The anti-Antigone: Pākehā settler masculinity, racialized kinship, and contested paternity in Carl Nixon’s Settlers’ Creek

ABSTRACT

This article places Carl Nixon’s novel Settlers’ Creek (2010) alongside Sophocles’ Antigone as the springboard for an inquiry into the dynamic relationship between kinship bonds and state legitimacy in a settler-colonial context. Loosely based on a high-profile legal case in Aotearoa New Zealand regarding funerary practices, the novel highlights tensions between settler and indigenous constructions of law. Settlers’ Creek and Antigone share a central premise: rival claims for justice centred around the matter of an unburied corpse. However, where Antigone has been read in Continental philosophy to theorize the ascendance of the impersonal modern state and the deposition of kinship, Nixon’s novel can be read as an allegory of the reverse historical process through a (re)turn to filiative relationships in western nation states. By highlighting the Pākēhā protagonist’s failures to engage with bicultural kinship, the novel critiques a paternalistic colonial regime and undermines the affective grounding of settler cultural racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Patriarchy
• Aotearoa New Zealand
• settler cultural racism
• biculturalism
• Māori
• kinship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For definitions of Māori words and phrases used in this article, the Te Aka dictionary is a reputable source (Maoridictionary.co.nz).

2. Some examples of the integration of tikanga into statute law, government and legal process include: the requirement to apply central Māori concepts such as kaitiakitanga (guardianship) and wāhi tapu (sacred site) to treasures of the natural environment in the Resource Management Act 1991; the bestowing of indigenous agency and legal personhood on the Whanganui River and the Urewera conservation area; consideration of the concept of mana (status, authority, spiritual power) in a recent legal decision to allow the appeal of a deceased man in the case of Peter Ellis (MacKay, 2020); and integration of Māori spiritual practices in institutional settings including prisons, government ministries, and health and education sites (Nikora, Te Awekotuku, and Tamanui 2013, 5).

3. The phrase “anti-Antigone” is borrowed, by extension, from Deleuze and Guattari’s ([1972] 1983) argument against western culture’s paternalistic structuring of desire.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Lawn

Jennifer Lawn is associate professor in English in the School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication at Massey University, Auckland. Her research and teaching interests centre around the study of narrative genres in social contexts, particularly materialist approaches to literature, gender studies, and Gothic fiction. She is the author of Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984–2008 (2016). Her writing is informed by her social identity as a middle-class Pākehā.