Revolting Others

Disgusted Bodies as a Function of Colonial Continuity in

Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific

Jessica Holly Bates

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of
Arts in English, The University of Auckland, 2011.
2 |

Abstract

This thesis examines the continuity of colonial identities in Aotearoa New Zealand and
Pacific contexts in terms of an affective disgust for others, with regard to an embodied
sensory response to the world. This study demonstrates that the revolted sensation in these
contexts is an operation of othering, from which a putative white male heterosexual subject-
hood emerges. By addressing the embodied relations of this subject-hood, the thesis
addresses a sensorial lack in the archive, which has obscured the continuity of an
asymmetrical power relation in what is termed the post-colonial era. Refusing the critical
safety of a post-colonial condition, this thesis argues that we exist in a colonial present. In
the present, colonialism is preserved in our sensorial relation to the world, which informs
our national identity as New Zealanders. In both the colonial Pacific and the settler-colonial
New Zealand contexts, this disgusted subject-hood is expressed in and through different
constellations of colonizing aesthetics, which this thesis terms the disgust-beauty amalgam
of colonial subjectivity. Two separate geographical contexts are utilized to demonstrate a
fundamental difference in the way disgust functions in respective colonial environments. In
the eighteenth-century Pacific, the indigenous body is represented in monstrous and
excessive ways by the disgust-beauty complex, which functions to make it irrevocably Other
to the colonial subject in the moment of encounter. Concerning Aotearoa New Zealand, this
study demonstrates the ways in which disgust informs the invention of a national identity in
settler-colonial states. By addressing the temporal stability of the constructed norm of a New
Zealander, as embodied by a white male heterosexual Pkeh, this thesis shows the way
disgust continues to naturalise the bodies of these second settlers in this place over time.
The way in which the settler subject aesthetically codes the bodies of both indigenous (Mori)
and exogenous (migrant) in New Zealand as variously beautiful and revolting others
demonstrates the ongoing function of disgust in authorising settler-colonial presence in this
country. In addressing the greasy embodied matter which disgusts us, this thesis suggests
the ways colonial aversions remain embedded in our sensorium: it is an embodied
nationalism distinguishing self from other.
 3

Acknowledgements

Thoughmuchofthisthesisisinthefirstperson,itisnotjustastoryaboutme.Thisistheplace
whereIcangestureoutsidethecoversofthisbook,tothelonger,wider,andmorebanalstoryin
whichthisthesisisembedded.Itisastoryfullofthebodiesofotherpeople:holdingmeup,handing
mecoffee,goadingmeforward,andlettingmego.

Iwanttothankmyfamily,Jennifer,TerryandGeorgia,whohaveenduredthespecialtumultofthe
lasteighteenmonthswithme.Youhavegrantedmesafetyandsupport.Youhavegivenmethe
gracetoacceptwithhumilitythatIamordinary,butyoucontinuetobelieveinmeassomeone
extraordinary.Forthesepowersofimaginationandhope,Iamgrateful.

IwanttothanktheUniversityofAucklandEnglishDepartmentfortheirsupportandpatiencewith
me,especiallyProfessorsTomBishopandJanCronin.TomythesissupervisorStephenTurner,Iam
gratefulforyourimaginationandbeliefinmycapabilities,forbothenvisioningwhatthisthesiswas
tryingtobe,andforspeakingmyownsweatylanguagewithme.

ThankyoutofellowpostgraduatesMarkTaylorandSoongPhoonfortheirkindsupportand
contributionstomywork.

IwanttothankmydisgustingandgracefulfriendSueLiTaskerYeoforprovidingaconstantsupply
ofaffectiveandembodiedintellectualdiscussionsoverthelast12months.Iamalsogratefulforthe
unmitigatedfriendship,positivity,andlongstandingsupportofKelseySerjeant,NatassjaMolloy,
JuliaRecordon,SarahRose,ElizabethAitkenRose,CarolineFergusson,SarahThomson,Stephanie
BarnettMackintosh,MatthewNorthin,RichardSimkinsandChristabelSpong.Withoutthispatient
networktocatchmyvariousaffectiveoutburstsofenthusiasmanddespair,theworkofthisthesis
wouldneverhavebeencompleted.

4 |

Contents

Introduction:Ongroundsofmybody,withmyfeetonthisground............6

1: The Forgotten Sensorium15
The unwelcome presence of a colonial present..19
An unsurprising condition: the settlercolonial present 21
The structural relation of disgust and settlercolonialism..22
Adopting the voice of the disgusted white man... 25
An embodied colonial history......... 29


2:InDisgust:Ambivalence,FetidOoze,andtheOperationofOthering..33
Whatisdisgust?..............................................................................................................................33
The disgusting: mere matteroutofplace or roiling life soup?.................................................... 36
Andreas Krebs: contextualising the disgusted settler in Canada.41
Disgustasanoperationofcolonialothering43
(i) Theforceofdisgustinmoralcolonialism45
(ii) Aracistparadigminthepathologyofdisgust.48
(iii) Amisogynisingdiscourse:abjection,excessandthevetula..51


3: The DisgustBeauty Amalgam...56
The scenes of the colonies: beauty in Empire.59
From marvellous to monstrous in colonial India..60
Bracketed settlercolonialism: an aesthetics of authenticity...64
FromIndiannegativesublimetoinhabitedmissionarypicturesque.66


4: The Devouring Savage..................................................... .............................................................71
Abject sexuality: black and bestial forms of Melanesia...74
Excesses in paradise: the Polynesian sexual appetite..79
The disgusting unrepresentable of homoerotic possibility...83
A consuming paranoia: disgust and the discourse of cannibalism .85
Paul Moons cannibals: a disgusted scholar in search of the real thing..89

5:DyingNativesandDirtySettlers...92
Lorenzo Veracini: settlement as transfer....95
Nostalgia (for), disgust (at) Moriland....97
Greasy brutes and stinking shark oil: notes of disgust in Lawson and Maning..100
Manings affective troubles: unsettled, ashamed and disgusted...103
Sublime silences and new amalgamations: Arthur Adams vision of Moriland ....106
Earning a place in the land: rejected colonial, passing indigene, successful settler...108
Really real? Masculinist New Zealand and the disavowal of disgust...110
Mucky weeds and possum entrails: the disgusted econationalist...114



6: The Abject Migrants..119
Swamped with immigrants: the persistence of disgust......121
Not white enough: Hages multicultural limit on cultural capital...125
The multisensory recognition of the Third World body..128
At an impasse of inclusion: smelly otherness...130
Convenient disgust: ignoring indigenes and defining New Zealanders..132

Epilogue...134

Bibliography........................................................................................................................................139
6 |

Introduction

on grounds of my body, with my feet on this ground

This thesis is an operation of embodied colonialism. It runs counter to a constitutive

disavowal of bodies and their sensory conditions inside colonial discourses. I want to
challenge the dubious postcolonial assumption that colonialism is a historical, rather than a
structural (and structuring) force. I want to suggest that colonialism is not discrete and
bounded by temporal and spatial measures, but rather is a thing of continuity, fiercely coded
into the way our bodies behave in the present. Colonialism is re-figured as a thing-in-the-
body, not just a thing-in-the-archive.

Theorizing the body has become a contemporary cult in the humanities. This corporeal turn
acts as panacea to a long tradition of disembodied philosophy. This tradition sought to
discover knowledge objectively, and hence the impassioned and unstable (physical) bodies
that housed this knowledge had to be refused. Being in the body has hence been
constructed as somehow subordinate to the thinking in the mind. The elevated importance
of the latter has been the means by which much philosophical theory has been written. This
asymmetrical understanding of human knowledge and experience, as either reasonably
objective (derived from the mind) or irrationally subjective (derived from the body) has been
attended to by staging a return to this neglected term the body. One answer to this task has
been the Deleuzian-inspired study of affect, which claims to force a constant relationality of
body and mind, by drawing attention to the way affects straddle the theoretical chasm
between the minds power to think and the bodys power to act.1

A return to the corpus would seem to allay the asymmetries of philosophy, presenting a
new site of stability for theory. If the theorist is now standing with legs astride, able to
straddle both mind and body, then both concepts are pinned down for explication. This
theoretical pinning presumes both body and mind to be static entities, objects which can
be fixed and described by rational analysis. Problematically, however, bodies as bodies are

1
MichaelHardt,Foreword:WhatAffectsAreGoodFor,inTheAffectiveTurn:TheorizingtheSocial,ed.
PatriciaTicinetoCloughandJeanHalley(Durham:DukeUniversityPress,2007),xi.
 7

not static, they are made of matter that is dynamic, fallible, and conditioned by inflows and
outflows. I follow Ruth Leys criticism of affective theorists here when I assert that there is a
deep coherence between the rational Enlightenment tradition which has informed a neuro-
scientific narrative of the body, and the affective theories which decry this mind-body split.2
For Leys the fundamental coherency is one of anti-intentionalism to the behavior of the
human body, since affective power is defined as an a-signifying intensity below the level of
consciousness. The reactions of the body are rendered incapable of making meaning in the
same ways as cognitive processing.3 This prejudicial division of (signifying, intentional) mind
over (a-signifying, anti-intentionaI) matter maintains an unhelpful discontinuity which
obscures the ways in which bodies produce, rather than merely inhabit, the contexts in which
they live.

In order to re-contextualise colonialism as an embodied phenomenon, the way the sensory

receptors of the human body organize the world must be understood as simultaneously
instinctive and intentional. I argue here that the meaning-making potential of the body, or its
ability to be read with intentionalism, has been in part stymied by the theorists failure to
address the human body on its own terms. This is the problem of revisionary body-inspired
theories: they fail to speak about the body as a sweating and stinking corporeal reality. The
body is a sanitized object under the microscope of embodied affect studies, in a way that
reenacts the dry realities of Cartesian philosophy whilst claiming a radical departure from
these sterile forebears. To this radical end, there is a laughing revulsion in the emaciated
face of Enlightenment philosophical tradition.4

For Steven Connor, this tradition amounts to Descartes sensory strip-tease, against which
Michel Serres The Five Senses revolts. In this theoretical stripping, all the gorgeous,
questionable habiliments of the senses . . . [in] the flesh itself . . . [are peeled back,] leaving
finally, exposed to its own view, exposure itself, self-exposure itself.5 The final Cartesian
revelation is always the product of dry and reasoned endeavor. It is a skeleton. This tradition
makes thinker into archaeologist digging up graves of buried truths - exposing clean and

2
RuthLeys,TheTurntoAffect:ACritique,CriticalInquiry37,no.3(2011):443.
3
BrianMassumispeaksaboutaffectasanintensitywhichisadefinitionallynonsemanticexperience,sinceit
amountstoanonconscious,nevertobeconsciousautonomicremainder...itisoutsideexpectationand
adaptation,asdisconnectedfrommeaningfulsequencing,fromnarration,asitisfromvitalfunction.Brian
Massumi,ParablesfortheVirtual:Movement,Affect,Sensation(Durham:DukeUniversityPress,2002),25.
4
StevenConnor,MichelSerresFiveSenses,(conferencepaperatMichelSerresConference,Birkbeck
College,London,May29,1999),http://www.stevenconnor.com/5senses.htm.
5
Ibid.
8 |

gleaming bones. My theoretical expository prose declares it. It is a reverent process: here
lies what we know.

