval event of some sort, a visit to Cape Town by a Portuguese scholar and/or dignitary and a series of lectures. A great deal of the committee’s time was spent debating the pros and cons of associating with South African government initiatives which were starting to gather pace at this time. Van der Ross was very wary of such a merger as it was likely to “disinterest many people.” He was supported by many members of the committee who wanted the celebrations to be “undertaken as a private initiative on the part of interested individuals and communities.”11 Ironically, turning the quincentenary into a commemoration of a “great event in world history” placed the genesis of the historic “us” in the Portuguese nation-state. Yet there seems to have been ambivalence in Portugal in accepting this status. Although by the end of 1982 the Portuguese government had set up a group to coordinate projects among departments involved in the quincentenary, by the beginning of 1984 no committee had been formed.12 Perhaps the reluctance is explained by the use of the Portuguese voyages for the purposes of national propaganda under the Salazar and then Caetano dictatorships, from 1932 until 1974. After the revolution of 1974, the end of Portuguese empire in Guinea, Mozambique and Angola, a counter-coup in Portugal, and the assumption of a semblance of a democratic form of government under the “watching brief” of the military, there may have been less enthusiasm for such brazen gestures of heroic nationalism in Portugal. Military rule, under the non-executive state president, General António Eanes and the elected prime minister, the socialist Mario Soares, lasted until 1986. When the army ceded control, Soares was elected president and the conservative Cavaco Silva, “an abrasive young economist” whose “reform” strategy centered on a massive program of “reprivatisation of the 52% of the economy nationalized after the 1974 revolution,” became prime minister, heading a government that obtained an absolute majority in the general elections (Birmingham 2003: 199; Hippley 1987). Wanting to assert Portugal as a modern European nation that was entering the European Economic Community, Silva’s government set up a National Board for the Celebration of the Portuguese Discoveries and proclaimed that the Portuguese explorers should become examples for “the economic and social progress we

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have to carry out, in the political and institutional stability we are living, to prepare for the coming century” (Cody 1988). In a moment of ardent nationalist fervor, Commander Rodrigues da Costa of the National Board maintained that, “from 1480 to 1520, we were the greatest in the world, no doubt about it.” Explicitly the commemorations were seen to compensate for the end of the Portuguese imperial project. “We have lost our empire; now we must discover ourselves,” said da Costa (Cody 1988). Within South Africa there was also growing enthusiasm for the Dias commemorative project from the apartheid government. Eric Axelson, for all his initial hesitancy about government involvement, was writing to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, R. F. (Pik) Botha, and the Minister of National Education, Gerritt Viljoen, urging them “about the necessity of planning for the commemorations.”13 These suggestions were well received and by September 1983 the Minister of National Education had decided to appoint the National Steering Committee Dias.14 In effect this reduced the group that had been meeting under the auspices of the Portuguese consulate in Cape Town into a local Cape Town committee (with Axelson and an ex-naval officer, Captain da Sousa as delegates to the national steering committee), alongside an Albany (Grahamstown), Port Elizabeth, Mossel Bay and later a Luderitz committee. These local committees were all represented on the national structure, together with delegates from the South African Navy, the national government departments of education, foreign affairs and nature conservation, and the cultural affairs section of the provincial Western Cape government. This was to all intents and purposes, not only a government appointed committee, but one where its interests were evidently paramount. The National Steering Committee Dias fell under the “white own affairs” Department of National Education. This departmental designation was in terms of a revised South African constitution that was adopted in 1983. Making use of racial categories that were derived from the 1950 Population Registration Act, the constitution created separate franchises for people who were considered to be part of South Africa’s “population groups”: “the White persons, the Coloured persons” and “the Indians.” In what was called a tricameral parliament, a “House of Assembly” would make decisions on “white own affairs,” a “House of Representatives” on “coloured own affairs” and a House of Delegates on “Indian own affairs.” Own affairs were defined as: “Matters which specially or differentially affect a population group in relation to the maintenance of its identity and the upholding and furtherance of its way of

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life, culture, traditions and customs.” Social welfare, education, arts and culture, health and housing were all specified as “own affairs.” When there was a matter of uncertainty, the President, who was given sweeping executive powers in the revised constitution, could decided what was a general or own affair. A grouping called a “President’s Council,” consisting of representatives from the three houses and 20 of the President’s nominees, was set up to advise the President, particularly on whether an issue was a “general” or “own” affair. The most telling part of the constitution was that it considered people who were referred to as the “Black population” as subjects of the President’s “control and administration.”15 Eric Axelson, who was a key figure on the National Steering Committee Dias, expressed, in his private correspondence, his dissatisfaction with the constitution: “It grants, as you probably know, a measure of parliamentary representation to ‘coloureds’ and Indians, but in separate houses, so further constitutionalizing apartheid. There is no provision whatsoever for any black share in the central government; and an executive president is granted extraordinary powers.”16 In the meetings of the steering committee (which by the beginning of 1985 was turned into the National Festival Committee Dias 1988), there was considerable concern about finding ways to hide “below the water line” the South African government’s role in the festival. J. J. De Villiers, who represented the Department of National Education on the committee, would report on the money that the government was allocating for the commemoration and then issue a warning that “the impression must not be created that it would be a festival organized by the Government.”17 The Dias committee was well aware that, as the international boycott of apartheid South Africa was becoming more effective in the 1980s, that “the overt involvement of the SA Government in either the organizational arrangements or fund-raising for the caravel project would prejudice international participation.”18 When Elkan Green, the Cape Town festival director, visited Portugal to make arrangements about the caravel and hold a series of meetings with several organizations, his report was kept secret in order to conceal South Africa’s involvement in fund-raising. Indeed Green and the festival committee intended to keep government funding to a minimum and instead show that the project was one that emanated from “Portuguese sources” (the inverted commas are used in the original document) in South Africa and in Portugal.19 Several fund-raising activities were held to solicit these funds but, although there was some support, it did not begin to cover the costs of the festival, in particular the caravel project. All of the R1.3 million that the government guaranteed for the caravel, and that had been held in

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reserve because of the “sensitivity of the project,” was eventually used.20 Nonetheless the cover up of South African government involvement enabled the National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries to assert that the idea of the caravel “came from the Portuguese Communities in South Africa and the National Commission Dias 1988” and that the caravel was built on instruction from representatives of the Portuguese Communities (de Brito 1988: 38). What made it even more imperative for the committee to depict the South African government as a relatively minor player in the festival organization was this: the committee had its origins in a ministry of “white own affairs.” The problem, as the committee saw it, was not that this was a “fact,” but that it should not be a knowable fact, especially in Portugal. The imminent danger was that “no participation by the Portuguese Government, whether of an official or unofficial nature, would be possible.”21 But active suppression of evidence was impossible, particularly as there was dissatisfaction from within the Cape Town committee about the National Committee being located within a “white” department. For the Cape Town committee this went against the intention of the festival that they asserted as having “a universal meaning.” This universality did not go against the meanings being developed by the national committee—it was expressed in precisely the same modernizing alibis of race (“discovery,” “first contacts,” and benefits accruing from “the introduction of Western Civilization”)—but argued that this could not be achieved if the “descendants of all communities involved, as a result of the events of 1488,” were to be excluded from the commemoration by virtue of it being organized as “white affair.” Richard van der Ross, the chair of the Cape Town committee threatened to resign if this situation continued to prevail. Faced with a crisis that could jeopardize the festival, the executive of the National Committee resorted to its strategy of concealment and prevailed upon Van der Ross “not to release the matter to the media.”22 Van der Ross’s resignation did not take place as the National Committee came up with a solution that appeared to appease him: it replicated, on a much smaller scale, the structures of the tricameral parliament. The chair of the National Committee claimed “it was never the intention that the celebration should be for Whites only.” The decision was made “to co-opt one member each of the Coloured, Indian and Black population to the Committee.” These would primarily come through the tricameral structures, from the House of Delegates and the House of Representatives, with the “Black” representative being nominated by the Minister of Cooperation and Development.23 This would make the National Committee

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similar in its racial structuring to the Cape Town Committee, where Van der Ross and the University of the Western Cape, supplied “coloured” representation to a committee that was dominated by people who were classified, under apartheid, as white, and E. A. Bawa was defined as a delegate from “the Indian community.” For the “black community” the chair was directed to do research and come up with a suitable nominee.24 Van der Ross was completely satisfied with this sort of arrangement and maintained that the operations of the Cape Town committee showed not the “slightest hint of apartheid.”25 To sustain the image of the festival being dissociated from apartheid South Africa and its government, and instead promote a multicultural reformed Dias, the committee had to make sure that the obvious signs of racialized segregation had to be eliminated. Often designated as “petty-apartheid” this included racially designated recreational, eating, seating, drinking and ablution facilities. The National Committee pledged that there would not be racial restrictions to venues and events associated with the festival. This decision had emerged after venues at the holiday resort of Hartenbos (near Mossel Bay) had been suggested for the Dias festival.26 Hartenbos had been developed in the 1930s for Afrikaans speaking white railway workers who felt alienated from Durban, which they perceived as dominated by English-speakers.27 The Dias Committee tried to gain assurances from the Afrikaans Taal en Kultuur Vereniging (Afrikaans Language and Culture Organization) around open access but no reply was forthcoming. In this space of uncertainty the Program committee of the festival decided that it “couldn’t risk Hartenbos as it could place the festival as a whole in jeopardy if some population groups were excluded.”28 Yet, in deciding to exclude Hartenbos, the committee presented its decision upon the need to centralize venues for the festival in Mossel Bay. To even out the decision the committee also maintained it was excluding D’Almeida township, which the Mossel Bay municipality proudly proclaimed as a model “coloured residential area” with tarred roads, schools, recreational facilities, clinic and library, for the same reason.29 The festival program had also to contain elements that asserted late apartheid South Africa as a multicultural community. The idea was that there would be separate folk dances as part of the same event. Negotiations were entered into with the Israeli Shalom Group, Italian and Indian dancers, Scottish bagpipe players, gumboot dancers, and the Malay choir board.30 They would perform as “traditional folk dancers” at the opening ceremony of the festival, at the Van Riebeeck Stadium, on 29 January, and thereafter at a “typical” Portuguese village being con-

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structed (using remains from old houses recently demolished in Mossel Bay) in a railways goods shed at Mossel Bay Harbour.31 By inserting racialized and ethnicized groups into an international world of cultural difference, dressed up as folk, apartheid South Africa could take to Dias’ stage in 1988 as the site of “many cultures” that were initiated five centuries before (Maree 1988b: 7). Not part of these stagings of folkness was to be the performances by a contingent of black policemen from the police training college in Hammanskraal. They were pencilled in to the opening program at the Van Riebeeck Stadium on 29 January, just prior to the arrival of official dignitaries, and would give a repeat show the next day alongside parachutists, drum majorettes and a dog demonstration. These black policemen were part of the increasing number that the South African government was training in the late 1980s. According to Shärf the use of black policemen were seen by the apartheid state as an effective method to counter resistance in the township as they had more extensive and in-depth knowledge and their acts of repression might not reflect so adversely on the state (Shärf 1988). A substantial number went to Hammanskraal, a college that was set aside purely for training black policemen, where carrying out drilling exercises was a major component of the curriculum. South Africans saw these policemen from Hammanskraal on a regular basis in the late 1980s as they made frequent appearances on television screens performing precision mass rhythmic gymnastics. Television had become a major vehicle in the late 1980s for what Swilling and Phillips (1989: 146) refer to as the “legitimation of state structures.” On government controlled South African Television, resistance was presented as inherently criminal and out-of-control, in contrast to the police and army who were imaged as defenders of community interests (Cock 1989: 262–74). The gymnastic policemen from Hammanskraal, however, were totally taken out of the context of their daily policing functions and instead appeared only as performers who could be marveled at for their athleticism, precision and rhythmic abilities. The Program committee of the festival indeed wanted the police for the “spectacle” of their “mass displays.”32 The group who made their way to Mossel Bay had performed together 32 times and had stayed on, after their police training was completed, especially for the festival (Van Gijsen 1988).

Beach politics From the initial planning stages it was immensely difficult for the organizers of Dias 1988 to contain the tensions and contradictions of a festival

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that asserted its multiculturalism within the bounds of (but attempting to be apart from) the apartheid state. Even within the limited parameters of the structures of the tricameral parliament keeping hold of these images was more easier said than done. There was the problem of finding candidates from racialized communities designated as “Coloured,” “Indian,” and “Black” for the committee structures of the Dias festival and when they were located they attended meetings very infrequently.33 The Cape Town committee eventually decided to give up the search for a “Black representative” because of “difficulties encountered in identifying Black organizations which would be prepared to nominate representatives.”34 These tensions spilled over at the beginning of 1988 when Rev Pieter Klink, a cleric from Belville South and member of the President’s Council that was set up by the new constitution, was ordered off the “whites only” De Bakke beach at Mossel Bay. The deputy town clerk of Mossel Bay confirmed that, “the town council reserved De Bakke and Dos Santos beaches for whites because the coloured community have Dias beach” (Stuijt 1988a). The implication was, as Edgar Domingo, a school principal in Mossel Bay, pointed out, Dias was going to land the following month on a beach that “would normally be closed to the coloured community” (Stuijt 1988b). Berthold Alheit, Mossel Bay’s deputy mayor said that the landing of the caravel just “happened” to be scheduled for a “white” beach (Esterhuyse & Houwing 1988). Within the realm of politics as constituted through South Africa’s reformed constitution and the tricameral parliament it was racially segregated facilities that were regarded as synonymous with apartheid. Thus, when The Argus commented on the beach evictions at Mossel Bay in relation to the festival, it was the restricted access to the beaches “on the basis of skin colour” that was “spoil[ing]” the commemoration of a “historic voyage of discovery that led to the founding and development of South Africa.”35 There was no enquiry at all into the underlying basis for the commemorations. When Peter Klink, followed by 12 school principals in Mossel Bay, and then Rev Alan Hendrickse of the House of Representatives, made a call to boycott the Dias festival, its primary aim was to make the Mossel Bay town council open access to all its beaches on a permanent basis. But there was also a greater questioning of the need for commemorating Dias. Nonetheless this boycott call was framed in the very same racialized categories as the Population Registration Act and directed specifically at “the coloured communities.” People who were classified “coloured” were recast as “indigenous” subjects of oppression and exploitation (Stuijt 1988c).

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Richard van der Ross, of the Cape Town committee, though was very reluctant to support the boycott call. Although he announced that he was pulling out of the festival program that would be held in Mossel Bay he maintained that his decision had nothing to do with the segregated facilities in the town but arose out of his need to devote his attention to promoting the Dias festival events in Cape Town (Dowson 1988). Although he was opposed to the racial segregation on beaches, he said that the decision to restrict access was not derived from the Dias Festival committee. Therefore, he maintained, that actions that serve “to punish, or to have any adverse effects should not be directed against them” (Van der Ross 1988). Van der Ross’s reservations about boycotting were largely brushed aside, and when Ryland Fisher, a reporter from the community newspaper South, visited Mossel Bay at the beginning of February, just before the festival was about to kick off, he found that “the local coloured and African people appeared to be united in their opposition to the festival” (Fisher 1988). Even the festival director, Edwin Tyler was now insisting that they had never had the cooperation of the “coloured community” (Van Gijsen 1988). What Fisher also found was that the call to stay away was not merely based upon access to segregated amenities but on a rejection of the system of apartheid and the beach politics of Klink and Hendrickse. Rev. Leslie Crotz of the Volkskerk and Rev Pietie Rhodes of the Anglican Church both claimed that, long before Klink and Hendrickse made their “noise,” that there had been absolutely no intention to participate in a festival that celebrated white political and “economic power” in a country that was “under a State of Emergency.” Klink was rebuked for his opportunism: “What’s the point of making an issue of being chased off the beach when you are still on the government’s payroll?” (Fisher 1988). There was one further complication to representing the Dias festival as a space and time of multicultural meeting within the bounds of apartheid. And that was History. There are no contemporary sources available about the voyage of Dias and much of what happened is based upon chroniclers who wrote about his travels over the next century. One of these is the so-called diary of the voyage of Vasco da Gama between 1497 and 1499, apparently written by Álvaro Velho who sailed with Da Gama’s fleet aboard the São Rafael, from which extracts were copied in the sixteenth century and which was first published in 1838 (Axelson 1998: 18–19). Contained within “Da Gama’s diary” is a description of Dias encounters with the

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… when Bartolomeu Dias was here they fled from him and would not take anything from him that he offered them, but rather, one day, as they were taking in water at a very good watering place that is here at the edge of the sea, they defended the watering place with stones thrown from the top of the hill which is above the watering place, and Bartolomeu Dias shot a cross-bow at them and killed one of them (Axelson 1998: 26–7; Axelson 1988: 7). Creating a multicultural pageant on the basis of this evidence would have been enormously difficult and could not form the basis of multicultural pageantry on the “whites-only” beaches of Mossel Bay in February 1988. With a boycott and history confounding the attempts at providing a multicultural imagery for Dias, a bus crash on the day the festival was due to open, almost entirely shattered any remaining hopes the organizers might still have retained for a “spectacle of colour.” On the Robinson Pass, 35 kilometers from Mossel Bay, one of the buses, carrying 83 of the police gymnasts from Hammanskraal, lost it brakes. It careered off the road, went over the side of the pass and crashed into a forest of pine trees. Captain J. J. S. Zondi, Constables S. P. Mbokazi, M. P. Mogashoa, B. A. Gumede, M. M. Sukazi, H. M. Sebothoma, T. B. Ngwopa, M. Gayisa, M. F. Seanego, M. E. Matsepe, M. P. Myende, D. T. Phiri and Sergeant M. G. Pitseng, were all killed in the crash. Seventy-one others were injured.36 The performances of the police from Hammanskraal at the Van Riebeeck stadium in Mossel Bay were cancelled and the gymnasts were no longer able to convey the image that Gene Louw, the administrator of the Cape and the chair of National Festival Committee Dias 1988, had explicitly anticipated that they would: that of a festival (and by implication of late apartheid South Africa) as unreservedly a place and time for all “racial groups” (Van Gijsen 1988).

“Fees gaan voort” [Festival goes ahead] But the plans were too far advanced to cancel the proceedings. At the end of January and the beginning of February 1988 the Dias festival in Mossel Bay took place as a public relations event for multiculturalism. The Afrikaner youth movement, the Voortrekkers, paraded with South African, Portuguese and Dias flags. The cadets of P. W. Botha Technical

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local population when he landed at Mossel Bay, ten years before Da Gama:

High School in George led them through the streets of Mossel Bay.37 And in the evening there was a prestige ball for specially invited guests (Maree 1988c: 9). In the Van Riebeeck stadium and at the Portuguese village there were performances from a Cape Malay Choir (the Good Hope Entertainers) “with their own peculiar brand of music,” groups from Portugal and Madeira who “fascinated spectators with their intricate steps,” an Indian dance group in their “brightly coloured saris,” Greek dancers in “traditional costume,” “kilted Scottish dancers,” Afrikaans-speaking South Africans dressed in Voortrekker costumes and “vigorous Gumboot Dancers who also performed traditional Zulu dances in tribal dress” (Maree 1988b: 5–7).38 These images of multiculturalism were, nonetheless, impossible to sustain. Almost all newspapers reporters who were in attendance, from those who supported the festival to those who were far more cynical, concurred that one had to look “hard and long to find a black face” (Williams 1988). Even one report that maintained that “a large number of coloured people” attended the festival events had to concede that was “clear that then festival was being boycotted.”39 The stayaway was most evident when the pageantry took place on the beach on 3 February when a tableau of Dias landing was reenacted. Written and directed by Marie Hamman, the festival’s deputy director, it contained scenes of Dias (Manuel Escorcio) accompanied by Pedro (?) and an unnamed sailor. To meet them were actors representing the indigenous inhabitants, who had gathered around a fire. But what made spectators gasp in astonishment was that these actors were a “group of whites” in black mask. There were rumors amongst the spectators that the actors were from the navy. Directed by Vanessa Kruger, the group had donned curly wigs, painted their faces black with shoe polish, and bedecked themselves with jewellery and other decorations in order “to portray the Khoisan people met by Dias and his party” (Duggan 1988).40 In a most astonishing reversal “whites” had to masquerade as “blacks” in order to perform apartheid’s last festival.

Conclusion This masquerade of blackness by people classified as “white” at the 1988 Dias festival was markedly different from that performed in other reenactments of settlement in twentieth century South Africa, where in the historical narratives people classified as blacks were largely excluded from the past that was produced. At moments when it had been absolutely necessary for the historical drama to include people who would be

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recognized as other than “white,” the organizers were able to call upon individuals or groups of people who had a long history of association with government structures (Witz 2003; Merrington 1995). When it was time for the Portuguese seafarer Dias to step ashore to commemorate his arrival 500 years previously, finding groups that would represent indigeniety and be on hand to welcome Europe to Africa with expressions of appreciation was difficult. In the late 1970s and early 80s, as apartheid was being reformed, and repressive mechanisms has been set in place accompanied by attempts to bring different groupings of people into the system through carefully selected and appointed “black” representatives. But by the time of the Dias festival it was clear that, in the face of widespread popular rebellion throughout the 1980s and international isolation of the apartheid regime, that such a strategy was failing. And, in one of the ironies of the late 1980s, it was only through whites rendering themselves as black that a festival, which was constructed around a moment of European arrival (but not of discovery), could proceed. Although masked and dressed as black, these caricatures in the drama on the beach in 1988 bore very little resemblance to the stereotypical blackface minstrelsy that had taken root in the United States, and later at the Cape, in the second half of the nineteenth century (Lott 1993; Martin 1999). Nor was it what Gubar refers to as a racechange, “an extravagant aesthetic construction that functions self-reflexively to comment on representation in general, racial representation in particular” (Gubar 1997: 10). Instead this was a moment of extreme anxiety, when donning blackness was a desperate attempt by white South Africa to reassert apartheid’s largely repudiated modernizing claims as the bearer of civilization and Christianity. The performance of blackness, represented an alibi in that “familiar alignment of colonial subjects—Black/White. Self/Other” (Bhaba 1991: ix). In late apartheid South Africa whites had to perform as blacks to affirm whiteness as rightness, and blackness as backness (Gubar 1997: 25). And the performative mask could easily be removed. Soon after Dias landed, and P. W. Botha had made his speech, three young girls all dressed in longish white dresses stepped up to the rostrum and presented Elize Botha with a cage containing a dove. The South African television commentator, Riaan Cruywagen, identified two of the girls, with long blond hair and who most probably would have been racially classified as “white” under apartheid, as the Chambers twins from Mossel Bay. The third, who most likely would have been classified as “black” under apartheid, was completely ignored by the commentator. Elize

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Botha embraced the Chambers twins and then freed the bird. Cast into the background, the unnamed young “black” girl was entirely disregarded as the dove soared above the Mossel Bay crowd and Elize Botha hugged and kissed the Chambers twins.41 The multicultural legacy which P. W. Botha and Bartolomeu Dias planned “to leave to the people of South Africa and to posterity” in 1988 was unable to accommodate a national identity constructed on ideas of commonality (Maree 1988a: 3). Notes 1 This paper is based on research for the NRF funded Project “The Heritage Disciplines,” based in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape. The financial support of the NRF towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions and conclusions expressed in this essay are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF. For assistance with this research I would like to thank Joanne Parsons, Sgt Coetzee, Evangelina Lindt, Lincoln Bernardo and the staff at the Dias Museum Complex, particularly Erna Marx. 2 Series of photographs of tableau of Landing of Dias, 3 February 1988, File 51, Maritime Museum, Dias Museum Complex, Mossel Bay. 3 Argus, 4 February 1988; Cape Times, 4 February 1988. 4 Dias 1988: Total expenditure: April 1985–July 1988, Annexure A to Minutes of the 10th Meeting Dias National Festival Committee, 3 October 1988, Eric Axelson papers University of Cape Town Manuscripts and Archives (hereafter EA) Box: Dias 1988 Steering Committee: National Committee: Management Committee. All the minutes of the Dias National Festival Committee and Steering Committee are located in this box. 5 Eric Axelson to Richard VD Ross, chair of Cape of Good Hope Dias Committee, 7/11/83, Report of Maritime Sub-committee, Dias 1988 held on 7 Nov 1983. EA, Box: Caravel: Minutes, papers. 6 Minutes Caravel sub-committee, Dias 1988, meeting 4 May 1984, EA, Box: Caravel: Minutes, papers. 7 “Message from Gene Louw, Chair of National festival Committee Dias 1988,” in Dias ‘88 National Festival Programme, Mossel Bay 29 January–6 February, 3. 8 Mossel Bay Advertiser, 25 August 1978. 9 Resume of meeting with the Portuguese Ambassador, 27 September 1982 (AJ Clement, Dental surgeon from Pt Alfred) Meeting was taped and this is Clement’s resume, which he passed on to Axelson. EA Box: Caravel: Minutes, Papers. 10 30 Sep 1981: Axelson to Portuguese ambassador; Resume of meeting with the Portuguese Ambassador, 27 September 1982. EA, Box: Caravel: Minutes, Papers. 11 Minutes: Steering Committee of the V Centenary Commemoration of Bartolomeu Dias, 2nd , 4th and 5th meetings (19 May, 7 September and 19 October 2003), EA, Box: Caravel: Minutes; papers. 12 Senhora Dona Maria de Lordes Simões Carvalho to Axelson, 31 Jan 1983; Senhora Dona Maria de Lourdes Simões Carvalho to Axelson, 5 Feb 1984, EA, Box: Caravel: Minutes, Papers.

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13 Axelson to R. F. Botha, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 9 May 1983; Eric Axelson, “The Origin of the caravel project, and of the caravel and maritime affairs subcommittee,” 31 May 1987 (typed document), EA, Box: Caravel: Minutes; papers. 14 Minutes of National Steering Committee Dias 1988, 1st meeting 15 November 1983. 15 Republic of South Africa Constitution Act No 110 of 1983, http://www.info. gov.za/documents/constitution/83cons.htm, accessed 6 June 2005. 16 Axelson to Senhora Dona Maria de Lourdes Simões Carvalho, 17 Sep 1983. Ministry of Culture, Cultural International Relations, Lisbon, EA, Box: Caravel: Minutes; papers. 17 Minutes First meeting National Committee Dias 1988, 1 Feb 1985, held in Mossel Bay. 18 Minutes 3rd Meeting National Committee Dias 1988, 20 August 1985, Cape Town. 19 Memo from Elkan Green to Chairman, Bartholmew Dias Cape Town Committee, 31 May 1985, EA, Box: Caravel: Minutes; papers. 20 Minutes Eighth Meeting, National Committee Dias 1988, Friday 5 June 1987, Cape Town; Dias 1988: Total expenditure: April 1985–July 1988. Annex A to the Minutes 10th meeting National Committee Dias 1988, 3 October 1988. 21 Minutes 2nd meeting National Festival committee Dias 1988, 10 May 1985, Cape Town. 22 Minutes of 7th meeting Management Committee Dias 1988, 18 Feb 1985, EA, Box: Dias 1988 Steering Committee: National Committee: Management Committee. 23 Minutes 2nd meeting National Festival committee Dias 1988, Cape Town, 10 May 1985. 24 Minutes 4th Meeting National Steering Committee Dias, 31 August 1984. 25 The Citizen, 20 January 1988. 26 2nd Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 10 May 1985, Cape Town. 27 Thanks to Albert Grundlingh for this information. He is presently working on a history of Hartenbos. Email correspondence, 2 January 2005. 28 Appendix F: Minutes Program sub-committee, 3 Oct 1985, appended to Minutes 4th Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 19 November 1985, Cape Town. 29 “Mosssel Bay 1987,” Municipal Brochure (Mossel Bay: 1987); Appendix F: Minutes Program sub-committee, 3 Oct 1985, appended to Minutes 4th Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 19 Nov 1985, Cape Town; Minutes Fifth Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 11 March 1986, Cape Town. 30 Annex C: Three Monthly Report by Marie Hamman, Assistant Director Dias Festival, 1-1-87—31-3-87, appended to Minutes 8th Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 5 June 1987, Cape Town. 31 National Festival Programme Dias 1988, as revised on 31 August 1987, appended to Minutes 9th Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 16 October 1987, Cape Town; “Dias recreation an exciting project,” Supplement to Cape Times, 30 January 1988.

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32 Appendix F: Program sub-committee, 3 Oct 1985, appended to Minutes 5th Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 19 Nov 1985, Cape Town. 33 Minutes 4th Meeting National Committee Dias 1988, 19 Nov 1985, Cape Town. 34 Minutes 7 Meeting National Committee Dias 1988, 7 November 1986, Cape Town. 35 “Don’t let apartheid spoil Dias festival,” Argus, 8 January 1988. 36 Thanks to Sergeant G. Coetzee from the SAP Museum in Pretoria for providing me with a list of names of those who died in the crash. Letter from Sergeant Coetzee to Erna Marx, Dias Museum, Mossel Bay, 28 January 2005. 37 “Feesbooikot keer Mosselbaaiers nie,” Die Burger, 1 February 1988. 38 “Feesbooikot keer Mosselbaaiers nie,” Die Burger, 1 February 1988. 39 “Feesbooikot keer Mosselbaaiers nie,” Die Burger, 1 February 1988. 40 Series of photographs of tableau of Landing of Dias, 3 February 1988, File 51, Maritime Museum, Dias Museum Complex, Mossel Bay. 41 SATV footage, 3 February 1988, Maritime Museum Collection, Dias Museum Complex, Mossel Bay.

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10 Iain McCalman University of Sydney

In early January 1980 I sailed up the West Coast of Lake Nyassa, Central Africa, in a somewhat down-at-heel steamer, the SS Ilala II. Malawi Railways runs the service for local transportation because large sections of the dirt roads bordering the Lake are impassable in the wet season. Though the Ilala was licensed to carry around 400 passengers, more than twice that number were crammed into the open lower-deck area, along with a mass of goats, chickens, bicycles, dried fish, clay pots and reed baskets. As I walked up the gang-plank they were stretched out in spots of shade, or sitting impassively chewing and spitting out sugar cane, or squatting on their heels playing cards and laughing explosively. The ship was to sail from Monkey Bay near the southern end of the Lake up to Karonga at the northern tip, where the Malawi border meets Tanzania—a round trip that takes nearly a week because the Lake is 365 miles long. It was my self-reward for nine months of grinding doctoral research in grey, expensive London: a nostalgic return to the country of my birth last seen in 1965 when I migrated to Australia aged 18. I was returning to a spot I remembered as Paradise and still half thought of as home. Ever since I left Africa, the Lake had been my pastoral, a magical landscape where I remembered ideal relationships with local fishermen, villagers and boat-boys. Here I’d learnt to swim, snorkel, surf, sail and shoot, and to love African habitats as my own. I was quivering with sentiment as I glimpsed the Pandanus palms, Baobab trees and soft sand-dunes on the outskirts of Monkey Bay. In my bag I carried a bundle of books on David Livingstone’s travels, including a copy of the Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries…1858–64 (1865) compiled by Livingstone and his brother Charles. It describes their failed attempt in 1861 to explore and map 156

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Failing with Livingstone: A Voyage of Reenactment on Lake Nyassa

the full length of the Lake’s coastline from south to north. Such sober reading was designed to dignify my idle pleasures by giving them a vague Romantic shape. I was also curious to dabble in a history that I’d never bothered with when I was actually living in Nyasaland. Since leaving, I’d come to the guilty realization that I’d lived in my country of birth as blindly and instinctually as a dog. Though I’d grown up speaking a rough version of the native lingua franca, Cinyanja, I’d never wondered how whites like myself had come to colonize the land of the Lake. David Livingstone, Nyasaland’s supposed European discoverer, seemed a good place to find out. Despite these historical pretensions, I didn’t think of my voyage as perpetrating any elements of reenactment. Being one of only three tourists who’d paid for a small cabin on the first-class deck, mine was to be an easy deck-chair exploration, tramping only across the printed page. I had absolutely no intention of simulating any of the ordeals of Livingstone and his companions: extreme history never crossed my mind. Reading about David Livingstone’s struggles to chart this coastline in a four-oared sailing gig in 1861 would accentuate the sybaritic pleasures of sunning myself on the deck, sipping Mshlovu beer and admiring the Lake’s stunning coastline of white beaches, palmy coves and soaring mountains. Somehow, though, I did get caught up in a type of involuntary historical reenactment, or at least in a series of experiences that produced strange reverberations between Livingstone’s voyage and my own. The 1861 voyage of exploration had been a miserable failure, one of the few occasions, Livingstone later ruefully admitted to his Cambridge friend Adam Sedgwick, when he ever turned back before reaching an intended destination; and it shattered forever his dreams of founding a lakeside Eldorado of British Christianity, commerce and colonization. By accident, coincidence or synchronicity my voyage up the west coast of Lake Nyassa turned out to be blighted by essentially the same forces that had defeated Livingstone and his comrades over a century earlier. This is not to say that I surmounted the gulf between past and present: I didn’t get a jot closer to what it must have felt like for Livingstone and his intrepid companions to sail up that coastline in 1861. But my hapless retracing, if we can call it that, did generate some historical insights of a wholly unexpected and salutary kind. If nothing else, it brought me to a greater awareness of how Livingstone’s history and my own were still commonly imbricated in the grim political and social realities of contemporary Malawi.

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Livingstone’s initial navigation into the legendary “Lake of Stars” or Ninyesi, had been oddly anti-climatic for someone whom Laurence Van der Post aptly called “God drunk and Lake obsessed.” In August 1861, David and three European companions had set off up the Shire River in the small gig, accompanied by a land party of Makololo bearers with food and supplies. When they reached the Murchison Falls—40 miles of crashing cataracts that wrecked Livingstone’s plans of finding “God’s highway” into the interior—the bearers carried the boat overland. After relaunching on the smooth upper reaches of the Shire, the sailors pushed through the reeds of the shallow feeder-lake to burst onto the deep waters of Lake Nyassa on 2 September 1861. A thick mist hid the opposite shoreline, but Livingstone’s European companions—photographer Charles Livingstone, doctor-botanist John Kirk and veteran seaman John Neil—were delighted by the cool breezes, the slap of spray, and the endless sweep of fresh water colored “the deep blue or indigo tint of the Indian Ocean…” (McNair n.d: 245). Their spirits lifted at the thought of procuring fish, fruits, and vegetables from dense pockets of villages wedged between the sandy beaches and mountainous hinterland. David Livingstone’s dour response to this moment was partly a matter of personality: introspective, ascetic and paranoid by nature, he was irritated by the fussy neediness of European companions like his brother Charles. Worse, having finally piloted himself onto the waters of the Lake, David was secretly nursing an egotistical explorer’s bitterest pain—to know in his heart that he’d been beaten to the discovery of a great African wonder. He and Kirk had first glimpsed the Lake’s southern tip two years earlier, after making a tough 200-mile overland march from their base on the Shire. Livingstone had immediately declared himself the Lake’s European discoverer, omitting to mention that he was carrying a map from a Portuguese trader who claimed to have reached it 15 years earlier. Livingstone always vehemently denied that this Sen ¸ or Candido had found the correct lake, but he failed to convince even the British government of his priority. He’d have been utterly devastated to know that another Portuguese trader had also reached there in the seventeenth century. Sailing along the beautiful southern coastline of the Lake in September 1861 did gradually lift David’s depressed spirits. He consoled himself that he would be the first European to sail and chart the length of the Lake. The sight of coastal villages and high healthy-looking plateaux also

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I

revived his hopes of establishing a British beach-head. From this could grow a Central African colony to eclipse the pretensions of the decadent, “syphilitic” Portuguese. It would transmit the superior moral message of a Protestant God, and it would undermine the slave trade by substituting a prosperous native trade with Britain in cotton, coal, and rice. By the time the gig reached close to where I was now harbored in the Ilala, Livingstone’s mood was nearly as buoyant as mine: he named the “great rocky wooded promontory,” I could see from my cabin porthole, Cape Maclear after his friend the Cape Town Astronomer-Royal, Thomas Maclear (McNair, n.d.: 246).

II But now Livingstone encountered the first of a series of obstacles that was to make this the toughest and most demoralizing of all his explorations. After skimming along for several days before a steady breeze, the boat ran into a cauldron of storms. As the sailors battled the shrieking winds and towering waves, it dawned on them that this was no ordinary lake, but a savage inland ocean. Inadvertently they’d entered the Lake during the season when it was ravaged by south-east gales that Manganja locals called the mwera. They blew with a ferocity that could whip up 15-foot waves and rip huge trees from the ground. “Suddenly and without any warning was heard the sound of a coming storm, roaring on with crowds of angry waves in its wake,” Charles Livingstone recorded. “The waves most dreaded came rolling on in threes, with their crests driven into spray, streaming behind them. A short lull followed each triple charge. Had one of these white-maned seas struck our frail bark nothing could have saved us” (Livingstone 2001: 246). Neil, who’d sailed all his life on the Atlantic, had never seen anything like it. Day after day the sailors had to crouch helplessly on the beach until the wind abated. They suggested sourly that Nyassa’s nickname should be changed from “Lake of Stars” to “Lake of Storms.” I can’t say that this aspect of Livingstone’s voyage surprised me. I knew the storms: during my boyhood I’d three times been caught by mwera while sailing in small dinghies, and it’s true they’re terrifying. One time the wind snapped my mast into a dozen pieces and levered up my foredeck like a bottle-top, but we’d clung to the capsized hull and eventually been washed back to shore. Of course, everyone wasn’t always so lucky: a large passenger steamer, the Vipya, had been famously sunk by a mwera in July 1946 with the loss of around 300 passengers (Ransford 1966: 253–63). However the ship’s white uniformed captain confirmed

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my belief that the Ilala had survived many a mwera, in part because they quickly sheltered in one of the Lake’s many bays or coves. Livingstone’s party had done the same, but in less luxurious circumstances.

The next blow that Lake Nyassa inflicted on the Livingstone party was more moral than physical: David reported sadly that, “the Lake slave trade was going on at a terrible rate” (McNair, n.d.: 251). He’d encountered some of this trade on his earlier overland trip to find the Lake in 1859. The junction of the Shire and the Lake had turned out to be a key crossing point for slave parties originating in the Congo and heading to the Indian Ocean. The southern lake region also took in the tribal territory of the fierce Ajawa or Yao people, who proved to be the main middlemen of the Central African trade. A restless tribe who’d migrated from further east, the Ajawa had converted to Islam, traded, and interbred for centuries with Arab slave entrepreneurs and acquired muskets that they used to prey on their more pacific Manganja neighbors. The Ajawa were strategically placed to serve as a major replenishing point for slave caravans heading to markets in the East African ports of Kilwa, Ibo and Zanzibar. Livingstone and Kirk had not long arrived at the southern tip of the Lake in 1859 when they heard the bray of kudu horn trumpets signalling the arrival of an Ajawa slave party. Led by a handful of Somali-Arab traders carrying muskets, it consisted of 84 freshly-purchased slaves—men, women and children— marching under the roasting sun in a single straggling line, their necks clamped into forked goree-sticks and their backs bowed with ivory and other trade goods (McNair, n.d.: 209). Livingstone had not then realized that the whole Lake was actually a slaver sea, but after only a day or so of sailing, the gig reached the village of Chitanda which proved to be the first of more than half a dozen crossing points for ferrying slaves by Arab dhow across to Portuguese Mozambique. Strapped to bamboo racks stacked on top of each other in layers of three, the slaves lay face down in putrid, stifling holds until they reached the opposite shore (Liebowitz 1999: 34–5).1 Aghast, Livingstone saw that this was the first leg of an interwoven series of land- and waterborn trips that constituted the East African middle passage. At Chitanda too, they were robbed while sleeping on the shore—the first time in Livingstone’s career as an African explorer. They lost essential clothing and provisions as well as the trade cloth on which they relied for future food supplies. To Livingstone, the robbery confirmed the

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moral degradation that infected all who associated with this “hellish trade.” Until reading this account I hadn’t faced up to the fact that my Lake paradise had once been both a slaver hub and a heinous middle passage. The effect of the discovery was like a loss of innocence, a fall from Eden’s fantasy. The lovely beachscapes sweeping the Ilala’s bow now carried sinister traces of pain and humiliation. Nowhere was this more palpable than when we reached the port of Nkhota-kota: as a child I’d been entranced by the port’s exotic Arabic-Yao culture. I’d been awed by the sight of tall men with Hamitic features, who wore red fezzes and swishing white Kanzus, spoke an unfamiliar language and lived in square houses with Arabesque designs painted above the doors. Knowing now that Nkhota-kota had been the largest slave emporium in Central Africa instantly dispelled this cloud of romance. Looking from the deck, I wondered how I’d ever enjoyed this baleful strip of red-soiled swamp dotted with dirty-white buildings and spidery paths. In 1861 Livingstone’s party had found the harbor seas too rough to disembark so that it was not until two years later that David visited the emporium, and even then he’d traveled overland to get there. The same choppiness bothered our Ilala passengers as they tried to jump into a narrow yawing painter while simultaneously balancing gunnybags, scrabbling goats, racks of dried fish, and basket-covered bicycles. Leaning out from the rearing bow, I tried to help a little huddle of women to scramble on board from the steamer’s deck. A small clothwrapped bundle suddenly dropped down from the Ilala. As the Bosun caught it, the women broke out in the most desolate cries. The bundle was a baby that had died of cholera only hours earlier. Trying to keep upright in that overloaded boat, with the gunwales only just clearing the water, surrounding by keening women, I felt for the first time as if caught up in some squalid reenactment of slave days. Later I tried to find “the magnificent wild fig tree” under which Livingstone had sat in 1863 talking with Jume, the half-Arab chieftain of Nkhota-kota. Livingstone had tried vainly to persuade the wily old slave-master of the evil of running fleets of dhows across the Lake to Losefa, from where they were taken to the barracoons of Zanzibar, the plantations of Cuba, or the harems of Turkey. Though amused by the missionary doctor’s naiveté, Jume apologized politely for upsetting his visitor with the sight of “gangs of stout young men slaves … waiting for exportation”: had he been forewarned, he would have stored them out of sight. The unusually large numbers of slaves awaiting departure were, he explained, a consequence of having to build a new dhow to

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replace one that had been wrecked in a recent Lake storm (Livingstone 2001: 383–8, 445). As I boy I’d loved tacking close to the lateen-rigged craft that traded out of Nkhota-kota. Now, looking into a dhow half capsized on the shore, I was appalled to think of a human cargo crammed into that rank little hole. It was unimaginable. I didn’t find Livingstone’s celebrated figtree either, though I did find a huge lone baobab standing in the market clearing. Half way up its trunk was tacked a yellow tin sign that read: “The Commercial Bank of Malawi meets here on Thursday afternoons.” Once, I would have loved the Evelyn Waugh-like absurdity of the scene, but a ragged little boy standing under the sign now seemed all too symbolic of the varieties of slavery that continued to haunt this sad place.

