Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal

The Settler Colonial Situation

Bibliographic Data

ID3667201
AuthorsL Veracini (0000-0002-3481-8535, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume29
Issue4
Pages363-379
Publication date2008-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Intercultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0725-6868 • E-ISSN: 1469-9540
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07256860802372246
OpenAlexW2010267092
LanguageEN
Citations received46
References cited55

This paper outlines a number of approaches to an analysis of settler colonial subjectivities, the exploration of a specific state of mind and the detection of a number of paranoiac dispositions in a particular set of political traditions. At the same time, this paper explores the possibility of a Lacanian (i.e. imaginary-symbolic-real) interpretation of what is here defined as the settler colonial situation. First there is an imaginary spectacle, an ordered community working hard and living peacefully Little House on the Prairie style. Then there is the symbolic and ideological background: a moral and regenerative world that supposedly epitomises settler democratic traditions (the 'frontier', the 'outback', the 'backblocks', etc.). Finally, there is the real: expanding capitalist orders associated with the need to resettle a growing number of people. While this paper is aware that the categories of this analysis were initially developed in order to classify individual psychic phenomena and not collective processes and while it is suggestive rather than conclusive (and while it focuses on Australia's settler colonial condition), this paper is especially aimed at outlining the possibility for further research. It ultimately suggests that 'settler society' is in itself a fantasy emanating from a painful perception of growing contradictions and social strife, where the prospect of settler migration literally operates as a displacement of tension, and where the longing for a classless, stationary and settled body politic can find expression. This paper also suggests that an appraisal of the settler colonial situation can contribute to the interpretation of current contestations surrounding Indigenous difference in settler societies. Keywords: DisavowalFantasyPsychoanalysisSettler ColonialismTrauma Notes 1. I have especially relied on The Language of Psycho-analysis (Laplanche and Pontalis Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J. B. 1973. The Language of Psycho-analysis, New York: Norton. [Google Scholar]). 2. Historian John Hirst's positive and influential rendition of convict society in Australia, for example, can be seen as replacing one defensive mechanism with another, finally disposing of repression relating to the 'convict stain' with its idealisation (Hirst Hirst, John. 1983. Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales, Sydney: George Allen & Unwin. [Google Scholar]). 3. On the need to include fantasy, projection, idealisation and other psychic components in the analysis of the dynamic process of identification, see Hall Hall , Stuart "Introduction: Who Needs Identity." Questions of Cultural Identity Stuart Hall and Paul de Gay . London : Sage , 1996 . 1 - 17 . [Google Scholar] 1-17. 4. For a persuasive argument about disavowal as a response shaped by social concerns and underpinned by specific collective strategies, see Eviatar Zerubavel Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]'s The Elephant in the Room. 5. Pearson Pearson, David. 2001. The Politics of Ethnicity in Settler Societies: States of Unease, 21-36. Basingstoke: Palgrave. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] insightfully suggests that "settler and post-settler society citizenship is best conceptualized and described by examining the linked processes of [...] the aboriginalization (of aboriginal minorities), the ethnification (of immigrant minorities) and the indigenization (of settler majorities)" ("Theorizing Citizenship" 990). 6. At times, settler political traditions cannot possibly lay claim to a 'quiet land' and a celebration of frontier violence becomes a feature of national mythologies. In these instances, however, 'quiet' and disavowal reemerge after the 'closing' of the troubled frontier/the 'end' of the conflict, and after the establishment of a settled/settler order. 7. The reverse can also be true. At times the settler project is premised, or partially premised, on the appropriation of Indigenous labour. In these cases, dispossessing Indigenous land is primarily aimed at ensuring appropriate conditions for labour recruitment. However, as this is a necessary requirement for their survival, even in these cases the settler colonial situation is ultimately reliant on settler territorialisation. 8. Whether concerns about worst case scenarios are founded or a paranoid construction should be less important. As Lacan remarked, a jealous husband's pathological disposition towards his wife remains pathological independently of whether she actually sleeps with other men or not (cited in Zizek Zizek , Slavoj . Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle . London : Verso , 2003 . [Google Scholar] 51; as regards Australia - for many reasons an especially nervous settler locale - see Walker Walker, David. 1999. Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. [Google Scholar]; Rutherford Rutherford, Jennifer. 2000. The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. [Google Scholar]; Burke Burke , Anthony . In Fear of Security: Australia's Invasion Anxiety . Annandale : Pluto Press , 2001 . [Google Scholar]; on Australian diplomat Alan Renouf's insightful notion of Australia as the 'frightened country' see Hartcher Hartcher, Peter. 2007. "Bipolar Nation: How to Win the Election". Quarterly Essay, 25: 2007 [Google Scholar]). On the other hand, while the 2007 Australian federal election has been called the first climate change election in the world, an Australian settler consciousness and stubborn uneasiness about Australian landscapes contribute to making climate change anxieties especially relevant. 9. A recent case in the phenomenology of the Nero complex could be mentioned here. During the summer of 2006 reports noted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert saying in a cabinet discussion that he wanted "the Palestinians to understand that the landlord has gone crazy", that is, that Israeli retaliation needed to be both disproportionate and absolute of Palestinian behaviour (cited in Eldar Eldar Akiva "The Landlord's Crazyness." Haaretz 5 July 2006 . [Google Scholar]). 