This thesis wants to re-endow those bones with a weight of flesh and sensation, and it takes
up the body-ists scornful condition of revulsion in order to do so. I argue that the affective
condition of disgust is a means to materialize an analysis of colonial practice in the present,
in a way that builds on the corporeal turn. But we must be wary of an over-congratulatory
sense of theoretical emancipation. The contemporary fashion for embodiment has been
perceived elsewhere as a mere lexical band-aid to the unhealing wound of the Cartesian
mind-body dualism.6 Our address of disgust must pay more than lip-service to the body.
Disgust demands an uncomfortable reality, as opposed to a theoretical abstract. We need
to address bodies in all their offensive viscera. We need to speak of bodies that fart, and
grunt, and menstruate, and sweat. We want bodies that leak and seep and urinate and grow
hair in uncomfortable places.

This is a messy corner for academic discussion, and a difficult zone to speak about in the
alien meta-language of theory. Michel Serres voices a similar complaint in the Five Senses.
Serres is troubled by the gaunt terms of philosophical discourse, and his text seeks to
return a plump and fleshy rotundity to the language of theory. His fattening act is compelling.
Serres cries out at the empire of signs, and I, too, am upset.7 I will cry with him, my nose
will run, and my throat will stick. I will become snotty-nosed and swollen-eyed. I do so with
the lumpy sadness of a personal problem. I weep alongside Serres with a local implication,
because my problem is that I am a settler. I have a firm political recognition that this empire
of signs with which we speak is indeed a sign of Empire. I speak English. I am a student of
the English Department, even. My discipline is coded by its title. I use the language of New
Zealands colonizer, and I speak an academic dialect that preserves the power hierarchies of
this colonization.

6
MaxineSheetsJohnstone,TheCorporealTurn:AnInterdisciplinaryReader(Exeter,UK:ImprintAcademic,
2009),4.
7
InaconversationwithBrunoLatour,heexpresseshisperceptionthatcertainphenomenologicalworksare
ridiculouslyhypocriticalintheirapproachtotheflesh,whichisthestartingpointforhistextTheFiveSenses.
WhenIwasyoung,IlaughedalotatMerleauPonty'sPhenomenologyofPerception.Heopensitwiththese
words:Attheoutsetofthestudyofperception,wefindinlanguagethenotionofsensation....Isn'tthisan
exemplaryintroduction?Acollectionofexamplesinthesamevein,soaustereandmeager,inspirethe
descriptionsthatfollow.Fromhiswindowtheauthorseessometree,alwaysinbloom;hehuddlesoverhis
desk;nowandagainaredblotchappearsit'saquote.Whatyoucandecipherinthisbookisaniceethnology
ofcitydwellerswhoarehypertechnicalized,intellectualized,chainedtotheirlibrarychairs,andtragically
strippedofanytangibleexperience.Lotsofphenomenologyandnosensationeverythingvialanguage...My
bookLesCinqsenscriesoutattheempireofsigns.MichelSerreswithBrunoLatour,FourthConversation:
TheEndofCriticism,inConversationsonScience,CultureandTime,trans.RoxanneLapidus(AnnArbor:
UniversityofMichiganPress,1995),1312;originalitalics.
 9

There is a way to write this thesis without getting worked up. It would preserve the same
critical terms as I use here. It would speak about colonial encounter, and disgust. I could pick
a different location from where I live, a place with a narrative of national independence. This
could be any number of de-colonized nation-states I could choose Papua New Guinea, or
the Philippines, or India. In these colonial encounters, the affective response to the Other
has a transparency about it. The Other is constructed as exotic. Post Edward Saids
Orientalism, we can predict what feelings this exotic might elicit in the colonial gut. The gap
between colonizing self and colonized other is mediated by a dialectic of attraction and
repulsion. There has been a large amount of attention given to the attracted quantity of this
equation (colonial desire), 8 and much less to its repulsed partner (colonial disgust).
Regardless, they are not radical concepts. The overt existence of these affective colonial
constellations is not difficult to imagine. These responses are programmed into the
discursive construction of exoticism. Their expression is a function of the distance placed
between colonial and Other they are not me, and so I can reject them. This is because the
colonial scenario is a visitation, and not a settling.9 The colonial can always go home.

There would be a critical safety in fleshing out a thesis such as this, which bears
uncomfortable similarities to the colonial security of returning home. This is because I can
always go home. Having finished my account of colonialism out there, I can return to my
place, New Zealand, where things are different.

Inhabiting a snotted-up settler body that lives in New Zealand, I find that critical safe-place to
be insufficient to my conditions of being. It is a sign of Empire that I am here. I bear shame
in the knowledge that Pkeh arrived uninvited, and aggressively settled here, creating
grievances that have not yet been resolved. In a settler-colonial context then, there is no
other home. There is no distance, there is only here. The affective responses in this
scenario demand different things of the body. The settler body must reconcile the presence
of bodies of difference those of the native inhabitants, and the land itself with their
imperative to make their body at home here. The sense of overt desire or disgust cannot

8
SeeRobertYoung,ColonialDesire:HybridityinTheory,Culture,andRace(London:Routledge,1995)and
HomiBhabha,TheLocationofCulture(London:Routledge,2004).
9
IamseekingtodrawattentionheretothedifferencebetweenImperialcolonialismandSettlercolonialism,
whichwillbeunderstoodhereasthedifferencebetweencolonialandsettlercolonialscenarios.Settler
colonialstatessuchasNewZealand,Australia,SouthAfricaandCanadamustbeunderstoodascontextually
specific(andasIwillargue,continuallycolonial)unlikestateswhichsufferedinterventionduringimperial
expansion,butwereneverintendedassitesforEuropeansettlementandinhabitance.ChapterOneprovidesa
moredetaileddifferentiationofsettlercolonialismasadistinctivecolonialcontext.
10 |

operate under these conditions. Rather, this thesis shall seek to uncover the more
embedded operations of disgust within the settler condition.

The presence of disgust is somewhat disguised in a settler context, but it can be traced
through an account of aesthetic gestures which I term the disgust-beauty amalgam. This
amalgam is suspiciously fervent in its insistence that the Other is not disgusting. The Other
is nothing but beautiful and thus we find a mask at work here. This is the quality of the
passive-aggressive in the settler condition. The apparently aesthetic harmony of bi-cultural
Aotearoa is necessary for the project of national forgetting demanded for successful
settlement.10 We must forget we ever came from anywhere else, that there was ever another
home to go to.

The desires of the settler are here multiplied beyond an imperial want for exoticised Other-
ness. This is the difference: the settler wants to make a home in a place. Arriving to find this
promised home filled with the bodies of Others, the settler is consumed by longing and
animosity. The dialectic of desire and disgust is set in motion. The settlers desire to occupy
is held in concert with a base disgust for the already-occupying indigene. The model of a
shared-home via bi-cultural narratives of New Zealand identity bears no trace of this disgust,
since it amounts to an aesthetic transfer of settlement. Bi-culturalism knowingly factors the
indigenous into the sheer promise of a place, displacing the disgust rooted within the settler
desire for home and disavowing the colonizing moment this disgust might gesture toward.
In doing so, the unflattering history of this place is divorced. Settlement requires that
colonialism becomes a thing that happened somewhere else, or at least a long time ago.

I dont wish to forget. Or rather, I cant, because I want to talk about bodies. And I have a
body, in a place. My bodily account then is a gesture toward remembering the sheer
continuity of our history. It requires a constant self-reflexive encounter with my text. As a
result, parts of this thesis read like dialogue. There is a conversation going on between
myself and the theory I write. This is my attempt to account for the narrative of my body in
this text, a signpost which points not only inward to the writing body of the author, but also
outward to the presence of other bodies in text. The understanding of bodies as inherent to
writing and knowing is the basis for the personal and political coherence of this thesis. There
is a conscious symmetry of self and nation. The parallel is drawn between the relations of

10
Foradiscussionoftheconstitutiveamnesiarequiredfortheharmoniousunderstandingofnationalidentity
insettlercolonialstatesseeStephenTurner,SettlementAsForgetting,inQuicksands:FoundationalHistories
inAustraliaandAotearoaNewZealand,ed.KlausNeumann,NicholasThomasandHilaryEricksen(Sydney:
UniversityofNewSouthWalesPress,1999).
 11

my body and my text, and the relations between the body of the settler and the national text,
that is our narrative of cultural identity, or what constitutes New Zealand-ness in Aotearoa
New Zealand.

I want to grapple with the sticky realities of speaking about this topic. I want to get a handle
on disgust. I want to open the door to thinking about a sensory colonial present. But I must
notice the way the handle slips in my fingers. I cannot hold it. It is a greased and slippery
surface. It is object, and not. It must be understood in relation to subjects. The idea of
disgust reminds me that I am a body among other bodies, a site of exchange, a relational
being, a flow in a network. This is because disgust itself works at the mediating boundaries
of self and others. Disgust exists between bodies; it is both relational, and relating. It cannot
be an object proper. Rather, it approximates Serres quasi-abstract object, which asserts
that we are all quasi-subjects by virtue of our bodies.11

In this recognition, I approach a problem of theory itself as an analytical, revelatory and

objectifying task. In accounting for the limited capabilities of a theoretical exploration of
disgust, I refuse the self-satisfaction of inalienable knowns which distance what-I-write-
about from she-who-writes. I must return always to my own voice in order to avoid those
perils of theory, and it is the quasi-ness of my content that authorizes this approach.
Disgusts quasi quality is in the way it calls attention, constantly, to the materialities of the
body, its messy and mattered parts. It recalls the bodys permeability, the fluids that are
excreted and taken in, and the failure of bodies to be contained and tidy. How can my critical
act respond to this liminal being, this quasi-object that I make use of? I hope to do so by
occupying a critical borderline, which interweaves both empirical observation and theory
proper into a matrix of disgust, through which colonialism and settler colonialism can be
thought about in sensory terms.

The disgust matrix proceeds as follows:

Chapter One is a definitional space, fleshing out the terms of reference for a sensory
encounter. Both colonialism and settler-colonialism are reframed as structural forces, a
fact which the disembodied bias of history has concealed.