IV By the time Livingstone’s gig had reached Nkhota-Kota, the crew were already gravely ill. Blistered by the sun and weakened by lack of food, they were easy prey for anopheles mosquitoes carrying multiple strains of malaria, including a particularly nasty cerebral type called falciparum. The sailors were also suffering from the bloody enervations of amoebic dysentery, and their bladders were probably further infested with the ancient microscopic spirochites of bilharzia, a variant of liver fluke that inhabited most fresh water in Africa including the reedy shallows of the Lake. Kirk, who on top of all this seems to have had the bone-racking pain of dengue fever, believed he’d never encountered such a sickly environment. On shore, he saw scores of African villagers, with their faces and arms disfigured by smallpox and leprosy. Others had collapsed chests from TB, bloated limbs from elephantisis or the deformed feet and twisted spines of polio victims. Confronted with this overwhelming evidence of disease, Livingstone could only sink deeper into depression, convinced that the Lake district was unsuitable for European settlement. As if to prove his point I began to feel ill a few days after we left Nkhota-Kota. At first I thought this was merely the sympathetic hypochondria I usually contract when reading of other people’s illnesses, but it was too insistent. Before long I was prostrate with haemorrhages of amoebic dysentery that the steward euphemistically called “shitwater.” On top of this, a day or so after the Ilala reached its most northern port and turned for home, I also began to get the mix of teeth-chattering cold and burning forehead that presaged a return of malaria. Lying in my

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greasy stifling cabin, I watched cockroaches scuttling around a small electric fan strapped to the bulkhead with a soiled bandage. As my temperature climbed during the early evening, I began to hallucinate that I was lying in Livingstone’s foul little gig, without help or medicine, on an insane mission of exploration. Not before or since have I been so literally possessed by historical reenactment. By the time we reached Nkhata Bay, the Captain was so alarmed at my soaring temperature and dirtied sheets that he asked a missionary, named—of all things—Father Happy, to drive me from the ship to the local hospital in his rattling Landrover. The sole hospital ward was so overcrowded that scores of patients, all a great deal sicker than me, lay jumbled on blankets in the narrow aisles between the beds. My sense of hallucination intensified when the elderly doctor seemed at first sight to have stars in his eyes. Closer up, they turned out to be heavily cracked spectacle lenses. With disturbing honesty he announced that he was a retired medical orderly standing in for the doctor who had left the district many months earlier. Provided I had dysentery or malaria, I would be fine, he reassured me. Which did I have? “Both, I think.” His starry eyes sparkled with pleasure. Pulling open a drawer filled with pills of every color like spilt Smarties, he confidently picked out several color variations, twisted them in a screw of paper, and handed them over. Next day, after a night at the mission-house, Father Happy drove me—strangely feeling a deal better—to meet the Ilala as it docked at its home berth of Monkey Bay.

V Sharing illnesses with Livingstone and his companions edged me closer to the mood of gloom that pervaded their journals. Yet it was another coincidence that finally turned my pleasure cruise into a full-blooded Livingstonian nightmare. On 3 October 1861, the gig had come ashore to find the bearers gazing down on the ashes of what had been a large coastal village. They could smell the stink of decomposing bodies, and it was difficult to walk without crunching over littered bones and skulls. Livingstone quickly learnt that this was the work of a war party of Mazitu or Ngoni warriors, a ferocious Zulu offshoot who’d settled on the East coast of the Lake and terrorized its existing inhabitants. “As an Englishman loves to kill game, so they kill men for sport,” wrote Livingstone in horror (Jeal 1973: 243). Already pathologically depressed by malaria and the slave trade, he was appalled at the hopeless severities of lakeshore life. Confronted with the prospect of meeting the Mazitu, Livingstone’s

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frightened bearers would not go on unless he accompanied them. He had no choice but to divide the party, putting Charles in charge of the boat, while he agreed to march the bearers in tandem along the shore. Within days, Livingstone’s land party lost sight of the boat in the spray and mist thrown up by the mwera. Their own progress was painfully slow: slippery, mountainous outcrops and ravines forced them to crawl on hands and knees scrabbling for hand holds. Ten hours of climbing usually advanced them five miles (Livingstone 2001: 287). With each day, too, Livingstone saw further evidence of the maelstrom of tribal violence. As well as mounds of ashes and bones, he occasionally glimpsed Manganja fugitives lurking on floating beds of reeds or clambering up to shelters perched on rock ledges (Jeal 1973: 243). Eventually, a direct encounter with a couple of aggressive young Mazitu scouts proved the literal turning point of the expedition; Livingstone himself didn’t frighten easily, but his dwindling party of bearers refused to continue. A day or two later the sailors independently came to the same decision. Unable to endure the storms, sunburn, fever, hunger, and exhaustion, they put the gig about and headed back. They’d traveled 220 miles along the west coast, and, as we now know, would still have had a further 140 miles to go before they reached the end. Luckily they bumped into David and the shore party a few days later. None of the sailors had ever seen their leader in such a bad way: hunger, illness and overpowering melancholy made him savage company. Desperately short of provisions, the reunited party camped overnight on shore and only narrowly escaped a Mazitu war party intent on wiping them out (Liebowitz 1999: 93). More bearers immediately deserted. A terrible gloom pervaded the expedition’s famished 200-mile march of November 1861 back to their base just below the Murchison rapids. My encounter with Lake Nyassa’s legacies of tribal war and violence began soon after we left Nkhota-kota, while I was already beginning to sicken. At one of the more obscure ports, perhaps Usiya, close to where Livingstone’s gig had turned back, I bumped into a young African man traveling north. Tall, ebony-skinned, and unusually bearded, he stood out from most of the ragged brown passengers. He introduced himself as Osman Mwamlima, spoke fluent English and held a Master’s degree in Sociology from McGill University. He was at once oddly familiar yet slightly mysterious. In Malawi, elevated educational qualifications like his usually guaranteed the prosperous lifestyle of a professional, businessman or government minister. Instead, he was a poorly paid clerk working at a remote lakeside rice collective. Surprisingly, too, his Cinyanja was not significantly better than mine. Though we became

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instant friends, I noticed that he was evasive about his purpose and destination. A few days later we moored for six hours at Chilumba, the second most northerly port before the Ilala turned for home. I was sweating heavily with the onset of fever. On a hot, humid night, sitting in the shadows of the first-class deck with a beer in hand, Osman told me his story. His uncle, Yatuta Chisiza, was a notorious name in Malawi because he’d led an armed rebellion against Dr Hastings Banda in 1972. Yatuta had been defeated and killed. After that, all Chisiza relatives and friends were in danger: Life President Banda and his henchman were not forgiving souls. Many of the family, including Osman’s mother, fled into exile in Tanzania. Osman himself, who had been in Canada during the attempted coup, returned to find himself a target of deep suspicion. He gave me no details, but I gathered that he’d spent time in jail, probably the infamous Mikuyu prison in Zomba where several celebrated inmates had died. After some time he’d been released and permitted to work in his humble lakeside job provided he had nothing more to do with his Chisiza relatives. Recently, though, he’d had a letter from his mother in Tanzania saying she was gravely ill; and he was determined to see her. Of course it would not be too politic to advertise his destination, but there was a good chance no one would notice. When the hubbub of unloading and loading passengers eventually died down, he intended to stroll behind the rusting customs shed and pass quietly through the sagging wire fence. Would I help him by making sure nobody was watching? The coincidence was eerie. Now I knew why he seemed so familiar: he looked an awful lot like his uncle who had in happier days worked with my father as Parliamentary Secretary of the Department of Labor in Limbe. Dad had liked Yatuta for his elegant Swahili, his quick intelligence, his integrity, and his sardonic wit. I remember him telling me that not only the Chisizas but also many other Nkonde from the north had proved “exceptionally bright,” rising quickly to the top of the political administration of the newly independent country. When I told Osman of my weird historical connection with his uncle, he hugged me fiercely and called me his achmweni or relative. He explained that Banda and most of his henchmen were Cewa (formerly Manganja), and deeply jealous of the lakeside Yao and the northern Ngoni and Nkonde. “The Cewa have long memories, you see; they blame us for enslaving them, or for killing their men and stealing their women long ago.” But now Banda’s people were in power, it was payback time. The little dictator had built a new capital in Lilongwe to

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bring wealth to his own people and he’d increasingly discriminated against old tribal enemies. At every opportunity Banda’s political henchmen had blocked or persecuted intellectuals of Yao, Nkonde and Ngoni origins. This was why Henry Chipember, a former minister and Yao, had rebelled against Banda in 1964, and why Yatuta, a former Parliamentary Secretary and Nkonde, had led the abortive invasion force from Tanzania in 1972. Ill as I was, keeping a lookout while Osman made a stealthy departure was easy enough. By the time he scurried through the fence, suitcase in hand, it was two o’clock in the morning and the harbor was deserted. Though the ship was not to leave for an hour or two, prospective passengers had long ago found spots to sleep on the sweltering under-deck. I waved Osman goodbye and returned to sit in my favorite deck chair on the upper deck, feeling too feverish to sleep. I suppose I dozed for half an hour or so, waking up abruptly as two large African men drew up chairs beside me. They were polite but unfriendly. Despite the absence of any uniform, they described themselves as “Railway Policemen” traveling on the boat “to keep an eye on things.” Without further preliminaries they began questioning me about my association with Osman, a man, they told me, “from a very bad family of traitors.” What had I been doing keeping such company? Had I known him before the trip? Where had he gone? Why had I come up to this part of the Lake? How come I could speak Cinyanja? Where had I been living since leaving Malawi? What was my intention in visiting the northern provinces of Malawi? Had I ever been to Tanzania? Was I going there next? Half-dazed and perhaps half-crazed with incipient malaria and dysentery, my answers sounded lame and implausible or devious and suspicious. The fact that my father had been in the Labor department in 1964, at the same time as that “vile, Communist rebel Mister Yatuta Chisiza,” brought a perceptible increase of menace in their tone. When my explanations began to sound incoherent even to my own ears, they got up to leave, promising to talk with me again later and to notify their superiors in Blantyre, who would also contact me. I suppose my cocktail of illnesses, as well as Father Happy and the Nkhata Bay hospital, saved me from another discussion with the “Railway Policemen” since I left the ship the next day for treatment. I did later hear, though, that a few hours after speaking to me they’d beaten up the local District Commissioner for some nameless crime. And they fulfilled their promise of notifying their superiors. I was interrogated again in Blantyre by several other large men in uniform, who this time described themselves as Malawi Congress officials and abandoned all pretence of

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politeness. They temporarily confiscated my passport and exchanged ominous looks while leafing through a draft article on “English Radicalism” shown to establish my bona fides. Those last few days in Blantyre before I flew out of Malawi were some of the most frightening of my life. As always, local bars and coffee shops were rife with whispered stories of people who’d been dumped in prison without any legal process or got themselves killed in inexplicable car crashes or who’d simply disappeared. My few remaining shreds of nostalgia were replaced with a depression that would have rivalled David Livingstone’s. I longed to escape from a place that had transmogrified itself from a boyhood utopia into a paranoid mix of tropical illness and political dread.

VI It was only in retrospect, when I came to look at my own journal notes many years later, that I saw the depth of coincidence between Livingstone’s Lake voyage and my own. We’d both started out with dreams about the Lake’s fantastic possibilities, both been shocked out of our illusions by the impacts of slavery, illness, and tribal struggle, both ended our voyages depressed and embittered. As a professional historian I’m sceptical about most reenactments because they pretend to bridge the gap between past and present. Still, I’d been forced halfaccidentally into a reenactive experience that I never intended, and one with a power that I would never forget. Of course the act of reading Livingstone’s bleak journals as I traveled in his wake couldn’t help but influence my perceptions and mood, especially when it came to viewing the landscapes of slavery. But the connection between the two voyages ran deeper than that. Places where nature still rules without much medical check, places that have been incompletely transformed by modernity, retain long memories. Luck, contingency, fatalism are omnipresent. Lake Nyassa was such a place. I suspect that the human body also responds similarly to some physical afflictions across the barriers of time. The anopheles mosquitoes that injected me with malaria and the amoebic dysentery bacteria that invaded my gut were, in a sense, lineal ancestors of those that afflicted David Livingstone’s expedition. The sicknesses they carried were likewise recognizably similar across the span of the centuries. Livingstone would have had no difficulty diagnosing my malaria. So too with the Lake’s politics. Perhaps countries where the struggles of the past are still urgently influencing the outcomes of the present

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can force people into reenactive roles whether they seek them or not. So much of the history of such countries is still unfinished business. An ex-colonial needs to be exceptionally careful or lucky when returning to Malawi or he is likely to become caught up in what Marx described as history’s farcical recapitulations. Both for me and for David Livingstone, though, the failed voyages up Lake Nyassa did eventually produce new self-understandings. In the aftermath of his failed Zambezi expedition between 1858 and 1863, Livingstone gave up his aspirations to lead organized protocolonial expeditions of exploration. For the last years of his life he wandered instead in a haze of malaria around the edges of the Lake, helped only by a few African bearers. His half-mystical private mission was to map and publicize the enormities of the East African middle passage that originated in the Lake of Stars, Ninyesi. And despite the fact that this great lake had so often betrayed his deepest hopes, he made peace with it on a last visit in 1866, plunging into the surf delightedly, “as if I had come back to an old home” (McNair n.d: 296). Even dour David Livingstone was susceptible to nostalgia. My own voyage convinced me that I no longer had any place in Malawi, even in nostalgic fantasy. It was a country I’d loved, but never really known or understood, a country to which, in truth, I’d contributed nothing. For 18 years growing up there I had been blind to its sad histories. My dream as a white African manqué was over. From now on, I would concentrate on living in Australia, and there cope with reenactments of a different kind. Note 1 I read this book only recently, many years after my original trip.

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Section 4

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Australia

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Impossible Historical Reenactments: Invisible Aborigines on TV1 Chris Healy University of Melbourne

In the late 1960s at my Melbourne school, Manningham Primary, films were screened during the holidays, presumably to keep us off the street in those brief respites from formal instruction. The format, as I remember it, was a feature such as Born Free—a film that never failed to bring forth a flood of tears—preceded by a “short.” More than once, that short came from the television series Alcheringa, a prize-winning 1962 ABC program of 12 quarter-hour episodes, initially broadcast weekly, that recreated, romantically and anthropologically, an imagined world of everyday indigenous practices “before the coming of the white man.” The series was written and directed by Frank Few, an Americanborn director who also made some of the first wildlife or nature documentaries in Australia, and hosted by Bill Onus, a Yorta Yorta man. The cast members were all indigenous. In each episode, Bill Onus appears after the opening sequence and provides specific commentary that serves to frame the action. At the end of each episode, Onus reflects on what has been shown and anticipates the next week’s program. The series consists of dramatic recreations of the life of indigenous people of “long ago.” For the most part, these reenactments focus on Aborigines acquiring the means of physical subsistence. Programs include “Making a stone axe” (episode 3), “Fishing” (episode 5), “Women gathering food” (episode 6) and “Hunting an emu” (episode 8), as well as two more socio-cultural episodes, “Trading” (episode 2) and “Walkabout” (episode 10). The various activities are dramatized as the life of an Aboriginal family group—a man, woman, young girl and boy—who, we are told, are spending the hot summer months in an “allocated area,” after which they will be “reunited with the tribe in the autumn” (episode 1). The series was shot on 16 millimetre, black-and-white film, all of it filmed in outdoor locations under natural light without synchronized 171

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sound, with the exception of the Onus commentary that frames each episode. For the most part, the camera is static, using medium shots and medium close-ups. Occasional tracking and following shots of characters walking through the bush are intercut with close-ups of faces and manufacturing activity. There are a few panoramic sequences, particularly in the “Walkabout” episode, and the editing is, in general, leisurely, as is the pace of the dramatization. Exceptions are the hunting scenes in the episodes “Hunting a kangaroo” (episode 7) and “Hunting an emu” (episode 8), in which relatively fast cuts are used to dramatize the chase and the kill. The soundtrack consists of occasional diegetic sound such as scraping and axe blows on a tree that were recorded separately, an orchestral score played for mood and feel, and an omniscient narration by the actor John Morgan. This narration performs a number of roles. It explains some of the on-screen action; for example, telling us in episode 1, “Upon the return of mother and daughter from their food gathering, the boy tells them what he and his father have achieved during their absence.” It provides contextual information elaborating on the on-screen action, much of it couched as authoritative anthropological knowledge: Trading performed an important function in spreading the culture of the Aboriginal people across Australia. Various articles, corroboree, ritual cults, art designs and material culture of all kinds were passed on directly or indirectly through trade, bringing to the varied cultures scattered across the continent a degree of unity (episode 2). Occasionally, the commentary becomes explicitly didactic. At other times, the narration borders on the bizarre and mysterious; for example, in an episode on gathering shellfish (episode 11), the narrator informs the viewer that “The Australian Aborigine had extremely good teeth.” These are the basic elements of Alcheringa, which is but one example fished from a very large reservoir of cultural products—images, newspaper accounts, books, public displays, films, television programs, theatrical events, and much else besides—in which non-indigenous people have told each other stories about “things Aboriginal.” I want to examine Alcheringa here, not to judge it as producing good or bad representations, but because it exemplifies some of the central tensions between “archaic Aboriginal being” and “pure white modernity” that seem to overflow from, or produce a surplus in, this televisual restaging of an imagined precolonial Aboriginal world. I want to think about how such programs work in a paradoxical memory culture haunted by strange patterns of

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amnesia in the contact zones between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. I want to explore how Alcheringa deploys and relies on characterizations of indigenous people that are primitivist, condescending and disrespectful; how it understands indigenous people as colonized; and how, in some ways, it is a relatively open and complex television series that produces Aboriginality as a postcolonial space of exchange that looks forward to more recent examples of television.

Stone Age primitives The primitive does what we ask it to do. Voiceless, it lets us speak for it. It is our ventriloquist’s dummy—or so we like to think (Torgovnick 1990: 9). Each episode of Alcheringa begins with the same fixed camera shot of a flat, empty landscape punctuated by a small dead tree in the middle distance. As the opening narration begins, two Aboriginal men enter the frame from behind the camera and walk towards the tree. John Morgan’s sonorous and theatrical, mid-century English-Australian voice intones: Theirs was a timeless land unmarked or divided by the wheels of science. Before the first half-formed words of recorded history, these people made peace with an unchanging world. These were the people of the dreaming time, of a world now dying. A world of ages past. A world of Alcheringa. As the narration closes, a powerful and insistent indigenous song reaches a crescendo as the word “Alcheringa” appears on screen in a script constructed out of boomerang shapes. The screen then fades to black, before Bill Onus appears to introduce the weekly component part. If the intensity of the opening sequence helped lodge this series in my memory, it certainly did so by insisting, from the very beginning, on the primitivism of the people about whom I was to learn. Through image, narration and diegesis, Alcheringa is relentless in producing a vision of Aborigines as primitives. In doing this, Alcheringa reenacts not “a world of Aborigines” but a non-indigenous imaginary. The first move in guaranteeing the primitiveness of indigenous people is to establish them as a distinctive group defined by race. This is achieved in both the opening shot of two black men carrying spears in an arid landscape, and the first lines of the narration: “The Australian Aborigine

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is an Australoid, one of the four basic races of mankind. He lives in close harmony with nature and is dependent upon her for his existence” (episode 1). While the narration tells the listener that the “origins” of the indigenous people are scientifically inconclusive, the real origins of Aborigines are made entirely clear: Aborigines are part of nature, and definitely of another time. The notion that “He lives in close harmony with nature” is the strongest single theme that structures the series, organized as it is around the variety of ways in which Aborigines acquire the means of subsistence—men fishing and hunting, and women gathering food—and the technical means that enabled this mode of life—fire, boomerangs, stone axes and bark canoes. But this version of “harmony with nature” is not a proto-environmentalist insistence that all human societies exist in a mutually interdependent relationship with nature. In this case, it is predominantly an account of “harmony with nature”—and indeed a form of existence—that is “of another time,” in the sense that the anthropologist Johannes Fabian and many others have argued is so central to evolutionist thinking (Fabian 1983). Aborigines are a distinct and separate race of people who are both ancient and underdeveloped in comparison to “Europeans” who are both the paradigm for, and pinnacle of, human biological and social development. Aborigines were superstitious and cunning people whose cultural barbarism was marked by polygamy. And the viewers of Alcheringa know this because they are told so by the omniscient narration, which confidently instructs the viewer on all aspects of the lives and minds of these silent, naked black people. The primitivism of indigenous people is secured most emphatically in Alcheringa through images of Aboriginal bodies that ground and guarantee otherness. This is clear from the first episode through the use of close-ups of near-naked black bodies, and the prosthetic scarification applied to the skin of Harry Williams and Doris Simpson, the male and female leads. In later episodes, particularly the episode on collecting shellfish, the camera lingers fetishistically on Doris Simpson’s body to produce an eroticized primitive woman (Figure 11.1). Certainly John B. Murray, the series producer, understood how important it was for Simpson to appear topless, and spent some time convincing her that, in his words, Alcheringa was not “just more exploitation.” While I am sure that Murray’s aims concerned his sense of verisimilitude, in some respects it was more exploitation, and not only of Simpson’s body. But perhaps it’s not all so neat in Alcheringa. In the first place, “primitives” take many forms, especially in the Pacific. We know this because indigenous people across the Pacific (including Australia) have, at various

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Figure 11.1 Production shot from Alcheringa. Doris Simpson. Photo: John Pearson. Reproduced with kind permission of the ABC.

times for Europeans, appeared both noble and beastlike. More broadly, primitives can be evil enemies or loyal companions, wily tricksters or childlike simpletons, lazy or labor power, and much else besides. Nor are these categories necessarily fixed: the capacity to control the name

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of the other is a fundamental part of the power of colonial attribution. If we stay, for a moment, with the critic Marianna Torgovnick’s notion of the primitive as “our ventriloquist’s dummy,” then the mobility of the category suggests that indigenous people are figured as primitives not simply to produce racist representations but in order to fulfil particular functions for non-indigenous people. So, what roles were these primitives playing for non-indigenous viewers who were, after all, the majority audience for the television series? In addition to being primitives, I want to suggest that in Alcheringa Aborigines are both decent primitives, and they are “our primitives,” Australian primitives. Despite living at a low level of material development, being superstitious and possibly polygamous, they are a people who are resourceful and strong, family-centered and networked by trade, who possess culture and spirituality, great ingenuity and skill. These ambiguities are made clear in episode 3 of the series, “Making a stone axe.” On the face of it, this episode is about the processes involved in making a stone axe. The lesson for the viewer is that “the stone axe raised his standard of existence.” But these aspects of the program are intercut with a series of close-ups and wide shots of the two happy children of the family, swimming at the waterhole, playing with a koala and just generally mucking around. The narration didactically informs the viewer that children were “treated affectionately” and given “considerable freedom,” but “as in most primitive nomadic tribes, infant mortality among the Australian Aborigines was high. Disease, hunger and unavoidable lack of care were the main causes.” Whatever we might make of the odd phrase “unavoidable lack of care,” this vision of indigenous people is, in part, underpinned by a strongly humanist sense of the primitive possessing particular premodern virtues. In this sense, not only is family strong, attachment to place rich and meaningful, and childhood a space of play rather than instrumental training; Aboriginal society itself becomes momentarily utopian. These premodern virtues of the world of Alcheringa are also articulated as lessons for the present. In other episodes, the narrator tells us that “time had not yet become man’s master”; notes with some appreciation the “remarkable ability [of indigenous people] to take advantage of his natural environment”; and evokes an explicit moralism in commentary such as: “Unlike modern men, the Aboriginal hunter killed game for food alone” (episodes 2, 5 and 7). We can hear in these small, melancholic laments a refrain that is common in appraisals of modernity from Goethe to Joni Mitchell. But what’s important in Alcheringa are the human connections made between the values of their world and “our” world.

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These claims about Aborigines are clearly addressed to nonindigenous people as lessons that can be learnt from “our” primitives about “our” society, and I do not mean this in any generic sense but as a specifically Australian injunction. These lessons are about Australia. From the opening desert shot to Onus standing in front of a map of Australia in the first introductory sequence, the animal extras (emu, kangaroo, koala, turtle, and so on), the diegetic sound and the locations, Alcheringa is rooted in Australia. It is important to remember that the audience for this series had a very different experience of national audiovisual culture than that of a contemporary audience. Theirs was an audiovisual culture dominated by cinema and the newsreel, by images in magazines and books, by advertisements and newspapers. So, while Alcheringa does not use locations that would be taken as iconically national almost all of what we see on screen is immediately identifiable as Australian. So, in one important sense, “our primitives” are, in this televisual reenactment, occupying “our” country. Our primitives live in tribal lands, use trade routes across the country, have a remarkable body of knowledge about animals, plants and other natural resources, and their spiritual belief systems are intimately attached to place. But there is a strange paradox in the indigenous occupation of “Australia” in Alcheringa, because the country is both occupied and empty. In the archive of film-making about indigenous people, there is, in general, a strong preference for filming large groups. We can see this convention in the archetypal anthropological wide shot of ceremonial performances. In all these cases, the frame of the camera and, by extension, the location itself, is full of people. Alcheringa is closer to that other more melancholic imaging tradition in which Aborigines form a minor or even absent element within a landscape. The paintings of Eugène von Guérard or Albert Namatjira are strong examples of work that resonates with the broader cultural conception of Australia as an empty continent (Thomas 1999a; French 2002). So, while we are told by the narrator that a “tribe” occupies the story-space of the series, in most episodes, the actual televisual space is only occupied by a fourperson family group. This was certainly a result of a very limited budget. But the relative emptiness of the mise en scène certainly connects the world of Alcheringa to the cultural imaginary of terra nullius. So, Alcheringa invests heavily in primitivism “with its aura of unchangeability, voicelessness, mystery, and difference from the West” (Torgovnick 1990: 20). While these first two characterizations, “unchangeability” and “voicelessness,” can, and probably should, be thought of as negative

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attributions, I am not so sure about “mystery” and “difference,” especially if we consider the ways in which the series was consumed. Alcheringa was for me and many other viewers first and foremost an educational television series structured around teaching and learning. I mean this in a double sense, referring both to the series as storytelling, and about the discovery of objects of fascination. The narratives and the voice-overs remind the viewer repeatedly that the various activities on screen are a means of teaching the children (particularly the son) the skills needed to survive and prosper. This is especially the case in the episodes “The boomerang” (episode 1), “Making a stone axe” and “Bark canoe” (episode 4), in which we are told: For this young boy living in close harmony with nature and learning to utilise the many materials she provides this had been an important experience. Just how well he absorbs its details will determine his future success as a hunter and provider for his family. All three of the books that accompanied the series also strongly emphasize pedagogy. For example, the preface to The Stone-Axe Maker reads: A long, long time ago, many Aborigines lived here in our land of Australia. In those days the hills, the valleys, and the deserts—in fact, all the land belonged to them. The boys and girls were taught by their fathers and mothers all they should know—how to track animals, how to find food in the bush, and how to make the things they needed, such as spears, boomerangs, and stone axes. This is the story of such a family living in a desert area (Few & Few, 1966). These aspects of the series are heavily accentuated (again in both the television and book series) by the loving attention to shot details in the scenes and processes of making the boomerang, the stone axe and other tools. The use of close-ups, in particular, works to produce Alcheringa not only as a didactic educational experience but also as an experience of fascination. And that’s how I remember watching the series and reading the books. The historian Stephen Atkinson has written evocatively about his relationship with Whiplash in which the television series seems to have energized his fascination with “things Aboriginal” (Atkinson 2007). Similarly, for me, Alcheringa helped me make sense of a stone axe and a boomerang that my father brought to Melbourne from the Northern Territory in the early 1970s; it was an incitement to curiosity.

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It seems to me now that Frank Few might also have been curious about indigenous people, and wanted to incite that curiosity in others. Like me, he had come from the United States to Australia; Few after serving in the Pacific during the Second World War and me as a child. Perhaps for Frank Few that transition provoked questions about indigenous Australia and the presence of the disavowed past of his adopted country. But unlike me, Frank Few was a Native American. Perhaps that personal history, about which I know little else, led him to make television that was inquisitive about the world of Aborigines as Stone Age primitives. Such curiosity is neither good nor bad, and nor is it necessarily racist. There is nothing objectionable about either producing or marvelling at a filmic reconstruction of making a boomerang, or being enthralled by images of living in a world in which one had to hunt and harvest food every day. But it is objectionable in Alcheringa because it is curiosity without any reflective impulse. It has no capacity to imagine how that curiosity comes about, how questions of difference become important, how indigenous people have been fixed in time to serve particular non-indigenous needs. It is also curiosity in the absence of any consciousness of the historical experiences of indigenous people, experiences fundamentally entwined with nonindigenous people.

A colonized people One of the crucial characteristics of indigenous people rendered as Stone Age primitives is that they are always Stone Age primitives: they are outside of history, fixed in another time to both modernity and the present. In one sense, we see this in a very pure form in Alcheringa as a series that recreates life in an unspecified but clearly very distant past. Bill Onus, the series host, emphasizes this when he introduces episodes with expressions such as “Let’s watch the past …” and “Come back with me …” That past, as I have already noted, is characterized as “a timeless land” and “an unchanging world.” And, importantly, it was and is (interchangeably) a world, a way of life and a people “now dying.” Yet, both the viewers of the series and we ourselves know that the series depended on indigenous moderns as actors and narrators, as well as an array of modern technologies, and that Alcheringa was, in part, the product of a colonial history. The very framing of the series is performed, and some of the words are spoken, by an indigenous man, who identifies himself as Aboriginal in a number of ways. To put it differently: a series about some Stone Age primitives (a people now dying) is introduced to the

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viewer by a genial and articulate man who is very much alive and very much indigenous. I want to explore these contradictions—of “a people” both alive and dying—as an example of a particularly Australian colonial conundrum of living in (at least) two places and (at least) two times, and to consider how such a conundrum is worked through in Alcheringa. The notion of Stone Age primitives was first given voice in Europe to name people who, for Europeans, had once been in their place but who were no longer. It referred to people of “the first, earliest age, period or stage” (OED). In Europe, primitives were dead people and necessarily absent people, precisely because they preceded history and the triumph of civilization. They were, like the fossilized bones of longdead creatures, signs in the archaeological strata. Their time was not the time of Europe. Yet, this did not mean that living primitive people were an impossibility for the European imagination. Indeed, according to the OED, at the end of the eighteenth century when “primitive” was used to refer to “inhabitants of prehistoric times” (in Europe), it was also used to refer to “natives” in non-European lands. It did, however, mean that—both before and after the adoption of evolutionary models of human biological development derived from Charles Darwin—reports about, images of and even the bodies of living primitives could only come to Europe from elsewhere, and thus from other times. Because Europe is possessed of historicist thought, the primitive is necessarily anachronistic or a reenactment. The term “anachronism” plays an important role in the key contribution on historicist thought by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Chakrabarty begins from a simple proposition: “That Europe works as a silent referent in historical knowledge” (Chakrabarty 2000: 28). He means this in the practical sense that the histories of nonEuropeans are understood as backward, underdeveloped, incomplete and lacking in relation to Europe, “the ‘first in Europe and then elsewhere’ structure of time” (Chakrabarty 2000: 8). In this sense, the primitive is indissolubly linked to the modern, objectified as a vestige of another time or place: Historical evidence (the archive) is produced by our capacity to see something that is contemporaneous with us—ranging from practices, humans, institutions, and stone-inscriptions to documents—as relics of another time or place. The person gifted with historical consciousness sees these objects as things that once belonged to their historical context and now exist in the observer’s time as a ‘bit’

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But the “gift” comes with a cost when, instead of seeing different ways of being human that coexist in the present, historical consciousness produces a hierarchy. For Chakrabarty, philosophy itself is infused with the historicism that Walter Benjamin called the secular, empty and homogeneous time of history, such that: Reason becomes elitist whenever we allow unreason and superstition to stand in for backwardness, that is to say, when reason colludes with the logic of historicist thought. For then we see our ‘superstitious’ contemporaries as examples of an ‘earlier type,’ as human embodiments of the principle of anachronism. In the awakening of this sense of anachronism lies the beginning of modern historical consciousness (Chakrabarty, 2000: 238). Chakrabarty’s project is to think historical difference. To “provincialize Europe in historical thought” is not to do away with European thought, but rather: to struggle to hold in a state of permanent tension a dialogue between two contradictory points of view. On the one side is the indispensable and universal narrative of capital … On the other side is thought about diverse ways of being human (254). He stages a dialogue around a mobile triangulation of Europe (as a hyperreal category), the modernized colonial subject and/or state (modern Indians and India) and the peasant (“a shorthand for all the seemingly nonmodern, rural, nonsecular relationships and life practices that constantly leave their imprint on the lives of even the elites in India and on their institutions of government” (11). While we cannot map that particular triangulation directly onto the Australian colonial experience, we can join him in the spirit of thinking historical difference in specifically Australian ways. European Australians were split in different ways. In the first place, they lived in a place that was both not Europe—Australia as a continent that predated colonization—and a place that was European—Australia as a colony and then a nation-state that came into existence through European discovery and colonization. It was also a place of multiple

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of that past. A particular past thus becomes objectified in the observer’s time (Chakrabarty 2000: 238).

temporalities: archaically prehistoric (indigenous), incompletely modern and underdeveloped (first as a European outpost and then as an emerging nation), and as completely modern and fully historical (as Europe transplanted or an autonomous complete nation). Traditional Australian historiography has focused almost exclusively on the question of Australia’s development from primitive colony to civilized nation; that is, on the universal narrative of Australia becoming fully modern. It is no surprise that such historiography ignores the simple fact that being fully in the time and space of Australia could only be conceived in relation to the place and time of indigenous people in Australia. There have been many generic “solutions” to the contradictions between archaic Aboriginal being and pure white modernity: the fantasy that the continent was unoccupied; the genocidal desire, acted on at small and larger scales, to remove indigenous people from the country; the belief in the present as a transitional moment before their inevitable “departure”; the myriad practices to effect the eradication of Aborigines as a distinct people; and of course, forgetting. But real as these ideas and practices are, they were at the same time imaginary “solutions” to the actual intercultural experience of colonization. Being in Australia meant that indigenous and non-indigenous peoples coexisted; they watched each other, listened to each other; they interacted through the complexities of conquest and governance, of punishment and dialogue, of theft and trade, of employment and sex, and much more. Here I want to explore how Alcheringa negotiated what we might call the actuality of such colonial complexities, actual intercultural relationships so often obscured by forgetfulness, and refusals to see or hear. When Bill Onus appears on screen after the opening sequence, he reminds me today of my paternal grandfather (Figure 11.2). The two men were almost the same age. My grandfather’s parents were children of Irish immigrants. Bill grew up on the mission at Cummeragunja. Both had snowy-white hair, and seemed possessed of patrician seriousness and stubborn dignity. In front of a camera (Onus) or at church (my grandpa), both wore similar respectable and honest threepiece suits. These are the very first words that Bill Onus utters in Alcheringa: Yes. My people, the Australian Aborigines, knew of Alcheringa, which means from the very beginning of time. Their ways were the ways of their forefathers. These ways were good. They need not be changed. Let’s look back through the mists of time and see some of

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Figure 11.2 Bill Onus making boomerangs, c. 1950s. Reproduced with kind permission of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

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At one level, those first three words, “Yes. My people,” entirely undo the ways in which Alcheringa is a reenactment that locates Aborigines as both Stone Age primitives and prehistoric to the historical time of Australia. Onus’s historical consciousness, far from objectifying “his people” as a bit of the past, claims Aborigines, in Stephen Muecke’s wonderful phrase, as both ancient and modern (Muecke 2004). In other words, the kind of settlement implied in much of Alcheringa—that with the coming of history to the continent of Australia, an archaic people were naturally displaced and became a dying remnant—is unsettled, as its reenactment is staged by a man who is both articulate and very much alive in the present and claims primitives as “my people.” How can we make sense of these seemingly contradictory aspects of the television series? According to John Murray, the decision to feature Onus as the “host” was not made until after shooting the series was completed. He says, “There was a lot of talk about it. But we felt that it was necessary. It gave the series a continuity and structure. Without that, the episodes were very disparate. [Onus] sort of held it together.”2 Whether or not Onus wrote framing narrations, they are certainly a distinct element in the film text. Onus speaks in the first person and repetitively produces a living connection between himself and the subjects of the films not only through his filmic presence, but also by saying “my people.” He also uses the Wiradjuri language (the language of his people) to name artefacts and spiritual beliefs. Through his powerful on-screen presence, Onus thus establishes strong continuity between precolonial indigenous people and himself. And he claims for himself the status of being a modern Aborigine. He speaks of the film being about “primitive Aborigines” in a way that is analogous to the contemporary expressions “classical” or “traditional” Aboriginal culture. The way he handles and talks about a boomerang, axe and spear makes a point of both his knowledge of these objects and their artefactual status. These things “belong” to Onus and his time, but they also belong in another time when he says in episode 5, “Come back with me and see how the Aborigine used this spear.” In a sense, this coexistence of “ancient and modern” is a reenactment in that it is of a piece with Onus’s life. He grew up in a famous Aboriginal reserve community and, while a teenager, worked as a drover and shearer. He was a wharf tally clerk and a justice of the peace. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in reviving the Australian Aborigines

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the ways of my people before the future overwhelmed them and the white man’s time began.

League, while also organizing with Douglas Nicholls such theatrical performances as Corroboree (1949) and An Aboriginal Moomba: Out of the dark (1951). He was a champion boomerang thrower who gave exhibitions around Melbourne, and in 1952 he established Aboriginal Enterprises as a tourist outlet for indigenous craft production in the hills north of Melbourne (Kleinert and Neale 2000: 666). We could consider Bill Onus’s life as archetypal of generations of twentieth-century Kooris in south-east Australia. He was deeply connected to his Yorta Yorta traditions through a community refashioned by colonial settlement and government policies of segregation and concentration. His experience of life and labor was both rural and urban. Archival records and living tradition attest to his energies in cultural, political and entrepreneurial ventures. His son, who died in 1996, was not only a very significant artist but also an institutional bridge between the aesthetic, cultural and political worlds of his father and a new century. So, rather than think of Onus in Alcheringa as an unfortunate ventriloquist’s dummy, we might imagine him as speaking to both an indigenous and a non-indigenous audience about precisely the historical context for this life: the experience of colonization. At the conclusion of the first episode, Onus stands in front of a map of Australia and says: At the coming of the first European, it is estimated that there were about a quarter of a million Aborigines in Australia. This number was broken down to about 525 tribes or sub-tribes. They occupied every corner of the continent from the burning deserts of the center to the jungle-covered coastal areas. The tribal area of my forbears, the Wiradjuri, extended along this part of the Murray River, a place of plentiful water and game. From the primitive man’s viewpoint, an excellent place to live. Unfortunately for the Aboriginal, the new settlers from Europe also found the area most suitable for colonization. In the skirmishes that followed, the primitive Wiradjuri lost, and as a tribe ceased to exist. In this little scene, Onus puts colonization on the historiographical map of Australia. He remembers indigenous occupation of the country in ways that were already integral to Koori land rights claims of the 1960s, and would reverberate ten years later in national demands for the recognition of land rights. He remembers the place of his people, “the tribal area of my forbears,” not as disappearing but as continuous with a colonized place, “along this part of the Murray River.” And he

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remembers the impact of invasion for the Wiradjuri, a defeat that was only partial, qualified by the phrase “as a tribe” and attested to by his presence, which announces in everything but the words themselves that, “As a people we have survived.” There is another kind of reenactment of colonization not in the film itself but in ways Alcheringa was produced as television. How we might recognize, and remember, the actual presence of colonialism in Alcheringa is suggested by John Murray’s recollection about producing the series. Murray remembers: We had to cast the jolly thing and that was diabolical. Frank and I traveled all over Victoria and southern New South Wales to the mission stations and anywhere Aborigines were living, on the banks of the Murray or whatever river it was, in humpies. We finally, after a long search which was not successful, found the female lead [Doris Simpson] working as a domestic two streets up from Ripponlea Studios [the ABC studio in suburban Melbourne] and we found Arthur working on the assembly line at General Motors [Holden, at Fishermans Bend in Melbourne]. I like this story because of the contrast between the presupposition made by Murray and Few—that they would discover Aboriginal actors by searching rural Victoria for “Aborigines in humpies”—and their actual experience of recruiting from a Melbourne suburb and a transnational company’s factory floor. But it is not a story to be told at Murray’s expense; in fact, it reminds us that, more often than not, film-making (and much other cultural production) about Aborigines relies on actual interactions and exchanges between indigenous and non-indigenous people, asymmetrical though those relationships may be. The exchanges that produced Alcheringa extended to the first shooting location, Lake Tyers, perhaps the most significant site of continuing indigenous and non-indigenous interactions in the south-east corner of the continent, and an important memory place (Haebich 2000). Albert Mullet, a respected elder and spokesperson for the Gunai/Kurnai people, grew up on a fringe camp at Lake Tyers. He remembers that around this time: There was only full-blood Aboriginal people to live on Lake Tyers. So all part-Aboriginal people, we lived across the lake. And we were sort of then the, I suppose you would say, fringe dwellers then. Living outside of the mission because the government policies didn’t want part-

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John Murray came into this situation with the actors and crew of Alcheringa, and remembers being shocked by the man who ran what was then the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Station (Figure 11.3): “He was a real brute, a real bastard of a man and we were shocked by the attitude he had to the Aborigines, you know, absolute contempt.” He went on: What happened was our lead was arrested on the location at Lake Tyers. I had these tents, and I had Arthur’s tent next to mine, so that you know if he wanted anything … he wouldn’t feel too isolated. And I put the door of the tent round on the other side to give him some privacy … And suddenly one day, we’re filming on the bank of the Lake, and the police arrived and they just arrested him on the spot for carnal knowledge … It seems that a young girl who was underage, had been going into Arthur’s tent. I couldn’t see at night. And he [Arthur] seemed to think that she wasn’t underage at all and I really believe him. … But the police wouldn’t take no for an answer and they just took him. You know, we were left stranded there and we had to find another lead … Arthur was put in jail in Lake’s Entrance and I went in to take him some clothes and food and so on and it was as bad as anything you could imagine of South Africa. You know, the attitude of the police was just complete loathing and contempt. It was a great shock to me, I had no conception of the Aboriginal problem until then … that in Australia that we would treat and have attitudes like we did was a real shock (Murray 2004). Arthur took no further part in the production of Alcheringa, but John Murray had one further moment of contact in relation to his imprisonment: At one stage, … much later, I got a call from a woman who was … looking after Arthur after he was charged … She wanted me to appear as a witness for him … I was about to go off on the Balranald leg [of the Alcheringa shoot] and I also felt well I’m an employee of the ABC and so, I don’t think that’s my role … I hadn’t seen

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Aboriginal people. In their devious ways, saying: ‘We cannot afford to keep these people. They’ve got to assimilate into wider society and they’ve got to survive by the best way they can.’3

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Figure 11.3 Production shot from Alcheringa. Arthur Johnson. Photo: John Pearson. Reproduced with kind permission of the ABC.

anything anyway and I had no knowledge of him other than when we hired him and it was in the first week or the second week, and I felt no, it’s wiser under all the circumstances that I didn’t go.

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A local newspaper, the Gippsland Times, reported: Michael Arthur Johnson (24) an aboriginal, laborer, Gibbs St, Collingwood pleaded guilty to three counts of carnal knowledge at Lake Tyers between January 23 and 25 this year. Sentencing him, Mr Justice Adam said Johnson’s bad record merited a heavy sentence but he was prepared to make an allowance because he was a victim of circumstances (17 March 1961).

