Thieves like us: the British monarchy, celebrity, and settler colonialism

ABSTRACT

This article considers how the treatment of the British Royal Family as celebrities simultaneously maintains and displaces the white diasporic ties between Commonwealth settler nations. The media production and consumption of the House of Windsor in terms of celebrity culture is a crucial way in which the British monarchy is legitimised as an important part of civil and public life in settler countries such as Australia and New Zealand. This article focuses on print news reporting of two state visits by Prince William to Australia and New Zealand in 2010 and 2011. As part of this reporting, I examine the mediation of protocols of sovereign welcome and recognition by and for the Royal Family and Gadigal and Māori peoples in terms of their contribution to a civic polity that normalises settler durability. Although Royal visits are enabled by white diasporic links between settler countries and the United Kingdom, I argue that media tropes of celebrity aura and divine charisma function to ex-nominate whiteness and race from media reporting on the British Royal Family. The celebritisation of constitutional monarchy has the effect of obscuring the racial and religious power that authorises constitutional monarchy as well as these states’ settler colonial histories.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• settler colonialism
• sovereignty
• British monarchy
• Royal Family
• indigeneity
• celebrity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Holly Randell-Moon

Holly Randell-Moon is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her publications on popular culture, biopower, gender and sexuality have appeared in the edited book collections Common Sense: Intelligence as Presented on Popular Television (2008) and Television Aesthetics and Style (2013) as well as the journals Feminist Media Studies and Refractory. She has also published on race, religion, and secularism in the journals Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, borderlands, and Social Semiotics and in the edited book collection Religion After Secularization in Australia (2015). Along with Ryan Tippet, she is the editor of Security, Race, Biopower: Essays on Technology and Corporeality (2016)