11
ForSerres,thequasiobjectisalsoaquasisubject,whichsuggestsitsrelationalquality:thequasiobjectis
notanobject,butitisonenevertheless,sinceitisnotasubject,sinceitisintheworld;itisalsoaquasi
subject,sinceitmarksordesignatesasubjectwho,withoutit,wouldnotbeasubjectinMichelSerres,The
Parasite(Baltimore:JohnHopkinsUniversityPress,1982),225.
12 |

Chapter Two adds critical mass to the bodily concept of disgust, highlighting
contemporary scholarly debates about its social, biological and political function, and
identifying theoretical holes in the disgust scholarship which require redress. In answer
to the work of Andreas Krebs on disgust in a Canadian settler-colonial context, the
relation of disgust to colonialism is here framed as a triadic structure. Describing what-
it-is to be colonial as a subtractive and constructed process, the quasi-abstract bodies of
encounter are understood as a mucky swamp of ambivalence from which the colonial
must recoil. In the moment of rejection, the Other is demarcated as a body which is
morally suspect, pathologically diseased and abjectly feminized. In the process of this
Othering operation the colonial Subject is also created. From the revolting remainder, the
colonial body must be subtracted. From the muck of ambivalence, a subject emerges
who is good, healthy, and masculine.

Chapter Three responds to the specificities of the disgust mechanism in a settler colonial
environment. This context demands a unique understanding, which is here formulated in
terms of an amalgamated complex of disgust and beauty, from which emerges the
opportunity to speak in complicated ways about colonial and settler-colonial disgust. An
analysis of Pramod Nayars Colonizing Aesthetics in an Indian context is here utilized to
formulate two separate aesthetic frameworks for approaching Pacific colonial and New
Zealand settler-colonial scenarios, respectively.

Chapter Four is concerned with the overt disgust in the imperial encounter with the
Pacific. The aversion-repulsion dialectic toward primitive women is explained as both a
geographical phenomenon and as the respective applications of prohibitive hard and
satietory soft disgust functionalities. This heterosexual revulsion is counterbalanced by
the narrative alternative of homoerotic disgust obscured by the sheer misogyny of the
prevailing Pacific discourse. The colonial fear of the devouring savage is explored for its
colonial continuity in the critical discourse of cannibalism, revealing a postcolonial writing
body that is not immune to the machinations of disgust.

Chapter Five offers an account of how settler-colonial disgust operates in New Zealand.
Borrowing from Lorenzo Veracinis account of settlement as conditioned by transfer,
disgust in New Zealand is read firstly as an aesthetic disavowal of indigenous bodies in
order to clear discursive space for the body of the settler. The nostalgic dying race trope
of Moriland literature is complicated by settler conditions of shame, fascination,
 13

indignation, unease and disgust. Secondly, the ethic of hard physical work in the land
demanded by the civilizing project of the settler offers a second transfer, one of the literal
dirt-of-place on the settling male body. The dirt becomes symbol for a literal inhabitation,
and an earned right to be included in the national collective of New Zealanders. Dirt-as-
transfer is visible in our contemporary ecological practices of eco-nationalism, which
weed out the disgusting exotic from the revered native, in order to employ disgust as a
method of nationalist exclusion, in terms of which the Pkeh New Zealander is
constructed.

Chapter Six extends the analysis of exclusionary disgust by exploring the revulsion
expressed by the white Pkeh majority toward migrant bodies in New Zealand. The
persistent exclusion of these bodies from the national bi-cultural identity is a function of
their bodies failure to speak in terms of cultural capital. Rather, the embodied realities of
being Third World-looking, tasting, sounding and above all smelling demonstrate the
embedded colonial prejudices in the affect of disgust in the social construction of the
New Zealand nation-state.

The intermingling of primary and secondary documentation utilized within the hexapod matrix
is an answer to the constitutive instability of colonial representation. There is a
misapprehension that a primary text is somehow raw and unmediated. To assume so is
tantamount to reading disgust as a gesture of the bodily real, entirely unmediated by social
acculturation. The artificial separation of primary and secondary is in part a refusal to
acknowledge that colonialism could be understood in terms of an embodied disgust. The
prejudice of primary-ness reveals both our temporal coding (colonialism has passed) and
reinstatement of authentic originals (there is an inviolable essence in the text, not the body).
In this thesis both presumptions are problematised. In order to keep mindful of the slippage
from primary to real in a thesis which can be reduced to feelings, I must look to a diverse
range of primary, secondary, fictional, anecdotal, and visual resources to inform my work. I
must cast my textual net wide, in order to demonstrate the permeating powers of colonial
discourse.

As a matrix of six chapters, disgust is on its own terms. It is a six-legged creature, a

hexapod which wades through critical issues of disgust and located sites of disgusted
colonial enterprise. But there is no attempt here to map these discussions as discrete parts,
laid out adjacent to one another. Rather, these chapters should be understood as layers of
14 |

thickening critical tissue, knotted together to form an abnormal growth. This is the lumpy
node formed when disgust and colonialism are yoked.

Here, this clump of ideas has clustered around specific contexts of the colonial Pacific and
settler-colonial New Zealand. In the Pacific, these colonial nodes have left their scars, but
have been substantially cut out in the decolonizing endeavor. In New Zealand, our lumps
have only accreted mass, and much as we might try to ignore our settled protrusions on this
place, they are hardly benign. We may have settled down, but we are still settlers, and our
bodies bear knowledge of our abnormal presence here. I declare my alien status, I must,
because these are the stakes: my thesis and I are abnormal growths on this land.
 15

Chapter One

The Forgotten Sensorium

I am writing about colonialism in New Zealand, so this thesis is personal. I find myself on this
ground, in this place, because of a colonial history of violent oppression, political exclusion,
cultural ignorance and land confiscation. And it disgusts me. My moral sensibilities make
my lip curl at the thought of New Zealands colonial history. Without powers of specificity for
this affect, I might go one step farther I might check myself. Perhaps I feel too rashly, after
all. I track down the etymological origins of colonisation and find myself scoffing the
Latin derivative colere offers not merely opportunity for the acting subject to inhabit and
cultivate, typical of the settlement and agrarian economic model imposed on British
colonies, but it further gives licence for such acts of nurture as to tend, to guard and worst
of all, to respect. I believe I am not alone when I laugh at the thought of British Colonisation
here as a tend-er process. I afford myself the right to criticize, nay, to be revolted. I do so
because I have imposed a quality of distance on those events. I enjoy a visceral denial of my
involvement because I did not do those things. That was not me. That was them.

My use of the third person plural pronoun, in the objective case: them, can hardly be as
neutral as its nomenclature suggests. The tension of the implicit accusation it carries is
coiled into the sentence. Properly, perhaps I should term it the accusative case, since my
sense of blame is myriad. Them is necessarily a plurality, a mass, a hoard, a multitude. But
it is also an implication of distance. Them people exist beyond my radius of self. In order to
describe the self, or what-I-am-not, spatial metaphors come in handy. Them, that morally
despicable other, capable of (un)imaginable Eurocentrism, essentialism and racism, are dis-
located. Those people are removed by my rhetoric, but also by the convenient temporal
scale by which we measure, and place, discrete events of history behind us.

In every expression of time, we turn irreducibly to metaphors of space. Thus, when one
attempts to wax historical, we are permitted the benefits not merely of looking at an object
such as the colonial as a thing which lies behind us in space, but also behind us in time.
Like so many ripe fruits from Pkeh quarter-acre backyards, this period has been bottled,
16 |

sealed and preserved in the great Agee Jar we call our colonial past. With time, the fruit has
turned and split in the jar (perhaps we didnt store in a cool, dry place), only to reveal the
seedy innards of the content. We can now peer in, and make out our pasts contents
insides, outsides, all with the smug assurance that a thick wall of container glass
divides us from them. I may feel safely disgusted by its contents. Others may look through
the glass, laughing (racism can be so retro). Others again may justify the glass divide as a
way to protect the contents from our criticism (the colonial era, and its mistakes, must be
seen as a product of its contextual environment it can only be as bad as the pickle in which
it marinates).

I characterize my disgust as safe, because I am different from these colonizers. I am not in

their pickle. What pickle, then, do I write in? If the past is both temporal and spatial Other,
then I must now have arrived on the shores of a new geography. I step onto the green breast
of a new-New Zealand, smelling the freshness, the new mint of the place. This must be, I
say breathlessly, the post-colonial. Ive heard so much about it!

It is in this safe-place, on the post-colonial outside of the glass divide, that I can generate
disgust toward those colonial insides. This disgust is not a sensorial or embodied disgust.
Rather, this disgust is a moral and cognitive reflex, which allows me to define myself as a
complete and uncomplicated settler subject. It is this sense of complete-ness in my I that
allows me to speak in the first person, since I am made whole by my disavowal of a morally
inferior past. However, I argue that this sense of self-autonomy which post-colonial moral
superiority permits is more complicated than it appears. This seemingly autonomous settler
subject sutures over and disguises the existence of a quasi-abstract subject, one which
bears an embodied relation to the world around it.

My use of the first-person in this thesis seeks to demonstrate the problem of the postcolonial
machine, which disguises the bodily reflex of disgust in the present (experienced through the
senses of a quasi-abstract settler subject) with a moral reflex of disgust toward the past
(owned by a authoritative post-settler subject, or a New Zealander). The one is an easy and
indoctrinated moral disgust, and the other is an embodied visceral disgust, which is relational.
The first is easy because it reaffirms my subject-hood. The second is more difficult to speak
about in the present, since it unbuckles my subject-ness and reveals the quasi-ness which is
experienced as an embodied queasiness to the world around me. It makes me relational to
colonial bodies who were queasy and nauseous in their new surroundings. It makes me
 17

crack through the glass, and get at the seeping insides which my first-person moralising
allowed me to disavow. I am still in the first-person, but I am in a mucky body, among other
mucky bodies and objects.

Let us look for a moment at the legacy of these queasy colonials. Early colonials arriving on
the shores of Aotearoa were confronted by a mixture of desire and disgust - for the heathen,
blood-thirsty, yet noble, savages, and for the impenetrable, beautiful and ominous bush. But
for the Enlightenment purposes of Discovery and Knowledge, such responses are not
relevant in their unmediated affective formats. This is the Empire, after all. There is no
unofficial account. Every record is a Record. With the omnipotent force of Science at the
helm, the research imperative of the colonial Empire set sail. The comforting binaries of
modernism are coded into each objective observation made by these budding imperial
scientists. So many journal entries, scrawled with cursive ink, betray the basic injustice of
colonial privilege. The very fact of their existence as our historical record is a symptom of a
strenuous cognitive ordering of the world in order to authorise one written voice.12 The writer
is always the same. It is the civilized, white male. As I shall argue, the presence of female
and indigenous writers in our contemporary institutions does necessarily depart from
asymmetrical power relations in the colonial writing act. Colonisation operated under the
auspices of a putative white male subject, and (moralised and easy) disgust attaches itself to
that white male subject. This is a condition built into the institutions from which I write.

It remains tempting, however, to emphasize the differences between then and now, where
that New Zealand is not this New Zealand. This time, its me writing. Im a woman. Im no
white-ie - our ozone-depleted summers tan me up every year. And Im not civilized. I ate
oysters straight off the rocks when I was a kid. See? Im nothing like them. Where those
colonial men felt they had every evolutionary and moral right to demean Mori tikanga, my
mum taught me to sing the colours of the rainbow in Te Reo when I was three. We today are
different.