Warlpiri on television Alcheringa is not what, in the twenty-first century, would be called indigenous or Aboriginal television but Walpiri television certainly is. Like most “inventions,” the Warlpiri invention of television didn’t take place in a vacuum but relied on a whole range of preexisting technical facilities and conventions, a significant textual archive and a world of cultural knowledges and practices. The short film Bush Mechanics (1998) and the television series Bush Mechanics: The series (2001) were both made by the Warlpiri Media Association at Yuendumu and were co-directed by and featured Francis Jupurrula Kelly.4 These two films are in one sense stories about the creative and crazy stuff that a bunch of Warlpiri guys do with cars in the bush. The films are also part of a longer tradition of cultural explorations about the uses of cars in and by indigenous communities. But for my purposes here what’s interesting about both the film Bush Mechanics and Bush Mechanics: The series is that they reenact, revisit and remember some of the very conventions of film-making about Aborigines that structured Alcheringa, and in doing so they reinvent history. Bush Mechanics uses, parodies and replies to a whole raft of conventions about imaging indigenous people. Let me mention only two obvious examples. The graphical title “Bush” (as it appears on screen, DVD/video covers and the website) is assembled from bits and pieces of cars—pistons, shock absorbers, brake shoes—and appears to mimic the ways in which the title in Alcheringa is assembled from boomerangs. And there’s another kind of reply to Alcheringa (and other similar anthropologically inflected

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But I’m very sorry that I didn’t go. I should have gone and done something. Because it may have made a difference to his prison sentence. So I was very sorry that I hadn’t taken that step. In fact it’s one of the saddest things of my life (Murray 2004).

films about Aborigines) in the opening scene when Kelly performs as if he were a primitive under the anthropological gaze, except he’s not only the actor but also the co-director, and rather than performing an anthropological script, he’s remembering a story of his countryman, Jack Jakamarra Ross. This is a thoroughly “two ways” cultural product: its relations and conditions of production making it a historical not a “prehistorical” text. Bush Mechanics begins with Francis Kelly playing the Mayal (one of the two characters that he plays, the other being Bush Mechanic) sitting and eating by a campfire. He says to himself, in Warlpiri that’s translated in subtitles, “Mmm birds singing. It’s getting late. I better look for some more meat.” He gets up, grabs spears and a woomera, and walks into the red sand and spinifex country where he finds kangaroo tracks. As the camera follows Kelly tracking the kangaroo, Kelly’s voice is replaced by that of Jack Ross, who begins a story: We left our old camp and were hunting as we walked towards Wayirdi. It was near there that we came across the strange track. ‘What’s this thing?’ we asked each other. We looked east to be sure there were no more strange things. Then we looked south but saw nothing. I thought this thing must be some sort of a monster. As we listen to this narration, we watch Kelly finding and following a car tyre track. Then we cut to Ross completing the story. A distinguished old man wearing a magnificent cowboy hat and red-checked shirt tells of “the first car.” The rest of Bush Mechanics follows the Jupurrurla gang through a series of mechanical misadventures with their car on a bush trip. These adventures are intercut with various indigenous people reminiscing about cars, and with Kelly (now in blue overalls) and Ross as bush mechanics, demonstrating to the viewer various nyurulypa, “good tricks,” such as making a clutch plate from mulga wood, repairing a flat tyre with spinifex grass, and using Omo soap powder and water to make replacement brake fluid. Bush Mechanics: The series also begins with Kelly out in the bush, this time looking for a goanna and chatting away to himself in Warlpiri. We cut momentarily to Jack Ross, who takes up the story, establishing the sense that Kelly is reenacting Ross’s first encounter with a motor car—the same story that, on the Bush Mechanics website, Ross says was told to him by his grandmother. Kelly comes across two white fellas at a camp site. In a little comedy spoof, Kelly asks of the men, “What’s

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“What this big monster? It must be sleeping. Might be a big lizard. I better go before it wakes up.” We cut back to Jack, who says, “I was frightened of that truck. So I ran into the bush for good. True.” Like the “original,” Bush Mechanics: The series, which consists of five 30-minute episodes, follows a group of indigenous men on car adventures. But in the series the adventures are more elaborate: they drive to their first gig, bring a cousin back from jail in Alice Springs, chase car thieves from a rival football team and drive to Broome to bring back pearl shells for a rainmaker. And like the “original” too, the wrecks of old cars provide sites for older indigenous men to tell stories about cars. But in the series there is a more fully developed attempt to use car wrecks and car stories as sites of memory that provide a way of telling the history of colonization. Again, there is an echo from Alcheringa here: it’s as if the map in front of which Bill Onus talked about the colonization of his people is replaced by a landscape dotted with car wrecks which can be used to map first encounters, the arrival of pastoralists and confrontations with police, the Coniston massacres and the establishment of stations. In Bush Mechanics, these “histories” litter the landscape and provide an excuse to restage the past in the present. But there is one final feature of Bush Mechanics that’s suggestive for thinking about the impossible reenactments and invisible Aborigines with which this chapter has been concerned. In the short film and the television series, Kelly plays both Bush Mechanic and a Warlpiri man from the old days who appears in moments of historical recreation, principally of encounters between indigenous and non-indigenous people. In one sense, these are not two characters but a single character, who takes different forms at different times, moving between old days and new days. As Kelly puts it on the Bush Mechanics website, the trickster character both emphasizes cultural continuity and, equally, offers a deep challenge to historicist ways of thinking: In old days they had a skill, today they still have a skill but they’re mixing two skill together to use the tricks on motorcars like when

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that covering your skins?” He takes a cup of tea from them, tastes the hot drink and then tips the “black water” out (but keeps the mug). He takes a tin of meat that the men offer and then, as he heads off, is startled by the sight of their truck and asks:

radiator leaks, they break battery and use the lead from battery or put pepper to stop the leak … Those sort of things. And we’ve been thinking about making bush mechanics—the old ways and the new ways of using the skill … Learning both the old ways and new ways to make things run better for their future and make other people follow on. … Old Jack Jakamarra used to tell us; in old days they used to use their skill and he’s using new skill to work better. Kelly’s character performs this role by appearing and disappearing in various times and places. The ability to make things appear and disappear, like the capacity to transform one thing into another, is a kind of magic. It’s not necessarily something positive or negative; indeed it might be both at the same time, and its outcomes may well be unexpectedly creative or destructive. In a sense, Kelly appears in the present (as a bearer of both new and old skills) when he is needed, such as when a car breaks down and his people need to remember some skills for the present. In other words, he is there all the time, even when we don’t actually see him. Perhaps, like Kelly, the history of Aboriginality in this country is there all the time, but it appears and disappears for complex reasons, some practical and some magical. Remembering and reenactment as forms of appearance and disappearance might be a way of thinking that avoids the crude positivism of presence and absence. Notes 1 Earlier versions of this work were presented at the Settlers, Creoles, and the Reenactment of History Conference, Vanderbilt University, 11–12 November 2005 and the History of Australian Television Conference, University of Technology Sydney and the Powerhouse Museum, 8–10 December 2005. Thanks to Jonathan Lamb and Liz Jacka for those invitations. A shorter version of this essay appeared in Australian Cultural History 27 (2007): 69–90 and a different version appears in Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008). I thank AIATSIS for supplying me with a copy of Alcheringa, Wendy Borchers for generously passing on to me her earlier unpublished research on Alcheringa, and John Murray and Betty Few for agreeing to be interviewed. 2 Interview with John B. Murray, 2004. 3 From the ABC Radio series, “Mission Voices,” available at http://www.abc. net.au/missionvoices/lake_tyers/default.htm 4 David Batty & Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, Bush Mechanics: The series, Film Australia and Warlpiri Media Association, 2001. See also . Kelly was Eric Michaels’s collaborator and the subject of his book, For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu, Arts & Criticism Monography Series, vol. 3 (Sydney: Artspace, 1987).

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Colonialism and Reenactment Television: Imagining Belonging in Outback House Catriona Elder University of Sydney

In the last decade or so, as part of an increasing interest in popular history a spate of reenactment television programs have been produced. In Britain there were programs such as 1900 House (1999), 1940s House (2001), The Edwardian Country House (2002). On German television The Black Forest House (2002) and Life in the Manor House (2004) appeared. Australian, New Zealand, American and Canadian production companies have also created series that reenact life from around 150 years ago. In the United States there was Frontier House (2002) and Colonial House (2004). New Zealand had Pioneer House (1999) and Pioneer Quest (2000) screened on Canadian television. The reenactment series produced in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States differ significantly from the European versions. In these nations to reenact the past is to engage with the history of colonialism and nation formation. This chapter focuses on an Australian series and uses it to explore contemporary attitudes to land and belonging as they are represented in a reenactment of pioneer history. Many of these reenactment series, dubbed the “house” series, were produced in conjunction with the Wall to Wall production company; others were variations on this theme made by other companies. The participants in all these programs “re-enact the everyday lives of people in an historical era” (Luo 2006, n.p.). In Australia there have been two of these series: The Colony (SBS 2004) and Outback House (ABC 2005). In Outback House, produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) and Wall to Wall productions, the participants were invited to reenact life on a sheep property in 1861 in the Australian colony of New South Wales. The roles included a squatter, his wife and three daughters. There were also domestic staff (a cook, a governess, house and kitchen maids) and outdoor staff (shepherds, an overseer, handymen and laborers). There were two Indigenous participants—Danielle and Mal—both Wiradjuri people 193

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on whose country the program was filmed. Danielle was a scullery maid and Mal a laborer. The scripted drama of the series was organized around wool. The squatter began the series with over 1000 sheep and he and his employees had to look after them for six weeks and then shear the flock and produce a wool clip sizable enough to warrant the squatter keeping his property. Reenactment television draws on various genres with which contemporary television viewers are familiar—a mix of documentary, soap and reality. Documentary techniques deployed in the series include an authoritative narrator providing expert comment that is based on the research of academics. The historians who assisted in the production of the series are listed at the end of each episode and the website for the program includes extended notes on historical issues and events (Arrow 2007). The format of the House series also encourages viewers to read the series by referring to “other entertainment-oriented genres” (Luo 2006). In Outback House soap opera techniques shape the unfolding of the episodes. Each episode begins by reprising the dramas of the previous one, and viewers are often left hanging at the end of an episode wondering how a difficult or delicate situation will be resolved. The “soap” drama of the series was provided by the near permanent insurrection in the kitchen and the men’s quarters. There was an ongoing tension between the squatter’s wife and the cook and the maids and also between the squatter, the overseer and the farm workers. These tensions led to departures, tearful returns and more departures. These House reenactment series also draw on the logic of reality television. As with reality series such as Survivor or Big Brother the participants are continually tested and part of the interest for the viewer is watching the participants cope with their new lives and world (Agnew 2007: 303). In historical reality programs the challenges can be a task as simple as getting dressed, quite a difficult process for people not used to the intricacies of a pre-elastic, multilayered clothing regime, or a structured task such as cooking a Christmas dinner on a wood stove. In Outback House there are no opposing teams, the participants all need to work together to meet the challenges. The central Big Brother challenge is to avoid “eviction,” that is the squatter with the help of his employees needed to economically improve his land or he would be thrown off it. The participants in Outback House needed to be successful colonizers.

Creating the past Historical reenactment television produces a milieu that mixes accuracy and affect. Viewers and participants want to feel as if they are in 10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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Bernie: [We are] very rare people who have actually lived in the past, which noone can really do as we have done. Russell: What you’ve got to think about is that we lived it. We actually lived 1861. It was three-dimensional for us (ABC 2005). For Russell and Bernie the feelings of past-ness—of “actually” having “lived” in the past—are produced through a sense of the body being in another space. It was “three dimensional.” They stress that living is the past is impossible—“no-one can really do [it]”—but paradoxically this is what they feel they did: “We lived 1861.” The narration for Outback House emphasizes the temporal and spatial shift undertaken by the participants and links this with a sense of being isolated from modernity. In episode two the opening voiceover states: “Last week on Outback House the nineteenth century was unleashed for real” (ABC 2005). Then the voice tells the viewer: “Welcome to Oxley Downs a nineteenth century sheep station cut off from the modern world … They’re on their own.” Stephen Gapps argues that a sense or feeling of the past is most commonly produced through “clothing the body with signifiers of authenticity, surrounded by staged and evocative landscapes” (2003a: 16). The program producers worked hard to create this sense of being in the nineteenth century and not the modern world through signifiers of authenticity. The Oxley Downs homestead was built from scratch as a nineteenth century property. There was nothing in the field of vision of the viewer that came from a period after 1861 (Though interestingly for the participants there were always the cameras and camera men and women on set). People who came and left the show did so at a gate at the edge of the property and there was no visual clue of the newcomers emerging from the twenty-first century. Outback House allowed viewers and participants to reacquaint themselves with a history that was quite familiar to them through national histories. The mass media (television in particular) has become a key site for the production of cultural memory. The electronic media is one of the “major social institutions in which the past is stored and categorised” (Ma 1999: 85). Each replay by the media of an aspect of 10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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the past—a real place. The feeling of being in the past is produced through the accurate restaging of the look of the past (food, clothes, technology, manners). For some Outback House participants this feeling of being in the past is strong. In the final episode two of the participants—Bernie and Russell who played roles as farm workers—reflect on their time at Oxley Downs:

national cultural memory sees it “refreshed and renewed,” but also reworked so that it has meaning for new audiences (85). The production of history on television is one of the ways in which citizens engage with, reacquaint themselves with, and rework collective or national stories. The historical reenactment programs from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all reenact aspects of a shared mid-nineteenth century white settler expansion that operates in the dominant histories of these nations as part of a narrative of heroic pioneering adventure. Not surprisingly there is a certain sameness to the reenactments in these series. The Australian pioneering story of colonial expansion featured in Outback House is life on a sheep station. Setting the series here centralizes a historical narrative that emerges from the circumstances of British immigration and has long been framed in terms of men’s work and class affiliations. This narrative posits the pastoral expansion as a heroic endeavor and attributes to it an important role in the evolution of Australian egalitarianism (Schaffer 1988; Elder 2007: 40–64; Rose & Davis 2006). This story highlights the legend of a “type” that for decades was seen as the quintessential Australian—the bush bloke. In this legend the bush bloke, represented as an independent hard working, hard drinking larrikin who prizes mateship above all else, is the person who made Australia (Ward 1958). Given the choice of this historical script it is perhaps not surprising that the series’ participants are mostly Anglo-Celtic or white Australians and that it is the men in particular who seem to identify with this popular pioneering story.

Outback House and the Local Story Though the house series exhibit similarities that emerge from them being a franchise, each is also produced in circumstances that are nation specific and engage with “local stories” (Agnew 2007: 304). The “local stories” of the series tend not to be the obvious focus of the series as imagined by the producers, rather they are associated with repressed or barely audible aspects of national history. They attach to narratives that may have only come to the surface in recent times. In the case of Australia these “local stories” emerge from the slow decolonization process and national discussions about land and belonging that have gained strength over the last decades. So though shearing sheep is the obvious issue of the series, belonging and land is the quiet story that pervades the program.

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From 1788, when the British arrived in Australia, the non-indigenous presumption underpinning expansion was that the land being taken up by the colonists was Crown land. The power of English law and the imputation that indigenous peoples lived nomadic lives meant the continent was claimed in the name of the English sovereign. Any land transferred to indigenous peoples—for example reserve land or freehold title—was undertaken as a result of non-indigenous largesse rather than the recognition of indigenous peoples’ legal rights. Though indigenous peoples have long contested the theft of their land through the legal system and various resistance practices it was not until the late twentieth century that they had any real success. The most successful legal challenge to the colonial practice of dispossession, now referred to in shorthand as the Mabo decision, entered the judicial system in the mid-1980s. In 1992 the High Court of Australia handed down the final judgement for the case. Its decision recognized that the presumptions underpinning the wholesale transfer of indigenous land to the Crown could in some cases be legally problematic and that in the Mabo case the Meriam people (inhabitants of the island of Mer in the Torres Strait) still had a native title claim to their land. The ramifications of this decision were felt immediately. If the Meriam people still had some form of title over their land then so might other indigenous communities whose country was still held as Crown land. Later that decade the High Court of Australia again recognized indigenous claims to land. In this decision, known as the Wik decision, the court recognized that even if Crown land had been leased to pastoralists indigenous peoples might still have claims to use the land for customary purposes. Land might have been leased for decades but indigenous occupants could still claim rights to cross and occupy this land for ceremonies or community responsibilities. In both cases the governments of the day moved to limit the impact of the court decisions. The Native Title Act was passed in 1992 and set up a series of stringent criteria that needed to be met to claim native title. Later the Act was amended to curtail the force of the Wik decision. These legal decisions and the legislative ripostes were handed down in a decade (1991–2000) that had been officially marked as a decade of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. So the popular discussion about the meaning of these court rulings was immense. One debate that took place in the media, government and academic circles concerned Australian histories of the frontier. From 1988 (the bicentenary of British settlement) there had been increasing recognition within educational institutions that Australian history

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needed to recognize the “other side of the frontier”—the costs to indigenous peoples of colonization (Reynolds 1987; Reynolds 1990). In the late 1990s, this approach was challenged with counter claims that this recognition had gone too far, was not based on sound historical evidence and painted far too negative a picture of colonizers (Windschuttle 2002). It is of course important to note here that the native title legal decisions and debates about history are of concern to all Australians but they focus on relations between indigenous peoples and the dominant nonindigenous Anglo-Celtic group within the nation. The arguments tend to link early colonial history (which was dominated by British immigration) with contemporary racial problems. The dramatically different Australia that has emerged as a result of the end of the “white Australia” policy and high post-1945 non-British immigration is almost invisible in much of this discussion. Though the dominance of discourses shaped around the stories of non-indigenous peoples of British heritage need to be challenged, it is perhaps also appropriate that the analysis of the series be framed in terms of the binary of indigenous peoples and non-indigenous peoples of British heritage. Though all non-indigenous Australians—whether they have family who have been in Australia for six generations or are newly arrived—benefit from the dispossession of indigenous peoples the specificity of “white possession” needs to be recognized (Moreton-Robinson 2004). Keeping this in mind my analysis will focus on the discourses that have been structured around the categories of indigenous peoples and non-indigenous peoples of British heritage—white peoples.1 The recognition in the Wik decision of the possibility for the sharing of land and the earlier Mabo decision that recognized the possibility of ongoing indigenous title was seen by many non-indigenous peoples as a positive step. The suffering of indigenous peoples as a result of colonialism was seen as deeply unjust and there was a desire to recognize and respond to indigenous injury, including the revision of histories. For other non-indigenous Australians the “tide of history” was seen to have “washed away” any need to make amends for the past and in some cases the Mabo and Wik decisions were represented as attempts at indigenous special treatment.2 One type of response entailed “reterritorialization,” that is a process where white Australians “develop strategies … to (re)imagine the connection between themselves and the culture and land they claim for their nation state” (Cerwonka 2004: 3). The High Court’s native title decisions had caused waves of panic and backlash among some non-indigenous peoples, unsettling their certainty about belonging. For these non-indigenous peoples—white or not—the

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native title decisions were seen as threatening their “property” (Cowlishaw cited in Hage 1998). This unsettling was made clear in the slightly hysterical discussions about the threat to urban “backyards” in the wake of the Mabo decision, but more importantly in the lobbying by the National Party to limit the effect of the Wik judgment. For the dominant white Australian group the threat was understood as a challenge to their sense of being in charge of their homely white space in particular to being in charge of national history (Hage 1998). The “history wars” made clear the resentment of many non-indigenous Australians towards a “black armband” version of history they saw as negating the worth of their forbears’ lives. By the time Outback House was filmed in 2005 the daily force of these 1990s decisions and discussions had passed, however they still lingered as unresolved issues in Australian race relations and shaped the “local stories” of the program. In the micro historical reenactments that take place in Outback House—where individuals are invited to re-do colonization, it is possible to see both an empathetic response to injury, and a process of re-territorialization; and it is the tension between these responses that shapes the series.

Anxiety and belonging The Mabo and Wik decisions made visible long-standing but mostly repressed anxieties about white belonging (Rutherford 2000; Walker 1999; Burke 2001). Dominant national stories of white Australia seek to assuage anxieties that derive from the refusal to acknowledge the meaning of indigenous prior occupation of the continent. They soothe or ease the feelings that white Australians might be nowhere at home. To this end the logic of dominant national narratives have been organized around a white body as the body at home in Australia. As Sara Ahmed puts it the white body is the one that “comes to matter through the reduction of other bodies to matter out of place” (2000: 52). The bodies that are “matter out of place” come to be seen as “strange bodies” (52). In reenactment television the “strange body” can be culturally, spatially or temporally out of place. In the colonial reenactment in Outback House it is the men who tend to worry about being “out of place.” Their video diaries or responses to camera suggest they want to see how or if they belong in 1861 and on the land. For example, Dan the shepherd is heartbroken when he “cracks” on the first weekend. Left alone for 24 hours with 500 lambing ewes he was on the brink of leaving the show and was only convinced to stay when moved to milking and garden duties. He comments: “I wanted to prove

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that I could do it; that I was as good as and as tough as and could be as hard as our forbears.” Similarly Mal one of the laborers notes: “I don’t know how I’m going to stack up against my counterparts from the 1860s.” And Russell the farrier on his first day feels so at home in the space of 1861 that the narrator says of him: “For Russell, Oxley Downs is the place of which he has always dreamed.” He says himself: “I’m in heaven. I want to be buried here.” There are no similar comments from the women that are televised. The mythology of the bush bloke, which these men—especially the older, heterosexual ones with rural or military backgrounds—can still draw on, means it is easier for them to imagine themselves as in the right place in the rural colonial past. However, the legend of the bush bloke also makes the desire to be able to seamlessly move across to the space of the past more fraught. The possibility of failure is felt more keenly. Ahmed further suggests that mostly unacknowledged in white Australian imaginings of their home is the idea that the white social body already included, indeed desired to be touched by that which it saw as “strange.” In this sense non-white bodies marked out white Australia not by their distance from it but their proximity to it (Ahmed 2000: 3). Proximity to the other is a way of establishing that white bodies belonged in the nation, other bodies did not have the same status. The non-white bodies in Outback House are those of the two Wiradjuri participants and the visiting hawker who is an Australian-Indian Sikh. Their bodies, while integral to the series, especially in the context of multiculturalism, also operate as signifiers of other types of belonging in Australia.

Land and belonging In representing Oxley Downs station the series vacillates between suggestions of it as already marked and occupied and as an unmarked place; but also between a sense of the place as real and as imagined. Early in the series the narrator states that the participants are “abandoning the modern world to become part of the bush” that they are occupying a “remote valley” and testing themselves “against mythology”—the bush legend of Australian history. In this same episode the narrator also informs the viewer that the ABC carpenters built every part of the set—a suggestion of prior emptiness. However, at the same time there is an acknowledgement of indigeneity. In geographically or spatially locating Oxley Downs for the viewer the co-ordinates are expressed through indigenous knowledge systems—the viewer is told the station is on Wiradjuri land—rather than through a non-indigenous lexicon—for

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example, Oxley Downs is 50 kilometres south of Wagga Wagga. Further when the two indigenous characters Mal and Danielle are introduced it is made clear that as Wiradjuri people they are in their own country. Indeed in the establishing shots for Danielle at the beginning of the series she is shown with her mother flicking through a family photograph album. Later the viewer is informed that Danielle’s grandmother worked on a property that once sat on the site where the series was filmed. In the third episode, there is a scene where Mal is filmed building a gunyah (lean-to) to live in. He speaks to the camera: “The reason why I’m down here [away from the house] is to acknowledge to the people—to the settlers that—you know—that we’re different, we’re connected to the land more than what they are.” Later in this same episode, when Danielle’s mother comes to visit, Danielle says to Mal and her mother: I’ve had so much déjà vu it’s not funny and I swear it’s because I know that people … people that are related to me have been here already (ABC 2005). Her mother responds: “This place is so significant … to us and our heritage because our family and our ancestors worked on the very same property.” This exchange is followed by a scene, in which Mal and Tom, another Wiradjuri visitor, walk over the property and talk about the bush tucker [food] that is available. The pair also discuss the historical dependence of colonizers on indigenous knowledge and labor. Mal says to camera: You see [our?] people were connected to the land. They were here for thousands of years and they lived at one with the land. They hunted animals. A lot of the first settlers would have just perished without the help of the old people (ABC 2005). These conversations contrast with the narration that suggests that the participants are “stepping back into the unknown.” In establishing a sense of place in this program there is a reversal of the common story of indigenous connection to land as mystical and sitting outside history; instead indigenous belonging is established through a connection to both the colonial history of the place—Danielle’s family worked on the property in “real” life—as well as through indigenous sovereignty—Danielle and Mal are Wiradjuri people who are the custodians of the land in “real” life. What this suggests is that these two

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participants are at home in this place, they know the place. This idea is reinforced in the bush tucker walk Mal and Tom take. By way of contrast most of the non-indigenous people are not represented and do not represent themselves as at home. The exception is Russell, the farrier, who expresses a passionate connection to the place and when interviewed after the program has finished says the place of Oxley Downs remains in his head. He can’t get rid of it. This acknowledgement and foregrounding of indigenous belonging is always in tension with another narrative of colonial occupation. The heart of the series is about the pioneer endeavor—the process of nonindigenous occupation of the land, which has as its necessary corollary indigenous dispossession. The reenactment of dispossession takes place in many scenes, sometimes painfully acknowledged, other times passed over, almost invisible to white participants. For example, in episode one the men arrive at Oxley Downs first and set up the station for the women who arrive three days later. Both Mal and Danielle arrive in this second group. So the property is “empty” of indigenous people when the men reenact the 1861 arrival. In the sequence where the women and Mal arrive the viewer hears Mal say: “Alright here we go” as he opens the gate to the property (ABC 2005). Then the narrator: “Three days after the men’s arrival it’s time for the women and children to enter 1861.” Then the scene cuts to a shot of the men wandering through fields filled with the weed Paterson’s Curse. They are gathering it up to make bouquets for the women. The squatter mutters that the flowers are “to make them welcome when they arrive.” After these shots the scene cuts back to Mal shutting the gate and the narration: “Station hand Malcolm Burns has stayed behind to accompany the women on their journey through his traditional land.” In the reenactment the colonizing men do not need to be so accompanied. Indeed they precede Mal to his traditional land and perform the welcome to country3 with their bouquets of flowers. It is only in episode four that Mal Burns finally enacts a welcome to country. Interestingly this takes place when a visitor—Hawker Singh—comes to Oxley Downs. The narrator introduces the welcome with a prelude: “Dusk and the welcoming spirit of the ancient Aboriginal culture emerges on Oxley Downs through its custodian Malcolm Burns.” There is then a shot of Mal who is seen standing by the fire as he says: “Gabbel gor Wiradjuri Wilay Wiradjuri” (ABC 2005). He translates: “Welcome to the country of the Red Ochre people with the Wiradjuri nation. Possum man Wiradjuri. May the spirits look over us.” The person who responds to Mal is the visitor—Hawker Singh—who humorously

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says: “May the spirits up there and may the spirits in the bottle all look after us.” In this way Mal’s welcome is directed more to the non-white, transitory Hawker, than the white squatter and his workers.

One of the central conceits of British colonization was the dichotomy between indigenous approaches to land as unproductive and British methods of improvement. The idea of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one) gets much of its power from the presumption of indigenous nomadism and primitive land use patterns. By way of contrast settler colonial belonging is historically represented as being enacted through economic improvement of the land. So, it is not surprising that the premise of the series Outback House is the challenge for the squatter to increase the size of his flock of sheep and make enough profit to justify retaining his lease. The drama is that he may lose his land—the key non-indigenous anxiety of the post-Mabo moment. The program reenacts in the historical moment of 1861 the contemporary anxiety of belonging. However in Outback House the people to whom the squatter may lose his property are selectors—small land holders—not indigenous peoples. The squatter’s wife and the male farm workers are the people who perform the work for this improvement. The men are shown building fences, ingeniously designing sheep washing races, building a new house, fixing a broken dray. Juli, the squatter’s wife is also represented as extremely resourceful. She is filmed educating her children (when the governess gets sick) cooking and cleaning (when the cook resigns). One of the station hands gets married adding a new white colonizer (his wife) to the community and introducing, as a young heterosexual couple, the potential for more community members. The nonproductive people in the community are represented as the maids. The two maids, Clare and Danielle, are perceived by the original cook and the squatter’s wife as simply not to be working hard enough. Danielle in particular refuses to put her housework first. She takes unannounced breaks. Both maids go off without permission from Juli. The spectre here is the historical white understanding of indigenous ways of being as unproductive. Historically this lack of engagement with particular forms of work and production is what authorized the dispossession process. Danielle does leave the show in episode six. And as Mal lives away from the rest of the community (he makes this choice for himself) when Danielle leaves her departure empties the Oxley Downs house of indigenous people.

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Improvement

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As Australian colonial historians know 1862—the year after Outback House is set—is the year that the Lands Act was passed in New South Wales, an act that enabled colonists to purchase crown land, previously often held in large tracts by squatters. So in the last few episodes a new story emerges about the process and possibilities for the other participants to claim land. By law underutilized parts of Paul’s property will be available for selection from January 1862. So in a process of reality television strategizing Paul has to see if he can make alliances with some of his employees, encouraging them to select land and then work with him rather than become rivals. These new discussions about the transfer of land are discussions amongst men and amongst the white men. Over time the pool of men with whom the squatter has his strategic discussions increases. He initially only asks men who are playing the roles of overseer and skill laborers to join him, but later all of the men are included in his plans. The squatter’s initial choice of men to be part of the land scheme reflects the class positions of the participants. In episode eight the men actually go out to mark the boundaries of the squatter’s property and to note the land for which they will make a claim at the Land’s Office. Not surprisingly this process showcases the series’ most elaborate discussion about ownership and belonging. In the scenes where the men go out to assess the land the narrator refers to the selection process as part of the “great Australian dream of property and independence.” He goes on to say: “It’s a European process of which Wiradjuri man Malcolm Burns want no part in” (ABC 2005). Mal is invited to take part in the process—to go out with the men—but he declines: I’ve been invited by Paul to join in and be a part of it, but I’ve decided that no I’m not going to get involved in the actual land selection. It means they are going to be putting some type of title on the land and—ummm—it sort of gives them some sort of ownership. Whereas I don’t believe you can actually own the land and it’s, it’s, I belong to the land. It owns me. Mal’s speech accompanies footage that shows four of the white men riding out from the homestead and dumping a pile of boundary markers; ready to reenact exactly what Mal suggests cannot be done—own the land. The a-historical or symbolic nature of the invitation for Mal to

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Claiming the land

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In Mal’s case I have a sensitivity to his feeling because—errr—this process of selection really was about the further taking of the land from his people and Mal knows that too. These discussions about land and dispossession are intercut with images of what Mal did instead of being part of the selection process—he takes the children on a nature walk, sharing his knowledge of bush tucker and the land. Over the eight episodes of Outback House viewers gather a sense of the impact of visiting the past on the participants. Participating in or viewing the series creates a “pastpresent”—a space where the past and present interrupt and infect each other (King 2004). The participants enter Oxley Downs with their various understandings of history and of race relations, of belonging and being Australian. In twentyfirst century Australia, the consultant historians, the writers and producers, participants and viewers of Outback House are sensitive to the meaning of reenacting the process of land selection for a Wiradjuri person. This creates a problem because the process of selection must still be enacted as an historical event. The idea of land sharing—that emerges from Wik—is the solution to this dilemma. Though the legal impact of the radical interpretation of title offered by the Wik judgement was quickly minimized, the notion of co-existence or sharing took hold as a popular idea to understand white and indigenous belonging. The editing of episode eight draws on this idea. It sets out two stories of belonging, one overlaid on the other: one is the white legal story; the other is a non-legal communal story. In the scenes about selection the narrator intones the legal story of non-indigenous legal possession of the land: At the end of 1861 the station-hands would have … mapp[ed] and mark[ed] the available land and submit[ed] a detailed written claim to the Land’s Office (ABC 2005). Inter-cut with this is Mal’s non-legal communal story: … people ask me questions: How do you feel about people taking the land away from you. Well how can you take the land anywhere?

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participate is underscored a few minutes later when the narrator says: “But only white men had the right to select.” This is followed by Paul speaking to camera:

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As these words are heard, the viewer sees Mal walking with the children across Wiradjuri country, reinforcing the story that indigenous people cannot have the land taken from them. The white men are making a claim to belonging by reenacting the pioneer land grab; Mal simply is at home. Yet, the actual pegging out of the land claims in Outback House still reenacts dispossession. Home or homeliness is demarcated not simply by the absence of that which is alien, but “spaces of belonging” are demarcated by the proximity of the alien to home, not their distance from it. The alien “established the very necessity of policing the borders of knowable and habitable terrains” (Ahmed 2000: 3). That is, if there were nothing or nobody who was deemed as not belonging it would be unnecessary to draw a line that excluded them. So though claiming the land is reenacted in Outback House as a legal process that involves just the squatters and selectors—Mal stands to the side of it—the proclamation of these boundaries actually replayed indigenous dispossession. So though Mal can know the land, can belong to the land, can be at home at Oxley Downs—all forms of belonging that can coexist with legal ownership—he cannot in this historical reenactment own the land. It is Mal—the person who has the greatest claim to the land and who is represented as at home in the land—who needs to be (legally) alienated. And he knows it: “Every time they drove a fence post into the ground it’s like they put a splinter into my soul” (ABC 2005).

Conclusion As citizens who have lived through Mabo, Wik, and the history wars most viewers of Outback House know there are new ways of telling stories of colonization that contrast with earlier histories. Many desire these new stories. Though one of the pleasures of reenactment is historical authenticity, viewers of Outback House also desired a revised past. As one viewer wrote on the weblog for the show: “Personally I am much happier seeing a show where indigenous peoples and women are treated equally” (ABC 2005). In its reenactment of aspects of the white nation building project in the post-Mabo era Oxley Downs is reimagined as space shared by indigenous and non-indigenous people. Nonindigenous acquaintance with space is traditionally enacted through

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It’s still here. You can’t take the land away… It’s always going to be here and our spirits are always going to be here.

stories of rural generational belonging, but in Outback House Danielle is the participant who has this type of connection to the property. She is the one whose grandmother worked on Oxley Downs. So instead a nonindigenous connection is established by a story of sharing. All the participants belong to the space of Oxley Downs, each in their own way. Linn Miller suggests sharing—which has been a key non-indigenous motif of race relations in the last 15 years—can be understood in two ways—as division or merger (2003: 414). Outback House replays the mastery by white peoples of the merger aspect of sharing land, but not the division aspect. White peoples easily use or ally ourselves to indigenous modes for expressing belonging—we are happy to be part of this discourse. We are less proficient at sharing in terms of giving up a story of legal ownership. Notes 1 Selecting descriptors to apply to racial groups is a fraught process. Keeping this in mind, I am using the asymmetrical terms indigenous and white to apply to the two key groups about which I am writing. 2 Justice Olney in the Federal Court hearing of the Yorta Yorta peoples’ native title claim in the late 1990s found against the indigenous community arguing that the “the tide of history has indeed washed away any real acknowledgement of their traditional laws and any real observance of their traditional customs.” 3 A welcome to country is a ceremony conducted by indigenous elders at the beginning of formal occasions. The elders welcome the visitors—both indigenous and non-indigenous—to their land and wish them well in their endeavors. This ceremony has emerged in non-indigenous public life as part of the recognition of prior and ongoing claims to land by indigenous peoples.

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13 Stephen Gapps Historia Pty Ltd

Figure 13.1 Reenactors of Charles Sturt’s 1830 exploration party for the Jubilee of Federation Celebrations of 1951 are under “attack” by European Australians dressed as Aborigines.

Figure 13.2 At Balranald in south-western New South Wales, an ABC Television documentary crew found “authentic” Aborigines to participate in the filming ambush Sturt’s party. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 January 1951, p. 3. 208

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“Blacking Up” for the Explorers of 1951

In January 1951, the New South Wales Minister for Education made a public appeal to parents to take their children to see the Sydney street parade in celebration of the Jubilee of the 1901 Federation of Australia. The Minister referred to the various discrete histories on passing floats as “stories in motion from the pages of Australian History books.”1 These stories both physically and metaphorically traversed wide areas of New South Wales over several weeks. As a way of including regional areas in a more national celebration of Australian history, reenactments of inland explorers were chosen over the usual fare of Captain Cook and Governor Phillip, the traditional—and Sydney based—origin figures of Australian history. Retracings of the 1830 journey by Charles Sturt across south-west New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, and the 1813 crossing of the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney, were enthusiastically conceived, and proved to be just as enthusiastically received, by a rural Australia that did not usually figure in celebrations of national origin. The main attraction of the 1951 celebrations was not to be the reenactment of an anniversary event such as the foundational moments of 1770 and 1788. Rather, the “struggles” of the inland explorers were mobilized by organizers to add “drama and history” to the celebration of what was effectively a non-event—the commemoration of 50 years since the Federation of the Australian colonies, an event that, in itself, was neither spectacular nor particularly “reenactable.” In casting performers for these reenactments, organizers sought only the explorers and their retinues of convicts and soldiers. The explorers of 1813 and 1830 had of course passed through Aboriginal lands and met numerous Aboriginal people. Yet these people, who at times guided, gave food or greeted the explorers with hundreds of armed warriors, were effectively ignored by organizers. Although some Aboriginal people from the area were invited to participate in the documentary filming of the “confrontation” between Sturt and a war party, they were an afterthought during the rest of the reenactment. Clearly, organizers did not conceive of the expedition as having anything to do with Aboriginal history and the official correspondence makes no mention of Aborigines. Just as their lives were segregated in rural townships by local policies that excluded them from swimming pools and cinema stalls, Aborigines were also segregated from the celebration of history. Any attention to historical accuracy in a reenactment of Charles Sturt’s 1830 voyage down the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers would have necessitated the inclusion of Aboriginal performers. Whilst this point may have been lost on the reenactment organizers, it was not lost on the rural townships through which the reenactment passed. In January 1951,

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a group of eight bearded and costumed men rowed a wooden boat down a river for three weeks and quite unintentionally entered a temporary landscape of staged blackness. During this particular reenactment hundreds of local people “blacked up” as Aborigines in what proved to be at times a quite bizarre series of events. The major celebratory historical reenactments that occurred in Australia in the 1950s are generally forgotten, yet they were responsible for significantly transforming cultural practices involved in performing history. They occurred at a time that was in between the high pageantry of foundational ceremonies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the rapid expansion of popular participation in “do it yourself” reenactments dating from the 1960s. By the 1970s, officially sanctioned historical commemoration did not need to create the costumed pageants of the past. The expanding numbers of amateur historical reenactment societies of “soldiers and convicts” or “bushrangers and police” were called on to add color and movement to the proceedings. During the 1950s, however, reenactments were effectively taken over by their audiences. Those who were meant to watch and learn about historical events now took it on themselves to dress up and participate with their own interpretations of history. At times, this fitted neatly with organizers’ aims to show the significance of explorers to the nation. Yet at other moments, it constituted a radical departure from the script, particularly when people dressed up as Aborigines and literally ambushed the reenactments. A central feature of the 1951 reenactments was the widespread adoption of “black-facing” or “blacking up,” a practice involving white people painting themselves as Aborigines. This essay investigates the construction of the historical sensibilities that made the mass participation of white as black a conceivable option for the popular representation of Australian history in 1951. Reenactments of the past have attracted increasing scholarly attention from historians and cultural critics. In the main, this has been driven by efforts to understand the burgeoning presence of historical reenactors in commemorations, museums, and film and television in what appears to be an increasingly widespread acceptance of reenactment as a valid and authentic representation of the past. As I have noted elsewhere, scholarly investigations into the theoretical and practical value of the concept of reenactment have also begun to note its long cultural history—historical commemorations, celebrations, and other didactic public performances of the past are often framed as reenactments (Gapps 2003b).

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In Australia, the first such major reenactment was performed for the 1901 celebration of the Federation of the British Colonies into the Australian nation. The landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay near Sydney was reenacted “on the actual spot” where the crew of the ship Endeavour waded ashore. Although there had been many history parades at anniversary moments like the centennial of British colonization and settlement in 1888, Cook’s landing was the first in what was to become a long line of reenactments of Australian colonial history throughout the twentieth century. The participation of indigenous people in these reenactments of European Australian colonization moments has an intriguing and varied history. In 1901, “authentic” Aboriginal people were bought to Sydney from northern Queensland and their dances and spear and boomerang throwing proved to be more popular with audiences than the landing of Cook. In 1938 for the sesqui-centenary celebrations of the arrival of the First Fleet, local Aboriginal protests meant that people from western New South Wales had to be bought in to perform resistance and subsequent submission to Governor Phillip and his soldiers. They also had to be kept quarantined from protestors lest they decide not to participate in the celebrations—something that would have been disastrous for organizers, who wanted to stage what they referred to as a “dramatic” and “authentic” reenactment of Phillip’s landing in Sydney Cove in 1788. By the time of Cook’s centenary in 1970, a changed political landscape meant that organizers now had to pay professional Aboriginal actors to perform acts of resistance. Meanwhile, a small group of local Aboriginal people threw funeral wreaths into Botany Bay in the hope that they would float past the eyes of a young Queen Elizabeth who was in town for the reenactment. By 1988, changing historical sensibilities meant that the commemorations of the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia were met by large public protests. Indigenous Australians and their supporters ensured that a fleet of “tall ships” retracing the First Fleet’s voyage from England to Sydney could not, as initially planned, end in a reenactment of Governor Phillip and his soldiers and sailors stepping ashore. During the twentieth century, in other words, reenactments of European colonization received a mixed reception from indigenous Australians. In some instances, Aboriginal people obviously made political decisions to participate in what were essentially self-congratulatory rewritings of European-Australian foundational moments. Some sort of role in these processions of modernity was perhaps better than none at all. In other cases, there were quite visible protests, while at other times there

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were boycotts. Commemorative reenactments in a climate of the White Australia Policy and popular understanding of Aborigines as a so-called “dying race” made it awkward for organizers to include them as part of national history. Yet it was also difficult to exclude them in reenactments of “origin moments” such as the landing of Cook or Phillip. Often overlooked in the (albeit limited) historiography of commemorative historical reenactments, pageants, and parades are the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Federation of the Australian Colonies in 1951. Organizers and the media were surprised at the widespread popular enthusiasm for the reenactments and remained confident they would foster national histories. However the reenactments occurred on local stages in rural areas beyond the reach of the organizers. Such open-air theaters gave people the opportunity to confound organizers’ serious efforts by donning “Cowboy and Indian” outfits and turning the explorers’ arrival into some sort of “live” Hollywood Western. Rendering Australian colonial historical figures into American cowboys was relatively easy, as was conceiving Australia as the “Wild West.” Yet manufacturing “Indians” to play with the cowboys, when the real indigenes either refused to participate or were never consulted, meant that many people on the route of the “explorers” found it necessary to “black-up” as “Aborigines.” Sturt’s expedition fitted neatly within the kind of framework promoted by the organizers and by news reporters, who stressed the hardships, endurance, and constant danger of a three-week voyage in a small boat down the Murray River through sparsely populated areas. It was also an opportunity to bring history to rural areas and thereby strengthen ties of nation. However, the rapturous welcome that the reenactors received from the crowds lining the riverbanks of country towns en route tended to transform history from masculine danger into comic festivity. Indeed, joyous crowds turned the serious pageantry of past reenactments into a carnivalesque affair. Yet the reenactment was supposed to be a good history lesson. Prior to 1951, Charles Sturt had been part of the pantheon of inland explorers taught to schoolchildren and celebrated in public statuary. He was, and still is, distinguished from other explorers by his fervent belief in the existence of an inland sea in the middle of the Australian continent. Slightly mad, but undeniably stoic, Sturt has been upheld for his apparent friendliness to “natives,” for discovering the site that was to become the city of Adelaide, and for finally putting to rest (mainly his) idea that there was an inland sea (Clarke 1976: 37; Beale 1979; Sturt 1899; Cumpston 1951).

