Writing people and place: discourses of ‘race’ and gender in European constructions of ‘native rebels’ in the Auckland Press, 1863

Abstract

The Governor of New Zealand, George Grey, ordered an invasion of the Waikato region on 12 July 1863. The invasion was predicated on the notion that Waikato Māori were planning to attack Auckland, ‘ravage’ the town, and murder ‘peaceable’ settlers. I argue that such notions about the ‘danger’ of ‘savage’ Natives gained their rhetorical power from intertextual links to a host of longstanding racialised and gendered discourses about British masculinity and its Other. I illustrate my argument through a discursive analysis of representations of the Waikato Wars in the Daily Southern Cross, and The New Zealander during July 1863. This thesis has three objectives. First, I argue that geographic scholarship needs to be situated within the masculinism of the discipline of academic geography in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and within wider theoretical debates about modernity and postmodernity. Second, I argue that ‘Native rebels’ and the spaces they inhabited were not some pre-existing phenomena which the Auckland press merely ‘reported’ in its news stories, but instead that they were (at least partly) constructed in newspaper representations of the Waikato War. Third, I argue that notions of ‘race’ were inextricably tied up with those of gender in the nineteenth-century identity politics that dominated commonsense rhetorics concerning the Wars. Māori people and the places they inhabited in the 1860s were present in newspaper rhetorics as a significant absence -- that is, they played a part as a gendered, racialised, and negatively valued foil for British notions of masculine superiority, rationality and Enlightenment. Māori were constituted as objects by which a masculine European subject discursively affirmed its own superiority. Social constructions of gender played such an important role in hegemonic European constructions of the masculine Self that they helped reconstitute racialised constructions of the Other.