1
Thisstrenuouscognitiveorderingsplitstheworldintwo,underconventionalmodernistbinaries.These
binariesarethosefamiliaroldtwopartasymmetriestotheworld:Manoverwomen,Presenceover
absence,Centreoverperiphery,Colonizerovercolonized,Whiteovercoloured.Theformercategory
ofthepairalwaysdrawspowerfrombeingthatwhichspeaks,thatwhichdesignatesitsotherhalf.Itmaintains
thepowerofmeaningmakingintheworldbyasetofdualistcategories.Intermsofdisgust,weshalllatersee
thatthediscretemindversusmessy,myriadbodyCartesiandualismisthemostsignificantbinaryofall.
Postcolonialstudieswouldappeartohavecomplicatedandsupersededcolonialerabinaries,butthisisthe
mistakeofcontinuingcolonialism,Iargue,throughasystematicinattentiontothebodyinwayswhichare
structuredbyhistoricalcolonialism.
18 |

My meaningful bi-cultural upbringing is in stark contrast to them colonials, who were

scrupulous in their de-meaning operation. To demean Mori meant not only to claim
superior rights of knowledge, history and citizenship, but also the right to write Mori. What-
it-is-to-be-Mori was written into existence by the all-knowing white man. Mori were de-
meaned in a second sense. They were stripped of all autonomous and self-determined
meaning.13 But, like I said, my mum made up for it. And my writing is different from theirs. Im
a different voice. Its because I can count to ten in Mori and because the New Zealand
government now funds a Mori Television Station, not to mention the Waitangi Tribunal
which has been righting our historic wrongs against Mori since 1975. We have moved
some way since the cultural hegemony and despicable assumptions of colonial New
Zealand.

So this post-colonial New Zealand is premised on post-colonial New Zealanders. We are

an officially bi-cultural nation, a definition which recognises our moral and cultural
responsibilities to the indigenous people of this land. Under the rubric of bi-culturalism,
colonial asymmetries can be rectified. It is a rhetoric that reads as explicitly in favour of
Mori presence in New Zealand. We dont wish to destroy you, we dont wish to assimilate
you, we wish to celebrate you! Celebration is the sanctioned national response to the
commemoration of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. 14 Prevailing marketing of New

13
In2007,AlisonJonesgavealecturewhichraisedtheproblemofwhitearchivingofMoripresenceinNew
Zealand,specificallyinrelationtotwoeyewitnessaccountsofeventsrecordedinmissionarySamuel
MarsdensJournal.ThefirstwasamockbattlebetweentherespectivetribesofchiefKorokoroandchief
RuataraorganisedonthebeachinRangihouain1814asentertainmentforthePkehsettlerswhohad
arrivedintheBay.ThesecondwasasermondeliveredtoMoribyMarsden,andpurportedlytranslatedtothe
peoplebyRuatara,whospokereasonablygoodEnglish.ThedescriptionoftheseeventswrittenbyMarsden
arealsoadescription;"thereisnoMorirecordoftheseevents,andsotheeventisentirelyconstructedby
thearchivalrecord,whichisnotablywhite.ForJones,thisraisesanontologicalproblemwheretheevents
bothdidtakeplaceandthattheydidnot,(originalemphasis)sincetheyareentirelydescribedinthereality
ofthewhitewriters.AlisonJones,KaWhawhaiTonuMtou:TheInterminableProblemofKnowingOthers
(InauguralProfessorialLecture,UniversityofAuckland,October24,2007),3,
http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/webdav/site/education/shared/about/schools/tepuna/docs/Inaugural_
Lecture.pdf.Onlythewhitemeaningoftheeventsistranscribed.Thisisnotmerelyanissueofcultural
relativismwhichmightberesolvedbygettingbothreadingsofthehistoricaleventsandroundingoutthe
asymmetriesofthearchive.Jonesmaintainsthattherearedeepincompatibilitiesandinterminabletensions
betweenthemeaningmakingprocessesofbothMoriandPkehinrelationtotheseevents.These
incompatibilitiesandtensionspreventawellrounded,inclusionary,harmoniousandbiculturalaccountofthe
mockbattleandsermonhappenings.Theyhaveonlyhappenedinthewhiteimaginary,anditisthetension
betweencontradictoryrealities[thatmakeswayfor]theakeakeake,theendlessstruggletoknow,toread,
tounderstand,toworkwith,toengagewith,others.Jones,KaWhawhaiTonuMtou,10;original
emphasis.
14
TheNewZealandMinistryforCultureandHeritageprovidesthecurrentofficialperspectiveonthefunction
ofWaitangiDay,andtheappropriateaffectiveresponsetothe1840signingofTeTiritioWaitangi.The
websitedescribesthetwentyfirstcenturyposition,wherethegovernmenthasmadefundingavailableto
assisteventsandactivitiesthatcommemoratethesigningoftheTreaty.Whilstcontemporaryunderstanding
 19

Zealand as a community of diverse ethnicities has replaced assimilationist rhetoric with an

increased public recognition for ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious minorities.15 In this
respect, New Zealand tends to pat itself on the back. We have evolved.16 We are a thing
constructed on the basis of a national discursive performance. Not only do we recognise
Mori cultural and political rights, but we enjoy an elevated state of consciousness, which
begins to recognise all ethnic minorities within the New Zealand nation-state. Multi-
culturalism is thus heralded as the ultimate philosophical and political break with our
unpleasant colonial history. If there is a break, then we have arrived in a new land. We are,
surely, post-colonial.

The Unwelcome Presence of a Colonial Present

But herein lies the problem. Whatever affect we employ in relation to our colonial past be it
revulsion, amusement, or sympathetic understanding our glass divide remains. In the
moment of disgust at those directly implicated in the violence of our colonial past, a certain
moral divide splits our personal selves from their personal selves. Further, a certain political
shift is implicitly recognized, from the colonial policies of the imposed Pkeh government
toward the present day liberalized politics of difference which reflect a drift toward a multi-
cultural New Zealand identity. The growing popular consensus that we now exist in a zone
of temporality termed the post-colonial era does everything to affirm the idea that our moral,
social and political ties to the colonial past have now been severed.

ofcolonialismisoneofindigenousloss,bothculturalandmaterial,thetaxpayerwillonlyfundactionswhich
placeapositivespinontheadventoftheTreatyinNewZealand:eventssupportedbythe[Commemorating
WaitangiDayFund]celebratethepositiveaspectsofWaitangiDaythecomingtogetherofthepeoplesof
st
NewZealandinaTreatyPartnership.WaitangiDayinthe21 century,NewZealandMinistryofCultureand
Heritage,lastmodifiedFebruary12,2010,http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/politics/treaty/waitangiday/21st
centurywaitangiday.
15
In2006,HelenClarkgaveaspeechattheRegionalInterfaithDialogueConferenceheldinCebu,Philippines,
whichforegroundeddialogueasthecrucialtooltoaddressingtheincreasingdiversitywhichcharacterisedthe
NewZealandnationstate:ourwiderregionisonewherealloftheworldsgreatfaithsaretobefoundand
thesameistrueofNewZealanditself,whichisbecomingincreasinglymulticulturalanddiverse...indialogue,
wecanempowereachother,affirmourhopes,nurtureourrelationships,andachievemutualrespectforeach
other.Rt.HonHelenClark,AddressattheRegionalInterfaithDialogueConference,March14,2006,
transcript,ScoopIndependentNews,http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0603/S00213.htm.
16
InarecentjournalarticleMervinSingham,theDirectoroftheOfficeofEthnicAffairsdescribedthe
relationshipofMoriwiththeCrownashavingpavedthewayfornewminoritycommunities.Theirjourney
illuminatesthewayforothers.MervinSingham,MulticulturalisminNewZealandtheneedforanew
paradigm,AotearoaEthnicNetworkJournal1,no.1(2006):34,
http://www.aen.org.nz/journal/1/1/AENJ.1.1.Singham.pdf.Thephrasinghereexplicitlysuggeststhatthebi
culturalMoriPkehrelationhasbuiltthefoundationforrecognitionofotherminoritypopulationswithin
NewZealand.
20 |

Indeed, it is my intention here to dispel the myth of distance that we project onto an
undesirable national history. I want to avoid the kind of amnesiac history which arranges a
narrative of discrete events that we call our past. I want to make trouble for the assumption
that colonialism was a series of neatly vacuum-packed happenings, which the Western
Academy can now turn over in the clean palm of its hand sterilized by the post-colonial
condition. Helpful to my cause is Derek Gregorys contention that we exist in a colonial
present that is incapable of divorcing its socio-economic, cultural and political realities from
the traces of a violent colonial past.

Gregory speaks in terms of a colonial modernity in order to recognize the extent to which
we continue to encode our reality through the bloodshot and bleary eyes of colonialism. We
are still experiencing its hang-over. By Gregorys reckoning, the colonial present is a
performative operation, which we continue to play out. The present is made complicit in a
violent colonial history because its legacy exists beyond our public social ordering. Those
socio-political and economic systems (and their disparities) which structure our public
existence remain implicated in this present as much as the way we think and perceive the
world around us: it is a personal and political enterprise. We must therefore remain astute in
the face of the sheer banality which characterises the colonial present.17 As Gregory insists,
there is a deceptive quality to the everyday in the way colonialism has survived. It is
remarkably ordinary to our lives:

The colonial present is not produced through geopolitics and geoeconomics alone,
through foreign and economic policy set in motion by presidents, prime ministers
and chief executives, the state, military apparatus and transnational corporations. It
is also set in motion through mundane cultural forms and cultural practices that
mark other people as irredeemably Other and that license the unleashing of
18
exemplary violence against them.

In keeping with the assertion that colonial modes of thinking have currency within our cultural
forms of Othering, I would here suggest that the concept of disgust functions as one such
mundane cultural form. Disgust, then, is a lens. If we look through it, we can spot a
seemingly naturalized and affective form of Othering in our culture.

But disgust is not commonly recognized as a cultural form or practice. It seems, rather, to
occupy a liminal status. It lies somewhere between affect and sensation, and as such, it
possesses a physiological quality which would seem to make it resistant to critical analysis.

17
DerekGregory,TheColonialPresent(Oxford:BlackwellPublishingLtd,2004),16.
18
Ibid.
 21

Disgust feels natural. Indeed, it is interpreted fundamentally as a feeling, an affect which

simply responds unreflectively to its external environment. It is visceral. It is instinctive. It is
a reaction of the body, seemingly coded into our evolved biology. However, it is a reaction
which is deeply culturally loaded, and in this respect, disgust offers a revealing look at a
disguised cultural agenda.

This chapter serves four key purposes. The first is to complicate the critical act of discussing
colonialism by introducing the concept of a colonial present. The second is to explore how
settler-colonialism is a phenomenon in its own right, and how its unique conditions might
bear structural similarities to the way in which disgust is intimately related to colonial
practice. Our discussion of disgust here will be cursory, as a deeper definitional account will
be offered in Chapter Two: In Disgust: Ambivalence, Fetid Ooze and the Operation of
Othering. The third imperative of this chapter is to account for, and accept, the asymmetries
of power which a critical voice speaking from the position of a disgusted colonial might
encourage. Finally, this chapter will serve to suggest how the study of disgust will
interrogate the biases of the historical archive, an archive which remains dumb to the
fundamental embodied nature of the colonial encounter.