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The story of the crossing of the Blue Mountains is still well known today as a crucial episode in the history of New South Wales and Australia generally. After several (debatably unsuccessful) attempts to break out from the ring of mountains that had contained the expansion of the British colony around Sydney since 1788, in 1813 a small party of Europeans decided to follow Aboriginal paths along the ridge tops. The trail blazed by the colonists Gregory Blaxland, William Wentworth, and William Lawson was quickly followed by expansion into the fertile Wiradjuri lands of the Western Plains. This area was prized by the Europeans for its cattle and sheep grazing potential, as the Blue Mountains Echo newspaper exhorted during centenary celebrations in 1913: “At that moment New South Wales ceased to be a mere settlement.”2 The three explorers’ names still remain mantras in recycled school histories and narratives of Australian history primarily because the explorers are considered responsible for the resulting economic prosperity. In 1951, several towns in the Blue Mountains applied for Commonwealth Jubilee Celebration funding to organize a reenactment of the mountain crossing, a reenactment that would continue local efforts to promote the district as a historic tourist destination. The reenactment organizers wanted “mountain men,” so they chose several Sydney bushwalkers. “Blaxland” was played by a ceramic worker from the Sydney suburb of Auburn, “Lawson” by a fitter and turner from Belmore, and “Wentworth” by a tanner and leather dresser from Lakemba. They were confirmed by the Sydney Federation of Bushwalking Clubs as fit, healthy, and experienced walkers. When questioned by a journalist about his aptitude for the fortnight-long journey, Kevin Ardill, who played Blaxland, replied he had not only ten years experience bushwalking, but knew the mountains very well—an unnecessary remark considering that the party did not take a step in the bush, but were to tread the Great Western Highway crowded with people, their monuments, and celebrations. In fact, the celebrations were to prove more arduous than the walking. This conflation of contemporary bushwalkers and historical explorers was by no means accidental. Bushwalking had been promoted since the early twentieth century as a way for the urbanite to keep in touch with their rugged bushmen forebears. However the Mayor of Katoomba (correctly) predicted that “the only hardship the party would experience would be in trying to keep pace with the hospitality of the people on the Blue Mountains.”3 For many of the townships along the routes of the Jubilee reenactments, the arrival of the reenactors was the biggest celebratory event in

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their history. Civic groups organized functions and commemorations and urged the often thousands of people in the streets to dress up “historically” for the occasion. Basking in the popularity of the January Sturt reenactment, the mountains crossing in May of 1951 received national coverage from newspapers that were attracted to a human interest item that could be run like a serial. The national public radio broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), kept listeners updated along the trek, regularly broadcasting the progress of the reenactment as a news item, a news review item, and as a separate program. The Jubilee reenactment organizers were keen to ensure that several recommended “themes” were central to the proceedings. “Pageantmasters” were provided with a list of themes for local celebratory efforts: “assimilation” (of migrants), “defense,” and “increased production.” The reenactments would, as the Prime Minister’s “message to the nation” for that year stated, include both country and city and “cater for people of different interests and tastes.” The Sydney Jubilee celebrations included a grand parade of historical floats that were designed to be dismantled and sent to other areas of the state. The expansive, regional nature of the Jubilee histories impacted even so-called higher forms of culture. The traveling performance of the Ballet “Corroboree,” for example, was designed, according to the director of Jubilee celebrations, to promote “the real Australia of the untamed outback.”4 The most significant factor in the success and widespread popular appeal of the Sturt reenactment was that this expedition made perfect history for radio. The original plan to reenact Sturt’s trip down the Murray River (of course there was no reason to reenact him plodding back upstream) was hatched from within the national broadcaster itself. The general manager of the ABC, Charles Moses, was also chairman of the Federal Arts sub-committee responsible for the Jubilee celebrations. His proposal of a thousand-mile trip down the Murray River system, broadcast nightly to the nation on ABC Radio, quickly captured the imagination of Jubilee organizers, and officially became the “outstanding feature” of the celebrations. The public response to the radio broadcast of Sturt’s journey was even beyond the expectations of the ABC. Every night over a million people tuned in to find out what had happened to the “expedition” that day. By the end of the Sturt expedition at Adelaide, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper estimated that 300,000 people had seen the eight bearded men in a boat, rowing down the river making speeches at every town.5 The reenactment of Sturt’s journey neatly fitted several key elements of successful spectacular theater and outdoor historical pageantry. The

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river landscape was the perfect traveling stage, still “authentically historical” according to Jack Rogers of the National Film Unit, who was always on the lookout for a section of the river that “look[ed] as it would have in Sturt’s time.”6 The reenactors included two well-known movie stars, Army personnel, and a descendant of Sturt, all making for a wonderful blend of history, ancestry, and theater. Each day as the crew neared the next town, audiences eagerly awaited their turn as part of the drama on the banks of the river; they could then follow their journey downstream on the radio. For the Blue Mountains reenactors, traversing a more urban landscape than the Sturt voyagers, ceremonial obligations rather than rapids, snakes or submerged logs were the greatest hindrance. A typical day on the three-week long reenactment commenced with an address by the mayor, a morning walk along the Great Western Highway that still largely followed the original explorers route, a meeting with Boy Scouts, perhaps another official welcome, some tree planting, an ABC interview, and, at the end of the day, a throng of people in “period dress” ready to “escort” the explorers to their billets. This was often topped off with an “Explorers Party” in the evening or a local “Jubilee Ball” (CJBMCC 1951: 5). If the Sturt reenactors thought they might engage more fully with the historical experience of the journey through a physical experience, this became irrelevant after the first round of ceremonies and thronging crowds of well-wishers. At each stop the party was feted in various forms of local celebrations. At ceremonial moments, “Sturt,” in the tradition of modern historical pageantry, would speak “in character” to his audience, as if he were visiting from the past. He would congratulate them on their achievements—in the manner of previous Cook and Phillip reenactments—as if he were some sort of ghost come back to tell the present how wonderful it was. The serious historical intent was, however, regularly disrupted by audiences. At the Glenbrook Ball hosted for the explorers, a “hold-up” was staged where “bushrangers” with toy pistols attempted to “lynch” the mayor, until the timely arrival of the “police.” The reenactors were often surrounded by children riding ponies and dressed as “bushrangers.” The nineteenth day of the Sturt journey saw the party served an “authentic” banquet of “kangaroo-tail soup, kangaroo-tails rolled in emu-eggs and breadcrumbs, and Murray cod and wild duck,” much to the amusement of the citizens of Euston, who were waiting to test the reenactors’ reaction to “real bush food.” Two thousand people from the town eagerly anticipated the whaleboat’s arrival with an “aquatic

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carnival.” During the jostling for positions, people fell into the river. As Sturt appeared, he was promptly attacked by mock “Aborigines” and the crew was forced to duck when a spear landed in the side of the boat. After an unceremonious slide across the mud on the riverbank, the Sturt party lurched ashore and became an excuse for further local mayhem.7 Another regular element of “comedy” along both reenactment routes was the sight of non-indigenous Australians “black-facing” as Aboriginal people. The organizers’ requests for people to wear “period dress” were often met with bizarre and brazenly racist results. The original party that crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813 had heard the sounds of Aborigines in the distance and saw evidence of their campfires, but did not meet a single Aboriginal person. Yet during the 1951 reenactment, children regularly turned out as “Aborigines” to cheer on the reenactors. At Woodford, for example, Boy Scouts and Cubs took the “explorers” captive and took them to a campfire where they were forced to eat “roasted snake” (actually sausage) and “witchity grubs” (cake icing). At Wentworth Falls, “local identity” Percy Edwards “wearing war paint” appeared from the rear of the ABC Radio transmitting station “brandishing a spear, a snake and a recently killed rabbit” and “gave a war cry and did a war dance around the party.” “Explorer” William Wentworth apparently “fought off the attack with his ancient pistol, but not before the rabbit and snake had been wrapped around his neck.”8 The Sturt reenactors, in contrast, had historical evidence for meeting possibly thousands of Aboriginal people. Near the junction of the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers Sturt’s 1830 expedition was surrounded by hundreds of Aboriginal warriors and only narrowly avoided conflict. This historical episode was taken up by people in 1951 as an opportunity to “black up” and “attack” the “explorers” all along their route. At Narrandera, for example, what were commonly referred to in contemporary newspapers as “white Aborigines” or “lamp black Aborigines” (after the common blacking agent), apparently “created a good deal of amusement and spent some time bantering with the crew.” They met Sturt’s party “waving spears and chanting wild cries.” At Redcliffe, the local Returned Soldiers League and Women’s Auxiliary members combined indigenous Australians with American Western film “Indians” when they dressed as “a group of Aborigines” and then “attacked” the party before raising three cheers for them and offering a “peace pipe.”9 At the town of Gundagai, white “Aborigines” in apparently “traditional ochres” marched along merrily playing “The Road to Gundagai” on gumleaves. At Mannum in South Australia, local schoolboys dressed

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as Aborigines, built a “wurlie” on the river bank and danced around it, whilst others “menacingly” followed the whaleboat in a “blue canoe.” At Redcliffe, local rowing crews “blacked up” to escort the whaleboat into town. In Wagga, “Sturt” was presented with a boomerang from the “people of Wagga” before being “attacked” by Boy Scouts dressed as “Aborigines.” So too at Narrandera, a well-known local anthropologist, Linsday Black, organized local Boy Scouts to appear as Aborigines and provided them with Aboriginal weapons from his collection.10 At the town of Wentworth, the reenactors reached the only place where Sturt’s original party had been seriously threatened by Aborigines. It was here that the ABC crew filming the event actually hired local Aboriginal people as extras to perform a scene in which Sturt was on the verge of being attacked. Yet quite bizarrely, just downstream there were white “Aborigines” waiting to attack the boat all over again.11 Prior to the 1950s the usual practice in Australian history celebrations had been to either exclude indigenous people and their history, or to position them as a brief interlude in an inexorable progression toward modernity. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the “pioneer” and “settler” had been prominent symbolic characters in Australian public celebration. They usually followed sequentially after the figures of British origins, Captain Cook or Governor Phillip, who often had an already conquered Aboriginal people “at their feet.” Yet the audience/participants of the Sturt and Blue Mountains reenactments actively sought to represent, rather than ignore, Aboriginal people—albeit in a carnivalesque manner akin to North American traditions of minstrelsy. We ought not ignore the fact that thousands of white Australians dressed as Aborigines during the 1951 celebrations as part of an effort to participate in a national history. Recent analysis of the practices and effects of minstrelsy, or white masquerading as black as comedy, suggests that it was a more complex affair than at first appears and that working class white people were negotiating the possibilities of multiple subject positions. In North American minstrelsy, cultural critics have argued that empathy was often created out of the ruins of parody (Kershaw 1999; Cockrell 1997; Roach 1996). Still, to be in the position to lampoon was empowering. In Australia, the erasure of serious indigenous history as part of the national story worked to smooth over anxieties about violence and, racism in the past, and, in the broader picture, it assisted in the cultural maintenance of a modern, white Australia. In the United States, it has been argued that white lampooning of black people in song and dance was

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often included in history celebrations because it referenced the “good old days” of slavery (Kershaw 1999: 14, 141; Cockrell 1997: 73–89; Roach 1996: 61). In Australia, I argue that blackfacing was included in historical celebrations because it referenced the modern, rather than the old. While Aboriginal people were still on the margins of white society, camped outside rural towns across the country—indeed many were camped alongside the riverbanks of the Sturt reenactment route—they were still present and had not “died out.” There was still work to be done to confirm the “disappearance,” in the representation of history, of Aboriginal people. The fact that whites dressed as Aborigines has received little attention in literature on the historical representation of Aborigines by nonindigenous Australians. Perhaps too ephemeral, or too overtly racist, “blacking up” has largely been ignored by historians. We can dismiss these performances as grotesque, or laugh at what might now seem ridiculous. Aborigines playing their “subjugated” ancestors in reenactments of Cook and Phillip are easier for us to comprehend than histories of minstrelsy. These pernicious performances of race that circulated widely in the 1950s are anathema today, but their widespread appearance needs assessment. Analysis of “blackfacing” can add to our comprehension of what appears to be a remarkably resilient modern desire to at once efface and promote blackness. Despite efforts at erasure, a simultaneous fascination and fear of the colonized Other troubles these white performances. The history of “blackfacing” is useful in understanding the attraction of white audiences to black performances, particularly evident in the rapid transformation of non-indigenous sensibilities of indigenous culture and history that occurred from the 1970s. “Blackfacing” is actually an important site for considering the entanglements, in performed histories, of two otherwise quite different expressions of the past (Silverman 1996: 185; Hirsch 1999: 3–23). The 1951 reenactments were a watershed in minstrelsy. It was never again so widely publicly acceptable. The proliferation of blackfacing during the Sturt reenactment was in part due to a stronger residue of colonial constructions of race in rural areas. By the same token, it must also be seen as part of a broader search to find appropriate performable histories. The Sturt reenactment formed part of a modernizing and revitalizing project for south-western New South Wales and northwestern Victoria. A strengthening of regional history as part of the national story was considered by organizers to be central to “development and progress” for these areas. In other words, the reenactments

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of inland explorers were designed to place internal colonization as a critical element of Australian history that could strengthen the bonds between rural mythologies and an urban present. Historian Richard White has suggested that the 1950s saw a focus on the explorer in Australian literature, art, and tourism that responded to new forms of postwar modernity, where the “older certainties about the ruggedness of ordinary Australians in a hostile environment” were under threat from modern domestic spheres “in which women shopped and men were masters of modern consumerism” (White 1997: 90). Regular exhortations to burgeoning numbers of tourists to become “explorers” and “travel in their footsteps” compensated for a supposed loss of masculinity to modernity. The explorer reenactments of 1951 form part of this new “history tourism” that urged people to retrace inland explorers’ routes as educational holiday experiences. They also allowed an unprecedented level of costumed participation in official historical commemoration. These reenactments transformed the practices of historical pageantry in Australia into performances of history that no longer required passive audiences. Indeed, the audiences of the explorer reenactments showed a disregard for the parades and pageantry of previous didactic performances. The 1950s reenactments constituted a significant step towards the more contemporary “do it yourself” forms of reenactment that became popular from the 1960s onward (Gapps 2003b: 240–3). Considering the fact that foundational histories required engagement with indigenous Australia, it is perhaps unsurprising that, from the 1960s, Australian amateur performances of history and the growing numbers of “historical reenactment societies” turned toward the histories of Europe. The choice of these histories was, in many ways, a reaction against the grand narratives of colonialism in favor of histories from the “far away lands” of medieval damsels and knights. The sudden growth of amateur reenactment groups dedicated to medieval history was not merely a nostalgic response to a heightened modernity. Rather, it steered existing amateur history performances away from the problems of reenacting settler society pasts. From the 1960s to the 1980s, commemorative historical reenactments of Australian history were to continue to face issues of race that culminated in the protests by indigenous people and their supporters at the 1988 bicentenary of the arrival of the First Fleet. Entreated by organizers to “dress historically,” audiences of the 1951 explorer reenactments chose to blackface, taking the call to create authentic representations of history quite literally and creating a comic festival

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of racist lampooning. These performances drew upon histories of minstrelsy in more than just their inherent racism. The lamp black Aborigines ended up unsettling the usual official practices of performances of the past as didactic history lessons.

1 Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) 6 January 1951, p. 3. 2 Blue Mountains Echo 30 May 1913, p. 4. 3 Commonwealth Jubilee Blue Mountains Celebrations Committee (CJBMCC) 1951, p. 3; Blue Mountains Advertiser (BMA) 10 May 1951, p. 1; SMH, 30 January 1951, p. 11. 4 Border Morning Mail 3 January 1951, p. 3; SMH 6 January 1951, p. 7; SMH 13 January 1951, p. 7; Daily Advertiser (DA) 2 January 1951, p. 2; Gundagai Independent 1 January 1951, p. 6. 5 SMH 28 January 1951, p. 3. 6 ABC Radio Talks Unit “Sturt Report” ABC Radio, Sydney, 1951, Numbers 5–8. 7 ABC Radio Talks Unit “Across the Mountain Barrier” ABC Radio, Sydney, 1951; Blue Mountains Courier (BMC) 24 May 1951, p. 3; BMA 10 May 1951, p. 1; BMC 31 May 1951, p. 1; “Sturt Report” 13–16; Sunraysia Daily (SD) 17 January 1951, p. 3. 8 BMA 24 May 1951 p. 1. 9 Narrandera Argus (NA) 4 January 1951, p. 1; SMH 6 January 1951, p. 4; “Sturt Report” 17–20; SD 19 February 1951, p. 1. 10 DA 2 January 1951, p. 2; “Sturt Report” 29–32; SMH 6 January 1951, p. 4; DA 3 January 1951, p. 2; NA 4 January 1951, p. 2. 11 “Sturt Report” 17–20.

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Notes

Section 5

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New Zealand

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“The finest race of savages the world has seen”: How Empire Turned Out Differently in Australia and New Zealand Mark Williams Victoria University of Wellington

In Australia and New Zealand throughout the colonial period a common corpus of racial aversions was unashamedly expressed by progressives and conservatives, colonial nationalists and empire loyalists, balladeers in the Sydney Bulletin and pro-labour politicians in New Zealand. Asians, Kanaka, Lascars, and Aborigines were routinely denigrated in newspaper, journal, union bulletin, novel, and story.1 There were, however, distinctions made in respect of the indigenous races in each country: although both Maori and Aborigines were held to be fated victims of the collision between Saxonry and savagery, the former were regarded as more advanced than Aborigines and were exempted from much of the extreme antagonism evinced by white colonials towards colored races. This exemption applied in both Australia and New Zealand. Maori were even held in New Zealand to be fit subjects for amalgamation with the white race and, in Australia, to be worthy of admission to the white fortress of unionism (which did have curious breaches).2 How are we to interpret this favoritism towards Maori? I have argued elsewhere that it does not constitute a contradiction within white racism but, rather, reinforces the logic of gradation that structured that system (Williams 2005: 29–45). Here I wish to pursue further a related question: has the racial pattern itself been read too prescriptively—applied without regard for its particular manifestations? Patrick Brantlinger observes the insistent and ubiquitous theme of the “dying race” at work in New Zealand and Australia, and his examples certainly support his thesis (Brantlinger 1988: 126–7; see also O’Neill 1993: 106–7). Brantlinger finds this enthusiasm for extinction operative throughout the British Empire, but apparent discrepancies—or even different levels of attention within a 223

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common ideology—can produce real differences in the process of their enactment. Imperial racism was enacted differently in these two adjacent and closely related settler societies—once joined within “Australasia”—which came to diverge, especially over the issue of race, in the process of colonial nation-making and postcolonial remaking.3 Colonial New Zealand enacted its source as closely as possible; even at the turn of the nineteenth century when it embraced a limited kind of settler nationalism—or florid patriotism—it relied on models supplied by the mother country. Thus Maori were constructed as a heroic race along the lines of the Highland Scots, while the settlers deemed themselves to have become the better Britons promised at colonization. In Australia, a harsher version of imperial racism was enacted. Nationalism there was fastened to the cult of the white Indigene, while indigenous people themselves provided a faint backdrop or none at all. The sentiment that New Zealand settlers directed at Maori, was, in Australia, reserved for embattled whites (Williams 2005: 30). White racism is ubiquitous in both countries; as elsewhere in empire, settlement involved the extirpation of indigenous land holdings, cultures, and people. However, despite the homogenising effect of the approach to settler history found, for example, in Terry Goldie’s Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (1989), the specific enactments of a common template of racial theory in Australia and New Zealand in the colonial period helped produce distinct kinds of settler culture and these differences were extended in the postcolonial period from the late 1960s. The differences do not mean that one cast of settlers (in Australia) was racist while the other (in New Zealand) was not; in both countries all discussion of difference well into the twentieth century was grounded in explicit racism: indeed, the current meanings of “culture” often conceal the old meanings of race. Yet that racism was not unitary in the affects it induced or the effects it produced; moreover, a common set of ideas about racial hierarchy resulted in quite different attitudes towards indigenous populations and their place in the nation, and quite different relations between the parties to colonization. While Victorian ideas of race governed the formation of settler nationalisms in both countries, those ideas reflected the particularities of the local environments in which they were applied and the particular relations there between settler, empire and indigene. They were influenced in New Zealand by the active engagement of Maori with Europeans from the early period of contact, when tribes adopted stray sailors or adventurers known as “Pakeha-Maori” to the early twentieth century, when Maori members of Parliament swayed the opinion of

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government. They were also influenced by a strengthening sense of difference between white societies in the two countries that settler nationalism encouraged, especially around the time of Australian federation in 1901 when New Zealand, inspired by a sense of its distinct destiny among the nations and concerned not to be caught up in the Australian race situation, declined to join Australia.4 Self-congratulation among white New Zealanders about their advanced natives and benign race relations reached a culmination in the “Maoriland” period between 1880 and 1914 when both sources of superiority were made features of an enthusiastically imperialistic species of settler nationalism. For the New Zealand settlers a benevolent-seeming enactment of the imperial code of race in respect of Maori allowed them to approach the sense of nationhood without separating themselves from the source culture. In closing the distance between the imperial self and the colonial self, they sought to mark a sharpened sense of difference from Australia, that distorting mirror-image of their colonial character. Theirs was a purer enactment of the original, and their possession both of a superior native race—“the finest race of savages the world has seen” as William Pember Reeves boasted—and of superior race relations advertised the more advanced values of their incipient civilization (Reeves 1898: 57). By adopting the name “Maoriland” and declining to join the Australian colonies at confederation in 1901, the New Zealand settlers both consolidated the racial attitudes of empire which preferred “warrior races” and used those attitudes to mark their superior distinction from Australia.5 The idea of “Australasia” had real meaning in the late nineteenth century when a common literary market connected New Zealand writers to the Sydney Bulletin as closely as it did Queensland writers. Yet even then colonials in both countries were highly conscious of their local and national differences, seeing signs of emerging racial distinctions within the white race as it adapted to its new environments—producing not wholly new races but organic offshoots of the parent race. They were also acutely aware of differences between the indigenous peoples they inherited along with pasture and forests. The qualities of their indigenous people as well as those of the different classes of citizens in the colony were a particular point of satisfaction for the New Zealander settlers. Their sanguine view was confirmed by external observers. As late as 1949, A. Grenfell Price, in one of the few comparative studies of “White Settlers and Native Peoples” in North America and Australasia, observes: It is clear…that the more vigorous and culturally advanced groups like the Iroquois and Maoris, showed greater powers of survival and

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Different attitudes towards Maori and Aboriginal peoples were apparent in both countries from the earliest periods of contact when they were registered by way of pictorial representation; indeed, they were actively fashioned by such representation. Two paintings indicate the entrenchment of this difference by the early nineteenth century, decades before the emergence of settler nationalism in either country. In an 1820 painting by James Barry depicting Thomas Kendall and the chiefs Hongi and Waikato, the missionary Thomas Kendall gazes sidelong at two physically splendid and handsomely garbed Maori chiefs (Figure 14.1). For Kendall, entry into Maori life and culture would produce a reverse conversion effect in which erotic unsettlement became existential and philosophical

Figure 14.1 James Barry, The Rev Thomas Kendall and the Maori chiefs Hongi and Waikato, 1820.

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adaptation than highly primitive peoples such as the Australoids and Tasmanoids. Variations in the invading peoples were of importance…. Like the Quakers many of the New Zealand whites were free immigrants of a good type, and, dealing as they were with the advanced and courageous Maoris, neither side perpetrated many atrocities (Price 1949: 192–3).

doubt, and what we might now call cultural unsettlement. Conversely, Maori that he met in New Zealand would enter English life; the work was painted in the year the two chiefs depicted there accompanied Kendall to help with the compilation of a Maori-English grammar and vocabulary. The other painting, an 1840 work by Benjamin Duterrau, depicts what its title describes as a “conciliation” between the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, subjects of one of the world’s most determined genocides, and George Augustus Robinson, “protector of Aboriginals” (Figure 14.2). The Aborigines are not here depicted as degraded; indeed, Ian McLean observes that “In giving the skull of the Aborigine with whom Robinson shakes hands a facial angle of 90 degrees, Duterrau confirms Robinson’s belief that the Tasmanian Aborigines were as intellectually developed as Englishmen” (McLean 1998: 43). Yet they lack the magisterial presence of the Maori. The Maori wear elaborate ceremonial garments; the Aborigines have animal skins wrapped around their loins. The Maori are framed by a natural scene but stand separate from it in upright contemplation; the Aborigines stand, squat or cavort among a variety of familiar and exotic zoological specimens. The Maori are self-aware as they maintain a regal distance from the seated European, who looks at them admiringly. In spite of the painting’s title, Robinson’s benevolent intentions, and the conciliatory handshake between one of the group and the white man,

Figure 14.2

Benjamin Duterrau, ‘The Conciliation’ (1840).

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there are mixed signs of mutual regard in Duterrau’s work where some Aborigines go about their separate businesses, some seemingly unaware of the central event in the scene. This pictorial difference is also exhibited in the discourse of racial representation in the two countries. There was in New Zealand, unlike Australia, a continuous paternalistic language of protective concern for Maori among colonial administrators, church figures, politicians, even settler citizens, as widely distributed and respectable as the expressions of antagonistic racism one also finds. With active efforts to bring the native peoples into the condition of civilization (that is, Christianity) in the early nineteenth century these differences became more noticeable and more important. Samuel Marsden in the 1830s showed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for missionary work among the Aborigines yet was eager to convert Maori. Nicholas Thomas observes that Augustus Earle in the late 1820s “anticipated a kind of colonization in which Maori would be ‘hardy and willing assistants, and very different from the natives of New South Wales’” (Thomas 1999a: 57). One does not find in the early contact period of white engagement with native Australian cultures experiences such as Kendall’s, where the missionary comes to question Christianity in light of Maori ideas, or even the exuberant delight in the particulars of Maori life and custom of F. E. Maning, who had witnessed and perhaps participated in atrocities towards Aborigines in Tasmania.6 Certainly, one does one find in colonial Australia an evolution in attitude in which scattered sympathy for indigenous ways comes to include acceptance of equality between the races.7 Sir Robert Stout in 1890 compares Australia with its history of convictism unfavorably to New Zealand with its fascinating native history.8 Eight years later William Pember Reeves, in The Long White Cloud, celebrates the Maori over all other colored races, with evident national pride, and observes that the Pakeha “likes the Maori and hopes he will survive” (Reeves 1898: 57). In the 1924 edition of the book, as James Belich notes, Reeves replaces the last phrase with the more generous “treats them in many respects as his equals” (Reeves 1924: 62; Belich 2001: 210). Two years later Jean Devanny’s The Butcher Shop (1926) expresses the same sentiment, without Reeves’ anglophilia, when an immigrant character is criticized for having “English ideas about ‘colored’ people” and is described as needing “to learn that the Maori, grand in the traditions of his race, stood equal with the average white man, and that in New Zealand, racial distinction between Hawaiki’s sons and the whites was non-existent” (Devanny 1981:141).9 In colonial Australia one does find literary expressions of sympathy for Aborigines, even from the hero of white nationalism, Henry Lawson. One also finds ethnographic verse works on Aboriginal culture (O’Leary 2007: 10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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3–17). But it is not until the 1930s and the Jindyworobak movement that one finds a literary-romantic investment in Australian Aboriginal culture that bears any comparison with the romantic interest in Maori of “Maoriland.” Nineteenth-century art in which Aborigines are depicted as part of the landscape, properly belonging to the preContact past, it is true, conforms to a dominant pictorial representation of Maori. But in Australia the rise of a nationalist movement in the 1880s and 1890s saw Aborigines fading from literary and artistic representation as white Australians nativized themselves.10 In New Zealand at the same time the opposite occurs: there appears an elaborate industry for producing romantic figurings of Maori in the literature and especially the art of Maoriland—an industry that generated a significant export trade as well as supplying the local market. In a common art-historical interpretation, the noble antiquity of Maori in the portraits of Charles Goldie—produced both by the costumes and attitudes of the sitters—indicated that the best days of the race had passed and that they had only a tangential role in the busy, modern colonial present (Bell 1992; Keith 2007: 113).11 But they did not necessarily mean that the Maori subjects expected their race literally to die; they marked a sense of distance from the antique world their stylized poses reenact and their (somewhat stagey) regret that it has passed. Nor did those making or purchasing such representations necessarily want, or even expect, the imminent extinction of the race. The indigenous remains a pervasive presence in Maoriland, not just a ghostly reminder of the vanished past as in late nineteenth-century Australian fiction and art, but an active part of the present.12 There is a correlative to the indigenization of white Australians in Edith Searle Grossmann’s The Heart of the Bush (1910), where the swarthy Scot, Dennis MacDiarmid, is taken for a Maori. But in Australia a popular literary tradition that expresses white nationalism blanks out or usurps the Aboriginal claim to belonging. The sheer excess of Maori portraits and characters in the art and literature of Maoriland illustrates that, while the white New Zealanders’ claim to indigenous status rested on the incorporation of external signs of the other, that other exerted its claim to the present as well as the past. Sometimes, colonial self and indigenous other are even spliced together in a single subject, as in Arthur Adams’ Tussock Land (1904), where a character named Aroha, part Maori, part English, offers an unusually independent and forceful image of new national identity: She was a New Zealander. This land and she were kin…. A hemisphere separated her from her father, a dying history cut her off 10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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There were, also, extensive and profound practical differences in the relations between settler and indigenous in the two countries. Until well into the twentieth century Aboriginal Australians, unlike Maori, were excluded from participation in the political system, from citizenship and from legal recognition of their land rights. There was no Australian equivalent of the Native School system in late nineteenthcentury New Zealand: non-residential, supported by Maori communities, open to non-Maori students, and better funded per capita by the State than the general public schools (Pearson 1968: 56, 80–1).13 Does this favoritism towards Maori support the view firmly held by Maoriland champions like Sir Robert Stout that there was a higher mental tone to New Zealand public life because of the efforts to “preserve” the Maori—effectively, a moral difference between the two settler societies? (Stout 1890: 12). There was certainly a more idealistic turn than in Australia to the official narratives and promotional efforts of early New Zealand settlement, influenced by the anti-slavery movement and pro-indigenous sentiment within the Colonial Office. Edward Gibbon Wakefield projected in his advertising for the New Zealand settlement an idealized version of contemporary British society transplanted to the South Seas. Yet the difference between New Zealand and Australia also reinforces the potency of the hierarchy of race in both countries and the importance of the position on that scale of civilization granted to the other. As James Belich points out “neither racial incorporation nor racial harmony [in New Zealand] were [sic] based on the absence of racism, but on Maori exemption from it” (Belich 2001: 210). That preference for Maori, then, was as embedded in the racist ideas of the day as was aversion towards Chinese. Nevertheless, there were profound differences between the white settler societies in the ways in which they interacted with, depicted and imagined the other. The shaping of these differences may be observed in a pair of popular novels published in Dunedin and Melbourne in the mid-1870s, before the development of an assertive Australian literary nationalism centered on the Bulletin and well before the emergence of Maoriland’s more tentative nationalism. Vincent Pyke’s Wild Will Enderby (1873) and The Adventures of George Washington Pratt (1874) spanned the goldfields of New Zealand and Australia and were popular in both countries. Pyke shows already the concern with the effects of climate on biology that will become obsessive in the nationalist period soon to come,14 observing in

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from her mother. She began another race, belonging to a newer people, a nation that had no past (Adams 1904: 34).

Enderby that Sydney’s warm temperatures induced early sexual maturity and a vivid but fleeting beauty in young women (Pyke 1873: 52). Within the conventional colonial adventure narrative, Pyke’s linguistic stock is also acclimatizing. As Carol Dawber has observed, the diction in Enderby includes both “English” denotators like “glen” and colonial words like “gullies” and “creek” and expressions like “slung the billy” (Dawber 2005: 149). In other words, Pyke’s language is also being indigenized, but in Australasian rather than specifically New Zealand terms. For all that the language of the dying race permeates white writing in late-colonial New Zealand, Maori have a presence in that writing outside its lugubrious relegation of their life in the present or their role in the future, a presence disclosed in the irritation that arises out of everyday dealings—economic, cultural and in work relations—between the parties (see Calder 2002: 67–78). In George Washington Pratt Pyke inserts among his multiethnic caste of riff-raff a Maori character, Himoni Witi or Maori Jack, based on a man Pyke had actually known and who had discovered gold in Otago. Here we detect a racial response that is especially noticeable in New Zealand, the consequence of the continual and complex financial wranglings between the parties over land. The American, George Washington Pratt, is offended that Jack should want to derive rent from a claim that the Maori himself discovered but which he declines to work. Both irritation with the Maori predilection for seeking economic advantage and disapproval of their disposition to “idleness” (often because their land was considered unused or “waste” and thus open for purchase) are widely observed in Pakeha writing on Maori in the colonial period. In rendering Jack, Pyke exhibits what seems to be the source of the problem: Maori Jack displays a lack of belonging in a recognizably Maori world—that is, an archaic one—or a European one. His racial appearance is indeterminate and his mangled syntax is interspersed with maladroit Anglicisms: “‘My golly!’ quoth Jack, taking hold of George’s wet clothes. ‘What for you too much dis-a-ways?’”15 This is the generalized patois of the racial in-between and similar usages may readily be found in renditions of Aboriginal or African-American speech in popular nineteenth-century fiction. But Himoni Witi was not a generic figure of comic indigeneity; he was an economic agent in his own right. His fictional character signals the Maori claim on the advantages of commerce and modernity, and their quick understanding of the workings of capitalism. Lydia Wevers has observed that travelers in late nineteenth-century New Zealand routinely objected to the charges levied by Maori to photograph or paint the local wonders (Wevers 2002: 185). Pyke is in the

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position of the tourists paying to sketch the Pink and White Terraces: he resents Maori entry into modernity when it becomes inconvenient. But he is also alert to the narrative interest produced by the introduction of a Maori character. He is opening a seam of New Zealand’s then undeveloped ethnographic wealth: its possession of an attractive and intelligent, albeit intermittently roguish, native people.16 He is also probing at a rift between Maoriland and the rest of Australasia around which Maoriland will establish its point of difference. Pyke writes soon after the trauma presented to settlement by the land wars of the 1860s, during a period of hectic economic expansion aimed at opening up the land fully to European development. Two decades later the settlers have achieved the desired sense of security—settlement is secure—and they can now set about sanitizing the troubled past. James Milne, in an 1899 biographical sketch of Sir George Grey—administrator of New South Wales as well as New Zealand—notes that the Governor observed of “his favorite native race” that they were “naturally ambitious of military renown; they were born warriors” (Milne 1899: 90). Milne records Grey’s comment, “how easy it was for me to get on with so chivalrous a race as the Maoris!” and adds, “He and they had arrived at a mutual comprehension of each other. They recognized his parts, the manner in which he could make himself felt where least expected, the difficulty of beating him in expedients, his desire to advance their interests and happiness, his tender care for them as a father, after he had ridden as a Caesar” (101). Milne is contributing here to Maoriland’s cleansing of colonial history; he expounds a narrative of recognition by the conquered of the benevolent purposes of their conquerors. What Belich calls “the New Zealand Wars,” which bitterly separated settler and Maori, also generated myths of inclusion in which Maori valor and military prowess allow them to be “whitened.” In some elaborately mythical versions of this theme the colonization of New Zealand involved the fortunate meeting of two races ideally suited to their roles in the colonial story, as seafarers and warriors. The settlers were merely completing a long journey away from a shared Aryan past to this fated joining in the Pacific. Russell McGregor has pointed out that from the late nineteenth century “a significant strand of scientific opinion had held the Australian Aboriginals to be racially akin to the Caucasians [and that] that the theory of Aboriginal-Caucasian relatedness gained ground in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially, it seems, in Australia” (McGregor 1997: 156). Yet there is no equivalent narrative worked into Australian colonial nationalism of common ancestry, noble encounter and conjoined futurity between indigenous inhabitant and European.

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Maori themselves were persuaded by European conferment of superiority on them. As early as 1806, the Northern chief, Te Pahi, visiting Australia, was distinctly unimpressed by Aboriginal methods of warfare, considering them “trifling” (see Denoon and Mein-Smith 2000: 67). A century later, Maori Member of Parliament, Apirana Ngata worried that miscegenation with Chinese would compromise Maori, a fear that echoes Reeves’ concern about the Chinese threat to racial health.17 The long ladder from irredeemable savagery to redemptive civilization was sometimes regarded as a potential path forward for each race discovered by empire. More commonly it froze those races permanently in states of relative inferiority and superiority. This produced racist microcosms at each of the rungs within the ladder, with those below despised, the values of those above assimilated, adapted or worked into an ideology of subservience. For colonial-era Maori, told both that they were a dying race—and often convinced of this—and also that they were among all the savage races the most susceptible to civilization, racism was no more escapable than it was for their colonizers. They too enacted empire’s code of race. Their relation to empire was filtered through the imperial organization of the orders of otherness; their relation to the settlers was configured in a narrative of struggle and displacement they were encouraged to see as a reenactment of their own warrior traditions; their status in the present was dependent upon the idealization of that past by those who now owned the present. Maoriland could afford to gloss its colonial history as guided by benign purpose and productive of harmony because the threat posed by Maori militancy had receded; half a century earlier, settler reflection on their relations with Maori were considerably more pragmatic and capable of morally lucid self-scrutiny in defending acts recognized as abhorrent. Consider the robust and cynical sense of colonial race relations expressed in the Southern Monthly Magazine immediately after wars of 1860s: The questions with which we in New Zealand have found ourselves compelled to grapple are of a more subtle and complicated character [than politics in England]. We have to reconcile conflicting elements. We have to encroach upon the possessions of others without committing injustice, to seize by force that which we most require for our own uses without exhibiting a spirit of rapacity, to rescind treaty engagements without breaking faith, to civilize with the edge of the sword, to secure the interests of humanity and progress by a process of war, conquest, and confiscation, to induce a race of men who always

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Here the contest over land means that the colony cannot be a morally “better” Britain; its enactment of British character and destiny in the new place is necessarily compromised. In Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s glowing prospect of settlement and in Maoriland’s saccharine retrospect of colonial history New Zealand enacts an improved Britain. Maoriland preserves the fantasy of its likeness to Britain by exaggerating its unlikeness to Australia. Where the nascent nation cannot manage a break with the parent it must squabble with its sibling. The dying race theme is worked into this fabricated difference that helps define the self as a more sympathetic attention to the patient’s situation than in Australia. A crucial point of difference here is literacy; as the painting of the chiefs Hongi and Waikato illustrates, Maori quickly and eagerly participated in the translation of the Bible, of their own stories, and developed an extensive network of Maori newspapers in the late nineteenth century. In colonial New Zealand Maori participate in their own representations and articulate their own viewpoints in copious letters, delegations and newspapers. The colonial state’s engagement with Maori involves recognition and concern as well as managerial control and, at times, aggression. The representation of Maori as an archaic or dying race is not simply an ideological symptom of a general imperial will to extinguish the inconvenient other; it is also a metaphor to describe the gap between Maori as imagined in an idealized colonial exercise and those encountered in daily life at the end of the sad but inevitable business of unsheathing swords. But Maori are encountered in everyday life: in commerce, marriage and politics. Even in the art and literature that consigns them to the past, they talk back to those representations, participate in them, even, on occasions, subject them to humorous mockery.18 The establishment of the New Zealand colony famously aimed to reproduce as exactly as possible the parent culture in the antipodes. In the late nineteenth century the settlers, confident in their material success and their future as a “race,” came to the view that the colony could enter into the condition of nationhood not by separation but by more perfectly enacting its founding model. As both colony and nation—conditions which implied no contradiction—New Zealand might truly become a “Better Britain” and certainly a better New Zealand

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suspected our friendship while our swords were sheathed, to believe in it now when we press upon them with increasing force, drive them from their habitations, and occupy their land (cited in McEldowney 1998: 634).

than it would be as a part of the Australian federation. In the late nineteenth century Australia nationalist writers like Lawson and Joseph Furphy set about indigenizing the settlers by celebrating the unrefined, and thereby most authentic, qualities of colonial life. By focusing on the matey democracy of outback life they would differentiate the colonial from the imperial. Yet their colonial nationalism also enacts the savage racism it inherits from the history of British contact with Aborigines. Because the indigenous have no counter voice—not even a sentimentalized one—in the writing of colonial Australia, the difference it announces is fatally delimited, and that limitation persists into the postcolonial period. *** In 1968 New Zealand novelist and cultural critic, Bill Pearson, published a book on Henry Lawson’s time in New Zealand, especially the period teaching at a native school near Kaikoura in the South Island. Henry Lawson Among Maoris is deeply critical of Lawson’s understanding and representation of Maori in the story “A Daughter of Maoriland” (1901), the only work of any substance to emerge from Lawson’s plan to write a major fictional study of “quaint and queer” Maori life to be called “The Native School.”19 Among Pearson’s most negative Australian reviewers was Lawson’s editor, Colin Roderick. Writing in The Age, Roderick charged Pearson with “reduc[ing the story] to propaganda” (Roderick 1968: 14). Pearson’s attack not only on an iconic Australian literary figure but also on the racial attitudes that informed Australian literary nationalism (especially the code of white mateship) clearly rankled with Roderick, but Pearson had some Australian supporters, including Nancy Keesing, who welcomed the New Zealander’s debunking of “the Lawson myth” (Keesing 1968: 83). In this forgotten contention about a little read book we find a means of entering the distinct routes taken in Australia and New Zealand from the end of the 1960s as each country sought to purge national identity of its settler-colonial outlook and revise its monocultural image. Roderick’s defense of Lawson against Pearson’s meticulous anatomy of the latter’s failure to understand the fatal limitation that the code of mateship imposed upon his response to Maori illustrates the difficulty in Australia of disentangling the legacy of white racism from that of cultural nationalism. Throwing up a strong literary nationalist movement in the Victorian rather than the modernist era, 50 years before New Zealand, meant that Australia has retained a more positive link to its nineteenth-century

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literary history than New Zealand. This has provided an important advantage in terms of cultural knowledge, but the potent and sentimental terms in which that nationalist movement and its racist values were articulated mean that it remains more difficult to expel from consciousness. An emotive identification with whiteness threatened by sea-borne Asia is still easily called upon by Australian politicians. In New Zealand, although populist politicians also appeal successfully to anti-immigration sentiment, whiteness has traditionally considered itself less imperiled by Asia. Anti-Asian rhetoric there has had considerable appeal to Maori, ostensibly because of the fear that their status as first people or host culture will be compromised by immigration but perhaps also because Maori have unconsciously reenacted the imperial tropes of race in fashioning their own nationalist movement since the 1980s.20 Multiculturalism in post-1960s Australia represents a break with the racism of “white Australia” and the rooted antagonism to Asia in particular. But, as Marguerite Nolan argues, multiculturalism remains thinly distributed and fragile in white Australia.21 It appears as an elite managerial shift in the nation’s self-projection in response to new global economic configurations; it lacks broad popular purchase; it is easily undermined by appeals to the image of the traditionally white “Aussie battler”; its association with immigration means that it reignites the colonial workers’ fear of cheap Asian labor undermining white unionism. Multiculturalism in Australia has generated a much more extensive literature than in New Zealand, and a critical discourse of culture and immigration which addresses the Asian, European and Middle Eastern presences (See Ang 2000; Gunew 2004; Hage 2003). Yet the literature of multiculturalism has not been worked into the imagery of the nation as intimately as the Bulletin school of the 1890s or the literature of biculturalism in New Zealand.22 Moreover, while white Australia’s attention to the Aboriginal presence has at last resulted in an expression of national remorse, that remorse concentrates on a specific crime associated with bureaucratic modernity—the removal of Aboriginal children—rather than the general crime of white colonization, and, even allowing for the readiness of Kevin Rudd’s Labour government to recognize Aboriginal peoples in the Constitution, there is no equivalent discourse to the New Zealand one of “partnership.” New Zealand lacks Australia’s strong tradition of white cultural heroism: the literary nationalism that finally arrived in the 1930s idealized and often aped working class values, but it was intellectually too elitist (and perhaps too contaminated by an archly gay content) to be broadly popular. In New Zealand’s more limited version of late-colonial national-