10. Alan Lawson's insightful outline of settler subjectivities detected an inherently contradictory drive. In an attempt to establish his legitimacy, the settler seeks the "effacement of Indigenous authority" and the "appropriation of Indigenous authenticity" at the same time. In Lawson's analysis, settler desire emerges as a complex psychological situation: "There is also a complex chain of signification between desire for indigenized identity, spirituality, and land and desire for Aboriginal women which needs to be explored. The settler's desire to stand in for the Native produces the inadmissible desire for miscegenation, what in South Africa is often known as the 'taint'. The insertion of the settler self into the (physical and discursive) space of the Indigene is simultaneously characterized by desire and disavowal. The movement into indigenous space must be asymptotic: indigeneity must be approached but never touched. This produces in the settler an anxiety of proximity. The self-indigenizing settler has to stop just short of going completely native and, therefore, is frequently represented as sexless. 'He' must stand just in front of, but not exactly in the place of, the Indigene. The need, then, is to displace the other rather than replace him; but the other must remain to signify the boundary of the self, to confirm the subjectivity of the invader-settler" (Lawson). 11. A discursive distinction between 'colonialism' (as exercised over colonised peoples) and 'colonisation' (as exercised over a colonised land) is a recurring feature of settler ideologies. While this differentiation is premised on ongoing disavowal of Indigenous peoples, it also sustains fantasies of 'pristine wilderness' and guiltless 'pioneering endeavour' (for a sustained argument separating colonisation from colonialism, see Aaronsohn Aaronsohn Ran "Settlement in Eretz Israel: A Colonialist Enterprise? 'Critical' Scholarship and Historical Geography." Israel Studies 1.2 1996 : 214 - 29 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 12. Noting the "prevalence, in historical, political, and cultural discourses [in white-settler nations] of references to the Imperial Mother, to daughter-colonies, and to the Manhood of Nation", Chris Prentice Prentice , Chris . "Some Problems of Response to Empire in Settler Post-Colonial Societies." De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson . London : Routledge , 1994 . 45 - 60 . [Google Scholar] emphasised the intrinsically Oedipal dynamic inbuilt in processes of settler national affirmation: "This family groups (which is really only a mother-infant pair) suggests the process of maturation which is not only consistent with descriptions of the way in which Australia, Canada, and New Zealand gained nationhood, as opposed, for example, to the United States, but with a process of psychical development as represented in the theory of eodipalization." Exploring the psychical nature of a deliberate establishment of autonomous settler nationhood in the context of the maturation metaphor, Prentice concludes that the "emergence of Nation can be likened to the erection of the phallic 'I', the Self whose passage through an historical-cultural mirror-stage confers the image of autonomy, unity, integrity, and identity. In other words, it reflects the separation from the Maternal Continent, and projects a narcissistic investment in images of the whole and unique Self - images of national identity." Processes of settler national affirmation, she concludes, operate like a Lacanian mirror. And, like a Lacanian mirror, the image they produce "is valued as autonomous, but it is valued on the basis of its specular similarity to British cultural and institutional models" (46-47). 13. In Two Treatises of Government Locke had theorised a state of nature where there would be no property; if America was the world in its natural state, no Indigenous dispossession could ever happen. 14. Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial, for example, argued that Palestine was virtually empty before Zionist colonisation. Edward Said and Norman Finkelstein have comprehensively demolished Peters Peters, Joan. 1984. From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine, New York: Harper and Row. [Google Scholar]' scholarship (Said Said , Edward . "Conspiracy of Praise." Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens . London : Verso , 1988 . 23 - 32 . [Google Scholar]; Finkelstein Finkelstein , Norman . "Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial." Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens . London : Verso , 1988 . 33 - 69 . [Google Scholar]); the fact that the settler colonial situation compels a gaze that empties the landscape of its Indigenous inhabitants should also be considered. 15. On the specific difficulties associated with deploying a reconciliation model in a settler colonial context, see Short Short , Damien . "Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism." Journal of Intercultural Studies 26 . 3 2005 : 267 - 82 .[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]. 16. In a sense, however, Windschuttle is right: if a settler society is always characterised by a Narcissistic rendition of its history, openly addressing a violent past is unbefitting of a settler society. 17. Debates surrounding legislative activity in France regarding the official memory of colonial pasts epitomise a split consciousness. The Taubira Law explicitly recognised slavery and the slave trade as 'crimes against humanity' and instituted an official annual commemoration dedicated to this awareness. In 2005, however, another law demanded that teachers and textbooks "acknowledge and recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa". The official memory of colonialism is indeed easier to manage than the official memory of settler colonialism (see Blanchard Blanchard , Pascal , Nicolas Bancel , and Sandrine Lemaire La fracture coloniale, la société française au prisme de l'héritage colonial . Paris : La Découverte , 2005 . [Google Scholar], Bancel and Lemaire). Additional informationNotes on contributorsLorenzo VeraciniLorenzo Veracini teaches history at the University of Wollongong. He is currently working on the global history of settler colonial phenomena

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