An Unsurprising Condition: The Settler-Colonial Present

The assertion of the existence of a colonial present is fundamental to understanding the

way in which settler colonies operate. As Annie Coombes notes, the term settler has
about it a deceptively benign and domesticated ring19 that acts as a pleasing disguise. It
disguises both the violent encounter of a settled colony, and the continued discrimination of
governing practice against native peoples that such colonies maintain. Indeed, the action of
settling is a passive act, in that the settling subject is in fact placed at its final locus by an
external guiding force. This passivity informs, somewhat, the contemporary identity of the
settler. A settler is not the agent, but rather the thing-that-is-settled in a place, and settlers
hold no responsibility for their being there. If one wishes to extend this linguistic analysis of
settlement, it could well be noted that if one settles, then this act is performed intransitively,
in absence of an object. Therefore, we can say that Samuel Marsden settled in New Zealand,
but the preposition in only provides the scenery for the act of settlement, and does not imply

7
AnnieCoombes,Introduction:MemoryandHistoryinSettlerColonialisminRethinkingSettlerColonialism:
HistoryandMemoryinAustralia,Canada,AotearoaNZandSouthAfrica,ed.AnnieCoombes(Manchester:
ManchesterUniversityPress,2005),2.
22 |

that settling impacts on the place itself. The settler escapes responsibility on two counts,
apparently neither selecting his destination, nor impacting on any object (land or indigene)
by being in this destination. This definitional account of the term settler is vital to the way in
which settler colonial states can be structurally differentiated from colonial states.

Settler colonialism has been lately understood as a distinctive analytical concept for
understanding the continuity of colonial history into present-day national identity.20 Indeed,
Elkins and Pederson maintain that there are two fundaments that characterize the settler
colony. The first is the persistent definition of the land as terra nullius. The second is the
settler approach to the indigenous population: the logic of elimination as opposed to the
logic of exploitation that accompanied traditional imperial expansion.21 Where settlement
was the primary aim of the colonizing effort, the desire was not to enslave the indigene, but
rather to make him/her disappear. Both actual and discursive disappearance of the native
was entirely necessary in order to maintain the illusion of an empty and unoccupied land a
land ripe for European settlement. Adopting Gregorys conception of a colonial present
allows us to understand that settler colonialism cannot be reduced to a discrete temporal
period. But if we listen to Patrick Wolfes oft-quoted assertion that invasion is a structure,
not an event, we can flesh out our conception of settler colonialism further. As a structure,
settler colonialism becomes an organizing principle around which the state is founded. It is
a mode of ethics under which the states citizens live and think, a lasting design for
perceptions regarding national settler identity. Settler colonialism becomes a defining
structural characteristic of New Zealand, as opposed to originary moment in our Pkeh
history.

A Structural Relation: Disgust and Settler-Colonialism

Two analytical constructs are here being juxtaposed to undertake this study. The first is the
idea of settler-colonialism, and the second is disgust. Settler-colonialism is a way of
thinking and a way of being, a structural concept which continues to influence the way we
understand and order the world around us. By the same token, disgust is more than a mere
moment of revulsion, a responsive ewww in the face of something unsavoury. Chapter Two
will labour to develop the term disgust, offering greater dimensionality to its use, but for the

20
CarolineElkinsandSusanPederson,SettlerColonialism:AConceptanditsUsesinSettlerColonialismin
theTwentiethCentury:Projects,Practices,Legacies,ed.ElkinsandPederson(NewYork:Routledge,2005),1.
21
Ibid,2.
 23

moment we may usefully shortcut that process. Disgust is here understood as a social
function, which works in service of certain ideologies and beliefs that that society holds. This
thesis will serve to suggest that these two concepts are not only co-operative in context, but
that they also share a structural similarity. Both settler-colonialism and disgust are
programmed with a binary ethic, which splits the world into modernist hierarchies, where
only two pure types or categories exist. Centre is distinguished from periphery, continent
from colonies, settler from indigene, and disgusted subject from disgusting object. For Wolfe,
the concept of the Frontier services the illusion that two spaces and two peoples could be
made distinct by a kind of fixed . . . dividing line over which one could cross clearly, in order
to invade the other.22 The prevailing metaphor here is one of stasis, and this fixed-ness
prevents the more complicated interpretation of the frontier as a shifting, contextual,
negotiated, moved in and out of and suspended23 interactive space. Indeed, Jan Critchett
ironically suggests a kind of poster image for common conceptions of the frontier: a line
running down the centre of a bed shared by a black woman and white man.24

This kind of discursive simplicity is what post-colonial critique has strived to complicate by
reconsidering history from the perspective of colonialisms other. Inspired by anti-colonial
liberation movements, post-colonialism seeks to illuminate and give voice to those others
suppressed by colonial exclusionist histories. If there can be any unity within post-colonial
discourse, Robert Young claims it is common political and moral consensus . . . that the
history of European expansion . . . was both specific and problematic.25 At this site of unity,
a political imperative is embedded into the postcolonial project. Indeed, Young summarises
postcolonial critique as a form of activist writing . . . dedicated to changing those who were
formerly the objects of history into historys new subjects.26 It is with this popular practice of
re-orientation in mind that one might imagine this thesis to undertake a deconstruction of the
simple binaries of colonialism, to discard the over-played division between settler and
indigene as one of many divisions within a multi-cultural and multi-faceted social history, and
to embrace wholeheartedly a re-characterisation of settler-colonialism as dynamic, hybrid
and multiple. Certainly this has been a popular line of enquiry.27

22
PatrickWolfe,SettlerColonialismandtheTransformationofAnthropology(London:Cassell,1999),165.
23
Ibid,165.
24
JanCritchett,ADistantFieldofMurder(Carlton,Victoria:MelbourneUniversityPress,1990),23.
25
RobertYoung,Postcolonialism:AnHistoricalIntroduction,(Oxford:BlackwellPublishersLtd.,2001),5.
26
Ibid,10.
27
Postcolonialdiscoursehascritiquedculturalimperalismongroundsofitsessentialisminthefaceofgrowing
multiculturalawareness.Theconceptofhybridityisentirelyusefultothislineofargument,asitcomplicates
thedualistthinkingwhichservedbothcolonialandanticolonialpractices.HomiBhabhaarguesinThe
LocationofCulture(London;NewYork:Routledge,1994)thathybridityexposesafundamentalcolonial
24 |

However, the coupling of Settler Colonialism with the affect of Disgust alters the playing
field somewhat. Instead of deconstructing the hierarchies of value and knowledge which the
colonial era imposed, disgust reaffirms these values. It suggests the colonial other to be not
only racially, economically, spiritually and mentally inferior, but further to be some kind of
instinctively repulsive object by nature of its being. To be simply disgusting, by virtue of ones
sensory qualities, is innately personal. Disgust is linked so viscerally to the body as to
appear to its subject as a pure discernment: a truth. The prevailing winds of post-colonial
enterprise would encourage, therefore, a project which sought to destabilize this apparent
truth by speaking from the ulterior position, that of the disgust-ee. There is good reason,
however, for retaining an essentialist ideology by examining settler-colonial disgust from the
disgusted standpoint.

My justification for maintaining what Wolfe terms a zero-sum polarity to my enquiry is

multiple. Firstly, the postcolonial bandwagon which dissolves all binary oppositions in the
name of recognition politics has a curious relationship to the political ideologies of colonial
and present-day power distribution. In recognizing the changing face of Aotearoa to be an
image of increasing ethnic diversity, state rhetoric has followed suit with recognition of de
facto cultural pluralism. To extend the visual metaphor of such a gesture, the face of
Aotearoa would undoubtedly have the skin of a patchwork quilt, grafted with all manner of
tonal variations. The mosaic, judging by our latest census statistics, would be intricate,
among it a Chinese patch, a Dutch patch, a Korean patch, a Sri Lankan patch, a Tokelauan
patch, a Brazilian patch, a New Zealand European patch, and of course, in equal measure, a
Mori patch. Certainly this kind of cultural differentiation and ethnic recognition is desirable
on close inspection. The distinctive moles, hairs and freckles of each component can be
nuanced and prevent the assimilative mistakes of colonial enterprise. However, from a
distance, how do these nuances fare? Surely the intricate mosaic would bleed together with
distance, to form that coffee-colored vision of a melting-pot society.28

anxietytoliminalzones.Colonialhybridityalteredpowerdynamicsbyelicitingaresponseofambivalencefrom
colonialmasters.SeealsoStuartHall,NewEthnicitiesinRace,CultureandDifference,ed.JamesDonaldand
AliRattansi(London:Sage,1992),252259,andMikaelBakhtinsconceptsofpolyphonyandheteroglossiain
TheDialogicImagination:FourEssays,ed.MichaelHolquist(Austin:UniversityofTexasPress,1981).
28
ThisimageissomethingliketheFaceofAmerica,animaginarycomputergeneratedcitizenwhichfigured
onthecoverofa1993Timemagazine.LaurenBerlantdiscusseshowthisfacehasbeencastasanimaginary
solutiontotheproblemsofimmigration,multiculturalism,sexuality,genderand(trans)nationalidentitythat
haunttheU.S.presenttense.Berlantisconcernedtodemonstratehowthepoliticsofrecognitionthatthe
faceseemstorepresentactuallyworkstoreinstatethewhitenessandheteronormativityofmainstream
culture.Sheisjustaface,sinceherpureisolationfromlivedhistory...respondstowidespreaddebateabout
 25

In the context of a continuing colonial present, where fundamental economic and political
power disparities remain unchanged between predominant European settlers and marginal
Mori indigenes, multiculturalism appears as a convenient term for the project of nation-
building in New Zealand. By recognizing all ethnic minorities under a rubric of heterogeneity,
a certain homogenous coffee-coloured quality emerges so that, for example, Mori
sovereignty is accorded no greater discursive place in New Zealand than Korean
sovereignty, for example. Retaining the settler-colonial binary, therefore, enacts a certain
politics of recognition in itself it recognizes the fundamental political priority to the first
peoples of this nation, rather than dissolving all cultural difference into the patchwork of
equal representation.