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ism, Maoriland—which was popular—racism learned to represent itself as benevolence. But the literature of Maoriland, indeed of the whole of the nineteenth century, was almost entirely excised from national memory by the 1930s generation, notably poet Allen Curnow in his fierce dismissals of colonial longing in anthology introductions. In time, the literary nationalists would be relegated by a new generation of writers, but shifting the legacy of the father figures of the 1930s and 40s was made difficult by a lack of canonical nineteenth-century texts to turn to and revalue. Hence, Keri Hulme’s 1983 novel, the bone people, blindly returns to the tropes of a forgotten literature; in the guise of repudiating the colonial legacy Hulme reenacts the Maoriland themes of the spirituality of the ancient Maori, the redemptiveness of the wild, the special destiny of New Zealand, the educative force of women. By 1968 both countries were about to enter new territory in the experience of being white. For white Australians in the 1950s and 60s, national identity had been expressed through a growing confidence in the country’s material advantages. They didn’t need to present themselves as a “better” Britain because Australia was obviously better than an impoverished, diminished, constrained post-war Britain. The role of particular writers—James K. Baxter in New Zealand and Patrick White in Australia—in challenging the complacent consensus of these materially advanced but culturally debilitated societies was crucial. White’s fiction increasingly from the 1960s addresses Australian urbanity and, somewhat uncomfortably, moves to recognize the inadequacy of the figuring of Aborigines in the nation and its cultural pattern. Alf Dubbo, the Aboriginal artist in Riders in the Chariot (1961) in romantic tradition pursues visionary experience through art, anticipating Hurtle Duffield’s similarly self-destructive struggle between the imagination and paint in The Vivisector (1970). Yet Dubbo is romanticized as an artist rather than as a member of a minority; he understands “culture” in aesthetic rather than ethnic terms. His indigeneity is not foregrounded; indeed White makes little effort to imagine what being Aboriginal means to him. He is not “culturalized,” as is Jackie in Voss, however primitively. That is, his dilemma is aesthetic, social and economic rather than a function of inhabiting a discrete system of cultural intelligence.23 Nor is Dubbo’s indigenous otherness a potential source of redemption for guilty settlerdom, as is that of Maori for Baxter, the post-war writer whose negative diagnosis of the condition of the settler nation closely resembles that of White. The painter has more fictional space and voice than the Aboriginal figures in Lawson, but he elicits neither historical repentance nor cultural abnegation by white readers. Rather, he occupies a privileged

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position within the system of concentrated spiritual/aesthetic knowledge and dispersed materialistic bankruptcy that White imposes on modern Australia. White’s antagonism to modern Australia is pitched, like Baxter’s, in moral and at times religious language, but it is both more limited in cultural terms and less given to naïve self-projection onto the other because the indigenous presence is not central to his critique. The novel in which White comes closest to a postcolonial position towards Aboriginality is A Fringe of Leaves (1979). Eliza Fraser has a Whitean moment of religious epiphany participating in a cannibal feast with Aborigines. But she does not go over to them, becoming a “white-blackfeller.” Her experiences outside the official narratives of empire among the Aborigines and at the penal settlement in Tasmania, produce a moral insight into the punitive organization of her European world and a sense of necessary withdrawal, but not identification with the other or entry into their worldview. In White’s fiction, Lawson’s sympathy for the economic victims of settlement or women in brutal environments has been transferred to those made outcast by their sexuality, oddity, artistic or religious vision. But there is no sense that white Australians must indigenize themselves by a radical identification with the values and views of the indigenous. White’s critique of his literary forebears is conducted most strenuously at the level of style. White’s international success made him perhaps the most recognizable Australian writer. Nevertheless, he was not identified with the nation, as was Lawson in late-colonial Australia or Baxter in early-postcolonial New Zealand. His address to the nation added eminence and gravitas to a series of causes but it did not produce a broad shift in public readiness for indigenous rapprochement. In Baxter we find a writer, equally at odds with the material and spiritual dimensions of national life, who nevertheless had a profound influence on the formation of a bicultural New Zealand in the 1980s. If interest in Maori was part of colonial nationalism, the reenactment of that interest as Baxter’s biculturalism came with radical differences: colonial history is reprised in terms that privilege the illegitimate over the legitimate, and the Maoriland preference for archaic Maori over those struggling with contemporary modernity is reversed. Baxter collected around him the orphans and the wounded (nga mokai and nga raukore), as he called them: young Maori wasted by modernity but with no way back to the old ways. In a 1959 poem, “Eioko,” Baxter writes of a prostitute he met in Tokyo. Instead of displaying the tourist’s interest in the exotic East, Baxter finds the small, vulnerable and betrayed human being. It is this aspect of

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Baxter—the positive response to various forms of otherness and the willingness to stand back from the assumptions of his own culture—that allowed his private journey to be converted into a national one. But that conversion could only be effected when the otherness in question was local and familiar, already worked into the sentimental geography of national representation. After 1972 when Baxter died, the brilliant young poet would become associated by the literary establishment with fakery, posturing, and egotism. Yet Baxter remains a crucial enabler of white biculturalism because, for all that he condemned the bourgeois citizens, it was they—or their disenchanted children—who accepted his message about the other, while rejecting his apocalypticism. Liberal Pakeha suburbanites, initiated into Maori culture by Baxter’s extravagant example in the 1960s, went on to buy the literary texts of the Maori Renaissance in the 1980s, finding there further condemnation of their colonial selves and hence a delicious kind of moral purgation. By reading Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and Hulme they also—like their Maoriland greatgrandparents naming their streets and daughters with the Maori words for flowers and trees—strengthened their sense that they were indeed “indigenous” New Zealanders. But in reading the writers of the Maori Renaissance those postcolonial citizens do not find themselves in the same relation towards the subject of the literature as their colonial forebears. A Maoriland reader of A. A. Grace’s Tales of a Dying Race in 1905 would have derived a sentimental pleasure from its humorous, erotic, roguish and resilient Maori characters; her descendent reading Patricia Grace’s Cousins in 1992 found herself uncomfortably situated alongside a cultural outlook which required that she adjust her own perspectives to accommodate its difference. Those Pakeha citizens, unlike white Australians, were already prepared for biculturalism’s accommodation between settler and indigene, although few would have recognized the sources in their cultural history. Those sources lie in the late colonial period. In saying this I do not mean that biculturalism simply reenacts the colonial Celtic Twilight, granting Maori sentimental life in a romanticized past. Maoriland does all that, but also contains within itself, if not the voice of the other, at least registrations of that voice. Martin Blythe has speculated on how Maori might be given a voice in Maoriland (Blythe 1994: 17). I would suggest both that Maori did modify their representations in Maoriland—or at least agitate the stereotypes by which they were conveyed—and that Pakeha writers like A. A. Grace did, at times, acknowledge a Maori presence outside the trope of racial fading they employed. Hence the centrality of the Maori voice in biculturalism

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may be read not merely as a rupture from Maoriland but, rather, as a realization of possibilities that lay within it. In Pakeha biculturalism the colonial returns as a genuine desire to learn about the other as well as in the form of the urge to wear one’s knowledge of otherness as a badge (or a bone carving). It is the recognition of Maori people as a source of knowledge from which Europeans need to learn that gives Baxter’s ideas their potency. The conscience of the Western subject, for Baxter, is quickened when confronted with an inverse order of value between the spirituality of the outsider or the racial other and the “civilized darkness” that rules modern Western consciousness, medicine and legality.24 Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man determines to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (1980: 252). After his own adverse experiences of both empire and indigenous revivalism Joyce would have been contemptuous of Baxter’s gothic catholic faith and skeptical of the claims both of settler and Maori nationalism, but by using the word “conscience” rather than the more obvious “consciousness” he indicates Baxter’s belief that historical reenactment invigorated by the presence occluded in the original enactment make possible a nation that does not merely imitate other nations or repeat its own past. It is here that the postcolonial reenactments in white Australia and Pakeha New Zealand diverge. Multicultural Australia has in common with the colonial nationalism of the 1890s a preoccupation not with the indigenous but with Asia, although the view of the latter seems to have shifted from fear of engulfment to open embrace. In fact, the old fear of Asia remains, especially among the white working class who see themselves as disadvantaged by a contemporary form of globalization. But that class and its discontents are now marginalized in respectable political discourse and an embarrassment to progressive whites: anti-Chinese sentiment is no longer regarded as decent and politically progressive, as it was in the colonial period (Williams 2005: 32). The multicultural state, meanwhile, though eager to marginalize racist populism and “celebrate diversity,” nevertheless seeks to manage migration in favor of rich Asia while erecting protective barriers against poor Asia. In New Zealand, postcolonial Pakeha, like their colonial ancestors, have been preoccupied with the indigenous. As in Australia, Asia is courted and resented; multiculturalism increasingly figures in government policy and rhetoric. But the overwhelming concentration of cultural policy since the 1980s has been on Maori-Pakeha relations. The state has enacted a Pakeha wish to heal the wounds of colonization by working a Maori pres-

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ence not just into the figuring of the nation for tourist purposes but as the defining condition of the postcolonial nation, and this has consolidated New Zealand’s sense of difference from Australia. Biculturalism as an act of national conciliation, then, does more than reenact Maoriland sentimentality or the colonial desire for difference within a common template: it obliges ethical engagement with colonial history. In spite of multiculturalism, Australia since the 1960s—especially while John Howard pandered to settler recidivism—has retained a unitary notion of national identity based on white majority confidence established in the 1890s. In bicultural New Zealand, on the other hand, the relative weakness of settler nationalism in the late-colonial period reappears, but now, rather than merely appropriating from the other, it invites the indigenous to assume a co-equal place in the discourse of nation. What is special about bicultural New Zealand in relation to other settler societies seeking postcolonial status is not only that, unlike multicultural Australia or Canada, it has a strong indigenous presence, but also that its European voice is unaware how close it is to its colonial self. Maori Renaissance writers have potent precursors in the histories of colonial resistance (Te Kooti, Te Whiti, Rua Kenana) and cultural revivalism (Apirana Ngata) and they know their thought closely.25 Pakeha writers since the 1980s have no such cultural legacy within the colonial period to resist or admire—only Mansfield has literary force but she left for London at 19 and suffered from nightmares about being back in Wellington. Unlike contemporary Australian writers, Pakeha cannot revalue the colonial ancestors they do not know; hence they still rely on Maori difference to grant themselves an identity. In colonial fictions Maori ruffians carry off maidens, not the white girl, usually, but a beautiful and protesting Maori maiden. Snatched from peril, she may become a fit consort for her white rescuer. Maori “princesses” were an ornamental feature of upper-class colonial society in New Zealand; Mansfield had a love affair with one. Yet, if Maoriland and biculturalism both stress the prospect of a harmonious joining of the races, neither has quite expelled the threat lurking in the indigenous other—the savage self that lies beneath the civilized surface. In 2007, inspired by the international “war on terror,” the New Zealand police rediscovered Te Kooti—the warrior-prophet who wreaked vengeance on settlers and “friendly” Maori in the 1860s—in the figure of Tame Iti, a theatrical “freedom-fighter,” claiming to represent the Tuhoe tribe of the Urewera district. If the New Zealand state thus farcically reenacted in miniature the international war on atavistic otherness (and a 1916 action against Tuhoe leader, Rua Kenana, for opposing the war), Iti’s warriors

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training with guns in the Urewera forest staged an equally diminished reenactment of the past. In returning to the models of Te Kooti and Rua, contemporary Maori activists participate in the pattern of repetition that governs the settler state as it realigns the colonial nation. But Maori activists reenact their past knowingly; the problem for Pakeha at the end of the twentieth century is that they repeat themselves unaware of the models they enact. Still, while the Pakeha nationalism that biculturalism enables may not know what it reenacts, it does have an advantage over Australia at the close of the twenty-first century: the latter cannot quite repudiate what it remembers.

Notes 1 In the Sydney Bulletin, 2 July 1987, we find: “No nigger, no Chinaman, no Lascar, no Kanaka… is an Australian,” “Australia for the Australians” (cited in Pearson 1968: 12). 2 Racial theory in Australia also assumed that Aborigines would eventually be assimilated into the white race, but without the view commonly met in colonial New Zealand that the result would be the production of a positive commingling of elements of the two races into a hybrid people (Stafford and Williams 2006: 128). In 1893 the Australian Workers’ Union exempted from its racial restrictions: “Maoris, American negroes, or children of mixed parentage born in Australia” (Pearson 1968: 14). 3 On “Australasia,” see Ferrier’s 2007 essay on Jean Devanny: “At the end of the nineteenth century, the Tasman Sea was seen as not much more of a barrier than the state boundary between New South Wales and Victoria. There was a probability that New Zealand would federate, and the notion of Australasia was quite widely accepted. That federation did not happen has been seen as contributing to a persisting degree of insularity in New Zealand.” 4 Katherine Mansfield’s father, Sir Harold Beauchamp, recalls in his memoir that the Royal Commission appointed by Richard Seddon in December 1901 to investigate whether New Zealand should join the Commonwealth of Australia found that the workers of New Zealand were strongly opposed, in part because of “the bogey of coloured labour in Australia. New Zealand workers wanted to keep clear of anything like that” (cited in Stafford & Williams 2006: 131). 5 Thomas cautions about accepting the popular axiom that Maori were better treated than Aborigines “because they had put up a fight for their land,” pointing out the “violent resistance” of Aborigines and tracing “the positive and negative European responses” towards both races back to Cook. But he concludes that Maori warriorhood “was seized upon” and that it was worked into the estimation of Maori worth (1999a: 107). 6 Thomas notes that Augustus Earle’s account of his time spent with Maori in 1827 is decidedly unsympathetic to the missionaries and that Earle favourably contrasts the welcome afforded his party by their “savage friends” with that of

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7

8

9 10

11

12

13

14

15

16

“their Christian teachers, whose inhospitable dwellings we determined never to re-enter” (1999a: 56–7). Thomas observes: “Had Australian colonial artists been motivated to represent settler-indigenous relations on the model of transactions between near equals, the cultural history I am describing would have been very different” (1999a: 72). “The number of pamphlets and books on New Zealand and the Native Question far exceeded those printed and published of any other colony. There were more questions here. Political rights and the transportation of criminals were perhaps the only exciting questions in Australia. Here we had…the Maori, and his wars, his lands, and his treatment…” (Stout 1890: 14–5). Devanny’s The Butcher Shop was first published in 1926. Hawaiki is the mythical Pacific origin of Maori people. McLean argues that “the unconscious identification by non-Aboriginal Australians with Aborigines occurred as the colonists became confident of their own transformation into an independent center of Western civilisation” (1998: 70). Of the colonial period Leonard Bell asks, “Why were there so many images romanticising Maori at a time when government policy and the dominant ideology looked forward to the end of a distinctive Maori culture and the incorporation of Maori into European structures?” (1992: 3). McGregor observes that in Australia “the entanglement of the idea of progress with the concept of race lent credibility to the prediction of inevitable extinction” (1997: ix); in Maoriland this view also appears, but must compete with alternative views of Maori prospects and capacity for adaptation to modernity. The Native Schools were founded with the purpose of saving Maori from anticipated extinction as a race by “civilizing” them. Moreover, there were a small number of elite boarding schools within the system which took the brightest students and placed them in a “wholly civilized”—that is, nonMaori—environment. However, as Barrington observes, describing the aims and assumptions governing the schools, “despite a resilient strain of thinking that deemed them irreparably inferior, Maori were generally regarded quite highly among indigenous people on the hierarchical scale, and therefore more capable of ‘advancement’ than, for example, Australian Aboriginals. More importantly, many Europeans viewed Maori as culturally inferior but not necessarily biologically inferior, meaning they were assumed to be capable of such advancement” (2008: 16). For example: “More heavily built as a rule than the Australians, the New Zealanders have darker hair and thicker eyebrows than is common with the Anglo-Saxon of Northern England and Scotland. Tall and robust, the men do not carry themselves as straight as the nations which have been through the hands of the drill-sergeant. The women … are as tall, but not usually as slight, as those of the English upper classes” (Reeves 1898: 402). Jack is initially racially hard to identify by Pratt: “he was what he mentally termed ‘a coloured man,’ but of what nationality he could not determine” (Pyke 1874: 62). Pratt notes that Jack has a “more intelligent countenance than other Maoris” and at one point observes “an expression of strange intelligence overspread [Jack’s] features” (Pyke 1874: 62, 63).

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17 Millar points out that Ngata in the late 1920s had set up a committee to investigate “the issue of Maori miscegenation with ‘inferior’ Asians” (2005: 164). 18 See, for example, the depiction of supposedly “dying” Maori in A. A. Grace’s stories, as discussed in my “Smoothing the Pillow of a Dying Race: A. A. Grace” (Stafford & Williams, 2006, pp. 110–33). 19 The phrase is from a letter by Lawson to Hugh Maccallum, 25 June 1897, in Roderick 1968, p. 71. 20 Hamer, a writer for the Waitangi Tribunal, observes in an article on MaoriAboriginal friction in Australia: “There is clearly a degree of tension in the relationship between Maori and Aborigines. Some Maori look down on Aborigines in the same way much of the rest of society does, and enjoy having a relatively elevated social position. From the earliest times of colonial contact, some Maori have bought into European notions of a descending order of races. By contrast, many Aborigines resent Maori success and—in a wealthy mining town like Kalgoorlie—their willingness to flaunt it” (2008). 21 Nolan observes that multiculturalism “has never had majority support in Australia and, as such, as both concept and social reality, multiculturalism remains fragile,” “Mistaking Multiculturalism.” 22 The exposure of Helen Demidenko’s impersonation of a minority culture in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) illustrates the shallowness of multiculturalism in the national mythos: Demidenko’s fraud was seen as exposing that of multiculturalism itself. See Nolan, “Mistaking Multiculturalism.” 23 During observes that Dubbo’s Aboriginality “is much more a matter of his being the victim of everyday racism than of any core of Aboriginal belief” (1996: 34). 24 The phrase “civilized darkness” is from Baxter’s poem, “The Maori Jesus” (Millar 2001: 220–2). 25 Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (1830–1893) was a Maori prophet and guerrilla leader. Te Whiti o Rongomai (1830–1907) was a prophet who led a passive resistance movement against the appropriation of Maori land. Rua Kenana (1868?–1937) was a prophet and religious leader. Apirana Turupa Ngata (1874–1950) was a Maori leader and statesman.

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15 Reenacting Aotearoa, New Zealand University of Auckland

Reenactment plays a crucial role in settler-colonial nations, where settlers have historically invaded and made over a place of first peoples. Strictly speaking, the settlers in New Zealand are second settlers. Maori peoples are not autochthonous, but have been settled in New Zealand for around 1200 years. The key element of the indigenous claim to sovereignty is therefore anteriority, or being-before. The disavowal of the anteriority of Maori peoples, and of the Maori claim to place on that basis, makes the position of second settlers tenuous. Thanks to official biculturalism, they can imagine that as New Zealanders they are Maori as well as non-Maori (Pakeha). While Maori can be New Zealanders I do not think Pakeha New Zealanders can equally be Maori, though they might wish to be so in order to more strongly belong. The attempt by second settlers to coopt indigeneity, which I have elsewhere called cultural plagiarism, locates their historical origin in the new country, and not in the old countries from which they came. Their homeland turns out to have been here all along. History is continually being written, and reenacted in the process, to enable this transposition. The role of reenactment is to convert the idea of a new country that exists in the collective mind of second settlers into a country that has always existed as such. While Pakeha in the first instance stepped ashore in somebody else’s country, the reenactment of this moment has them stepping ashore in their own country—the new country of New Zealand. In reenactment scenarios, settlers are already at home. The regular staging of the event of second settlement, which includes earlier reenactments, supports the claim to be at home. Such remediation constructs the virtual history of second settlers. The “essence” of virtual history is not the technology that enables remediation, but the repetition of the founding reenactment, whether stepping ashore, signing a treaty 245

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or declaring independence. In this way a country that is not yet one is given a history, and settlers who are not yet at home are given a homeland. Remediated history works to relocate and resettle second settlers—to make them as indigenous as first peoples. The persistence of indigenous claims past the point where settlers expected there would any longer be indigenous peoples1 ensures that new countries with sizeable indigenous populations, such as New Zealand, must be settled over and over.

Public works The work of securing the position and place of second settlers in the new country naturally falls to historians. The writings of settler historians have proved as necessary to the settlement of New Zealand as other kinds of public works, such as clearing the land, building roads and bridges, establishing institutions of government, and so on. Part of the local historian’s brief, as a historian of New Zealand, is to tell the story of the new country’s construction. But telling history makes history too. The promise of the new country is made all the more real by giving it a history. It is not surprising that settler histories should be as linear, progressive and purposeful as the settler roads whose construction they also chronicle. Popular national history reenacts the “Great South Road” cut by Governor George Grey into the territory of the Tainui people in the upper north island to facilitate its invasion in the 1860s land wars between Maori and settlers. A work of history, once written, works to ground the place for second settlers—to make it their own place. New Zealand is an idea of “short,” or shorter, settler history that displaces “long,” or longer, Maori histories of the same place. So history-writing works to locate settlers in the new country, and to ground a future homeland. Being at home, as opposed to simply having a home, or house, requires a history to support the claim. The history of settlement and the writing of it are a package: the Great South Road is still present, a testament to history, while histories note its construction in the context of the land wars. Settler histories more generally involve the reenactment of the second settlers’ original idea of New Zealand. Through both acquiring and appropriating Maori land, this new country is what the place increasingly comes to realize. Constructing and maintaining the second settler’s idea of place is the public work, or function, of popular national history. Early historians of New Zealand tell the story of a place that the history they tell has not yet made fully real. For the New Zealand of second settlers has as

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yet little substance, or ground. As later histories build upon the earlier ones, New Zealand emerges as the reenactment of an imagined country. Short settler history is given greater substance, or weight, than the longer history of Maori through the arrival of settlers in much greater numbers in the last third of the nineteenth century. But the idea that such settlers could ever be at home—that New Zealand could be their homeland—is given weight by the public works of historians.2 “New Zealand” is the idea of a place that already existed in settlers’ minds, always coming to be as settlers work towards its fulfilment. The title of the first history of New Zealand, The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present, Savage and Civilized by Arthur Thomson, suggests that New Zealand is one country, and that its transformation as a result of second settlement is at once inevitable and an indisputable good. An historian today would avoid such a title but not necessarily disagree with these two assumptions. The original idea of a country-to-come is now staged as popular national history. A land of promise is realized more fully by the spectacle. Settler docudrama makes its audience the natural occupants of the place through the very performance of a national story. The affective weight of a majority non-Maori audience makes the performance all the more real, and a production of “real history.” James Belich, a leading New Zealand historian, uses the phrase “real history” in The New Zealand Wars on Television (1999) to assert New Zealand history over and against the Britain-centered history that schooling in New Zealand had lead him to take as his own.3 The national effort to secure the second settlement of New Zealand is shown to good effect in the more recent television series Frontier of Dreams (2005), the largest and most expensive documentary ever made in New Zealand. Sponsored by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, it involved a number of significant local historians who work for that Ministry. The program exhibits the characteristic transposition of remediated history: a national people exist before a nation does. The series involves a substitution of the place that exists now for the place that existed then, a metalepsis enabled by the weighty and approving presence of a national audience. Today’s second settlers appear fully present in the past, and therefore as if they are indigenous. The Indigenous New Zealander, an oxymoron for second settlers, is produced by the reenactment. The logic of settler reenactment is evident throughout the series. On the visit of Abel Tasman in 1642 we are told that the Dutch explorer “brought Europe to our shores”; the outcome of Captain Cook’s voyages was that “our islands would be brought to the attention of old Europe”;

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and “Cook’s view influenced Europe’s view of us.” “We,” which includes second settlers who came to New Zealand after Tasman and Cook, are already “there,” or “here,” before either of them. The reenactment reverses there and here, Europe and New Zealand, as “we” see Cook coming. So the language of the series reorients the second settler, who speaks with authority of a place, and from a place, that he or she has not yet encountered. The mid-point of episode four in this series refers to a significant moment of locally reenacted history: the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 between a representative of the British crown, Captain William Hobson, and a number of northern Maori chiefs. A reenactment that was staged in 1990 is literally reenacted. Second settler history is similarly a reenactment of a reenactment. The originary presence of second settlers is produced in and through that rereenactment. The making of the nation is reenacted in front of the watching nation, which, in effect, already exists. It does not matter that the constitutional status of the Treaty, though widely regarded as the founding document of the nation and its parliament, is highly circumscribed.4 The real importance of the Treaty reenactment is that it provides an historical platform, or proscenium arch, for the presence-to-self of New Zealanders as New Zealanders. This is not just a passing moment of reenacted history. The whole program, which makes “us” a national people before the nation exists, is reenactment history of the same order, staging the originary presence in this place of one people, first and second settlers alike. The program is technically remediated. It is interspersed with dramatic sequences from the history of New Zealand on film and television, such as the feature film Rewi’s Last Stand (1940) or the television series The Governor (1975). Remediated history founds New Zealand identity and place in the ahistorical presence of the reenactment itself. James Belich’s earlier New Zealand Wars had expanded the popular audience for history by giving that audience a rollicking good history of themselves. Part of the appeal of the program was the rhetorical claim to the firstness and bigness, along with “realness,” of New Zealand history: a battle in the upper north island (at Ohaeawai) was “The War – that Britain Lost” (my italics); a Maori fortress (Gate pa), faced by “one of the biggest guns ever used anywhere in the nineteenth century,” takes a heavier pounding per square metre than the western front in World War One; the Maori “invented” modern trench warfare (Ohaeawai again, an “important place in world military history”); a Maori chief (Te Rauparaha of Ngati Toa) is the “Napoleon of the South”; and so on. Local history turns out to be a lot like overseas history.

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Professional historians might dismiss history on television as corrupted by entertainment values and a popular audience. The basis of such programs in New Zealand, however, is the work of professional historians, who often also appear in them (Frontier of Dreams trumpets the truly impressive array of professional historians and academics who contributed to the program). The passing popularity of television series is only superficially the problem. Narratives of settler colonial nations are in essence remediated, and their logic reenactive. Belich’s series repeats in colorful terms the substantive claims of his earlier book, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Belich [1986] 1998). As he writes in the Preface to the reprinted edition, “The television series may be the pudding; the book remains the proof” (Belich 1998: 10). When it comes to history, settlers can have their cake and eat it too. Frontier of Dreams was similarly put together by leading historians whose essays fill out the book of the series (Dalley & Mclean 2006). Television series are filtered by written histories, which are themselves filtered by earlier histories. The remediation of the television series is not merely technical: remediated history reveals a logic of reenactment at work in settler colonial narratives more generally. While the technical effect of remediation might be described as virtual—the reenactment of an earlier reenactment—the social effect, or force, of remediation can be described as virtual history. The reenactive logic of remediated history describes the future past state of second settlement: New Zealand will always have been.

Virtual history A new country is a social fact of second settlement. I do not mean a social fact in the positivist sense of an objective social structure or cultural norm. The “logic” of social facts is performative and rhetorical, and applies to history-writing too. The nation, or country-to-come, is a logical presupposition of second settlement that is in the first instance a rhetorical claim. The reenactment of this presupposition makes the new country “official.” Yet the new country can never be assumed. It depends on the number of second settlers and their view of the place they have come to. If there are too few settlers the claim cannot be sustained. If there remain strong indigenous objections the nature of the claim will shift. The place might after all be an old, or older, country, understood in the terms of Maori peoples still living there. For most New Zealanders

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the long history of place is enfolded within the shorter national story (many Maori do not object to New Zealand nationhood, but few Pakeha do not object to Maori nationalism). This is a story of modernization, or, in today’s terms, continuous improvement. Social facts that do not support the construction of New Zealand and the bright promise of its – future, such as the longstanding claim of the North island Tuhoe people to independence, remain anomalous, and retrograde, in the one-nation narrative of second settlement. The independence of New Zealand may – be quite real to second settlers but the independence of Tuhoe is not. As custodians of settler memory, historians play a pivotal role in the national story. They conceive history in the rear-view mirror of earlier historians as a reenacted projection. The fact of the new country is taken as given. Without a more self-reflexive method, the role of history-writing itself in the design of a new country is underplayed. Local historians naturally see New Zealand as a matter of historical happenstance rather than any predetermined historical logic.5 But New Zealand has always been driven by ideas of the country-to-come. It is something more than the outcome or aggregate of an accumulation of particulars. Written histories are themselves particulars, and not without design. For New Zealand is a new country that has all along been taken by historians to exist. In later histories the nation, as if it already was, emerges as the virtual image of its already written history. The virtual image of Belich’s “real history,” for instance, reenacts James Cowan’s earlier reenactment of the land wars on the basis of interviews with Pakeha and Maori participants (Cowan 1922–23). The presumption by both Cowan and Belich that the New Zealand nation would be the outcome of the land wars marginalizes critical nineteenth-century histories of settlement by G. W. Rusden and Dom Felice Vaggioli, or, in the twentieth century, by Miles Fairburn. Such exceptional histories prove the rule of normative national history, which is progressive and purposeful—“onwards and upwards”—and above all hopeful. New Zealand today is the best of all possible outcomes, or, more strongly, the best of all possible new countries.6 The virtual territory of the new country is surveyed, or re-surveyed, by institutionalized discourses of academic writing about history, identity and place. A new book imagines New Zealand to exist, as its title suggests, “On Display” (Smith and Wevers, 2003). As Geoff Park observes in a recent book, New Zealand seen through the lens of second settlement is a “theatre country” (2006). The territory of this new country extends to the virtual history-writing in the exhibitions on display at the museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa (“our place”) in Wellington.

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In the contexts of settler-colonial nations, reenactment suggests a logic of second settlement, and a problem of settler historiography. For narratives of settler-colonial nations reenact a founding moment that is itself a reenactment. That is to say, the nation is “founded” in and through reenactment. Putting the nation on display re-founds it. The result is virtual history,7 where what is enacted is a nation that was, at a certain point, not yet one. The felt quality of “being” in the past of a place—the “dress up” of docudrama—is indispensable to virtual history. Settler docudrama enables the experience of “being there” as if you, here in the present, were already there in the past. Talking about the future of computer-based interactive experiences at Te Papa, former Te Papa curator Ian Wedde describes an imaging display that changes according to the number and behavior of people watching it: “if they’ve watched before, the tool will have remembered them” (Wedde 2005: 153). This is the key to the virtual history of second settlers. Popular national history, activated by a majority nonMaori audience, reenacts the reenactment history of earlier settlers, seen in those very bits of film and television which second settlers recognize because they have seen them, and seen “themselves” in them, before. In popular national history programs, such as Frontier of Dreams, virtual history has three elements. Firstly, computer-generated graphics construct a virtualized, digital history. The development of technology for making history graphic includes the virtual display of America’s Cup yachting races, held in 1995 and 2000 in Auckland; the virtual – Maori fortresses (pa) in The New Zealand Wars on Television, which reveal their formidable defences; and the digitally generated geo-historical landscapes of Frontier of Dreams. Secondly, virtual history in settler societies is remediated history. So Frontier of Dreams is interspersed with docudramatic sequences that are taken from previous film and television programs about New Zealand history, creating an effect of hypermediacy. The history here enacted is already a reenactment. The third element of virtual history is the technological substrate of settler political economy, the infrastructure through which the idea of a viable settlement is increasingly realized: roads, rails, public buildings, dairy technologies (from refrigeration to milking shed), and telecommunications, including digital technology. The hollowing-out of a fully Maori place and the embedding within it of a settler place is given effect, both enacted and made real, by settler docudrama. This is “short history,” which I contrast with a long, or longer, Maori history of inhabitation. Short and long histories of settlement are not

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simply opposed to each other. At least it doesn’t go both ways. For long history overlaps with and encompasses short history. Maori cannot be said to be not modern. Nor are longer Maori histories averse to reenactment scenarios or virtual media. Their basis, however, is not in the first instance an imagined future place, but existing relations to the older one—an actually existing indigeneity. Where virtual history reenacts the promise of the new country, indigenous histories reenvision it in terms of the older one written over by a national story of settlement. The absent presence of an older place—now you see it, now you don’t—is the blinking eye of a place of long history that returns the settler gaze. The living place and living knowledge of long history is in Maori terms a taniwha, a spirit creature and guardian of place whose presence has held up the construction of roads and public buildings in New Zealand.8 Taniwha generate great anger in middle New Zealand at Maori superstition, and trouble the short history of settlement. It is through knowledge of the taniwha that local Maori (tangata whenua) understand themselves to be the people they are. For Maori theorist, writer and film-maker Barry Barclay a taniwha is many things: an ancestor (tupuna), a story on which the future of the people depends, and the active and valid principle of that people’s subsistence (2005: 196–7).. The focus of second settlers, which is whether taniwha are “real,” just like the emphasis on “real” history, misconceives the long history of first peoples. Taniwha indicate the peopled landscape in Maori memory of their own earlier settlement, but remain opaque to white settler history. These are blackspots where non-Maori settlement shades into the longer local history of Maori. A taniwha is an anamorphosis of second settlement: a spectre of short history that can only be grasped from the perspective of long history. It is also as real as those local peoples whose being, and whose history of inhabiting the area, the taniwha instantiates. – In New Zealand history the fighting chief Tı tokowaru, who features in The New Zealand Wars on Television and is the subject of a separate book by James Belich, is a taniwha. He is a disturbing figure—glaring and one-eyed in the single existing photograph—whose inexplicable retreat from an apparently impregnable fortress in the lower North Island in 1869 troubles the national narrative of the television program (Belich 1999). After several victories over settlers, his mana bolstered and his forces enlarged by militant Maori from other tribes, the central North Island lay open to him. With settler militia approaching his – fortress at Taurangaika, and their assault likely to fail, the impending battle would be a decisive event in the story of New Zealand. But it did not happen.

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Correspondences The tenuous settler position suggests another story, which has been strongly contested, and significantly marginalized, by settler historians and reenactment scenarios. This is the story of people who have left their motherland and established themselves in somebody else’s country, and who might therefore be considered stray. Second settlers try to protect themselves from knowledge of this vagrancy by assuming they have always been at home.10 It is a difficult claim to keep up given that the native language (te reo) is for them a matter of mention rather than use, that the country was not originally for all “New Zealanders,” and that second settlement from a Maori perspective looks like the “adverse possession” of the squatter.11 The long-standing indigenous presence disavowed by reenactment history may equally be felt by Pakeha in the historical contractions of docudrama that give birth to “our place.” So “we” were already here. Short history is closely bound up with the idea that Maori would cease to exist as a distinct people, so that their long history of inhabitation would not matter for the future of the country.12 Today, the country is still looked back upon from an ideal point in the future when its

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–

For Belich, but not necessarily for Tı tokowaru and his warriors, this is a moment in the New Zealand wars that will make or break the New – Zealand nation. Belich suggests that Tı tokowaru’s forces dispersed because he may have slept with the wife of an allied chief, and thereby lost his war tapu. A different explanation that relies on tribal historians, and situates the event in the context of local Maori lifeworlds, suggests he may have been responding to a curse.9 While an explanation based in tribal knowledge would appear the stronger, my point is a different one: for tribal historians the import of the event may not have anything to do with the unfolding story of the nation. The difference between the meaning of an event in the lifeworld and long history of local Maori, and its significance in the shorter history of the New Zealand nation, unsettles the speaking position of the nonMaori historian. However, the reenactment of a national story puts the popular national historian back in the saddle. It is not just his voiceover; it is his own story he is telling. The voice-over of Frontier of Dreams also frames the historical action for all New Zealanders—first peoples and second settlers alike. However, the regrowth and regeneration of tribalized history, the bushy history cleared by the settlers’ Great South Road, reframes the second settler’s story.

current problems with historical claims will have been resolved. In the Maori view, however, long history is in front of you, not behind you. Maori reenactment scenarios at once reanimate and recall long history, – and challenge the national story of short history. The Tuhoe people of the mid-North Island Urewera ranges offer a striking example. – In January 2005, Tuhoe staged a reenactment of local history for members of the Government-mandated Waitangi Tribunal, which had – come to hear the Tuhoe claim before it. The claim is the only one of a constitutional nature among a great number before the Tribunal: – Tuhoe did not sign the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, and still assert their independent sovereignty. They have a further claim to their lands under an act of settler parliament, The Urewera District Act of 1896, which established the area as tribally autonomous and self-governing. – The claim to independence explains the forced conscription of Tuhoe by second settlers to the nation of short history. The reenactment that addresses this short history is shown to good effect in Robert Pouwhare’s documentary of the Tribunal visit, – Tuhoe: History of Resistance (2005). During the land wars of the 1860s – – the Tuhoe were declared rebels and prime Tuhoe land was confiscated, – leaving Tuhoe encircled and landlocked. The settler government also – pursued into Tuhoe country at this time the guerrilla fighter and prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, who was given shelter there. Governmentaligned Maori troops adopted a scorched-earth policy, burning property, – stores and crops, killing, and taking prisoners. Tuhoe grievances could not be more strongly felt. What Pakeha mostly saw of this particular reenactment in 2005 on – television was the scary Tuhoe challenge to the incoming Government party.13 Images on television and newspapers showed wild-looking, long-haired men with facial tattoos (moko), tongues protruding, shouting and chanting, while they turned about on horses. The evening news was most fixated on the well-known activist Tama Iti, immediately recognizable with his full-face moko, shooting a New Zealand flag on the grounds of the marae with a shotgun. Tama Iti has more recently been arrested for acts of subversion under – New Zealand’s Terror Suppression Act (2002). Many believe the Tuhoe claim to be an independent nation prompted the invasion in October – 2007 of Tuhoe by 300 police officers in a paramilitary operation to quell a perceived “terrorist” threat. Terror at home fulfils New Zealand’s obligations to a first world “war on terror” and justifies the remarkable refusal in 2007 of an officially bicultural country to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (New Zealand was notably joined by other

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settler societies: the United States, Canada and Australia). In the context of their own version of the homeland security legislation of the US, the action of the New Zealand police raises concerns with state surveillance, the use of exceptional and unwarranted powers, indefinite detention and the more global Guantanomisation of justice. In terms of short history, however, the police were reenacting earlier invasions – of Tuhoe land in 1868, in the hunt for Te Kooti, and in 1916, when – police constabulary came to arrest the Tuhoe leader and prophet Rua Kenana at Maungapohatu on alcohol charges and to destroy his peaceful settlement (see Binney, 1979). The charges of the recent raid under the Terrorism Act have since been dropped and replaced by firearms charges under the Crimes Act. These events of short history, and the claim to the land on the basis of their longer inhabitation of it, were the subject of the reenactment. – The lack of knowledge on the part of second settlers of Tuhoe history, and their more general lack of concern, is what Tracey McIntosh has called the “legitimation of ignorance.”14 What Pakeha New Zealanders – “know” is that Maori of long history were as savage as the Tuhoe who greeted the Government party appeared to be, indeed that they were once cannibals, and for this reason have quite reasonably been subdued and civilized. In their graphic depictions of cannibalism, popular national histories such as Frontier of Dreams reenact the title of Thomson’s originary settler history (from “savage to civilised”). – The spectre of savagery presented by Tuhoe must be the second settlers’ own view of Maori because it is the raison d’etre of a secondary sovereignty. The older country cannot otherwise have been taken over by themselves in good faith. Second settlers cannot see that Maori might also be performing a perception that non-Maori have of them. So Pakeha New Zealanders live in a place whose virtual history has been constructed by their own perception of Maori. Their ignorance is constantly highlighted by Maori performance. Yet second settlers will disavow any lack of knowledge, any sense of dislocation, any sense of not always having been at home. The official national narrative, and the second law of settlement that it supports, intervenes to save them from mockery. The performance is as old as first contact, which it also recalls and reanimates (what do you say to strangers when the most pressing and important thing about you for them is whether or not you are a cannibal)?15 History is animated, to put it in more Maori terms, by wind, breath or air (hau), understood, for instance, as the breath – of Tı tokowaru exhaled by his descendants. “E kore e ngaro/ He kakano i ruia mai i rangiatea”/ “I will never be lost/ For I am a seed sown from

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Rangiatea,” says one such descendant on The New Zealand Wars on Tele– – vision, Tom Ngati of Ngaruahine Rangi, at once himself and Tı tokowaru. The correspondence of time and place, long and short history, Tom Ngati – and Tı tokowaru, is at once counter-memory and counter-history. In the – case of Tuhoe such correspondences ground their claim to be an independent nation. The virtual history of second settlers, by contrast, corresponds to a place that will have been—once we have gotten over this kind of problem. Understood as hau, at once the vitality of human life and vital essence of the land (Moko Mead, 2003: 360), correspondences challenge the territorializing “reality” of settler reenactment. Virtual history does not ground “New Zealand” in the land wars, despite Belich’s claim that the wars constituted a “civil war” (a civil war already implies a nation, but the very idea of New Zealand was suspended while the land wars were being fought). It grounds history in the reenactment of the wars. The hau of long history turns over the ground of settlement, the public domain of settler docudrama and the public works of historians. For Maori histories don’t go back to or start from “here,” the place made present by settler docudrama, and on which settlers think they stand in good faith. It goes back to Hawai’iki, the fabled homeland of Maori origin. Hawai’iki may refer to another place in New Zealand that a tribe has left, or further back in time and place, to a place of Pacific origin, almost certainly in east Polynesia (the proverb [whakatauki] of Tom Ngati suggests Rangiatea, or Ra’iatea, in the Tahitian islands). Or it may equally refer to the spiritual netherworld of Te Po. This homeland is a place that isn’t hard ground, isn’t here and isn’t for or about “us,” that is, all New Zealanders. I think Pakeha at some level know that history is wind, and that they are pissing into it. But they can’t say so to themselves. Instead, the remediated interface of past and present, Maori and Pakeha, drives the on-going Maorification of everyday New Zealand life—a rich mixture of “smart” branding, self-indigenizing, bad faith and reenacted history. Meanwhile, the mocking moment of the first encounter—“we may well be what you think we are”—challenges the national narrative of – second settlers. The long view of Tuhoe frees them from, rather than binds them to, the short view of the “bicultural” nation. Notes 1 The possible extinction of Maori was as much evident in the decline of the Maori population in the later nineteenth century for the very reason that it was seemingly willed by second settlers. As Frederic Manning says in his classic work, Old New Zealand: “Doubting our professions of friendship, fearing

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our ultimate designs, led astray by false friends, possessed of that ‘little learning,’ which is, in their case, most emphatically ‘a dangerous thing,’ divided amongst themselves—such are the people with whom we are now in contact—such the people to whom, for our own safety and their preservation, we must give new laws and institutions, new habits of life, new ideas, sentiments and information—whom we must either civilize or by our mere contact exterminate” (2001: 138). I note the sheer weight of the numerous histories of New Zealand, including, in the last decade, a raft of heavy illustrated histories, which suggests a bulwark against rising Maori nationalism. See Thomson 1859; Rusden 1883; Felice Vaggioli 2000; Pember Reeves 1898; Condliffe and Airey 1925; Reed 1945; Oliver 1960; Sinclair 1969; Bassett, Sinclair and Stenson 1985; Binney, Bassett and Olssen 1990; Belich 1996; Belich 2001; King 2003; McLauchlan 2004; Stenson 2004; Wright 2004; Mein Smith 2005; Dalley and Mclean 2006; King 2007. For commentary on New Zealand historiography by historians, see Binney 2001; Sharp and McHugh 2001; Dalley and Philips 2001. As Belich says in episode one of The New Zealand Wars on Television: “[When I grew up] real wars, like real history, was supposed to happen overseas. Yet the New Zealand wars raged across the whole of the North Island for almost 30 years with heroism and massacre on both sides. They wrenched New Zealand history into new shapes. They left deep wounds, concealed but not healed by the scabs of legend, and we’re still paying for them in more ways than one. The wars helped make Ma– ori and Pa– keha– , lumping Ma– ori tribes into a people and splitting Pa– keha– settlers off from the old British. They were New Zealand’s great civil war, the grand clash of its two peoples.” Curiously, the idea of a civil war, something new to New Zealanders, is very much like “overseas” history, invoking as it does the nation-making American civil war in particular. Declared in the later nineteenth century “a simple nullity” by Judge James Prendergast, the Treaty of Waitangi was revived in the 1980s after the Waitangi Tribunal was established in 1975 to investigate and report to Parliament on historical injustices relating to Maori. Parliament, however, is not bound by the Treaty and could at any time vote out the scattered references to it in currently existing legislation. The Treaty today underpins official protocols of biculturalism but its articles have little foothold in law. As Angela Ballara puts it, “Methodologically, contemporary academic historians usually stand apart from belief in… any megaprocess at all. Nothing they write about is part of any manifest destiny, or if it is, the historian is not concerned with it” (126). The history of New Zealand can manifest no “logic.” Ballara is wary of “logical continuity,” dramatized as the “overview of the whole past,” which “raises the suspicion that scholars are not acting as historians, but propagandists for some teleological vision… like idealist philosophers (Hegel, Marx, Toynbee)” (127). Michael King’s parting comment at the end of his best-selling history—“By far the best general history of New Zealand to be published in a generation” (Kerry Howe, The New Zealand Herald)—speaks whole volumes of benign New Zealand history: “most New Zealanders, whatever their cultural backgrounds, are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant. Those qualities are part of the national cultural capital that has in the past saved

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the country from the worst excesses of chauvinism and racism in other parts of the world. They are as sound a basis as any for optimism about the country’s future” (2003: 520). My use of the term virtual history needs to be distinguished from Niall Ferguson’s use of the same term in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals to mean counter-factual, “but for X there might not have been Y” history. For Ferguson, virtual history illustrates the contingency and chance, or “chaostory,” of history. By virtual history I mean history that reenacts a reenactment. For me this is characteristic of the second settlers’ effort to reduce the long history of first peoples to their shorter history in the same place, as if they, the second settlers, were also an originary people of it. Notably at Ngawha in the far north (Taitokerau). In the teeth of significant protest a prison has been constructed in the area of the Ngawha springs, which are sacred to the Nga Puhi people, and home to the taniwha known locally as Takauere, guardian of the waters. Michael Reilly (2000) follows the tribal historian Ruka Broughton of Nga– Rauru. Reilly suggests that the settler militia leader, Colonel Thomas McDonnell, who – was well-versed in the mind of Maori, had been brought to see Tıtokowaru at – Tauranga– ika. There, McDonnell cursed Uenuku, the God of Tıtokowaru, in the – company of others. The effective power of the curse unsettled Tıtokowaru, weakened his sense of potency, and lead him to depart in order to preserve his heart and mind (“hinengaro”) from this “supernatural attack.” Reilly notes that Broughton has access to the tribal psyche, which makes possible better explanations of the actions of historical figures. Miles Fairburn in The Ideal Society its Enemies makes vagrancy a central theme of nineteenth-century settlement. His work is not neglected by James Belich, who grapples with Fairburn’s thesis for some 40 pages in Making Peoples (1996: 412–50). In the squatters’ favor, Robert Neuwirth discusses claims to land on the basis of lengthy and uncontested occupation (2005: 303). Where uncontested, I think “adverse possession” is the real claim to place of second settlers. Where contested, the second settler must answer to the charge of vagrancy. Prominent local commentator and philosophy professor at Canterbury University, Denis Dutton, offers an exemplary comment in The New Zealand Herald: “Today, 164 years later, as National’s leader Don Brash has pointed out, there are no racially pure Ma– ori left in New Zealand. Some 70 per cent of 24 to 37-year-olds who call themselves Ma– ori are married to non-Ma– ori. Time, migration to cities, and intermarriage mean that Hobson has turned out to be right in a way he could not have envisioned [the representative of the British Crown who declared at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi 1840 that we are now one people—’he iwi tatou’]. Of course, go back far enough and all New Zealanders are to some degree of mixed race” (2004). The action was described to reporter Catherine Porter by Tuhoe researcher and educator Te Hue Rangi as an “orgasm of performance” (2006). This was the theme of McIntosh’s talk at a public forum on terror (“Talk about Terror”) held at Auckland University on December 15, 2007. See Obeyesekere 2005 on the role of parody and performance in the first European encounters with Maori.

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16 Alex Calder University of Auckland

Henry Thoreau, digging one day for fish-worms, happened to uproot a groundnut. This small edible tuber had been a staple in pre-contact times but had long since dwindled into obscurity, becoming unnoticeable among the sundry vines and creepers of the forest. Unearthing “the potato of the aborigines” seemed to Thoreau “like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period”. He seems to have found this abstemious prospect so cheering that it prompted the following vision of abundance: Let wild Nature reign here once more, and … the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art (Thoreau 1997: 215). Early settlers of a new world often looked at a raw wilderness and pictured the farms and towns and amenities that would one day be established there. Those born into that prospect would often find their imagination drawn the other way. “It would,” wrote Thoreau, “be of some advantage to live in a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them” (12). And in the course of his reenactment of the settling of America, of his exercise in reality testing, a particular kind of fantasy comes to his aid: Walden becomes primeval, townsfolk revert to tribal ways, and the indigenous ground-nut emblazons the title pages of poetry books yet to come. 259

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I think how freely the wild grasses flower there, How grandly the storm-shaped trees are massed in their gorges, And the rain-worn rocks strewn in magnificent heaps … It is only a little while since this hillside Lay untrammelled likewise, Unceasingly swept by transmarine winds. In a very little while, it may be, When our impulsive limbs and our superior skulls Have to the soil restored several ounces of fertilizer, The Mother of all will take charge again And soon wipe away with her elements Our small fond human enclosures (Bethell 1985: 9).1 The imaginative journey of her poem, from garden out to wild nature, from wild nature back to the small enclosures of garden and grave, is a prolepsis in reverse: the future anticipated here really belongs to the past, to the uncultivated natural environment. Like Thoreau’s rewinding of the history of settlement so that its future can start over, Bethell’s fondness for perspectives that erase marks of human presence is a gesture characteristic of settler creoles everywhere. It is an expression of the misgivings that accompany the transformation of new world environments, of reservations that have as their literal monument those islands out of time we call National Parks. From an international perspective, National Parks are a feature of the very recent past. Most countries have them, and the 1960s is the decade that dominates lists of their formation. But prior to 1910, the only countries with national parks were the United States with eight, Australia and Canada both with five, and New Zealand with two.2 The origins of National Parks, if I might generalize about them for a moment, are with those regions of the “new” world where settlers quickly outnumbered indigenous peoples, where photography promoted a nascent tourist industry, and where creole or quasi-indigenous

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In a variation of this sentiment, the New Zealand poet, Mary Ursula Bethell, pausing from “earnestly digging” her suburban garden in the hills above the city of Christchurch, looked across the agronomic patchwork of the Canterbury plains to the snow peaks of the vast alpine ranges:

modes of belonging were expressed through a love for the natural environment. Every national park has a distinct and particular history: Tongariro, New Zealand’s first—and the park I happen to visit most often—was gifted in 1887 by the Maori chief Te Heuheu Tukino IV in order to preserve the mana and tapu of the mountain and to forestall subdivision and sale of the surrounding land to Pakeha farmers, but any sense one has of the park as an historical site is vastly overshadowed by the inevitable showcasing of Nature in this place. I had a quintessential experience of moving out of history into Nature one Easter, on a hike to the Waitonga Falls following an unseasonal fall of snow. Above the bush-line, a long boardwalk crosses a fragile alpine bog that has several small tarns reflecting the mighty volcano above. The snow had completely whitened the boardwalk; ahead of me, on this popular trail, not a boot-print to be seen—I was first-footer! It was a curious, and rather magical, encounter with an authentic yet wholly spurious “original” world. Even without the snow, the Waitonga Falls track offers everywhere the same mix of temporal and timeless, constructed and unadulterated experience. In the beech forest, it is common to see aprons of smooth tin nailed to a tree-trunk—they are a bar to the appetites of climbing possums and guard a rare and beautiful native mistletoe. From the boardwalk, in the rusty orange slicks of the alpine swamp, clumpy hebes fingered like coral resemble a miniaturized forest from a lost primeval world. And somehow, even the very roar of the falls, heard before the track bends and skeins of rushing water are partially glimpsed, seem a dramatically appropriate lead-up to the climax of the hike: the fully framed view in the mind’s cameraeye, an amplification of—and reduction to—the spectacle of what Nature looks like. National Parks aim, on the whole, to present a wild or pristine natural environment that restores the visitor to a time before human habitation took place. They offer a form of historical reenactment that finds no history here, only a kind of carefully stage-managed terra nullius, where the impact of humans appears to be slight but has more accurately been erased through a similar kind of reverse prolepsis to that which characterizes the writing of Thoreau, Bethell and many others.3 In this respect, National Parks illustrate a compromise between two fundamental and contrasting discursive structures of settlement: progressive plots of improvement and development on the one hand, and retrogressive stories of loss and impairment on the other. “The upward and downward lines of these stories,” William Cronon observes, “are everywhere apparent”—and “their very familiarity encourages us

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to shape our story telling to fit their patterns” (Cronon 1992: 1352). In the progressive mode, he notes, plot lines are impeded but rising: for example, the protagonist of a novel, perhaps a settler allied with a particular district, would typically face obstacles in the environment and be tested by adversity, but his future would not only turn out well: it would also represent a significant advance over more primitive times. “The ending,” Cronon writes, “is somehow more positive—happier, richer, freer, better, than the beginning” (1352). Narratives of improvement in New Zealand historical and political discourse are legion, yet there are remarkably few literary examples. It is not that we lack family sagas or historical romances—genres that ought to be especially hospitable to this patterning of events—but those we still read and remember generally refuse this storyline. By and large, it takes a distinct drop in literary value, to the level of the “Mills and Boon” sheep station romance, say, before one comes across numerous instances of the handsome farmer musing positively about changes wrought and benefits to come. Cultural value is overwhelmingly associated with an alternative patterning of events. The ruination plot, as I shall call it, follows the downward path typical of tragedy.4 It is a story of hubris and comeuppance, of ignorance leading to painful knowledge. The optimism characteristic of the improvement plot now becomes a tragic flaw: our blind faith in progress ends in environmental degradation—not paradise made, but paradise lost. Almost all the New Zealand literature that we still read follows or assumes the ruination plot line in one or another of its many variations. And yet a long and unbroken disquiet over the values of improvement, expressed in all our major art forms, for almost all our settlement history, and which has long since won the hearts and minds of a nature-loving majority, has had remarkably little impact on actual states of affairs. New Zealand, which currently runs a successful tourism campaign under the slogan, “100% Pure,” is not only one of the most altered environments in the world, we also have one of the worst records of biodiversity loss—since human settlement, and particularly since European settlement, nearly a third of all land and freshwater birds and a fifth of all seabirds have become extinct, and about 1000 plant, animal and fungi species are currently considered threatened. Historians of this familiar story invariably mention the role of acclimatization societies in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and point to the kind of whimsical folly that resulted in, say, the introduction of the possum and gorse with catastrophic results (in 1994 the possum population of New Zealand was estimated at 70 million).5 But we need to be careful of what Michael

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André Bernstein calls backshadowing: “a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come.”6 Bernstein draws his examples from writing about the Shoah, but backshadowing thrives in all scenarios of catastrophe and apocalypse, and is particularly common in environmental literature, especially when the writing becomes figurative—as, for example, in such classic works as The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants and Animals, a book which is given to imagining “armies” of “invading” animals, as if possums by the million were already massed in their landing craft (Clark 1949). It is misleading to think of early settlers as environmental vandals. Much like ourselves, they tended to be conservationists and developers both, and their legacy is not so much an awareness that the contradictions between those roles are so difficult to resolve in practice, but that we continue to act as if those contradictions had little real grip on us. It seems to me that the discourses of improvement and ruination, with all their potential for friction, are easily compartmentalized in the mind, much as nature reserves are compartmentalized in the workaday landscape. There may be many reasons why we so easily tolerate a division of sympathies, but I suspect we do so at least partly because the idealization of nature associated with the ruination plot is in deep and fundamental accord with fatalistic assumptions about historical change in the plot of improvement. From this angle, works lamenting environmental degradation belong rather more to a dominant than to an oppositional ideology. Narratives of ruination are a dime a dozen: it is much rarer to find writing that illuminates tensions between progress and despoliation in order to look past them. *** Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira: the Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station is seldom commended for the magnetic interest of its plot. This very lengthy work, written over several decades and appearing in the successively revised and expanded editions of 1921, 1926, and 1953, is “a record of minute alterations noted on one patch of land” (GuthrieSmith 1953: xvii–xviii).7 How minute? Perhaps I might best convey the scale of this work by noting that the introduction of weeds on the sheep station is discussed across eight chapters, loosely organized by their probable method of arrival: Stowaways, Garden Escapes, Children of the Church, Burdens of Sin, Fire and Flood Weeds, Pedestrians, the

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To my backwoodsman’s heart, there is … something austere, distinguished even, in the brotherhood of weeds. They are the MacGregors of our artificial highlands seizing as of right—these hard faced children of the wilderness—conditions they must yet despise—leafmould, sieved peats, sharp sands, and shredded sods … . Centuries of condemnation and oppression have made them what they are … . Theirs has been that sad sharpening of perception that comes to dwellers beyond the pale, to creatures proscribed, to whom discovery is death. Who can doubt but that in the process of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, … that garden cress however circumspectly gripped has added a new fury to its seed ejaculation, that petty spurge beneath its decapitated head has developed a more sure and certain stem reduplication, that mouse-ear carast has evolved a more profoundly furtive concealment in the heart of his host? Such are the lowly ways whereby humble folk may face adversity and perpetuate themselves (297–8). These exuberant anthropomorphisms perhaps unfold a parable of settlement, but it would be more accurate to say that they are in the service of an historical vision in which the distribution of humans and weeds are of equal interest, complexly interrelated, and that require alternatives to the usual compromises by which we reconcile the scenarios of improvement and ruination. Guthrie-Smith came to these alternatives in the course of writing Tutira. They are the result of a prolonged adventure in writing as well as in the discovery that there was indeed something to write about in the interaction of humans, animals, and plants, in the one place, over half a century. It is a book one needs to read with an eye to how it, as well as the land it describes, is a record of changes, and changes of mind about the nature of change. The final chapter of the original 1921 text, “Vicissitudes,” deals with the recent legal and economic history of the run. It explains how the land passed from Maori leasehold to private title and ends with the author’s decision to subdivide his empire of grass into smaller units. There are only two paragraphs of conclusion: the penultimate advises “any youthful readers to go forth also into the wilds and possess lands and flocks of their own” (1921: 399) and modulates into a hymn in praise of New Zealand: “in the sowing of the nations other emigrants

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New Jerusalem, and Latecomers—the chapter titles signalling a wry note of comparison with patterns of human settlement and displacement. The following passage is representative:

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One last word: he hopes that his readers have played the game, that they have not indulged the practice of skipping. If this has not been done, if every chapter has been read, they can rest assured that in examination, as it were under the microscope, of one sheep station, they have discovered what there is to be found in all … . Every station in Hawkes Bay has been moulded by a great rainfall; possesses legends and relics of a splendid aboriginal race; has been clothed with forest, flax, and fern; has been subdued by pioneers in desperate straits for cash and its equilibrium; has had its surface mapped by stock, its rivers affected by scour, and, lastly, has been or is in the process of being subdivided into smaller holdings (1921: 423). The reader who has not skipped, who has read “unflinchingly,” as a word inserted in the third edition has it, will not only see how the local example tells a larger story of human settlement and environmental transformation in New Zealand, but will have encountered various judgements and assumptions about that process. And Guthrie-Smith, like us all, is in two minds about this. Insofar as he is conservationist, he deplores the loss of the natural environment; insofar as he is a pragmatic and resourceful farmer, he sees development as desirable. The linear plots of improvement and ruination, which are locked in debate for much of the 1921 Tutira, would seem to settle into a compromise vision of linear and irreversible, necessary but regrettable, change. One indication that his thinking has moved on in the 1953 edition is the inclusion of several new chapters, most notably those dealing with earthquakes, and those (to be discussed later) concerning the microhistory of a paddock of regenerating bush. In the earlier editions of Tutira, the opening chapters on geology reveal steady and incremental processes of change that have determined the appearance and potential productivity of the land. Although evidence of seismic upheavals were everywhere apparent in the fault lines and seaward tilt of the hills, Guthrie-Smith always reckoned it poor form in a geologist to conjure up an earthquake when accounting for puzzling features in the landscape. Explaining everything, earthquakes explained nothing. In 1931, however, there occurred “a brief wrinkling of the epidermis of the earth, as evanescent as the shrug and stamp of a fly-pestered ox”—and the city of Napier

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have sought homes of easier attainment, the heaviest grain has been the furthest flung” (1921: 399)—a cultivation metaphor entirely in keeping with a narrative of improvement that seems unqualified at this point. A final paragraph then reads as follows.

was levelled by an earthquake (42). Fourteen or so miles away, out in the paddock, Guthrie-Smith was himself momentarily “shaken like a pebble in a box,” but remained unaware of the magnitude of what was taking place around him (42). Returning home to scenes of devastation, the fact that the whole countryside had been uplifted several feet was not observable, but it was the micro-patterns of disturbance that most challenged his sense of the possible. How was it, for example, that a hundred weight block falling from the chimney could be tossed clear of the veranda roof, pass between the posts and railings of the veranda, crash through the veranda floorboards, then extricate itself, flying once again between the roof and railings before embedding itself some yards away in the lawn? It requires several dumbfounded reiterations of the startling facts—there is the hole in floorboards, there, perfectly intact, is the veranda roof and the veranda railings—before more exact analogies are found: the forces involved remind him of juggling a pole in the palm of one’s hand, and the path of the block, domesticated to reason at last, is like that of a girl catching and tossing an apple in the lap of her dress (49). But the earthquake also made it possible to read the landscape differently. He had often wondered why, after heavy rain, the eels of Lake Tutira congregated en masse at a particular end of the lake, as if “eagerly scrutinising the margin” (43). Two hundred yards away, an elongated depression preserved the outline of a shallow creek. To one not versed in earthquakes, there could be no connection between the imprint of a distant dry watercourse and the congregation of eels; post 1931, “what had been inexplicable, in a flash became crystal clear”: the intervening hummock of land had been uplifted, stranding the eels that in times of flood would once have been flushed out to sea (42). Their thwarted migratory instinct had endured for at least a thousand years.8 Earthquakes, then, were important because they enlarged his historian’s sense of the room needed for unlikely and singular events. This was not wholly a new discovery. Major sections of the book that appear largely unrevised in 1953, to do with the settlement of the land by Maori and then by European settlers and their sheep, may seem unpromising avenues for historiographic innovation, but they too indicate a fine appreciation of the lack of reasonableness in history. Looking back, Guthrie-Smith wonders what on earth induced a young farmer like himself to attempt running a sheep station in a place like Tutira: The tenure of these runs was leasehold, and native leasehold at that; without exception the titles were flawed; the land was devoid of

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grass, the climate was wet, the access bad, the soil ungrateful and poor. There was no compensation for improvements. It seems impossible now that any reasonable soul could have believed there was either money or reputation to be made out of them. The truth is that [we] were not reasonable, that [we] did not think at all… . To this day I am unsure whether we were splendid young Britons, empire builders and so forth, or asses of the purest water (153). The latter case is recounted in convincing detail, but so too is the satisfaction to be found in breaking in new country and making marginal land productive. In the 1880s, the once-forested hills of Tutira were a tangle of bracken and the new farmer’s immediate priority was to convert it to pasture. On a hot day in late summer, the hillsides were set ablaze and grass subsequently sown in the black and fertile clearings. Come spring, the fern would shoot away again, but the tender fronds, if not exactly palatable to sheep, were at least edible. By crowding sheep onto a portion of land, a battalion of mowing jaws would keep the fern closely nibbled and allow the grasses to come on. It sounds simple in theory, but was murderously difficult in practice. Fern-grinding, as the process was known, not only meant over-stocking the land and wearing the sheep into “greyhound lankness,” it also broke another fundamental rule of stock management: never to move sheep from good country to bad, from dry land to wet—and from a sheep’s point of view, no previous home could be worse than Tutira (142). “All sheep suffer from nostalgia,” wrote Guthrie-Smith, “but the merino is perhaps the most miserably homesick beast on earth.” Liberated in strange country, a mob of merinos will lie against the barrier—cliff, river, fence, whatever it may be—blocking their homeward route. Night after night, day after day, week after week, there they will camp, resigned to starvation. They will hug the fenceline that debars them from returning to their old haunts till their droppings are inches deep, until their lank frames reveal every bone (141). But the rugged high country of Tutira offered many opportunities for sheep to escape: they drowned fording swift rivers, fell into crevices, were snared in thickets of prickly scrub and bogged in muddy quagmires. And not singly, for sheep are followers; a dart by one sparked ten in its train, each misjudged leap had an imitator. In the early years of the run, annual losses of 30 per cent or more were common.

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Just as sheep, when introduced into new territory, map it out through trails leading to bogs and crevices as well as green pastures, so too with the farmer: inexperience leads to failure; loss and wastage promote adaptation as conditions change. What might, in retrospect, look like a narrative of steadily rising improvement, of mistakes corrected and right paths eventually found, turns out to have been the by-product of repetition and chance. This is not adaptation in a strict evolutionary sense, for plans of course are deliberately made, but the role of intention in the historical patterning of events is much reduced in Tutira. Unconscious behavior— the sorts of things people do when operating on automatic pilot—and unplanned outcomes play a greater role in accounting for change. In this anti-teleological view of history, there is a sense in which humans transform the land in much the same way sheep corrugate the hillside with their trails and sleeping places. A sheep, retiring for the night, turns round three or four times before finally settling, with downward hooves dug in to take pressure. Through the repetition of insignificant action, they build a series of platforms, jutting, like a pouting lower lip, from the side of the hill. In a similar manner, their trails over the property evolve like a river into rapid and pool formations, the current of movement diverted here by a large obstacles, braiding there at open ground, or forming a single stream where a pocket of bush had funnelled animals into a closer file. But in wet weather, the reticulated paths and hollows made by the sheep act as open drains, rushing off rainwater, and contributing to the transformation of the countryside from a soft sponge to a hard slate vulnerable to slips and erosion of topsoil. As the turf gradually lost quality, hardier varieties of sheep had to be introduced. “It would be easy to stretch the links of cause and effect,” writes Guthrie-Smith: … the hills become like stone; the settler growls as, tipping his correspondence from mailbag onto verandah floor, he opens an epistle demanding an increase in rates owing to the destruction of bridges [in a flood]. Stock trample a hard countryside 12,000 miles from the great cities of Europe; [where] carpets are softer to the tread—the coarser Lincoln fleece has been supplanted by the finer wool of the Romney Marsh (200). The vision of Tutira is everywhere one of subtle and interactive change, of an environment transformed through “the cumulative result of trivialities” (195). ***

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In accordance with Guthrie-Smith’s wishes, Lake Tutira is now a bird sanctuary and wildlife preserve; the foreshore is a public domain, open for camping and fishing; and the residue of the property provides outdoor education and practical training in farming. Behind the homestead, a trail zigzags up through the hanger—a term for a steep wooded hillside—which is now managed as a native reserve alongside a recently developed arboretum planted in exotics. There are two chapters about the hanger in Tutira, both written for the final edition of the book. In the 1880s, the hanger, like much of the station in preEuropean times, was covered in the dense bracken that burgeoned in the wake of forest fires many centuries ago. Several attempts were made to burn off the fern but the newly sown grasses were crowded out in the spring rush. The third time this happened, owing to the cumulative effect of small changes elsewhere on the farm, a small and somewhat spindly tree, manuka, competed with the bracken for light and space, and within a decade, had largely displaced its forebear. Guthrie-Smith saw the potential for a biological experiment in “reenactment” and let the land alone. For 20 or so years, the hillside was covered in a dense covering of manuka: “a grove of sombre green during the eleven months of the year, a sheet of hawthorn white during the twelfth” (324). But conditions were subtly changing beneath the canopy. Millions of tiny spores and seeds responded to small chinks of light, and boring insects and wind eventually took their toll on weakening top branches of manuka, opening small light wells around which arose “an incipient forest” of tree seedlings, creepers, and ferns (324). In a word, the primeval forest was awakening, and would in turn over-shade and destroy the manuka, creating the “mixed woodland of green-leafed trees, tall shrubs, tree ferns innumerable, creepers, ground ferns, and small terrestrial orchids” that is the hanger today (325). Earlier, Guthrie-Smith had seen environmental change as irreversible. In the original preface, the author commends his book precisely because it preserves a record of irreversible change: “A virgin countryside cannot be restocked; the vicissitudes of its pioneers cannot be reenacted; its invasion by alien plants, animals, and birds cannot be repeated; its ancient vegetation cannot be resuscitated” (xvii). But he now had a new rule: “primordial conditions reassert themselves if given a chance” (320). Natural history could, as it were, be reenacted. The second chapter on the hanger is a hypothetical study of what would happen if a great fire destroyed the forest for a second time. Bracken, manuka, and green leaf tree seedlings would have their chance again; within months, a luxuriant foot high forest would cover the blackened earth but, within this

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“Lilliputian Eden, … as in the first garden of old, the Serpent, too, would be twining and writhing in the form of honeysuckle and convolvulus” (328). He estimated that within four years, “the greater part of the hanger would have become a tangle of suffocating honeysuckle coils, long bramble shoots, sprays of rose, and twining ropes of convolvulus” (328). What to do? Guthrie-Smith reckoned that if one were to mass plant a fast growing exotic like macrocarpa, and faithfully keep the growing trees clear of honeysuckle, blackberry, and other opportunists, they would eventually shade out the creepers and restore a forest of completely alien trees. Ringbarking these aliens would so manage the distribution of light to the forest floor that, in a new phase of regeneration, the hanger would be restored once again to “pristine conditions ere Tasman, Cook, Banks, and Solander were born or thought of” (329). There is an anticipation in this thought experiment of a kind of puritanical nativism that one finds in literary works such as the bone people—”Bloody pines…,” snarls Kerewin, “this land isn’t suitable for immigrants from Monterey or bloody wherever”—and in the Department of Conservation’s policy emphasis on recreating ecosystems found in prehuman times; a portion of Tutira, for example, is now designated a Mainland Island—that is to say, a reserve in which scientists aim to restore primordial conditions by reproducing the ecological security characteristic of an offshore island (Hulme 1985: 157).9 It is not that I object to a preference for native trees, or to setting ambitious conservation goals, but I would wish to disconnect my liking for such things from ahistorical myths of a pristine environment, and from historical models that can only conceive of change in terms either of improvement or of ruin and disaster. Guthrie-Smith leaves us instead with a sense of the interconnectedness of all living things, and of humans as organisms whose migrations from one landmass to another are only to be expected, but who settle the land in much the same way as sheep explore a hillside run, in strings and stragglings that are both unpredictable and highly patterned, and whose actions shape and are shaped by the new world in a dynamic that poses a fundamental problem of perspective. In the last paragraph of “The Hanger,” one of the last chapters composed for Tutira, Guthrie-Smith writes: When a block of land passes, as it may do through the hands of ten holders in half a century, how can long views be taken of its rights? Who under these conditions can give his acres their due? Aue, taukari e, ano te kuware o te Pakeha kahoro nei i whakaaro ki to mauri o te whenua. Alas! Alas! That the Pakeha should so neglect the

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What makes his lament different from the usual compromise whereby we accept the benefits of land development while mourning its results, is the historical vision which emerges from taking a long view of the history of this sheep station, and which rues the amnesia that accompanies a foreshortening of time in the new place. Looking back, nothing has turned out quite as expected, unintended results have been at least as important as planned actions, the future has never been inevitable, but nor have individuals, whether sheep, sparrows or humans, been able to “withstand the stream of tendency” (xiii). The individual is “drawn like water into the whirlpool, like dust into the draught” (xiii). But this stream of tendency is not a juggernaut of progress or ruination moving irresistibly, like a locomotive, along its iron rungs; a tendency is irresistible not because it is powerful, not because it is massive, but precisely because it is an aggregation of very small and insignificant pieces of behavior. “If this volume has a value,” he writes, “it is because of [its] insistence on the cumulative effects of trivialities” (320). It is a long view that allows us to see the settlement of New Zealand by Europeans on the same stage as its settlement by rabbits and weasels, bumble bees and trout, and in terms of processes and tendencies that resist reduction to the cartoon binaries of colonist or invader, improvement or ruination. Notes 1 This poem, one of Bethell’s most widely anthologized, was first published in From a Garden in the Antipodes (1929). 2 A smaller number of countries had areas of land under protected status by that date: aside from areas of the German, Italian and Swiss Alps, these were located primarily in British colonies in Africa (three parks) and the Indian subcontinent (three parks), and in the settler societies of Argentina and Chile (three parks). But when we note that Australia, Canada, and the USA also had an additional 14 parks under protected status prior to 1910, the correlation between these settler societies and the origins of the national park movement remains clear. Figures taken from the table “Principal national parks of the world” published in Britannica Online at 3 I am indebted to the environmental historian, Geoff Park, for this association between National Parks and the notorious legal doctrine of Terra Nullius. See his essay, “Our Terra Nullius,” Landfall 204 (November 2002), 53–67. New Zealand, of course, was never legally regarded as an “empty land” but the doctrine was applied in Australia.

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rights of the land, so forget the traditions of the Maori race, a people who recognised in it something more than the ability to grow meat and wool (325).

4 I prefer this slight variation on Cronon’s original choice of terms. He writes: “The one group of plots might be called ‘progressive,’ given their dependence on eighteenth-century Enlightenment notions of progress; the other might be called ‘tragic’ or ‘declensionist,’ tracing their historical roots to romantic and anti-modernist reactions against progress,” (1352). 5 According to the New Zealand Government’s 1994 “Environment 2010 Strategy” report: “The possum population is around 70 million. They eat around 21,000 tonnes of vegetation every 24 hours, causing serious damage to canopies of indigenous species.” 6 Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 16. 7 A fourth edition published in 1969 preserves the text of the third edition and adds an appendix noting changes in botanical and zoological nomenclature. A facsimile fifth edition, with a foreword by William Cronon, appeared in 1999. It is published as a Godwit Book by Random House in New Zealand and the University of Washington Press in the United States. Pagination is constant for the textual matter of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions; unless otherwise specified, all subsequent page references in this essay are from the 3rd edition, valid for subsequent editions, and are given in the body of this essay. 8 Guthrie-Smith was confident that had the earthquake occurred after Maori settlement of the lake, a record of the event would have been preserved in oral tradition. 9 The reserve is now called Boundary Stream Mainland Island. For further information and links, see the New Zealand Department of Conservation’s webpages for Parks and Recreation:

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Native Reenactments/Living Iterability: Lisa Reihana’s Native Portraits n.19897 Jo Smith Victoria University of Wellington

Reenacting colonial and racial stereotypes within the contemporary settler context of Aotearoa/New Zealand is a persistently popular practice amongst Maori and Pacific Island artists and performers.1 The active reappropriation of colonial stereotypes such as the Dusky Maiden and Noble Warrior enable contemporary indigenous artists to “speak back” to the colonial legacy of a settler nation. This form of “native” agency involves a necessarily double-edged quality in that these artists draw from the same colonial legacy that historically subjugated indigenous knowledge and modes of expression. Accordingly, while some contemporary indigenous artworks not only offer a critique of dominant modes of representation, the context in which these artworks circulate can also domesticate and regulate the critical potential of such creative practices. This ambivalent, Janus-faced process always already marks indigenous cultural production and characterizes the postcolonial condition of the indigene within the contemporary settler nation. One such artwork that astutely encapsulates these tensions is the multimedia installation Native Portraits n.19897 (hereafter Native Portraits) produced by Lisa Reihana (of Nga Puhi, English and Welsh descent) for the Museum of New Zealand—Te Papa Tongarewa. The critical reception of Native Portraits emphasizes the installation’s simulation of colonial portraiture and its critique of colonial history. I, on the other hand, emphasize the fact that the artwork was initially displayed at a national museum and argue that critics have overlooked the ways in which this positioning illuminates contemporary modes of settler governmentality (understood as technologies of power and modes of thought operating in a settler nation) that function to regulate and condition indigenous artworks. Accordingly, this essay inquires into the multiple possibilities opened up by indigenous reenactment of colonial 273

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portraiture techniques within the confines of a public museum such as Te Papa, such as visual irony, ambivalence, the disturbance and reconstruction of the teleology of history, and an affective relation to the past. Native Portraits (1998) remains one of Lisa Reihana’s most critically acclaimed artworks and has been exhibited in major international art galleries since its completion in 1998. Originally commissioned for the opening of New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa, Native Portraits drew on colonial photographs and postcards held in the museum’s collection to create a series of video vignettes that brought to life scenes from the colonial past as well as more recent times. Reihana reworked these museum materials (principally photographs from the nineteenthcentury photographers Alfred and Walter Burton) using themes, aesthetic structures, and cultural elements drawn from the world of Maori.2 While aspects of this original installation have since had a life outside of the nation’s museum, the context of Native Portraits’s initial emergence at Te Papa plays a crucial part in understanding the multiple effects this work has generated. Te Papa was conceived at a time when bicultural policies (the official recognition of two separate peoples) dominated Maori and State relationships during the 1980s and 1990s. According to Dominic O’Sullivan, bicultural reformism posed a challenge to the image of New Zealand as a racially harmonious nation of “one people” and has influenced policy practices since 1986.3 Born out of Maori political activism during the 1970s and 1980s, biculturalism seeks to honor the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi signed between the British Crown and (some) Maori representatives.4 Based on an ethos of partnership, biculturalism recognizes the importance of the Maori language within the nation and seeks to incorporate elements of Maori culture into public institutions. At its heights in the 1980s and early 1990s, Paul Spoonley suggests that active biculturalism “has been largely confined to particular sectors of the State.”5 While construed as a path to social justice for Maori, many critics regard biculturalism as a management technique for controlling other forms of political resistance and suggest that biculturalism is characterized by an explicitly assimilatory intent.6 Te Papa is one of the most visible and public example of biculturalism. The ethos of partnership between Maori and State not only informs the architectural spaces of Te Papa (which includes a marae and Treaty exhibit); the museum declares itself bicultural in its list of corporate principles, the first of which states that, “Te Papa values and reflects the cultural heritage and diversity of Tangata Whenua [the people of

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Te Papa’s sustained commitment to biculturalism, demonstrated in careful consultation with iwi about all matters pertaining to Maori taonga, and in the effort to maintain Maori representation internally, constitutes a real effort at partnership and a genuine act of decolonization (2004: 182). This attention to issues of partnership and biculturalism also make Te Papa a flagship of new museum practices. As Conal McCarthy argues, the inclusion of an indigenous perspective is a salient feature of the new museum in “post-settler” nations such as New Zealand.8 This new style of museum exhibition practice privileges an audience-oriented and experiential approach to display culture. Anna Neill describes the characteristics of this new form of museology in the following manner: It rejects the triumphant narrative of national destiny. It criticises the way in which museums have traditionally upheld the aura of the object and granted the viewer unmediated access to a frozen past. It advocates exposing the artifice of display in which objects are apparently re-embedded in their authentic environments. New museology advocates strategies of exhibition that involve the viewer interactively, suggesting that history and meaning are constructed and sometimes contradictory (183). Initially critiqued for its populist approach, Te Papa is that new breed of museum that favors experiential learning and interactive interfaces.9 Adaptive to the needs of its constituents, Te Papa offers a useful case study of new museology and its political aspirations. Technically innovative, the museum also seeks to explicitly de-colonize the nation’s history and replace narratives of “triumphant” national destiny with a story of New Zealand as a bicultural nation. It comes as no surprise, then, that an indigenous multimedia artist such as Reihana would be selected to produce a work for the opening of the museum. Reihana’s ongoing concern with issues of cultural identity, the relationship between words and images, and the untold histories of indigenous belonging certainly complements Te Papa’s mandate to recognize the importance of an indigenous perspective.10 Reihana’s installation also meets the aims of new museology by offering a vibrant

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the land—Maori] and Tangata Tiriti [the people of the Treaty of Waitangi—non-Maori].”7 Maori are also represented on the board and at all levels of management. As Anna Neill notes:

and technologically-savvy performance of Maori cultural specificity that encourages audience interaction. Video monitors and audio sequences help bring to life traditional art forms such as tukutuku (woven panels) and woodcarvings, with the structure of the installation echoing the cultural spaces of a community marae (meeting place). The design of the installation invited museum visitors to walk through a waharoa (archway) of video monitors encased in colonial period cabinets.11 By recreating a traditional cultural form using contemporary media technologies, Reihana juxtaposes past and present representational systems to demonstrate how the harnessing of new media and modes of representation have been a persistent feature of Maori cultural practices, a juxtaposition that seems to directly address those mid-eighteenth to late nineteenthcentury representations of Maori as a culture in decline.12 Much of the critical reception surrounding Reihana’s installation has focused on the work’s ability to explore the “active construction of recorded history” or its subversion of clichéd Polynesian stereotypes through the restaging of images of the past (Taouma 2004: 41).13 These discussions have focused more on the colonial history of representations of Maori as debunked by Native Portraits and less on the original context of Reihana’s installation, the bicultural flagship, Te Papa. Critics have focused on the trope of indigenous cultural producers “speaking back” to the representational systems that framed them as the objects rather than subjects of history. By reenacting and thus renewing Te Papa’s legacy of display and exhibition, critics argue that Reihana’s work asserts an indigenous perspective on colonial and historical processes of domination.14 While a necessary and important critique, one can also examine the ways in which Native Portraits “speaks to” the contemporary nation. That is to say, it is also useful to examine how Native Portraits participates in an institutional site of state-sanctioned biculturalism where (as critics of biculturalism might have it) the risk of domesticating Maori cultural differences exist. According to Vanessa Agnew, reenactment historiography is a contemporary practice that, at its best, works to disclose the always contested nature of orthodox national histories, and, at its worst, is a symptom of a generalized depoliticization of history within contemporary global culture (Agnew 2004: 328). There can be no doubt that Native Portraits offers a critique of colonial cultures of display, reminding museum audiences about the historical practices that produced understandings of Maori. By the same token, the site of the original exhibit (the national museum) has the potential to both normalize new museological practices and transform this critique of colonialism

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into a neo-colonial celebration of New Zealand’s bicultural present. Those critics who emphasize Native Portraits’ ability to offer a hitherto submerged narrative of the past—a kind of subaltern history—overlook the double-edged logic of these historical reenactments and the manner in which the debunking of history has become de rigueur in new museums. If it is now Te Papa’s role to replace narratives of “triumphant” national destiny with a story of New Zealand as a bicultural nation, what other stories of the nation and communities does this decolonizing gesture overshadow?15

Native Portraits as a critique of colonialism To some extent, Reihana’s installation can be seen as a politicized response to what Conal McCarthy calls the nineteenth-century museum practice of enshrining “indigenous culture within a Pacific Orientalism” that objectified Maori cultural material and classified it as artifacts of a dying race (McCarthy 2006: 117). Native Portraits was originally designed for the Te Papa exhibition named Kanohi ki te Kanohi (broadly translated as “Face to Face” or “Facing It”), a title that suggests that the New Zealand public is being invited to face is the history of colonial imposition and the ongoing “native” resistance to this imposition. The arch-like waharoa structure of the installation that the audience must pass through thus takes on greater significance in light of the exhibition’s title. The architecture of the display brings the museum audience into close proximity to the role played by photography in inscribing understandings of Maori cultural difference. The ethnographic reenactments in Native Portraits use moving imagery to dramatize the dual effects of the colonial visual archive and the ways in which these representational systems mask an alternate history of Maori as active agents in the nation’s past. Reihana’s use of moving imagery is crucial to the re-orientation of our understanding of colonial portraiture. In some instances, video footage captures subjects in motion prior to (or shortly after) posing for an imagined photographer who will record their existence. In the case of Reihana’s recreation of an existing photograph titled Te Oraka raua ko Ani (a photograph noted for the distracted gaze of the chief Te Oraka), Reihana provides an account of the action that might have occurred prior to the portrait sitting.16 As Reihana’s video portrait depicts it, Te Oraka and his granddaughter Ani are too absorbed in a conversation about war (perhaps a reference to the Land Wars of the 1860s) to pay heed to the photographer’s attempt to arrange their postures. What is captured instead is Te

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Oraka’s distracted gaze. In this video portrait, chief and granddaughter will not sit still for the photographer; their imagined involvement in pressing political concerns serves to challenge colonial portraiture, a mode of representation that simply froze the native in an idealized time and space.17 By invoking “before and after” actions together with the staged pose for the implied photographer, Reihana’s video portrait situates Te Oraka and his granddaughter not as passive objects of a colonial gaze but as active participants in the history of the nation. Posed in traditional kakahu (cloaks), Reihana’s contemporary models reenact the historical events of the past and literally stand in for the historical persons, Te Oraka and Ani. Where still photography is conventionally understood to preserve the past in a manner that underscores the ideals of historical veracity (we can think here of Andre Bazin’s notion of a “pure and preserved” past), Reihana’s video reenactments remind her audience of the constructed and highly mediated nature of all acts of representation.18 As Sophie Jerram remarks, when she describes the consciousness-raising powers of Native Portraits: [I]n the dramatization of Native Portraits n.19897 we are made acutely aware of the choice of pose, costume and “backstory” in contrast to genuine historical photographs. Combined with other hand-held still video portraits, these works remind us that misrepresentations and constructions of personal and national identity continue today. Despite greater cultural sensitivity, historicallyclichéd images continue to be perpetuated by the tourism of New Zealand in 2004 (Jerram 2004: 46). Reihana’s use of video footage emphasizes the immediacy of events occurring in real time, while the tension between movement and stasis brings an animated quality to the conventions of still photography. The technological set-up of the installation also makes an intimate appeal to the audience by “fleshing out” the two-dimensional conventions of still photography. The three-dimensional waharoa structure and the small video monitors and audio soundtrack force the audience into close proximity with the installation; they must lean in to listen and view the collage of sound and image-scapes that constitute the artwork. These portraits produce audio-visual experiences that round out the two-dimensional portraiture convention, highlighting the immersive and interactive dimensions of the installation.