Adopting the Voice of the Disgusted White Man:

If the powerful binary of colonial othering remains intact for the purposes of this enquiry, one
may wonder why this study does not adopt the anti-colonial stance, by seeking to give voice
to the object of colonialism, and not the subject. To do so would be to stage an Empire-
writes-back critique that would speak for Mori in this place. However, there is something
amiss in locating the voice of the indigene from within the academy. Can the Western
intellectual hold the right to claim authority over the discursive space of indigenous peoples?
Surely the intention to rectify the continuing societal biases inherited from colonialism is
undone when the intellectual speaks of and for the other. The discipline of anthropology in
particular has much to answer for in this regard. Anthropologys obsession with defining and
uncovering the authentic indigene exists as a kind of discursive capture of identity, a
conversation from which indigenous peoples were long excluded. Such practice appears as,
simply, Western discourse talking to itself.29

I wish here to make trouble for the classical practice of anthropology in that it always
purports to describe its object proper, its other. In the linguistic paradox that the act of
description entails, to describe an object is to further ones understanding of that object,

thevalueofworkingclassandproletarianimmigrants.InBerlantsview,themainstreampublicspherelink
whateverpositivevalueimmigrationhastothecurrentobsessivedesireforarevitalizednational
heterosexualityandawhite,normalnationalculture.LaurenBerlant,TheQueenofAmericaGoesto
WashingtonCity:EssaysonSexandCitizenship(Durham,NC:DukeUniversityPress,1997),176177.Apparent
multiculturalrepresentationsimplyactstoregirdthenormsofnationalidentity,normswhicharethedirect
resultofcolonialinterventionandtheasymmetriesofpowerthatstemfromit.
29
Wolfe,SettlerColonialism,4.
26 |

yet at the same time, it is de-scribed, thus its power to write itself is removed. This is
precisely the issue that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak takes up in her 1985 article Can the
Subaltern Speak? in addressing whether the indigene can ever be given voice, under the
theorizing and totalizing thumb of the Western Academy. The term sub-altern is borrowed
from Gramsci, and has now come to define a whole discipline of study in its own right. For
Spivak, subaltern is always the object, and never the subject of discourse. The subaltern is
incapable of speaking or signifying itself within elite spheres, because its difference has
already been represented, construed and fetishized under the descriptive terms and models
of the intellectual sphere. The academic interaction with the subaltern is always flawed by its
incapacity to decentre its own authority. It is always in the act of official meaning-making
from an indigenous experience. bell hooks parodies the tone of the sympathetic western
academic, by citing the insistence on indigenous pain which maintains a colonial practice of
de-authorization:

No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about
yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your
story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way
that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author,
authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the centre of my
30
talk.

Spivak is at pains to point out that the silent subaltern is a symptom of the irreducible gap
between abstract pure theory and local applied practice of the people, a social reality
which is definitionally unrepresentable 31 from the position of the subaltern. bell hooks
wishes to differentiate the forces of silence imposed upon the margins there is more than
simply categorical oppression at work. Indeed, the action of the white mans pen serves to
consolidate the characterisation of the margin as an oppressed space. This amounts to a
call for the subaltern to speak their story, but a failure to acknowledge that the listening
subject has selective hearing she only transcribes the pain. That margin of other can only
ever be a space of deprivation, a wound . . . [an] unfulfilled longing.32 The well-meaning
anthropologist may well feel wound-ed themselves by this assertion. They begin to feel
there is no space to engage with this other at all. The anxious Professor mops his brow as
he navigates the discursive maze. He can hear the eggshells cracking beneath his brown-
laced oxfords.

30
bellhooks,marginalityassiteofresistanceinOutThere:MarginalizationandContemporaryCultures,ed.
RussellFergusonandMarthaGever(Cambridge,MA:MIT,1990):343.
31
NeilLazarus,IntroducingPostcolonialStudiesinTheCambridgeCompaniontoPostcolonialLiterary
Studies,ed.NeilLazarus(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,2004),10.
32
bellhooks,marginalityassiteofresistance,343.
 27

But this is New Zealand. Our lecturers wear jandals, not oxfords, and theyre not all white. If
the brown face speaks from inside the academy, where does that leave us in the theory-
applied quagmire of colonial discussion? Linda Tuhiwai Smith attempts to provide some
critical methodologies for such brown faces to claim territory to speak in a role as
researcher. Her key focus in Decolonizing Methodologies is to create pathways for an
indigenous agenda within recognised academic research, where Mori travel the trajectory
from researched to researcher. Fundamental to this journey is the privileging of Mori
ways-of-knowing, a criterion which ensures Mori values and attitudes are reflected in both
content and process of indigenous research activity. Tuhiwai Smiths sense of social realism
and her political imperative for change have been embedded into her text,33 but she does not
permit the recognition of indigenous story as painful to become a secondary pained
silence. There is room here for more than the sound of tears. This is because the writing
subject is (Tuhiwai Smith argues necessarily) Mori, and operates under distinctive Kaupapa
Mori framework in research.

I am heartened by Tuhiwai Smiths rallying call to generate indigenous voices within

indigenous research orientations. The disparities of voice between the institutions of the
colonizing West and the representations of their colonized other is in part the subject of this
thesis. But the fingers tapping at this keyboard remain unmistakeably white. The disparity
privileges my voice to speak at all within Western academia, and my presence in front of this
computer, right now, can be seen as one of those lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results
of colonial enterprise.34 Indeed, it is Edward Saids characterization of the structural traces of
colonialism as grotesque that began my enquiry. Contemporary revulsion toward
colonialism must be understood in relation to historical revulsion as a tool of colonialism. But
how does the non-indigenous researcher behave in a way that does not seem to provoke a
kind of bulimic practice where one is wracked with self-disgust? I have become that
sweating anxious academic, paralysed to speak about colonialism without re-colonizing the
indigenous domain. Despite Tuhiwai Smiths model of methodological empowerment, I am

33
TuhiwaiSmithdiscussesthepressingsocialproblemsthatconfrontthecontemporarycolonialother,which
maymakeacademicquestionsseemirrelevant.Theacademicactoftakingapartthestory,revealing
underlyingtextsandgivingvoicetothingsthatareoftenknownintuitivelydoesnothelppeopletoimprove
theircurrentconditions.Itprovideswords...butitdoesnotpreventsomeonefromdying.Thereisan
urgencytoherenquiry,whichseeksachangefromtheWesternparadigmofknowledgemakinginorderto
addresstheseconcernsinarealway.LindaTuhiwaiSmith,DecolonizingMethodologies(Dunedin:Universityof
OtagoPress,1998),3.
34
EdwardSaid,Orientalism(NewYork:VintageBooksLtd,1979),207.
28 |

left haunted by her assertion that research remains one of the dirtiest words in the
indigenous worlds vocabulary.35

It is Tuhiwai Smiths recourse to the soiled history of the colonizing language that is, however,
my critical point of re-entry. I do not wish to perform that great deconstructive aha! which
transforms the academy itself into the disgusting other, however tempting that move might
be to assuage my westerners guilt. But we must not forget that my endeavour is a dirty one.
I want to talk about disgust, which is not necessarily the disgusting. Disgust has always a
sensorial liminality about it - it resists an object-based account. If anything, it is unashamedly
self-indulgent in its subject-forming practice. Speaking about disgust is only ever speaking
about the I that is revolted. Kristevas discussion of the abject, reveals the sheer
formlessness to this topic. The object proper disappears. What was object-ness, becomes
abject-ness. For Kristeva, these two positions are distinct, in that the abject is not an ob-
ject facing me, which I name or imagine . . . the abject has only one quality in common with
the object that of being opposed to the I.36 The abject allows the subject, the ego, to be.
However, in and of itself, the abject cannot be named, it cannot be described, because the
subject does not precede it. Rather, the abject is the primary, the repudiation of which allows
the subject to exist and to speak. Having already been rejected, the abject cannot be defined.
It is simply that-which-remains. The abject is never discrete, it is always fluid, shifting and
originary. In Kristevas terms these qualities signify the abject as distinctly maternal, a
classification vital to my later description of disgust as inherently misogynistic. The way in
which the abject sublimates discernable boundaries between subject and object reveals a
quasi-ness to being in the world. The abject not only elicits disgust by its quasi-subjective
ambiguity, but also for its capacity to reproduce more quasi-beings, possessing potential for
excessive life. The experience of the abject reiterates the fundamental rejection of the
mother to form a self, and hence a subject demonstrating disgust is always rejecting a
feminised other. In its ambiguous quasi-state, the abject is unable to be ob-jectified, the
abject is the sole reason for, and yet poses a virulent threat toward, the subject. Kristeva
offers a politics of abjection, even an affirmative abjection, which is an aggressive return on
behalf of the low, the rejected or the disgusting.

This is not the site for affirmative abjection. Under the rubric of abjection, normative models
of intellectual intercourse are objectionable to the very core of the way abject would wish to

35
TuhiwaiSmith,DecolonizingMethodologies,1.
36
JuliaKristeva,PowersofHorror:AnEssayonAbjection(NewYork:ColumbiaUniversityPress,1982),1.
 29

communicate. I cannot communicate the abject. The discursively regulated signifiers of this
document: its length, its chapter-by-chapter format, capped by suitable introductory and
conclusive discussion and underpinned by footnotes suggest why. I rather wish to take on
some of that slippery quality when I engage in my sensory account. There is an ethical
obligation to recognize my position within an institutional network, and to acknowledge that
no intellectual can purport to operate transparently within this network. But as Chapter Two
will divulge further, to engage with disgust, one must abandon notions of transparency
one must relish in the milky, viscous, and odorous. This is my desired academic space, the
messy liminal zones of the senses.

However vigorous my intention to become the dirty-fingered academic, with hands plunged
into the disgusting and disgusted realities of our colonial history, the sanitizing forces of the
historical archive are a sobering reality check. Certain privileges in the records of history
make the study of disgust a challenging task. Here lies my second justification for
undertaking a project which examines settler-colonial history specifically through the (grubby)
lens of disgust. This is not merely by virtue of its difficulty, but because it serves to work in
some small way against the biases of historical research. Our history has been dis-
embodied and dis-membered. Let us re-member it! For this, we call upon disgust. Disgust is
distinct in its capacity to be concrete[ly] sensual 37 as an affect. In order to describe
something that is deemed to be disgusting, ones recourse is to the sensory experience of
being proximal to the object. We describe its taste, its smell, its sight, its touch. An aversive
sensory perception of flavor, odor and feel is mandate enough to determine any object to be
disgusting. In this way, disgust must be present and of the body. This is not the abstract
and moral disgust of with which I began this chapter. That disgust was cognitive, a revulsion
wielded by an autonomous post-settler subject. Rather, the sensorial disgust I seek is not
abstract. It is a disgust embodied by a living, breathing, sniffing, devouring, desiring quasi-
subject.

An Embodied Colonial History

To trawl for disgust historically is, one soon discovers, no easy feat. This is in part due to a
bias of sensory privilege that pervades our historical practice of preservation. The
conventions of our institutions of memory, of both our museums and our historical archives,
dictate that history is a thing to be seen. Our official cultural memory does not extend to the

37
WilliamIanMiller,TheAnatomyofDisgust(Cambridge,Massachusetts:HarvardUniversityPress,1997),9.
30 |

capacities of smell, taste and touch. Indeed, the rise of the Western Academy, borne from
the assumed superiority of the Enlightenment and the profits of imperial expansion, has
promoted the excessive privilege of aural and visual capacities for understanding,
communication and knowledge. This tyranny over our senses and our historical knowledge
is what has been termed one of the pervasive colonial legacies which have privileged the
Western sensorium. 38 This legacy affords an illusion of objectivity to certain sensory
perceptions. Our eyes and our ears are to be trusted, the other senses are not. But in reality,
colonialism was not experienced through merely two sensory formats, as Elizabeth Edwards,
Chris Gosden and Ruth Phillips argue:

Distinctions of hierarchy, class and caste were created and represented not only
through clothing, buildings, representational forms, and the organization of the
landscape, but also through the formation of new conventions and distinctions
around food, odors, sounds, and the bodily contacts in which material objects
were, and continue to be, entangled. Indeed, both colonial and indigenous
categories were often generated viscerally, out of responses of desire or
39
disgust.