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As if to highlight the seepage between past and present, Reihana juxtaposes historical reenactments of colonial portraiture with more contemporary representations of Maori. This convergence between past and present imagery (as well as the distinction made in the video between movement and stasis) generates the kind of affective charge described by Fred Myers in his review of the New York version of the exhibit: There is something powerful to the effect in having moving video in imitation of portraits, in having the subjects hold a pose, emphasizing the smallest of movements—suspension of animation. One video sequence reenacts a photographer, with an old camera, telling a woman how to pose. ‘Lie down here,’ she is told. ‘Would you be so good as to remove your clothes?’ Then the video cuts to swimsuit photos (Myers 2005: 275). Myers points out that Reihana’s use of moving imagery produces an affective encounter, which reminds contemporary audiences about the power dynamics involved in photographic techniques. Reihana’s alternative visual techniques do not simply bring a historically underrepresented cultural group back “to life”; these temporal experiments with video portraiture reduce the distance between the historical object and the contemporary museum audience and affirm the living link between them. By affirming the dynamic relationship between the past and the present, Reihana’s strategic repetitions of colonial portraiture techniques produce a form of historical reenactment that gestures to what some might call a subaltern historiography: other ways of knowing the relationship between the past and the present hitherto submerged within the settler nation.19 If, as Vanessa Agnew argues, the stated aim of reenactment is to bring to light histories “from below,” then certainly Reihana’s video portraits remind the Te Papa audience that the colonial settlement of New Zealand depended on the subjugation of its indigenous peoples, and, further, that technologies of representation contribute to the ongoing subjection of Maori (Agnew 2004: 327). However, Agnew also warns her readers of the dangers of historical reenactment. Discussing the reenactment of medieval crusaders in Australia, Agnew writes: Reenactment often verges close to fantasy role-playing in its elastic appropriation of both the real and imagined past. Indeed, there is a

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While Agnew’s examples differ significantly from Reihana’s native reenactments (which involve contemporary Maori dressing as historical “natives”), the act of “bringing the past to the people” is a common theme. Taking Agnew’s warning seriously forces us to consider how Reihana’s installation might not only retrieve a hitherto submerged history; the very act of retrieval can also produce an unintended disconnect with the past that depoliticizes Reihana’s interventions. That is to say, critiques that focus on Native Portraits as a subaltern re-writing of colonial history and the continuation of stereotypes in industries such as tourism (recall Jerram’s comments of New Zealand tourism imagery in 2004 quoted earlier), overlook the state-sanctioned context in which this re-writing took place.

Native Portraits and new museology While Native Portraits can be praised for its critique of colonial history, its intention to debunk representations and highlight the artifice of display culture finds an easy fit within contemporary museology. The significant role of museums in disseminating colonial modes of knowing suggests that one must be wary of such synergies between an indigenous cultural producer and a state-funded museum designed to narrate the history of this settler nation. As Tony Bennett has long argued, the museum is institutionally crucial to the regulation and maintenance of a nation’s culture. The museum is a site of ongoing reconstruction in terms of representing the changing state of the nation. As such, it has always been subject to demands for reform driven by two key principles—first, that the museum be open and accessible to all and, second, that it represent the cultures and values of its constituents.20 In the context of New Zealand museums, Te Papa is a result of, and indeed encapsulates the tensions between, two influential moments in the development of New Zealand national identity in the mid- to late 1980s—the emergence of a politicized Maori consciousness that agitated for institutional and governmental changes, and neo-liberal economic reforms. According to Conal McCarthy, New Zealand museum and display culture underwent a form of “domestic decolonization” in the 1960s and experienced a cultural revitalization in the 1980s (the Maori

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general discrepancy between the mandate of reenactment—bringing the people to the past—and those same people’s dislocation from the reenacted past (328).

Renaissance). This placed the world of Maori firmly on the agenda of a hither to Pakeha-dominated public sphere (Pakeha is the term used to describe New Zealanders of European origin).21 As McCarthy notes, the museum become a central institution for effecting Maori cultural revitalization in this period. The national and international success of the exhibit Te Maori (which toured New Zealand and the United States between 1984–87) functioned as a catalyst for iwi (tribes) who renewed their cultural links with those materials once locked behind glass displays. McCarthy describes how this exhibition marked a shift in understanding. Whereas carvings, greenstone, and weavings had been seen as museum artifacts, they now came to be understood as taonga—ancestral treasures that have a spiritual and cultural connection to the people to whom they belong. Understanding materials as taonga means recognizing that the links between the presentday people and their ancestors (or tupuna) function in deeply moving and affective ways. The Te Maori exhibition is notable for the way it rekindled an awareness of Maori culture for both young and old iwi members; Maori visitors experienced a sense of being called to by ancestral voices speaking through the taonga (McCarthy 2004: 120. The exhibition has now come to symbolize a form of decolonized Maori identity that functioned to return urbanized Maori to their cultural roots and practices (116). The symbolic value of such shifts in museum practices cannot be underestimated for such shifts reflect the intimate and dynamic relationship between state-sanctioned institutional practices and national and cultural identities. Current museum practices are subsequently informed by a bicultural ethos that recognizes the cultural specificities of Maori. The shifts in Maori display and exhibition culture inaugurated in the 1980s find their contemporary echo in the new museology that informed Te Papa’s founding in 1998. These shifts from the decolonizing principles of the 1980s to the bicultural politics of the 1990s throw light on the role of the museum in reflecting a more equitable form of contemporary settlement. The online introduction to Te Papa’s longstanding exhibition Mana Whenua attests to this desire for a new and improved settler nation and confirms the museum’s principles of governance as based on a form of biculturalism in which Maori themselves can govern aspects of the representational spaces within the state-sponsored institution: The exhibition has been, and continues to be, developed through extensive consultation and partnerships with iwi (tribes) regarding

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their treasures. Iwis’ direct involvement in the selection, presentation, and interpretation of taonga acknowledges the living nature of taonga. It also ensures that the exhibition speaks with the mana (authority) of the people rather than from an ‘other’ perspective. The special relationship between Maori and their taonga is a vital dimension in the life of Te Papa Tongarewa now and into the future.22 This reference to “an ‘other,’” as well as the official recognition of the “special relationship between Maori and their taonga” clearly signals Te Papa’s sensitivity to the power dynamics of the colonial exhibitionary complex, a sensitivity that now characterizes contemporary forms of settlement. Linking the 1984 Te Maori exhibit with the 1998 Mana Whenua exhibition of Te Papa, Conal McCarthy concludes that the earlier objectification of Maori cultural materials by colonial exhibition processes has been the focus of political and cultural reform and that a crucial feature of these shifts is the recognition of the role of taonga for Maori. McCarthy argues that the institutional affirmation of the living relationship between Maori and taonga invites new modes of cultural interpellation that might affirm the agency of Maori within the settler nation and unsettle established understandings of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Where once the colonial museum displayed taonga as evidence of a dying race, the new museum of the 1980s and 1990s acknowledges the living and active link between taonga and Maori cultural identity and practices. Drawing on the Foucauldian inflections of Tony Bennett’s analysis, one could say that the principles behind the colonial museum have shifted dramatically from an anticipation of the cultural death of Maori to the recognition of the lively and dynamic nature of Maori cultural practices and worldviews, a liveliness that Native Portraits demonstrates. Yet these shifts in modes of understanding and engaging with Maori are not devoid of power dynamics. Indeed, McCarthy remains ambivalent about the effects of such institutional shifts and official forms of recognition, observing: Despite the rhetoric surrounding Maori-centerd exhibitions, displays of taonga Maori are no less a product of their time than other visual categories. […] It is too early to say whether the new generation of Maori exhibitions represent a postcolonial accommodation of nation and native, or merely a crude inversion of the self/other

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Following McCarthy’s observation that museum practices are always historically and politically embedded, one must be wary of a statesponsored institution’s recognition of taonga as good bicultural practice. Under certain conditions, such progressive acts of political advancement (the recognition of cultural artifacts as taonga and the inclusion of a Maori perspective in national museum spaces) can in fact function as a strategy of inclusion that offers no fundamental shift in the power dynamics between Maori and Pakeha. If 1980s New Zealand experienced the cultural and political revitalization of Maori, it also played witness to the incumbent Labour Party’s (commonly perceived as pro Socialist) introduction of neo-liberal economic reforms, the effects of which still condition contemporary cultural politics.23 The emphasis on economic viability is a feature of new museology that seeks to demonstrate the relevance of museums within a public sphere increasingly defined through consumer paradigms. Te Papa encapsulates these tensions and can be characterized as an audience-focused and biculturally-oriented institution that attempts to appeal to a broad and populist audience, as well as recognize the rights of Maori to participate in the production of the exhibition complex. The dual mandate of the contemporary museum—accessibility and representation—is typically framed in the case of Te Papa in terms of a “visitor-centered” perspective that is also shaped by the political recognition of an indigenous worldview.24 Te Papa’s aspirations towards true bicultural partnership (best reflected in the corporate principles of the institution) coexist with the museum’s need to demonstrate relevance and commercial viability. By provocatively noting that the website for Te Papa advertises its “living marae” in close proximity to the “Disneystyle rides offered on the floor below,” critics such as Anna Neill remind us that the bicultural ethos behind Te Papa commingles with new museum practices that develop exhibitions about the nation and its people “at the level of the individual and through the logic of consumption” (Neill 2004: 183). Neill’s discussion of the ways in which Te Papa dramatizes the dynamic relationship between neo-liberal reforms and bicultural practices can refine our understandings of the function played by Native Portraits at the opening of this national museum. As an indigenous artist commissioned by Te Papa to produce a work for its opening, Native Portraits can be considered as multimedia taonga.25 If Te Maori freed the taonga from its containment in a glass cabinet,

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equation which retains the same old Manichean allegory of colonizer/ colonized (McCarthy 2004: 124).

Reihana’s Native Portraits brings to light the affective charge of taonga/ Maori encounters using audio and visual techniques to reanimate neglected aspects of New Zealand history. Not only this, the more contemporary images of Maori in Reihana’s exhibit emphasize the techniques of the new museology: interactivity, experiential learning, and historical simulation, and these are modes of address open to both Maori and nonMaori.

The persistence of settler governmentality The Maori Renaissance of the 1980s not only produced reforms in art and cultural practices (of which Te Maori is a part); the 1980s also included the rise of state-sanctioned biculturalism within government departments and public institutions. The structure and governance surrounding Te Papa are products of these times and express an explicitly bicultural mandate. Avril Bell’s analysis of Te Papa’s bicultural rhetoric attends to the role of the museum in generating state-sanctioned narratives of a contemporary bicultural present that risk smoothing the complexities of colonial/indigenous encounters. Wary of the allegedly “progressive” nature of biculturalism, Bell admits that recognizing and honoring the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi as a partnership between two peoples has its benefits for Maori. However, biculturalism also works to keep Maori and Pakeha apart and overlooks their history of crosscultural encounter (Bell 2006: 254). Bell suggests that Te Papa is one such site where state-sanctioned histories of the two people work to “bifurcate” the nation and thus prevent a more nuanced interrogation of the past (266). Biculturalism as bifurcation is also a risk that attends Te Papa’s commissioning of Reihana’s work, a risk signaled in the title of that section of Te Papa (“Facing It”) where Native Portraits was displayed. The ethos of “facing up” to history accords with the general principles of what Bell calls “state-sponsored history” and we can very comfortably read Native Portraits in light of Te Papa’s role as generator of public history that affirms the agency of Maori within colonial history. “Facing It” emphasizes a conciliatory gesture towards the colonial past that asks its audience (Maori and Pakeha) to recognize the violence (both real and cultural) done to Maori and to acknowledge the alternate modes of agency available to Maori in the colonial period. As a discourse of political reform, the museum-going public is thus invited to reflect upon the colonial past. At the same time a naturalized division between Maori and Pakeha is called into being and functions to

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consolidate the differences between the two separate people. The dyad of colonizer and colonized is thus reenacted in the contemporary postcolonial context. Accordingly, this very invitation not only consolidates the differences between Maori and Pakeha; the aesthetic evocation of colonial portraiture such as that of Te Oraka raua ko Ani draws attention to the past at the risk of eliding Native Portraits’ critical perspective on contemporary forms of exhibition and display, including those of Te Papa’s new museum practices. If Te Papa is the flagship of best bicultural practice, then exhibiting Native Portraits at the opening of this institution risks presenting biculturalism as an already achieved state of affairs in the late 1990s. The violence of the settlement of New Zealand is thus eased by a strategy of reconciliation that attempts to “smooth the pillow” of New Zealand settler history.26 This means that, while it ostensibly offers a critique of the past, placing Native Portraits within the institutional domain of Te Papa also risks resolving the complexities of this past by affirming an achieved and reformed bicultural present. In a climate where techniques of display are continually revised in light of shifting political conditions, the viability of Te Papa as an institution, and of biculturalism as best political practice, is not obviously in question in the critical reception surrounding Reihana’s work. Instead, critics naturalize Te Papa’s role in providing space and resources for an indigenous artist to make a critique of those museum practices that historically objectified Maori. As such, the critical reception of Native Portraits focuses on the content of Reihana’s critique (her subaltern voice) and not the context in which that critique is made (the new museum practices of Te Papa). By emphasizing Reihana’s ability to express a Maori world view (temporally, aesthetically, and politically) the critical reception surrounding Native Portraits also reenacts a fundamental division between colonizer and colonized, Maori and non-Maori. 27 Moreover, by privileging Native Portraits’ ability to debunk the representational systems of colonialism, or contemporary tourism imagery, commentators such as Jerram and Myers overlook the initial context out of which the work emerged, the ostensibly new, improved, and allegedly more inclusive display practices of new museology. Yet, if new museum practices themselves do the work of debunking historical and contemporary representations, and thus align themselves with the decolonizing practices of Maori, what new forms of critique are possible under such conditions? How might the bifurcatory logic of biculturalism be disturbed and rewired? If we return to the concept of taonga and its incorporation into a state-sanctioned institution such as Te Papa, one might begin to see how Reihana’s multimedia

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taonga offers a disruption of orthodox approaches to biculturalism (as good political practice) and orthodox understandings of native agency (framed in terms of “speaking back” to narratives of nationhood that have historically subjugated indigenous forms of knowledge). Te Papa’s institutional recognition of taonga, while apparently driven by a democratic ethos, activates a form of attention that incorporates taonga into a recognizable and dominant system of meaning (statesanctioned biculturalism) that privileges the separate sphere model of biculturalism as bifurcation. That is to say, the official incorporation of this concept into museum practices risks restricting the notion of taonga to a specifically Maori cultural practice, a process of bifurcation that yet again functions to consolidate the self/other structure of the colonizer/colonized dyad to which Conal McCarthy’s analysis is so attentive. An insistence upon taonga as a cultural construct negates the fact that as a state-sanctioned museum practice, taonga becomes that charged and affective concept that speaks to the general condition of this nation, a mode of address that also includes non-Maori. That is to say, taonga is a form of Maori cultural difference that has been incorporated by a contemporary settler institution (Te Papa), a process that marks taonga with the messy discursive conditions of postcoloniality. As such, Reihana’s multimedia taonga could be considered as generating and dramatizing a newly forged concept of taonga born of the ongoing encounter between Maori and non-Maori. That is to say, by focusing on the conditions of its emergence, Native Portraits could be understood as inviting contemporary audiences to engage with the affective, spiritual, and temporal dimensions of Maori forms of taonga in light of the increasingly affective, interactive, and temporally dispersed practices of the new museum of Te Papa. If this is so, then what are the conditions necessary to understand the critical potential of such an approach to taonga and museum practice?

Native Portraits as reenactment historiography New museum practices and exhibits, in particular Reihana’s Native Portraits, are part of a larger shift in historical storytelling that affirms the affective and interactive dimensions of the past and its convergence with the present. Reihana’s method of juxtaposing past and present imagery finds its conceptual echo in Katie King’s discussion of historiography as reenactment.28 In her examination of emergent forms of knowledge making, King privileges the role played by globalization in the production and dissemination of new forms of historical representation. Emblematic

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of this new form of history writing is Keith Hopkins’s 1999 text, A World Full of Gods, which uses (among other experimental techniques) the mock documentary strategy of a film crew interviewing a surviving member of a Jewish sect to retell the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For King, such techniques combine popular cultural discourses (in this example, the genre of television documentary) with knowledge of the past (historical discourses surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls) to produce an assemblage that links the past to the present, or what King, following Donna Haraway, calls “pastpresents.”29 Hopkins’s historical/contemporary assemblage uses a historiographic method that switches between commercialized forms of knowledge (the genre of television documentary) and more scholarly forms of history writing (King 2004: 465). King suggests that this technique parallels Haraway’s method of “diffraction,” knowledge constitutes the “record of a passage” across, within, and through divergent discourses. This is a practice of historical representation that attempts to “make visible all those things that have been lost to an object; not in order to make the other meanings disappear, but rather to make it impossible for the bottom line to be one single statement” (465). According to King, this new historiography registers the struggle for meaning and signification within and across divergent communities of practice. By privileging the unending and flexible process of historical representation, with its attendant power struggles, King’s reenactment historiography offers new forms of historical classification that reveal “pastpresent” relationships. These kinds of pastpresent relationships invite the audience to replace a drive for historical veracity or expert knowledge with an openended embrace of the unknown so that they may “become beginners, over and over” and “give up mastery and […] open [themselves] up to risk, connection, and sometimes enthusiasm” (460). By putting into question the bottom line of History as “one single statement,” reenactment historiography peoples the archive with numerous voices from many different times, social positions, and places. This form of history writing privileges the mutually productive and agonistic relations between the past and the present, a process that highlights history as a contested and interested act of production. By replacing mastery over the past (the promise of traditional notions of history) with an attitude of curiosity that opens us to risk and “enthusiasm,” such techniques then expose “new distributed creativities” (King’s term) that entail new forms of agency. King’s discussion of the mutually productive and agonistic relations between the past and the present in reenactment historiography echo the dynamics of Reihana’s multimedia taonga. Where Hopkins draws

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upon the television documentary genre to reenact the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Reihana uses video footage to retell the history of colonial ethnography and its relationship to contemporary display culture. Juxtaposing old with new technologies as well as using contemporary and historical costuming, Reihana switches between the past and the present to produce slippages in teleological time that decenter the historical authority of the ethnographic text. Native Portrait uses a commercialized format (video) to reenact the somber poses of an earlier time, a process of mimicry and repetition that debunks the presumed veracity of ethnographic visual culture. These videographic pastpresent assemblages invite the audience to work through the multiple layers of meaning that the installation enunciates. By restaging the “before and after” events of an actual historical photograph, Reihana attempts to “make visible all those things that have been lost” to the historical photograph or postcard. Among the elements made visible in Native Portraits is the active role played by Maori in political issues of the day. The living and breathing models used in Reihana’s reenactments also recall the diverse meanings attached to the concept of taonga as it circulates within (and against) the exhibition complex of the colonial museum and Maori socio-cultural systems. The affective dimensions of taonga are reenacted by the direct address of the Maori performers who recreate colonial portraiture techniques. This direct address to the contemporary Te Papa audience is also an invitation to understand taonga as a concept underpinning an alternate historiography, one that attends to the power dynamics of the present as much as the past. Where the state’s recognition of taonga risks incorporating this concept into an orthodox system of meaning (taonga as a cultural idea specific only to Maori), Reihana’s “pastpresent” reenactment of taonga highlights another conceptual dimension. Rather than taonga being indicative of a political process of bicultural reform that emphasizes the separateness of the two people (biculturalism as bifurcation), Reihana’s multimediated taonga (which incorporates aspects of Maori cultural specificity and the consumer-oriented and interactive practices of the new museum) puts into play a system of thought and emotion that invites its audience to experience the more general conditions of New Zealand’s postcolonial historiography as structured along “pastpresent” lines. This alternate mode of critique dramatizes history writing as a struggle across divergent discursive terrains, a struggle shared by both Maori and non-Maori. What matters is not the production of any one single statement of the past but rather the performative and affective encounter between installation and audience—a form of living iterability that regis-

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ters the liveliness of postcolonial forms of historical production and the shared postcolonial predicament of Maori and non-Maori. Reihana’s video portraits can thus be described as a “record of passage” that dramatizes the messy discursive entanglements that inform, produce, and regulate those subjects who live in the aftermath of colonization. As an artwork that emphasizes movement over stasis, Native Portraits reveals a dynamic temporal relationship that provides a counterpoint to conventional settler histories that presume a break with the past.30 Reihana’s historiography produces a more entwined narrative of colonial history that is not one single narrative or bifurcated story of two peoples but a matrix of storylines that switch from one discursive terrain to another. In so doing, Reihana’s historiography reveals more fully those “distributed creativities” that persist alongside settler and Maori narratives of time and place. Such techniques restage a form of native agency. At the same time, these techniques question the critical potential of decolonizing tactics that seek to express a subaltern point of view. Native Portraits thus gestures to a way of reading New Zealand history and contemporary display culture that not only questions the possibility of any one single narrative of history; it illuminates the potential for conducting a history of the present. The question posed by Native Portraits is this: under what conditions might it be possible to make visible all that has been lost to an object of historical inquiry? Reihana’s task is not to solve these conundrums, but rather to reenact the history of these difficulties. Notes 1 The history of this practice has yet to be written. It could, however, begin with Billy T. James, a comedian, television personality, and musician popular in the 1980s, whose TV shows are currently being rerun on the indigenous channel – Maori Television. One could also think of the entertainer Pio Terei’s television series The Life & Times of Te Tutu, (2000/01, Pipi Productions). Other artists who engage in reenactments of the Dusky Maiden stereotype include the Samoan filmmaker Sima Urale and her mock-documentary Velvet Dreams (1991), and Ani O’Neill, Loni Hutchinson, Sofia Tekela-Smith, and Shigeyuki Kihara’s critique of representations of Pacific women. See Lisa Taouma’s “Gauguin is dead… there is no paradise,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 25, no. 1 (2004): 35–46. See also my “Postcolonial Affirmations: the return of the Dusky Maiden in Sima Urale’s Velvet Dreams,” Continuum 22, no. 1 (2008): 79–88. 2 As Megan Tamati-Quennell describes the work, Native Portraits “recreated in contemporary and moving image form elements of marae architecture and – art” where “Maori concepts relating to time and representation were combined with ideas of tourism, history and technology.” See her interview, “Lisa Reihana in Conversation with Megan Tamati-Quennell,” in Taiawhio – II: Contemporary Maori Artists (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2007), p. 220.

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[H]eld that the Maori, unlike the native peoples in other settler societies, were fortunate to be the recipients of a policy of benign assimilation. They were to be ‘raised’ to the level of European civilization, thus facilitating the transition to ‘one New Zealand people (Williams 1997: 20).

5 6

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This viewpoint stands in complete contrast to Maori perceptions of the Treaty at the time, which viewed the document as securing Maori sovereignty over their resources and lands (and hence partnership, not a “one people” model. See Ranginui Walker’s discussion of the Treaty of Waitangi in Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 90–7. See his book review of Beyond Biculturalism in Kotuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online 3 (2008): 77–9. These critics include O’Sullivan, who argues, “Biculturalism is inherently colonial. It positions Maori in junior ‘partnership’ with the Crown and oversimplifies the culture and political make-up of its assumed homogenous Maori – – and homogenous Pakeha entities” (O’Sullivan 2007: 3). Andrew Sharpe has suggested that strict justice is impossible under a system of biculturalism, Justice and the Maori: The Philosophy and Practice of Maori Claims in New Zealand since the 1970s (Auckland; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Sociologists, Fleras, and Spoonley, have argued that although the term “bicultural” suggests a separate but equal share in power and to the right to self-determination, “[i]nstead of power-sharing through structural adjustments, biculturalism – tends to lead to institutional accommodation by incorporating a Maori dimension into state practices and national symbols.” See Recalling Aotearoa (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 239. See http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/TePapa/English/AboutTePapa/AboutUs/What WeDo/ Corporate+Principles.htm. See his essay “Hailing the Subject: Maori visitors, museum display and the sociology of cultural reception,” New Zealand Sociology. Special Issue: Cultural Politics of Museums 21, no. 1 (2006): 108–30. See Jenny Harper’s newspaper article, “For the Sake of Your Art,” The Dominion, 22 June 1999, 9. See also Dennis Dutton’s criticisms in, “New National Museum Resembles a Junk Shop,” New Zealand Herald, 21 May 1998, A15. Native Portraits was produced in collaboration with Maori musician and poet Hinemoa Baker. Reihana’s body of work includes (among others) the short film Wog Features (1991); Take (1993), a series of small narratives related to – land issues, and A Maori Dragon Story (1995) an animated work based upon a South Island (Kai Tahu) myth. More recently Digital Marae (2003) celebrates the female figures of Maori mythology. Reihana has also collaborated with other Pacific artists including Ani O’Neill (Hypergirls, 1995) and performance group Pacific Sisters. See www.lisareihana.com/ for examples of her work, including scenes from Native Portraits.

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3 See his volume Beyond Biculturalism: the Politics of an Indigenous Minority (Wellington: Huia Press, 2007, pp. 18–21. 4 Interpretations surrounding the Treaty of Waitangi fuel many intra-national tensions. In his essay, “Crippled by Geography? New Zealand Nationalisms,” – – Mark Williams suggests that Pakeha (the Maori term for white settler) thinking at the time of the treaty’s signing:

11 The theme of marae is a recurring one for Reihana and her concept of a “virtual marae” (a communal space made through new media technologies) is a consistent refrain throughout her oeuvre, beginning with Tauira in 1991, which consisted of a 15-minute video designed for 36 monitors that depicts scenes that invoke the experience of being in a whare nui (the meeting house on a marae). Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay also uses the marae metaphor to describe his filmmaking practices in Our Own Image (Auckland, N.Z.: Longman Paul, 1990). More recently, Maori scholar Ocean Mercier uses the marae as a conceptual lens through which she reads Taika Waititi’s short films Two Cars, One Night (2003) and Tama Tu (2005). See her article, “Close Encounters of the Maori Kind,” NZ Journal of Media Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): 37–51. 12 The artworks of Charles Fredrick Goldie (1870–1947) are often considered to – reflect the Victorian belief that Maori were a dying race. For a nuanced discussion of the ambivalent legacy of Goldie’s paintings see Leonard Bell’s discussion, “Looking at Goldie: face to face with ‘All ‘e Same t’e Pakeha,’” in Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, eds. Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163–92. 13 See also Sophie Jerram’s article, “Historical Drama: Fiction and artifice in the work of Lisa Reihana,” ART AsiaPacific 41 (2004): 42–6. 14 In her introductory remarks to a selection of stills from Native Portraits that is included in Rethinking Settler Colonialism, Annie E. Coombes argues that Reihana’s video portraits offer a kind of agency that is absent from the historical photographs. She writes, “This is colonialism as masquerade, and masquerade has always contained the possibility of enacting a strategic appropriation” (Coombes 2006: 10). While Coombes is attentive to the critique of history offered by Native Portraits her own (unremarked upon) use of a still from Native Portraits to adorn the cover of Rethinking Settler Colonialism brackets out the possibility of critiquing contemporary uses of images of (and by) Maori. 15 To some extent, then, my discussion concerns the necessary complicity of indigenous cultural producers working within state-funded institutions such as Te Papa. There is no question that Te Papa advances a Maori presence and that iwi have actively worked with the museum to ensure that cultural displays reflect iwi interests (think here of the current Mana Whenua exhibit of Kai Tahu). There is no question that Reihana’s work has been supported and nurtured by this commissioning institution. However, such institutional inclusivity still raises questions about how the symbolic bicultural significance of Native Portraits at Te Papa might work to obscure other ways of knowing and seeing the nation and its current projection of identity. The point is, that the position of Native Portraits at Te Papa dramatizes—without resolving—these tensions and herein lies the work’s more nascent critical potential; a critical dimension overlooked by cultural commentators on Reihana’s work to date. 16 Sophie Jerram makes this observation in her article “Historical Drama: Fiction and artifice in the work of Lisa Reihana,” ART AsiaPacific 41 (2004): 42–6. 17 For a discussion of the role of postcards and colonial portraiture (including the Burton Brothers) in the New Zealand colonial project see Jacqui Sutton Beets discussion, “Images of Maori Women in New Zealand Postcards after

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1900,” in Bitter Sweet: Indigenous Women in the Pacific, eds Alison Jones, Phyllis Herda, and Tamasailau M. Suaalii (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000), pp. 17–32. Andre Bazin once contended that photography preserves against the damages of time. As he writes, ‘photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption’. See Bazin’s, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 14. The possibilities of subaltern (in this case, indigenous) agency are vexed and involve a necessary complicity with the very representational systems and structures that the subaltern seeks to destabilize. As such, Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the critical possibilities of subaltern historiography underpins my own suspicions of the reception surrounding Native Portraits. See her essay, “Subaltern Studies: deconstructing historiography,” in Spivak: In Other Worlds (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). See Tony Bennett’s essay “The Political Rationality of the Museum,” in Continuum 3, no. 1 (1990). The term “domestic decolonization” comes from the historian James Belich in his work Paradise Reforged: a History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin, 2001). An account of the Maori Renaissance can be found in Ranginui Walker’s volume Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 1990). See the Te Papa web site: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/TePapa/English/Whats On/LongTermExhibitions/ManaWhenua.htm. Accessed 12/01/2008. Jane Kelsey examines the neo-liberal economic reforms of post-1984 New Zealand in her book The New Zealand Experiment (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995). Tony Bennett makes the dual mandate argument in “The Political Rationality of the Museum,” in Continuum 3, no. 1 (1990). The interaction between traditional Maori cultural practices and new media has a long history. Deidre Brown provides a compelling analysis of the challenge facing standard collection management procedures in the wake of – digital technologies and Maori culture in museum contexts. See her essay on – “virtual taonga,” “‘Ko to Ringa ki nga Rakau a te Pakeha’: Virtual Tanga, Maori, and Museums,” in New Zealand Sociology. Special issue: Cultural Politics of Museums 21, no. 1 (2006): 27–48. Bell notes in her article that the phrase “smoothing the pillow” refers to comments made by Issac Featherston in the late nineteenth century in relation to the widely held idea at that time, that Maori were a dying race (Bell 2006: 262). A particularly intriguing aspect of the critical reception surrounding Native Portraits and Reihana herself involves a persisting contradiction. On the one hand, many articles about Reihana and her work take note of her Maori and Pakeha whakapapa (genealogy) while continuing to read the artworks in terms of a solely Maori world view. Reihana herself often takes pains to acknowledge her mixed heritage and the risk of typecasting that attends indigenous cultural producers. See Katie King’s essay, “Historiography as Reenactment: Metaphors and Literalizations of TV Documentaries,” Criticism 46, no. 3 (2004): 459–75.

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29 According to King, “Pastpresents (one word), similar to feminist technoscience historian and theorist Donna Haraway’s naturecultures (also one word), are implosions across discursive and other realms” (2004: 459). 30 Stephen Turner examines the notion of a “broken” history produced by acts of settlement when he writes of the active forgetting that is continuous with processes of colonization and settlement. See his “Managing Identity for the Nation’s Sake,” in Arena Journal 28 (2007): 87–106, in which he writes, “In this way, making a new country, resettling it, involves putting an older, longer history of place away or behind. Settler societies of new countries are oriented towards the future, not to the past of the place in which settlers find themselves.”

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Epilogue: Genealogies of Space in Colonial and Postcolonial Reenactment University of Michigan

We owe it, among others, to Herodotus that the concept of space has always been central to historical representation. The fifth-century Halicarnassan linked motion through space with traversing time, defining historia as the investigation of klea andron, men’s great and marvelous deeds. Historia was to be accomplished through travel to the edges of the oikoumene, the inhabited world (1996: xiii–xiv). This idea resonated in the eighteenth century, when the European enthusiasm for travel and foreign discovery was a source of inspiration for the emerging historiographical discipline. Reacting against armchair speculators who wrote about the Roman past without ever having set foot in Italy or about the French Revolution with no firsthand knowledge of France, late eighteenth-century scholars insisted on the need to see things for themselves. Good history writing, they felt, depended both on eyewitnessing and fixing past events in a specific time and place. Spatial location thus encompassed all three components of historical writing deemed important during the Enlightenment—investigative method, subject matter, and rhetoric. Space was where the historian uncovered his material and tested his hypotheses, while the description of space was integral to a persuasive and credible historical account. To reliably represent the past was to, in some way, convincingly stage the “showplaces of history” (Anon. 1785: 3ff). We could say, then, that it was the negotiation of space, not just time, that divided history from myth, and the past from the present. Traveling in the American colonies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt pointed to the historiographic significance of space when he contrasted the metropolis with the colonies, and settlers, creoles, and natives among one another. The imperial metropolis possessed a historical imagination, Humboldt maintained, 294

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because it was surrounded by material evidence of its own past and this provided a constant reminder of what had gone before. Settlers and creoles, in contrast, inhabited the ever-present because they were trapped between the places where they had been born and a world they scarcely knew. And, while there was evidence of earlier civilizations in Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico, the loss of indigenous mnemonic devices like the quipu and other memorial traditions had resulted in a great forgetting: consequently, native peoples were confined to the realm of myth (1995: 75–6). In the view of Humboldt and his European contemporaries, the notion of New World history was something of an oxymoron. There could be no distinct history of the Americas or, presumably, settler Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa because the historical soil was, to adopt a phrase, still “too shallow” (cited in Healy 1994: 39). In northern Australia, Captain Cook’s first voyage naturalist Joseph Banks had observed structures that resembled “English Druidical monuments” and Swedish “Rune Stones” (1962: 2:86). Nowhere, though, did Banks entertain the possibility of an indigenous historical sensibility. Making the kind of analogy typical of curiosity collectors a century earlier, the naturalist commented instead on morphological similarities between ancient monuments and a natural phenomenon—the termite mound. While Banks and later European observers acknowledged the significance of material culture to indigenous peoples, these observers were not much interested in what indigenous rock art, paintings, stories, songs, and ceremonial practices might say about the period prior to European contact. Rather, they folded the indigenous present into a historical conception that linked it to the origins of European culture. They debated the acceptability of classicizing indigenous peoples and, for example, depicting Polynesians as ancient Greeks, yet maintained, contradictorily, that non-Europeans embodied earlier stages of western development (Forster 1999: 755–85). Charting Europe’s social and political development and the progress of its art, literature, theater, and music, simply meant going back to antiquity and plugging gaps in the early record with references to a primitive present. These examples illustrate Dipesh Chakrabarty’s point that historiography was born of European colonialism and also provided one of its legitimizations (2000: 7). Characterizing the non-European world as a site of myth, forgetting, and the ever-present enabled Europeans to define their own old things as at once autochthonous and peculiarly historical. Further, the spatio-temporal cleft implied a dichotomization of subject positions that pegged the subject’s spatial location to levels

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of social, political, cultural, and physiognomic development, and, thus, to the subject’s relative capacity for historical progress. Historiography was, in other words, predicated on the idea of traveling back in time and this implied mentally, as well as physically, traversing space. In conceptual terms, the colonies were transformed into an offsite history laboratory that had to be reached via some form of conveyance. Local histories, too, involved an intense engagement with the physical environment—collecting, archiving, excavating, inspecting ruins, and surveying what Goethe referred to as “the high peaks” of past experience (1970: 136).1 As contributors to this volume demonstrate, however, fundamental challenges to this spatio-temporal model emerged from settler societies. Engaging with unfamiliar environments and exotic objects had, as Christopher Pinney argues, the potential to unsettle pervading ideas about the mimetic relationship between originals and copies, metropolitan societies and colonial offshoots. The mutual entanglement of objects and people meant that the center could be less readily juxtaposed against the periphery, history against myth, and the metropolis against its colonial reiteration: Europe itself needed to be acknowledged as a creolized phenomenon, a site that bore not only the material traces of its involvement with the East, but one that was shaped by its very desire for exotic manufactures. For Sean Goudie, the challenge was issued by New World creoles themselves. Creole society was not a corruption of the original, but its own thing. The redirection of economic activity from settler agriculture to global trade helped forge a new, not always welcome, proximity between Britain and colonies in North America and the West Indies, and this in itself constituted a kind of reclamation of space. Donna Landry’s account of literature of the Russian steppes and Georges Teyssot’s reading of German political theory, in contrast, show that it is the tension between settlement and mobility that disturbs historiographic notions of disjunctive, derivative space. Global exchange has, in other words, introduced alternative ways of negotiating time and space, ways that problematize the center versus periphery/history versus myth model of historical representation. The past, that was once held to occupy a remote spatial location, now seems temporally and spatially conjunctive. The journey that used to belong to the historian’s modus operandi has been overtaken by a new set of metaphors and, in place of the journey, we find a preponderance of doors, windows, audio-visual disturbances, photographs, and everyday objects that help negotiate the diaphanous line between then and now. These metaphors suggest that, for some historians, the past is less

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often construed as an objective reality—a remote “landscape” (Gaddis 2002: 5) or “foreign country” that needs to be excavated, toured, scrutinized, compared, contrasted, and conserved (Lowenthal 1985: xvii). It appears instead as an artifact of memory, which, because of its prosaic, subjective quality, seems more readily accessible to professional and lay historians alike (Ankersmit 2005: 4–5). Reenactment revels in this more recent form of historical consciousness because, as Jonathan Lamb points out in the introduction to this volume, reenacting is predicated on the assumption that the past can be brought close and made manageable when it is simulated in the present. Reenactment attempts to close the temporal gap by using a form of spatial poetics that is essentially domestic in character: history is not discursively located in some exotic clime but in the reenactor’s own backyard, where material culture and the practice of everyday life can be personally investigated and affectively restaged. Such affective performances complicate the nature of historical evidence. As James Epstein shows in his essay on a colonial governor tried in eighteenth-century London for administering torture, the witness’s courtroom reenactment of her abuse was understood as both conclusive proof of her victimization and as being so moving as to prejudice the jury. The judicial scales tipped provisionally in the direction of the victim and, hence, in the direction of reenactment’s investigative force. But, tellingly, the legal decision was subsequently reversed. Reenactment continues to be haunted by this dual legibility of affective performances. If historical evidence is made to hinge on the quality of the performance, what does this mean for our understanding of the past? What happens when reenactments go wrong and performances fail to elicit sufficient sympathy or when they elicit the wrong kinds of sympathy? Reenactments have a habit of going wrong partly because reenactors are not, and perhaps cannot be, adequate to their own task. Like Iain McCalman following in the footsteps of David Livingstone in Malawi, they get sick, fall victim to political contingency, or are brought up short by the insufficiency of the historical record. Like the blackface “Aborigines” at the reenacted Sturt expedition in Australia or the blackface “Africans” at the reenacted landing of Bartolomeu Dias in South Africa, the reenactors neither look the part nor follow the script. Performative infelicities also derive from the sheer nonsensicalness of the script—as Leslie Witz shows in his discussion of the Dias event, which attempted to restage the arrival of civilization in southern Africa via a multicultural festival designed to camouflage the government’s apartheid policies. Reenactments go wrong, in other words, because they try to simplify

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complex historical processes and conflate current social and political concerns with earlier ones. This is well exemplified by Monica Popescu’s analysis of apartheid South Africa, when reenacting Voortrekker values collided with the political sensibilities of the Cold War. In her analysis of the historical reality television show Outback House, Catriona Elder likewise demonstrates reenactment’s stumbling attempts to uphold an Australian national narrative about shared space and the pioneer spirit: reenacting settler land selection and indigenous dispossession of the 1860s was at odds with contemporary land rights decisions and Australia’s new ethos of reconciliation. These kinds of contradictions make for messy cultural products. For our understanding of the past, however, they may entail reenactment’s productive element. Stephen Gapps, for one, argues that the uncontrollable, incalculable element adheres to popular history: when reenactors resist stock narratives, use ethnomasquerade, and adopt exogenous histories as their own they pose important challenges to the historical enterprise. Whatever we presume to know about the past is thereby called into question and subject to subsequent revision. Jonathan Lamb refers to this as the force of History resisting human agency, a view in keeping with Alex Calder’s notion of the “lack of reasonableness in history.” In his reading of Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira, Calder argues that, since the schemes of settlement tend to go awry, how we understand this history needs to be seen as a question of perspective and not one of unilateral degradation and irreversible change. Taking the long view, Calder says, will allow us to escape the unproductive “binaries of colonist or invader, improvement or ruination” and reveal instead the interconnectedness of migrating peoples and their interconnections with the land. More so than most other forms of historical representation, reenactment wears its ethical project on its sleeve. Mark Williams argues in his comparative examination of Australia and New Zealand that national conciliation in the two countries differs because of the respective responses of white settlers to indigenous peoples. In contrast to Australia, which adopted a postcolonial policy of multiculturalism, New Zealand never simply enacted colonial policy. It insisted instead on white engagement with Maori culture as a precondition for state-sponsored biculturalism. Consequently, the imputation of Maori difference continues to serve as a guarantor both of indigeneity and of Pakeha cultural identity. In Epstein’s eighteenth-century judicial example, reenactment was the servant of the prosecution, not the defense, and its methods were deployed on behalf of a historical victim. For the creole woman misused by colonial authorities, the trial delivered justice—at least temporarily—and reenactment seems to have done its work properly. Chris Healy, too, ana10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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lyzes the way in which reenactment helps revise contemporary perceptions about the past, specifically, through its embrace of multiple temporalities. The 1960s television documentary Alcheringa managed this, he argues, when it invited audiences to “look back through the mists of time” to view Aboriginal ways of doing things. By claiming aspects of this ancient culture as their own, the series’ Aboriginal participants reminded viewers that indigenous life ways abided in the present. This, in turn, paved the way for later, more nuanced forms of cultural expression. We could say, then, that reenactment tries to manage the past by telling neglected stories, by showing history from below rather than from above, and by emphasizing conjectural interpretations of the past. This subjunctive quality suggests how the past might have unfolded differently—how economic and gender inequities, territorial dispossession, racial persecution, and genocidal violence could have been avoided—and it thereby allows the future to be imagined anew. At the same time, there exists the possibility that reenactment will lull us into believing that its ethical project is a fait accompli. As Jo Smith points out in her essay on Lisa Reihana’s installation Native Portraits n.19897, it is not only the perception of historical space that is germane to historical representation but also the physical space in which that history work is performed. Situating the Reihana installation in New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa, confers on it an authority that is potentially at odds with its revisionist message. Smith suggests, in the spirit of Nicholas Thomas and Conal McCarthy, that context matters when it comes to representing and interpreting the past.2 What is at stake in settler reenactments is, as Stephen Turner reminds us, the contested place of indigenous people in the land. Within the reenactment of an imagined New Zealand, Turner suggests that space and time are so closely allied as to vanish altogether. This radical folding of the present into the past results in the disappearing of native people: they were disappeared by their physical removal from the land and they are disappeared again by the retroactive projection of Europeans into indigenous space. Disappearance is likewise central to Colin Dayan’s interrogation of state-sanctioned terror in the US mainland, Guantánamo Bay, and Israel at the present moment. Dayan suggests that the state use of terror is predicated on a teleological view of history and, following Michel-Rolph Trouillot, she concludes that our capacity to challenge the abuse of state power hinges on whether we continue to see the past as distinct from the present or contiguous with it. *** 10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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The contributions to this volume indicate that the historical configuration of space and time has special salience for postcolonial societies where the political stakes remain high. The second part of this essay takes up this theme, along with arguments made by Mark S. Phillips and Andreas Huyssen respectively—first, that historiography is concerned with the perception of spatio-temporal distance and, second, that contemporary historical representation tends to collapse space and time (Phillips 2004: 127–8; Phillips 2007; Huyssen 2003: 1). The essay thus constitutes a shift in scholarly emphasis from colonial constructions of space to an examination of the spatial poetics of postcolonial reenactment (Noyes 1992; Pratt 1992; McClintock 1995). For the legatees of colonialism, land rights claims, reparation, cultural repatriation, and restitutive social policies hinge on establishing specific historical continuities between the past and present—on, for example, demonstrating traditional ties to the land. By the same token, these stakes are predicated on the collective acknowledgement of certain kinds of historical rupture, including dispossession, political disenfranchisement, and genocide. If we accept that reenactment is characterized by a reduction in spatio-temporal distance, we must inquire into the implications of this for postcolonial societies. Specifically, can postcolonial reenactment advance its avowed ethical aims if it upholds a notion of conjunctive space and remains invested in the domestic, micrological, and affective disposition of the past? This essay focuses on four examples of postcolonial reenactment—a memoir by Walter Benjamin, written in the 1920s, shortly after the dissolution of the German Empire; a travel account by W. G. Sebald, a German expatriate living in Thatcherite Britain who reflected on Europe’s imperial and Holocaustal legacy; a non-fiction account by Kate Grenville, the contemporary Australian novelist concerned with rethinking colonial history, and a graphic novel by Shaun Tan, the Australian artist who draws on the history of colonial settlement and migration to uphold a transnational, transhistorical vision of the past. Via their work, we find that the handling of space and things hinges on certain kinds of substitution—the reenactor for the historical agent, the present for the past, the material world for the human one, and one historical event for another. Their tropes, characterized respectively as “metonymic things,” “helical spaces,” “ventriloquist spaces,” and “substitutable spaces,” reject progressivist historical narratives and, to varying degrees, conflate individual with collective subjectivities.3 We will find that these tropes enhance the telling of some kinds of stories but impede the telling of others, and this, in turn, has implications for redressing past injustices.

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For a writer like Marcel Proust, the past lurked within everyday life: to reinstate that lost world was to submit oneself to the things surrounding one. In Remembrance of Things Past, the taste of a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea or the feeling of a linen towel on one’s face affected an alternative reality—the house, he says, “rose up like a stage set”—and it was thus that childhood could be conserved and change held at bay (1989: 51). Walter Benjamin, an avid reader of Proust, also wanted to recapture the world of his childhood in Berlin Childhood around 1900, albeit to different ends.4 Daily things—boys’ books, socks, the telephone—and familiar spaces like the bedroom, loggia, and park provided the magic junction between past and present. Yet, rather than staving off the future as Proust sought to do, Benjamin conceived of a past that prefigured, and was prefigured in, the present (Szondi 2006: 13–19). To reimagine imperial Berlin was, in other words, to inquire into the conditions of bourgeois privilege, industrialization, urban expansion, and geopolitical ambition, conditions that were already, even then, slated to change. Benjamin’s vignette about the Imperial Panorama, for instance, describes viewers sitting in chairs around a large circular device that presented them with stereoscopic images of exotic places. These travel scenes, he said, had great appeal because it did not matter where one began the cycle: each picture passed through all the stations (Benjamin 2006: 42). Although the image vanished, it returned with reassuring predictability, preempted by the ringing of a little bell.5 By construing the metropolis as home to technological progress and colonial space as a circular present, Benjamin introduced alternative possibilities for negotiating time and space: here, the exotic and familiar, past, present, and future could be apprehended synchronously. Benjamin was interested in the panorama precisely because it would soon be replaced by cinema as an important form of popular entertainment. “There was always a seat available,” he remarked, “And especially toward the end of my childhood, when fashion was already turning its back on the Imperial Panorama, one got used to taking the tour in a half-empty room” (43). In characterizing the panorama as outmoded, he stretched the anachronism, for to visit the imperial panorama was to take a virtual tour of Germany’s overseas empire, an empire that had already been disbanded by the time Benjamin put his memoirs to paper. And, as elsewhere in the book, Benjamin found a way to link observations about form with those about content, turning the everyday object into a metonym for a specific social and political

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Metonymic things

disposition. Like the sock that was folded into itself to create its own pocket—at once form and content, “veil and what is veiled” (Hülle und Verhülltes)—the undoing of one presaged the end of the other (96–7). In Benjamin, engaging with everyday objects was like piling rocks in a river: it reversed the flow of time. The historian’s task was to perform this labor, but it was also to recognize the object’s metonymic relationship to the past, and to restore to the part some of its missing wholeness. Benjamin likened this process to the experience of déjà vu: it was the article of clothing left behind by a visitor, he said, that pointed to that “invisible stranger, the future.” With a characteristic mixing of affective responses—sight, sound, and touch—he said that objects affected us like an “echo”: encountering them was like being jolted awake by a sound that seemed to have “issued from somewhere in the darkness of a past life.” “A word, a rustling or knocking,” he said, summoned us “unexpectedly into the cool sepulcher of the past” (129–30). What in Benjamin was a surprising, but polite “knocking”—an engagement with space and material culture that allowed for a form of intersubjective communication between past and present—was transformed by Theodor W. Adorno’s 1951 Minima Moralia into something violent, even brutal. In the highly technological world of late modernity, writes Adorno, there is no “knocking.” Gone are the casement windows, gently closing doors, thresholds and walled gardens that once separated the inside from the outside, gone, too, the gracious sense of space and superfluous action that were a precondition for civility. The new immediacy and functional economy with which people must engage the material world has contributed to a decline in deliberation, sociability, experience, and human freedom (2006: 19). Christopher Pinney adopts Adorno’s essentially historical argument and finds something productive in the capacity of objects to act “implacably and, as it were, ahistorically” on us. Objects’ agency, Pinney implies, compels us to rethink not only our relationship to the past but also the way in which we think about history itself.

Helical spaces We find Benjaminian gestures in the postmodern writer W. G. Sebald, for whom everyday life and subjective experience also lend time and space an elastic quality. The Rings of Saturn, with the German subtitle An English Pilgrimage (1998), uses the conceit of a walking tour in southern England to examine historical figures whose lives intersect with those of the narrator. The narrator’s ramble ranges from East

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Anglia to the Congo, China, Ireland, and the Continent as it explores Europe’s imperial and Holocaustal pasts. As the title suggests, Sebald posits a new metaphor for historical investigation: when the narrator follows in the footsteps of others this will be no crow’s flight between center and periphery; the journey will wheel back, seemingly endlessly, around a center that cannot hold. Coupled with this circular trajectory comes a rejection of the perspectivism that typified historical representation in the nineteenth century.6 Each episode in Sebald’s novel reinforces the point that our experience of the world is contingent on our location. Reconstructions of naval battles by painters like Philippe de Loutherbourg and Willem van de Velde, Sebald points out, are figments of the imagination, since no witness could ever have observed as much. These painters and historians provide clear sight lines and a macro view of events but their realism conveys nothing of the “true impression” of having been at Sole Bay on that May day in 1672—the burning masts and sails, the smashed decks, the din and smell; the sights of flailing bodies on fire (76–7). Sebald calls instead for a species of realism that will account for the “agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc” (78). Instead of a bird’s-eye view, which tells us little about “our species, our purpose and our end,” he demands the micrological (92). For, to understand the decline of the Netherlands and the rise of British maritime supremacy—the preconditions for Britain’s imperial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—is, Sebald suggests, to understand the small things—felling and preparing timber, mining and smelting ore, forging iron, weaving and sewing the sailcloth, building and equipping vessels, and then destroying them (78). Indeed, it is a visit to another panorama—the Waterloo Panorama commemorating the defeat of Napoleon in 1815—that brings Sebald to critique simulative, totalizing forms of historical representation.7 Visiting the panorama is “like being at the center of events”: On a sort of landscaped proscenium, immediately below the wooden rail amidst tree-stumps and undergrowth in the blood-stained sand, lie lifesize horses, and cut-down infantrymen, hussars and chevaux-légers, eyes rolling in pain or already extinguished. Their faces are moulded from wax but the boots, the leather belts, the weapons, the cuirasses, and the splendidly colored uniforms, probably stuffed with eelgrass, rags and the like, are to all appearances authentic. Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one’s gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural… This

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Rejecting the panoptic perspective means more than just transforming history from above into history from below. When Sebald asks, like Bertolt Brecht’s “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters,” about the labor conditions that underpinned the large-scale processes of war, slavery, and imperialism, he is contributing to a conjectural understanding of the past. To catalogue the daily lives of ordinary people is to acknowledge their exploitation and suffering and to mourn their destruction, however provisionally. Sebald criticizes simulative genres like history paintings and panoramas, genres that we have come to associate with reenactment (McCalman, forthcoming). Nonetheless, we could say that Sebald is a reenactor avant la lettre. He sends his narrator on a secular pilgrimage in order to recover a past that is subjective, emotionally charged, and preoccupied with the everyday. And, although the narrator asserts himself forcefully throughout the book—“The rain clouds had dispersed when, after dinner, I took my first walk around the streets and lanes of the town” (75)—the narrative position is constantly subverted in a manner reminiscent of Romantic writers like E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich von Kleist. Concealing the narrative “I” in reported speech allows other stories to be voiced. These multiple, often competing, views on events undermine the notion that realistic historical representation can ever be adequate to its object.8 At the same time, the distinctions between past and present are blurred when the narrator’s first person account is buried within historical first person accounts. The technique allows the narrator to voice and, seemingly recall, unfamiliar events and to elevate his affective response to the level of historical experience. Such decoupling of past events, processes, and agents has been described as a “loosening of referentiality” characteristic of the postmodern historical consciousness (Curthoys & Docker 2006: 191). As we will find in the following section, space assumes special significance when historical referentiality comes unmoored, for the very reason that it helps to anchor the historical narrative. Space becomes the constant against which change can be firmly pegged.

Ventriloquist spaces We see this loosening of referentiality and concomitant importance of space in the work of the contemporary Australian writer Kate Grenville, 10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was (124–5).

whose interest in colonial history has given rise to a series of novels including, most recently, The Lieutenant (2008a). Grenville’s previous novel, The Secret River (2005), tells the story of a convict, loosely based on the author’s ancestor, who is transported with his wife and child to New South Wales in the early nineteenth century. The freed convict occupies land on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney, where he farms and ultimately becomes rich. The tension in the novel is sparked by the settlers’ violent encounters with local Aborigines and by their competing stakes on the land. While the novel was well received, Grenville’s nonfiction account about the novel’s research and writing, Searching for the Secret River (2006a), has been much criticized for masquerading fiction as history and confusing historical evidence with an “experiential” approach (Schwarz, forthcoming; Grenville 2006b; Clendinnen 2006; McKenna 2005, cited in Clendinnen). Grenville invited criticism because, in the charged atmosphere of Australia’s history wars and debates over public acknowledgement of colonial injustice, she framed her reenactment project as a serious, even superior, contribution to historiography. Searching for the Secret River, the work that concerns us here, draws on techniques commonly used by reenactors—assuming a historic character, visiting historic sites, and engaging with historic objects. Yet it is arguably space that occupies the most important place in the author’s historical conception. The affective response to historic sites fills gaps in Grenville’s understanding, telling her—she claims—what she does not yet know and has been unable to discover via conventional research methods: I made my way between the muddy rock and grit to the water’s edge. Down there I could see what I hadn’t from the steps—that the water was running along the side of a thick beam, the edge of some ancient dock that over the years had rotted away to this line of black wood, inches above the water. As if someone had nudged me, I suddenly realized, he was here. This, right here, where I’m standing, is where it happened (56; original emphasis). Visiting the Thames seems to provide Grenville with unmediated access to early nineteenth-century London and the person of her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman. A sense of presence—expressed in italics—compensates for the cul-de-sacs and poor signposting in the written record and what emerges is an apparently Rankean impression of the way things really were.

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Reenactment claims to authentically represent the past and these claims hinge on the quality of the mise-en-scène—historically accurate living conditions, clothing, weaponry, transportation, furniture, and other everyday objects. All this is accomplished with Grenville’s London journey. At the same time, “authentic” representations hinge on the person of the reenactor him or herself. The closer he or she is to the historical figure in terms of genealogy, physical appearance, temperament, sexual orientation, social class, professional background, and geographic and national origin, the more reliable the representation seems to be.9 This insistence on authenticity belies a kind of mimetic insecurity—underlying doubt about reenactment’s capacity to convincingly perform what it is not. In this regard, reenactment is closely allied with standpoint theory, i.e., the idea that knowledge is always situated and derives from specific kinds of (gendered) experience (Kaplan 1996: 170). Without the confluence of past and present experience there can be—to extend this problematic argument—no reliable historical knowledge. Perhaps, indeed, no knowledge is possible at all. Here, it is instructive to compare Grenville’s investigation of London with her investigations closer to home. As in London, trips to the Australian bush generate powerful feelings, but with a difference. After being taken to see some rock engravings of kangaroos, emus, fish, and people, Grenville writes: The breeze had picked up. The bunches of leaves whipped against each other, whipped at the air. The place was starting to speak. It was a language I didn’t know, but even so I was starting to understand. How could I know what kind of book this was going to be? My job wasn’t to take what I’d learned and squeeze it into the shape I thought it should have. Before it could be a book this was a story. That story was somehow part of all this—these trees, these rocks full of language that was lost. I didn’t own that story. It had to be allowed to speak for itself. My job was to get out of its way (170–1). Trying to reenact what she is not, Grenville bumps up against the limits of the experiential method. Although the white Australian is “nudged” by the ghost of her ancestor on the Thames embankment, she is not “nudged” by the ghosts of Aboriginal people on the banks of the Hawkesbury, any more than she is, in Benjaminian-fashion, awakened by a surprising “rustling or knocking.” In place of the author’s voice or those of her interlocutors, she performs a disappearing act and causes the bush to speak instead.10

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Speaking things, Jonathan Lamb points out, tend to be hostile because they mean to remind us of our own inhumanity. His observation brings to mind the self-replenishing pudding in Norman Lindsay’s children’s classic, The Magic Pudding. Puddin’ is a notoriously grumpy fellow, whose chastising tone highlights the vanities and hypocrisies of the newly federated Australia. Since animals and things do not generally speak, we can think of this imputation of speech as an act of authorial magnanimity: animal fables and it-narratives (as the genre is called) bestow talents denied by nature or society (Lamb 2004: 949–67). Searching for the Secret River, in contrast, performs a kind of amputation when the bush is personified in the narrative. By substituting people for places, the author deprives people of their natural language in order to have them speak more authentically and truthfully as something else. Novels like Secret River and The Lieutenant make it clear that Grenville means to pursue a “double-visioned” account of native-settler encounters (Dening 2002: 9). In Searching for the Secret River, however, she is unable or unwilling to reenact any form of Aboriginality. Space is enlisted to do what the reenactor cannot or will not do, with the result that historical representation in fact breaks down. By conflating indigenes with nature, space speaks a new language of primitivism and reauthorizes precisely the kinds of colonial relations that Grenville is at pains to undo.

Substitutable spaces Thus far, we have seen that Benjamin’s objects bear a fractal relationship to the past: recuperating historical reality means retracing that fractal limb back to its fullest flowering. In Sebald, the past intersects with the present as though on a stage that retained all traces of the actors who once strode its boards: reprising those past roles becomes the task of the reenactor. For Grenville, the engagement with space allows indigenous subjects to be channeled: it is the reenactor who manipulates the ouija board, allowing the past to speak in an apparently unmediated form. Our last example, The Arrival (2006), shows how historical spaces become substitutable, with corresponding implications for the interchange of historical agents. In his graphic novel for children, Australian artist Shaun Tan tells the story of a man who flees his beleaguered homeland, leaving behind his wife and child. The unnamed main character arrives in a new place, only to experience loneliness and confusion as he tries to make sense of the strange world. Through a series of local encounters, the man

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gradually finds his bearings and learns the life stories, told through flashbacks, of other migrants fleeing poverty, exploitation, and war. He earns enough money to send for his wife and child and the book ends with the reunited family resuming the, now subtly altered, rituals of daily life. In the book’s final episode, the child helps a recent arrival and this welcoming gesture returns the story to its start. Unlike Grenville, Tan does not use reenactment as an investigative tool. His novel is, however, itself a kind of simulacrum. Its black-andwhite and sepia-toned drawings resemble old albumen prints and the book as a whole looks like a leather-bound album with faux flocking on the end pages, an embossed jacket with a photograph apparently glued to the cover, and trompe-l’oeil effects that mimic the pages’ wear and tear. The book’s tactility lends it a talismanic quality: the “photographs” demand special handling and a conservation not only of their material selves, but also of the stories that they convey. While the book evokes a sense of antiquity and singularity, the simulated photographs resemble individual frames on a filmstrip. Close-ups of everyday objects like a chipped cup and teapot, a child’s drawing, an origami bird, and a battered hat first appear as an apparently random assemblage of things—as though part of a collection that lacked a transparent organizing principle—only to reappear later within an intelligible context. An origami bird presented in parting to the child subsequently reappears, for example, in a flight of sea birds, where it signifies the promise of reunion and recalls T. A. G. Hungerford’s short story about a Chinese migrant in Australia (Hungerford 1977: 4). Tan reconstructs worlds that are familiar to us and it is in this sense, too, that his graphic novel performs a reenactment at the thematic level. The family flees tenement life and an existence menaced by violence: the tails of monstrous beasts loom over the city and threaten the inhabitants. This magical realist element is, however, subordinated to a historical hyperrealism: scenes of trains recall the deportation of European Jews in the mid twentieth century, while the voyage that liberates the main character seems to reference late nineteenth-century labor migration. The voyage thus introduces not only a new world but also a new temporality that blends past, present, and future. The ship’s passengers disembark into a world populated by fabulous creatures, food dispensed from automated machines, exuberant buildings, and futuristic people movers [Figure E.1: “The new world”]. Using a timetravel framing device typical of much contemporary reenactment, the family is transported in a pillar-box like the TARDIS from the 1960s science fiction show Dr. Who.11

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Figure E.1 “The new world.” Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Melbourne: Lothian, 2007, n. p.). Reproduced with kind permission of the publisher.

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In the United States, where The Arrival received an enthusiastic writeup in the New York Times, the book was praised for, on the one hand, universalizing the migrant experience and, on the other hand, for lending it an American cast (Yang 2007: n. p.). There are good reasons why the Times critic understood the book in American terms and compared it with the work of children’s book author Maurice Sendak. Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are offers its own fantasy of settlement and assimilation: newly-civilized creatures beg the child-voyager to remain on the island as their king (1988: n. p.). The Arrival relies, in other words, on the visual vocabulary of American migration. Using a photorealist style that literally reproduces photographs of migrants at Ellis Island,12 Tan’s ship is in fact a composite of two historic photographs depicting passengers on a vessel bound for the port of New York ca. 1892 [Figure E.2: “The ship foredeck”]. Tan interposes a cloaked woman, but in all other regards, he maintains a high degree of fidelity to the Ellis Island photographs. Consulting these original photographs explains the disembodied arrangement of legs and feet in the foreground of Tan’s illustration: it is the blurry historic photograph that has given rise to an image of corresponding indistinctness. Tan’s main character arrives in a harbor similarly reminiscent of New York and is processed in a way that recalls the mistreatment of turn-of-the-century arrivals: there are queues of passengers waiting to disembark with their baggage, and an uncomprehending main character who is interrogated and physically inspected by officials in a vast processing hall [Figures E.3: “The arrival hall” and E.4: “Migrant inspection”]. The work thus seems quintessentially American and yet the migrant narrative turns out to be highly portable. We find that The Arrival draws on not only canonical American images but also Australian ones and it consequently references a distinctly different settler experience. Australian migrant memoirs from the 1950s and 60s are, for example, one of the important influences on the work (“Artist’s Note,” n. p.) Prospective migrants to Australia recall how they, like their earlier American counterparts, were subject to physical inspections: When you went to them they looked at you like you were on the market. You had to show your teeth. It didn’t matter if you had no teeth but if you had bad teeth they wouldn’t take you… They also looked at your muscles and you had to walk up and down (Lowenstein and Loh 1977: 81; see also Davies and Dal Bosco 2001: 134). Tan likewise draws on the work of artist Tom Roberts (1856–1931). Roberts was a member of the Heidelberg School, a group of Australian 10.1057/9780230244900 - Settler and Creole Reenactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb

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Figure E.2 “The ship foredeck.” Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Melbourne: Lothian, 2007, n. p.). Reproduced with kind permission of the publisher.

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Figure E.3 “The arrival hall.” Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Melbourne: Lothian, 2007, n. p.). Reproduced with kind permission of the publisher.

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Figure E.4 “Migrant inspection.” Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Melbourne: Lothian, 2007, n. p.). Reproduced with kind permission of the publisher.

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Impressionists who tried to capture the distinctive character of the Australian bush by using techniques hitherto reserved for the European landscape. The best known of the Heidelberg School paintings—settlers struggling against the hostile bush and shearers wrestling sheep—have come to be associated with the pioneering spirit. By promoting a national style, these painters helped generate a vision of the “real” Australia as a pastoral one, at a time when the country was becoming increasingly urbanized (White 2005: 125). It is Roberts’ painting, Coming South (1885–86), based on the artist’s experience aboard the mail packet SS Lusitania, which forms another visual referent for Tan’s unnamed migrant ship [Figure E.5: “Coming South”]. Tan reverses the painting’s orientation to create the mise-enscène: we see the same architecture of the ship—the masts, rigging, and yardarms, but also the vast funnel and vents—characteristic of late nineteenth-century ships that combined steam and sail. What, we might ask, are the implications of grafting a migrant ship onto a mail packet, cleaving Australia to America, and superimposing two sets of space? Clearly, Tan’s passengers are not Roberts’. For Roberts himself, returning home after an antipodean grand tour, the voyage was not an especially uncomfortable one: his painting shows saloon passengers segregated from those traveling steerage and the passengers seem less incommoded than bored. Roberts’ title, Coming South, shifts the perspective from the metropolis to the colony, with the painting’s viewer implicitly located in the Antipodes. The painting’s perspective is not, in other words, commensurate with that of the passengers who advance towards, rather than away from, the external viewer. We can conclude, then, that Roberts’ painting thematizes both prospective settlers and, at the same time, it deals with settled Australia as it awaited its latest arrivals. It seems telling that Tan’s list of acknowledgements misnames Roberts’ painting Going South (“Artist’s Note,” n. p.). The perspective in Tan’s own painting is, after all, one of “going” rather than coming, as if a ship had, half way to New York, suddenly made for the southern hemisphere, or vice versa. On this reenacted voyage, conditions worsen and the passengers become impoverished. The nineteenth-century passage to Australia—if Robert’s Australia is indeed retained as a visual referent—ceases to be one of comparative comfort and upward mobility and is transformed into one of the settlers’ compulsion, desperation, and final resort. The Arrival does not, in other words, demythologize the settler experience and thereby pose the kind of challenge to Australian historiography that was first mounted in the 1950s (Russell 2005: 23–4). By overlaying

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Figure E.5 Tom Roberts, Coming South 1885–86, oil on canvas 63.5 × 52.2 cm. Reproduced with kind permission of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

different historical spaces, The Arrival instead establishes analogies between departure and arrival, coming and going, and between colonial settlement and postcolonial migration. At some level, then, the book folds the history of colonization into a narrative about refugeeism, with the result that the dual imperatives of hospitality and assimilation are historically

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generalized. Such a welcoming vision of migration may not seem misplaced at a time when refugees go on hunger strike to protest their detention in Australian immigration centers (Mercer 2008). And yet, I would argue, there is a cost that comes with reenactment’s facile handling of motion through space. When this reenactment creates a spatial palimpsest and transposes Lady Liberty’s “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” to the Australian ex-colony, it potentially overwrites two fundamentally different kinds of experience—that of refugees in the present and natives in the past.13 In place of their historically specific experience, we get a more palatable narrative about an American past that seems already to have been worked through.

Conclusion For a cultural critic like Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1920s and 30s, space was understood as a material site, where the material conditions of the past could be both staged and interrogated. At the other end of the historiographic spectrum, Fernand Braudel thought that space generated specific economic, social, and political relations: topographical features like high plains, valleys, and mountains impacted the ways in which people interacted with one another and societies were constituted over time. For neither of these scholars, however, was space thought of as a transparent category. Space demanded interpretation, and this exegetic task was the responsibility of the historian and cultural critic. To the extent that theirs was an ethical project, these ethics seemed to be tempered, on the one hand, by the biography of the writer (Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood is a highly personal, nostalgic text), and, on the other, by the conviction that material conditions, including the organization of space, were subject to laws that could be empirically tested and therefore generalized. More recent postcolonial reenactment, in contrast, tends to imply that space—as physical reality and historical category—exists above and beyond historical exegesis. This redefines the task of the reenactorhistorian. By collapsing the ontological and the epistemological, space is said to embody an historical truth that somehow speaks for itself. This strategy is patently not the same as personifying things and conferring on them speech in the manner of animal fables and it-narratives. In fables and it-narratives, speaking things were adversarial, yet when space speaks in the context of reenactment it usually speaks kindly. Space has, in other words, been transformed into an ally of the reenactor-historian, and ceased to be the rub.

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Channeling the past often confuses reenactment’s ethical project. Sebald’s spatial confection relativizes subject positions to impute a new historical victim—not indigenous people in colonial societies or Jews and others antithetical to Nazism, but, arguably, the bystanders of European history. In the context of Australia’s colonial past, Grenville revives the pioneer legend when she transforms the history of colonial settlement into a story about the difficulties of settlement—losses, grief, difficult choices, and unintended, but understandable, acts of violence (Pinto, forthcoming). The reader’s empathy is transferred from dispossessed Aborigines to convict settlers and the book does not live up to its avowed aims. By effectively blurring temporalities and geographical spaces, Tan’s work, in contrast, exemplifies the principal of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. His futuristic world enacts an exemplary tale of arrival, hospitality, and assimilation that itself performs an odd kind of reenactment when, to recall Alexander von Humboldt, it relegates history to the Old World and returns myth to the New. Such gestures will suit reenactors ready to substitute the present for a timeless past. Yet, a spatio-temporal model that accommodates separate historical subject positions and spaces would seem better suited to postcolonial societies trying to negotiate the imbricated interests of indigenous people, established migrants, and new refugees. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Kader Konuk, Julia Hell, Helmut Puff, and Jonathan Lamb for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. Notes 1 See Hell (“Imperial Ruin Gazers,” forthcoming). 2 See, for example, McCarthy (“Hailing the subject,” 2006: 108–30), and Thomas (“The Uses of Captain Cook,” 2006: 140–55). 3 In “Einmal ist keinmal,” Allen describes reenactment as a conflation of history and geography and sees it in strictly linear terms (2005: 187). 4 On Proust, Benjamin, and Auerbach, and the notion of figura, see Konuk, East-West Mimesis, manuscript. 5 On Benjamin’s subordination of listening to vision and the Kaiserpanorama as a means of regulating attention and “industrializing” visual consumption, see Koepnick (“Benjamin’s Silence,” 2005): 123–4. 6 On perspective in Macaulay and others, see Bann (Clothing of Clio, 1984): 29–30. 7 For a different view, see the discussion of Austerlitz and Luftkrieg und Literatur in Todd Presner’s 2004 article, “What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals,” in which Presner argues that Sebald does not “reproduce or repeat the past but rather stages and enacts it as the original and, hence, will not refer back to an event in any kind of rehabilitative [and realist] sense…” Sebald’s

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modernist techniques—multiplying perspectives, blurring the real and imaginary, foregrounding contingency, and “creating a synoptic and artificial view of extreme history”—prompt us to ask what history is and what it can be (357). John Beck argues that, rather than offering an alternative theory of history, Sebald’s book is a “poetics of history that contains even as it deforms the modes of domination [including Enlightenment rationality, realist representation, and historical experience] it seeks to reject” (“Reading Room,” 2004: 77). The reenactment community debates how much “authenticity” is enough: “stitch Nazis” insist on accuracy to the minutest detail; “hardcore” reenactors reject the costume-shop kit of “farbs” (dilettantish reenactors) and object to women (“farbarella”), fat people (“fat farb”), and older people (“age farbs”) playing combat soldiers. “If we all really wanted to be authentic then let’s restrict our recruiting efforts to those areas where units were actually raised… Want to do the 29th I[nfantry] D[ivision]? Sorry, if you were not from Virginia, Maryland, or DC you are a farb… It’s a hobby and this isn’t real, so where do you want to draw the line?” Quoted in Thompson (War Games, 2004: 226); see also 289–95. Grenville’s 2008a novel, The Lieutenant, circumvents this problem by excerpting historical documents for the dialogue spoken by the Aboriginal character. Thus, the author claims not to have “made anything up.” Grenville interview with Ramona Koval, ABC Radio National, The Book Show, 1 October 2008. Tan, himself the son of a Chinese Malaysian migrant to Australia, cites the influence of T. A. G. Hungerford’s short story, “Wong Chu and the Queen’s Letterbox,” about a Chinese man in Perth whose return to Hong Kong coincides with the disappearance of the red pillar box (4–5). See, for example, Tan’s illustrations of the arrivals hall and the man’s eye being inspected, both adapted from historic photographs available at http:// www.ellisisland.org/photoalbums/ellis_island_then.asp. Other influences cited by the author but not discussed here include a 1912 photograph of a newspaper boy announcing the sinking of the Titanic, Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist film, The Bicycle Thief, and the engraving “Over London by Rail” from London, A Pilgrimage by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré (ca. 1870). On the way in which migrant experience tends to erase memories of indigenous suffering, see Hamilton (1994: 13).

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White, R. (1997). “The Retreat from Adventure: Popular Travel Writing in the 1950s”. In J. Murphy & J. White (eds) The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. White, R. (2005). “Symbols of Australia”. In M. Lyons & P. White (eds), Australia’s History: Themes and Debates. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Wigley, M. (2001). White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Williams, M. (1997). “Crippled by Geography? New Zealand Nationalisms”. In S. Murray (ed.), Not On Any Map: Essays on Post-coloniality and Cultural Nationalism, pp. 19–43. Devon, UK: University of Exeter Press. Williams, M. (2005). “Sentimental Racism”. In C. Ferrall, P. Millar & K. Smith (eds), East By South: China in the Australasian Imagination. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Williams, R. (1988). Dark Shadow over the Day to Remember Dias. Cape Times, 6 February. Wilson, K. (2003). The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge. Windschuttle, K. (2002). The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Sydney: Macleay Press. Witz, L. (2003). Apartheid’s Festival. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wood, T. (2005). Annals of Utopia. New Left Review, 33(May/June), 14. Worrall, D. (2000). “The Political Culture of Gothic Drama”. In D. Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell. Wright, M. (2004). Reed Illustrated History of New Zealand. Auckland: Reed. Yang, G. L. (2007). “Stranger in a Strange Land”. New York Times Sunday Book Review, 11 November. from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/ Yang-t.html

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Aborigines 12–15, 56, 62, 171–192 passim, 208–220 passim, 223, 226–238 passim, 242n5, 243n10, 244n20 “White Aborigines” 13, 216 Adams, John 8–9, 86–87 Hamilton and 86–87 Adorno, Theodor 8, 68–69, 302 technology and 69 Aesthetics 30, 65, 68 Africa 4, 10–12, 64–65, 74, 125–126, 140–141, 151–152, 156–168 passim, 295 Communism and 125–126 demonization of 65 disease and 162 Europe and 152 exploration and 158 fetishism 65, 74 geology of 4 multiculturalism and 140 Portugal and 141, 159 reenactment and 151 slave trade and 160–162, 168 African National Congress 126, 136n7 Agnew, Vanessa 276, 279–280 Alcheringa 14, 171–189 passim Aboriginality and 173–176 education and 178 exploitation and 174 modernity and 172 narration 172 national culture and 176–177 America 8–10, 81–93 passim, 111, 120, 259, 296 degeneracy and 82–84, 87–92 exceptionalism and 82, 88 homeland security 120 South Africa and 132 settlement and 259 terror and 111 West Indies and 81

Ames, Fisher 88–91 genius and 90 Anthroposociology 30 Anti-Jacobin Review 101–103 Apaches 62–63 Apartheid 127–128, 138–140, 143–152 passim Boycott of 144 Dias festival and 143–144 modernization and 152 multiculturalism and 146 Architecture 21–30, 32, 35, 61 Chalet 23 and human body 29, 32 in Nazi Germany 35 Primitive 21–23 and social structure 27–28 Asia 6, 25, 31, 42–54 passim, 56–57 Europe and 48–49 material history and 56–57 migration and 25 nomadism and 42–43 settlement and 45 Atherstone, W. G. 4 Australia 12–15, 181–182, 184, 196–199, 209–211, 217, 223–242 passim, 242n2, 310 Asia and 240 Europe and 181 history and 184, 217 land rights in 197–199, 204, 206 localism and 196 national celebrations 209–211, 217 popular literature of 229 racism and 224 South Australia 15 Banda, Hastings 12 Baxter, James K. 237–239 Barthes, Roland 64, 67, 78 Bataille, Georges 64–65 Story of the Eye 64–65

336

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Index

Baxter, J. K. 13 Behr, Mark 123, 128, 131–135, 137n13 ideology of 134–135, 137n13 The Smell of Apples 123, 128, 131–135 Belich, James 228, 230, 232, 247, 250, 253, 256, 257n3, 292n21 Benjamin, Walter 51–52, 300–301, 307, 316, 317n5 mimesis 51–52 Bennett, Gordon 62 Bernstein, Michael André 262–263 Bethell, Mary Ursula 260, 271n1 environmentalism and 260 Blackfacing 12, 217–220, 297 Boers 10–11, 128 de Bolla, Peter 11 le Bon, Gustave 30–31, 35, 38n6 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 86, 92 Bronte, Charlotte 10 Burke, Edmund 10, 109 Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful 109 Philosophical Enquiry 10 Bush, George W. 108–109 Bush Mechanics 189–192 Butler, Samuel 4 Calderon, Luisa 9, 94–106 passim body of 99 death of 105 Gothicism of 102 torture of 96–106 passim Caribbean 9, 83–84, 86, 92, 95, 104, 110–111 religion 111 sexual economy of 104 Carroll, Lewis 3 Cazlis, Henri (Jean Lahor) 29–32 Aesthetics 30 eugenics and 31–32 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 180–181, 295 historicism and 180–181 Channing, Mark 74–75 Indian Mosaic 74–75 Chintz 63–64 Coetzee, J. M. 124

Collins, Wilkie 71–72 The Moonstone 71–72 Communism 11, 123–126, 134 capitalism and 123–124 in South Africa 125–126 Comte de Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc 2, 9 Cook, James 211, 217, 247–248, 295 le Corbusier 67–68 objects and 67 Cossacks 7, 45, 52 Craniology 22, 30–31, 35 Cronon, William 261–262, 272n4 Crusoe, Robinson 7 Da Gama, Vasco 149–150 Daudet, Alphonse 66 Declaration of Independence 11 Demolins, Edmond 25–26 Dias, Bartolemeu 11, 138–149 passim Dias Committee 143–146 legacy of 139 Dubbo, Alf 237, 244n23 Duff, Alan 13 Dysentery 162–163, 167 Eugenics 30–32 Europe 5–8, 15, 21–25, 43, 48–50, 55–60 passim, 65, 78, 82–93 passim, 180, 295–296 Africa and 74 America and 57 architecture and 21, 23 Asia and 43, 48 creolism and 78 genealogy of 21 knowledge and 66 material culture and 57 military power and 82 primitivism and 180 Russia and 50 self-definition of 65 South Africa and 127 subject/object distinctions of 65 Tasman and 15 Turkey and 48–49 typology and 21–23 Exoticism 71

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Index 337

338 Index 171, 179

Garrow, William 95–100, 102, 105 Glissant, Édouard 92 Glover, John 56 Gordimer, Nadine 126–127 Gothic drama 103 Great Trek 10–11, 129, 132 Grenville, Kate 13–14, 300, 304–308, 317, 318n10 Grimm, Jacob 23 Guantánamo Bay 107–108, 112–115 language and 114 suicide at 115 Guthrie-Smith, Herbert 4, 16, 263–270, 298 environmentalism and 269–270 textual editions 265, 272n7 Haggard, Rider 75–77 Hamilton, Alexander 8, 81–93 passim creolism and 81–82, 91 death 81, 93n2 early life 91 The Federalist 82 von Hellwald, Friedrich 28 Herodotus 294 Holmes, Sherlock 2, 72–73 The Speckled Band 72–73 Hulme, Keri 13 Humboldt, Alexander von 294–295, 317 Huyssen, Andreas 300 Hurricane Katrina 107 Hybridity 55 Istanbul

48–49

Jameson, Frederic 42–43 Jefferson, Thomas 8–9, 11, 81–82, 93n3 Notes on the State of Virginia 81 Jerusalem 118–119 Jünger, Ernst 6, 34–37 The Worker 34–36 “Total Mobilization” 34

Kendall, Thomas 226–228 King, Katie 53, 205, 286–288, 293n29 pastpresents 53, 205, 287–288, 293n29 Lake Nyassa 12, 156–168 passim Livingstone and 158 as pastoral 156 reenactment and 157 slavery and 160–162 weather of 159 Lake Tyers 186–187 Latour, Bruno 53, 54, 64–65, 67, 69–71, 78 Lawson, Henry 235, 238 Livingstone, David 12, 156–168 passim Lombroso, Cesare 26 Lyotard, Jean-François 57, 60, 64–65 “figure” 60 Judaism/Hellenism 65 Malaria 162–163, 167 Malawi 156–157, 164–168 Maning, Frederick 4, 228, 256n1 – Maori 12–13, 15–16, 223–242 passim, 242n5, 242n6, 243n13, 244n20, 245–256 passim, 256n1, 257n3, 258n12, 266, 274–277, 280–281, 283–285, 288–289, 291n12, 291n15, 292n25, 298 literacy and 234, 243n8 – Maoriland 225, 229–230, 232–233, 237, 239, 243n12 – Maori Renaissance 239, 241, 280–281, 284 pictorial representation of 226–227, 243n11 Martin, Henri 21 McCarthy, Conal 275, 280–283, 286, 290n8 Melville, Henry 94–95 trial of 94 Milne, James 232 Mimesis 1, 51–54 human-animal 51 sympathy and 54

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Few, Frank

Mobilization 34–37 Blitzkrieg 37 Modernism 62 High Modernism 62 baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 2 Monkey Bay 156, 163 Mossell Bay 11, 15, 138–141, 143, 146–153 Müller-Lyer, Franz Carl 25 Murray, John 186–189 Museum 16, 66–67, 275, 277, 280–283, 285–288, 291n15 affective dimensions of 287–288 new museology 275, 277, 280–283, 285 representation and 67 Myers, Fred 279 National Parks 260–261, 271n2, 271n3 Native Portraits 273–289 passim, 289n2, 290n10, 291n15, 292n27 audiovisual components 277–279, 284–286, 288–289 critical reception of 273, 276–277, 285, 290n6 historicism of 276 interactivity of 276 reenactment and 280, 287–288 New Zealand 12–17, 56, 78, 223–242 passim, 245–256 passim, 261–265, 271, 273, 279, 289, 298–299 Europe and 241 historicism and 250 language and 228, 231 literature of 262 national parks of 260–261 racism and 224 as reenactment 247 settler history and 246 Nomadism 42–44 friendship and 43 settlement and 44, 47 Onus, Bill 171–173, 179, 182–186 biography 184–185 colonization and 186

Ottoman Empire 48–50, 58 migration and 48 tropology and 48 Outback House 15, 193–196, 199–207 passim indigeneity and 201–203 land ownership and 204–207 narration 195 popular mythology and 200 premise of 194 soap opera techniques in 194 Ovid 2 –

–

Pakeha 13, 16, 224, 239–242, 245, 250–256 passim, 257n3, 284–285, 298 Palestine 45 Pastpresents 53–54 Phillips, Mark S. 300 Picton, Thomas 95–96, 98, 100–101, 105n1 trial of 95, 98 Platonov, Andrei 6, 41–54 passim Chevengur 41–42, 45, 46, 52–53 Soul-Dzhan 42, 46, 50, 53 le Play, Pierre Guillaume Frédéric 25, 37n3 Poe, Edgar Allan 71 Portugal 142, 144–146 Proust, Marcel 301 Pyke, Vincent 230–232 de Quincey, Thomas

71

Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François 2 Reenactment 1–17 passim, 37, 41, 53, 140–141, 151–152, 156–168 passim, 192, 193–195, 209–213, 217–219, 245, 251, 253, 279, 286–289, 297–299, 306 abstraction and 140 amateur history and 219 atrocities and 113 concealment and 192 dangers of 279 failures of 297 – Maori settlement and 245 historiography and 251

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Index 339

Reenactment – continued landscape and 37 minstrelsy and 218 national history and 217, 253 official sanctions of 210–211 realism and 1, 12 revolution and 53 spatial poetics and 297 television and 193–195 violence and 299 Reeves, Thomas Pember 228 Reihana, Lisa 273–289 passim, 290n11, 292n27 Revolution 45, 52 representation and 53 utopianism and 47 Rhys, Jean 3, 10, 119 Wide Sargasso Sea 3, 10, 119 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich 26–28 family and 27–28 The Natural History of the German People 26 Roberts, Tom 310, 314–315 Robespierre, Maximilien 10, 109 Robinson, George Augustus 227 Rosetta Stone 8, 75 Rush, Benjamin 109 Russia 42–48, 50 equestrianism and 47, 50 national narrative of 42 Scalia, Antonin 108 Sebald, W. G. 300, 302–304, 307, 317, 317n7, 318n8 Semper, Gottfried 21, 25, 27, 61 Sheep 266–268 Smith, Bernard 55 Smuggling 85 South Africa 11, 123–137 passim, 138–153 passim Angola and 130–131 constitution of 143, 148 settlers and 139–140 United States and 132 South African Defence Force 138 Sturt, Charles 209, 212, 214–218 reputation of 212 Swift, Jonathan 3

Tan, Shaun 300, 307–317, 318n11, 318n12 Taniwha 252 Tasman, Abel 247–248 Tasmania 227–228 Te Papa 16, 250, 273–294 passim, 291n15 biculturalism 274, 277, 283–285 coloniality and governance 273 contemporary settlement and 282 interactivity and 275 Terror 107–109, 112, 117, 119–120, 254–255, 299 war on 109, 120 Thoreau, Henry David 259–260 Tolstoy, Leo 5 Torture 9–10, 96–98, 108, 113–115, 297 in Guantánamo 113–115 in Trinidad 98 in the United States 108, 114 Toyota 116 Treaty of Waitangi 13, 248, 257n4, 290n4 Turner, Stephen 293n30 U.S. South

3, 9, 111

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 21, 23, 25, 27, 37n1, 37n2 and Joseph-Arthur Gobineau 23 and primitive architecture 21–23 Voortrekker Youth Organization 123–125, 128–131, 133, 135n4, 136n10, 137n11, 150–151 apartheid and 128–129 constitution of 135n4 masculinity and 133–134 pedagogy of 129 reenactment and 130 Waitangi Tribunal 13 Warlpiri 189 Whitbread, Samuel 94, 100 White, Patrick 13, 237–238 Xeno-figure 56, 59, 74, 78 alterity and 78

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340 Index