It is this entanglement of colonialism with the visceral realities of disgust that this project
wishes to bring to light, and the way this disgust shaped the categories that continue to
order our present understanding of the world.

Museum and archival practice is riddled with a fundamental inconsistency in that it

perpetuates the illusion that we are post-colonial, by presenting the objects of our colonial
past in such a way as to suggest that visual inspection will provide a total understanding of
the object before them. It essentially turns the object of examination into a signifier for the
past that remains static and eternal over time. So to suggest a fully sensorial object,
complete with taste and smell, is contrary to a simplified and hierarchical sensory perception
of history, and inimical to the normative production of rational knowledge within the Western
academy. If one permits the examination of disgust, then, the peripheral senses come to the
cultural fore, as we are forced to recognize that objects of cultural study are not concrete,
bounded and inscribed with visual meaning alone. Rather, in the style of Bruno Latour, a
focus on the sensory modes that historical archiving has suppressed might highlight the
relational quality of the objects we intend to study.40 The study of disgust therefore offers a

38
ElizabethEdwards,ChrisGosdenandRuthB.Phillips,(eds.)IntroductioninSensibleObjects:Colonialism,
MuseumsandMaterialCulture(Oxford:Berg,2006),1.
39
Ibid,3.
40
BrunoLatour,WeHaveNeverBeenModern(Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress,1993).
 31

relational understanding of those limiting cultural and temporal binaries which split colonizer
from Other and the post-colonial era from colonial past.

In part, this is because of the distinctive nature of disgust, and the metaphors which pervade
its association with the senses. William Miller explains that disgust has the power to
contaminate, infect or pollute by proximity,41 even to the extent that the senses used to
articulate the quality of disgusting-ness become unmentionable by association. Social taboo
surrounds not only those orifices with which sensory perception is associated, but further to
the extent that a conversation over digestion, indeed over toothbrushes, is already thought
rude. And as a consequence finer souls do not even think about such things.42 Disgust has
become associated with those senses and regions of the body which have been prohibited
from institutional memory and historical examination precisely because they are deemed
unfit for public and intellectual discussion. Bodily sensory functions like tastes and smells are
not an acceptable topic for intellectual discourse because they are disgusting. Disgust is not
an appropriate topic of discussion because it inevitably requires attention to the orifices of
the body that sense the world around them in a visceral, non-rational way. The two things
are locked into a dialectical relation, and as a result Western notions of impropriety have
suppressed their investigation, and preserved their low ranking in the long history of
scholarly endeavor.

The political quality of disgust is made obvious by the orientational and visibility metaphors 43
to which disgust is held hostage. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe this kind of
deep-rooted connection of understanding between two entities as cognitive metaphor,
where one thing is understood, not merely described, in terms of the other. The disgusting is
irreversibly understood as physically, morally and intellectually lower than its subject. It lies
beneath, associated with the dark, proximity-related senses; those of taste, smell and
touch.44 These are opposed to the higher senses; the eyes and ears permit access to a
certain clarity and light of reason. So we understand tasting, smelling and touching in
terms of a moral low-ness, and this affects how we think about that which smells or tastes
bad. Unlike the reasonable, clear, well-lit, higher acts of seeing and hearing, the senses
of disgust are dark, base, muddied, and morally suspect. They are an untrustworthy

41
Miller,TheAnatomyofDisgust,2.
42
WinfriedMenninghaus,Disgust:TheTheoryandHistoryofaStrongSensation(Albany:StateUniversityof
NewYorkPress,2003),157.
43
SeeGeorgeLakoffandMarkJohnson,MetaphorsWeLiveBy(Chicago:UniversityofChicagoPress,2003).
44
Menninghaus,Disgust,39.
32 |

means of understanding the world. Indeed the act of sensing is always inferior to the act of
seeing, where sight is invariably associated with a greater cognitive processing of the
world around us. Disgust is visceral. It is experienced through the senses. Indeed, disgust
and sensation become synonymous, where disgust is described as a sensation, 45 and the
act of sensing (and those implicitly revolting orifices with which we do so) becomes
disgusting in turn. To describe sensation as metaphor for disgust may seem counter-intuitive,
but in order to examine the cultural systems of meaning in which the disgusting is
entangled, Chapter Two must proceed to de-naturalise, at least partially, the feeling itself.

I have hoped here to remove my critical gloves somewhat, to reveal the sticky fingers of an
academic grappling with a colonial present. In the dissolution of my objects of study proper,
I have reappropriated colonialism, settler-colonialism, and disgust as structural forces to
my enquiry, as opposed to temporally static concepts from which I hold critical immunity. The
discursive power which these forces wield is inherently asymmetric in relation to their
others, but this is no excuse for a kind of anxious paralysis at the moment I acknowledge
my own whiteness. Rather, I look to disgust to inform a sensorial academic practice. I
approach my discussion of the colonial archive as a sweating, pulsating, sniffing, excreting
corpus. I thus seek to be slippery in the face of dry, white theory. We seek to elucidate the
colonial present with a real embodied presence, which requires a constant reminder of our
embodied critical act.

45
Thereissomedebateovertheappropriatewordtocategorisetheexperienceofdisgust.Most
theoreticiansagreethatdisgustisdistinctfromotherfeelingsoremotions.WilliamMillerclassifiesdisgustas
anemotion,asdistinctfromafeeling,inordertoexplainitsembeddednessinsocialhistoriesandcultural
systemsofmeaning.However,Menninghausclassifiesdisgustasastrongsensation,whichbestfitswiththe
embodiedexperienceofdisgustwithwhichthisthesisisconcerned.
 33

Chapter Two:

In Disgust: Ambivalence, Fetid Ooze and the Operation of Othering

What is Disgust?

When it comes to the disgust-sensation, the Cartesian dictum

I think therefore I am can be replaced by a new variant:
46
I am disgusted, hence something is real

Disgust has been variously characterized as a feeling, an emotion, a sensation and an affect.
Our starting point is experiential how does it feel? Disgust presents as an intoxicating
combination of heady nausea, terror and a rising-in-the-throat. These bodily presences, the
unwelcome return of digested matter and the sweaty anxiety under threat of contamination,
are independently insufficient to explore the personal and societal complexities of
understanding disgust and its historical agency. The signifier of disgust, the vomitive
impulse, appears to us as automaton. There is no rationalizing or arguing with disgust, it is
simply too visceral. It cannot be experienced ironically, it confronts as a kind of sickness it
demands its presence be attended to. It is a short-circuit since there are no mediating links
between a disgusting stench and the [disgusted] sensation. 47 This is Immanuel Kants
sense of the unconditional real that lies in disgust, since it is always a thing in-the-body.48
Disgust is about proximity, then. It inhabits the real in its act of bodily incorporation through
the senses it seems to bring the world into our gut, directly. Or rather, it would seem to
prevent our gut from incorporating that world. It is the ultimate border-defence mechanism
the instinctive soldier of our bodily orifices. It is a gag-reflex, a muscle spasm of the throat, a
seemingly involuntary response of our physiology. This is what makes disgust distinct from
other emotions: it induces a specific (admittedly self-reported) physiological state,49 and thus
creates the illusion of being entirely subjective. Indeed, it fails a basic test of objectivity; it

46
WinfriedMenninghaus,Disgust:TheTheoryandHistoryofaStrongSensation(Albany:StateUniversityof
NewYorkPress,2003),42.
47
Ibid,43.
48
Ibid,9.
49
PaulRozin,JonothanHaidt,andClarkR.McCauley,discussnauseaasadistinctlydisgustedphysiological
state,whereotheremotionsdonothaveaspecificphysiologyinDisgustinHandbookofEmotions,ed.
MichaelLewisandJeannetteM.Haviland(NewYork:GuilfordPress,1993).
34 |

has no critical distance. The revolting thing presses itself upon the revolted subject and
there is no space to think.50 If the role of intellectual processing is far less important, when
disgust is compared to fear, horror, grief or pity, 51 then thinking and speaking about disgust
become problematic. Words fail in the face of the senses, the throat is stuffed. There is a
great failure here to communicate at all. The mouth opens, but it does not speak. It vomits.

If disgust is not a thinker, it must be a do-er. We return irreducibly to its biological function,
what is it do-ing for us? It must be an evolved phenomenon. Scientific research has
discerned the universally applicable disgust face, which is based on facial motor activity
around the mouth and nose. Specifically, this faces salient features are its lifted upper lip
and wrinkled bridge of the nose.52 These studies operate on the basis of facial decoding,
such that anatomical signifiers are explicable in terms of evolutionary pragmatism. The key
impulse in the anatomy of disgust, such studies agree, is to expel the sensory stimuli from
the body, both orally and nasally.53 On this basis, neuropsychologists such as Paul Rozin
have declared disgust to have evolved as a biological defence mechanism to prevent the
ingestion of harmful substances. If I return momentarily to my introductory problem, of the
unhappy divorce of intentional minds and anti-intentional matter, I must insert brackets
around these Enlightenment scientific explications appropriately. Above all, this positivistic
approach emphasizes the distinctly oral quality to disgust. This is core disgust, which
performs a biological task: it stymies oral incorporation. But wait. I am disgusted by more
than just rotting fruit. I feel disgust at colonial ignorance. Here is an example. The idea that
indigenous intelligence was perceived as a function of the quantity of millet that filled an
ancestral skull is sickening. And its not because I dont want to eat the millet. The objection
is a moral one.

For Rozin, this moral disgust is secondary: it is peripheral to disgusts oral core. It is a
cultural metaphor for the biological, which extends the idea of bad oral content to bad
moral content for the soul. Colonial ignorance, then, must be a polluting idea. My soul might
sicken with its incorporation, just as my body might sicken with the eating of an expired
cheese. Is colonial thought then like cheese - a set of ideas that have grown mouldy with age,
simply past their used-by date? Rozin is most concerned about the body, which is the core.

50
ImmanuelKant,CritiqueofJudgement,trans.WernerS.Pluhar(Indianapolis,Ind.:HackettPublishingCo.,
1987),180.
51
Menninghaus,Disgust,43.
7
P.Ekman,W.FriesenandJ.C.Hager,FacialActionCodingSystem(SaltLakeCity:ResearchNexus,2002).
53
H.A.Chapmanetal.,InBadTaste:EvidencefortheOralOriginsofMoralDisgust,Science323(2009):1223.
 35

For his purposes, colonial frameworks are indeed like off-cheese: they bear the threat of
(some kind of moral) death. The physical threat of contamination is also a prevention of
primality. Disgust prevents return to a former evolutionary state, that unconscious state of
being that characterises our animal origins. As a result, disgust is a constant reminder of
bodily violation, and the idea of death. Indeed, any breach[ing] of the fragile body envelope
that our human souls occupy represents our potential death, and hence acts as an
uncomfortable reminde[r of our] animal vulnerability.54 Disgust negotiates an inside-outside
contamination, a life-death parameter, a good-bad morality and a human-animal
differentiation. Despite the complexity of this schema, Rozin happily returns to an
evolutionary standpoint. We are not beasts, and we do not wish to become beasts. As a
result we must fear death and contamination, on first a physical, and then a moral, level.
Being disgusted aids our rejection of those bestial reminders.

I remain troubled, however, by cultural ideas as a periphery to the bodys biological core. I
tend to agree with David Barnes, when he argues that this Darwinian interpretation of
disgust is both limited and static. The Darwinist argument promotes the disgusted response
as a universal adaptation, which acts as a defensive mechanism against either polluting
substances or polluting ideas. Alternately, the disgusted response is an evolutionary
place-holder, in that it demarcates the human from the animal. In Barnes view, such an
interpretation does little to increase our understanding of the contingency, mutability and
uses of disgust.55 In his work on the Great Stinks of London and Paris, which occurred at
different points in the nineteenth century, Barnes is interested in the cultural and historical
variance of disgust, as opposed to its essential qualities. This makes more sense. How can
millet in a skull revolt me, and not my colonial counterparts, if it truly serves some kind of
evolutionary agenda? Contextual variance is key to using disgust as that slippery
analytical instrument I discussed in Chapter One. Barnes criticism gives me hope toward
this end. In his estimation, disgust can be utilized to speak rich[ly] about temporal and
spatial nexi, in that it acts as both signpost and . . . engine of historical change.56 This
thesis will operate under a similar assumption, in that it attempts to use disgust as a lens
through which colonial continuity can be discerned inside history. But the sheer embodied
phenomenon of disgust means this lens is never keenly polished. We are constantly

54
Rozin,Haidt,andMcCauley,Disgust,584.
55
DavidS.Barnes,ConfrontingSensoryCrisisintheGreatStinksofLondonandParisinFilth:Dirt,Disgust,
andModernLife,ed.WilliamA.CohenandRyanJohnson(Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesotaPress,2005),
105.
56
Ibid,22;Barnesitalics.
36 |

reminded by disgust that as a tool of analysis it is never neutral. Rather than dispose of it
for lack of objective utility, I intend to embrace the richness this polluted lens imposes. I am
made self-reflexive in my act of viewing. I hold a scratched and filmy looking-glass, and its
rim is muddied with the oily thumbprints of (s)he who looks, the body of the speaker.

This chapter will attempt three key tasks. The first is to flesh out contemporary definitions of
and hence debates surrounding, disgust, and the second is to survey the literature
surrounding disgust in relation to colonialism, looking specifically at the work of Andreas
Krebs in relation to settler-colonial Canada. It is the work of this chapter to identify the
weaknesses of this discussion, and to build a more nuanced framework for the
understanding of disgust inside the discourses of colonialism. The third part of this chapter
declares a triadic structure of colonial Othering as it occurs through and in accordance with
the function of disgust inside moral, pathological and misogynistic discourses.

The Disgusting: Mere Matter-out-of-Place or Roiling Life-Soup?

It is precisely the aforementioned distinctiveness to disgust that informs contemporary

debate as to how it operates. It would seem, in a post-structuralist climate, that everyone
wants to take apart those things we find most natural. To pose disgust as an entirely
acculturated phenomenon would satisfy the demands of political correctness.57 But disgust
is incredibly intimate to our senses. It has no conditions, we recall, to its sense of the real. A
cross-cultural consensus emerges in the classification of disgusting matter: the excrement
of others, the putrified corpse, and that which possesses the qualities of slime or viscidity.58
So perhaps these things might just be real-ly disgusting. The response of disgust could be
elicited from the internal logic of these things-in-themselves. Excrement is everywhere,
always, in time and space - as are dead rotting bodies, and the presence of organic slimy
matter. There is a definite temptation toward disgusting essences here, which is unavoidable
to the empirical human experience. We all know that shit stinks. How can you deconstruct
shit? Edwards, Gosden and Phillips do useful work when they invert the qualities of agency

57
Menninghaus,Disgust,22.
58
WilliamIanMillerdiscussestheconvergenceofqualitiesofsliminess,ooze,fecesandmenstrualbloodbeing
classifiedasdisgustingacrosscultures.SeeWilliamIanMiller,TheAnatomyofDisgust(Cambridge,
Massachusetts:HarvardUniversityPress,1997),62.Menninghausprovidesaclearaccountofwhatvarious
theoristsuseastheirgenerictropeforthedisgusting.ForFreud,excrementandmensesarethereasonsfor
organicandculturalrepressiondisgustatthesebodilyrealitiesseemstohavebeenthedrivingforcefor
cultural(d)evolution.SeeMenninghaus,Disgust,183223.ForRosencranz,putrefactionanddecayarethekey
tropesintheinherentlydisgusting.Indeed,putrefactionaffordsanobjectivestructureofthedisgusting.
Menninghaus,Disgust,145.Formorediscussionofputrefaction,seeMenninghaus,Disgust,121145.
 37

and passivity on respective sides of the subject-object divide. They build on Alfred Gells
conclusion that objects are not concrete or passive, but rather constitute unfolding patterns
of social life59 which are embodied by affective qualities of terror, awe, fascination, desire60
and, I would add, disgust. In this vein, we can wonder what it is that objects demand in
terms of human emotional and sensory responses . . . [and] how . . . different perceptual
situations [might] elicit different sensual configurations. 61 No-one would deny that the
disgusting object demands an emotional and sensory response. There is no ignoring its
confrontation. This sense of agency must be explored, and two key disgust theorists, Mary
Douglas and William Ian Miller, make short work of the two opposing positions, which
demand our attention for a time.

Douglas is the cultural relativist par excellence. Her anthropological enquiry Purity and
Danger contextualises two terms: taboo and pollution. Her lasting contribution to the
collective cultural archive lies in the phrase matter out of place. This is Douglas term of
reference for the filthy and disgusting corners of cultural life. These dark abject objects or
concepts must not be blamed for their own (perceived) inferiority, but rather must be
understood. Performing such critical empathy requires resituating filth within a total system
of cultural meaning. Meaning is made relative to its contextual environment. What is deemed
dangerous cannot be inherently so; it must be re-deemed by placing it within a larger
schema: the great cultural order of things. The reputation of dirt and filth is re-starched; it is
given a clean slate, seen as simply matter out of place. Dirt is a window to the systematized
condition of culture. All ideas [about] dirt express symbolic systems . . . [therefore], where
there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification
of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.62

Let us take an example from the eradication of dirt. This is the re-making of the self as pure
or clean. Douglas is most interested in this example. She uses the term medical
materialism, a phrase she has borrowed from William James. Medical materialism is the
belief in Western models of sanitation as not mere ritual, but as producing the real, the
clean. This is the hegemonic understanding of Western civilization. Real cleanliness and
purity is a singular thing, achieved by a singular method, by a soap-action, for example.
Medical materialism holds that the cleaning rituals of primitive societies are incomparable to

59
AlfredGell,ArtandAgency:AnAnthropologicalTheory(Oxford:ClarendonPress,1998),6.
60
ElizabethEdwards,ChrisGosden,andRuthB.Phillips,eds.IntroductioninSensibleObjects:Colonialism,
MuseumsandMaterialCulture(Oxford:Berg,2006),8.
61
Ibid,12.
62
MaryDouglas,PurityandDanger:AnAnalysisofConceptsofPollutionandTaboo(London:Routledge,1966),
44.
38 |

Western hygiene practices. Primitive cleansing can only ever be a symbolic gesture,
understood as part of a ritual, religion, or sacred belief. Soap is different. It is not a ritual.
It is the actual act of cleaning, founded on concrete scientific knowledge hierarchies
regarding hygienic practice and the prevention of disease. It takes the real dirt away and
makes you truly pure. Douglas wishes to expose the asymmetry of this perception. She
refuses to elevate the prevailing eighteenth century understanding of pathogens to a
position of superior rationality for cultural practices of purity.

The disgusting is that which is rejected, and the act of rejection itself constitutes the
practice of identity-making, or ordering reality into patterns and systems. For Douglas, then,
disgust operates as an affective accompaniment to a classification process. This process is
necessary for us to operate as humans in the world. The disgusting is always a perceived
threat, so that it is not merely that which sits outside the system, but that which threatens to
demean the system itself, to impose meaninglessness upon it. This is why Douglas speaks
of the ambiguity or the anomaly (she uses the two terms interchangeably). Ambiguity is a
solvent, it threatens to dissolve crucial boundary lines, and as such it generates social and
cultural anxiety. The perceived ambiguity might destroy that which preserves order [as
distinct from] disorder, being [from] non-being, form [from] formlessness, [and] life [from]
death.63 What Douglas terms anxiety could just as easily be registered as disgust, since it
results in the ritualistic removal or suppression of the ambiguity, an instinct which is
constitutive of the disgusted response. For Douglas, these disgusted moments of recognition
that something does-not-fit are productive. These moments are the marginal and shifting
well-spring from which art, humor and horror can be generated. Our systems, our orders,
our classifications are culturally relative, and act as powerful tools of perception through by
which our affective palettes are guided. For the purposes of this thesis, I take from Douglas
the importance of ambiguity and ambivalence for my concept of disgust.

By contrast, William Ian Miller affords affect a primary, rather than secondary role in ordering
our consciousness. Indeed, disgust is awarded real agency in his book The Anatomy of
Disgust. Miller is at pains to express the sheer viscerality of disgust, agreeing with Immanuel
Kants notion that the disgusting has a certain animate quality about it, that it presses itself
upon us.64 Disgust for Miller is not merely herded by the patterns and schema of human
culture, but rather is one of our most aggressive culture-creating passions. 65 Millers
characterization of disgust as aggressive and passionate invigorates the writing of his text.

63
Ibid,7.
64
Kant,CritiqueofJudgment,203.
65
Miller,TheAnatomyofDisgust,xiv.
 39

He adopts the wriggly, oozy rhetoric of fecundity and filth. In doing so, he expresses disgust
as a complex network of attractions and repulsions that the reader must experience in the
content and process of his text. The power of disgust to generate images is exploited to full
effect:

The dankest matter where disgust arises [is] . . . the fetid ooze of what I call life soup,
the roiling stuff of eating, defecation, fornication, generation, death, rot and
66
regeneration.

The life soup of existence is what Miller continually returns to. The life soup operates in
part as a literal description of what constitutes the disgusting, and in part as a metaphor for
signifying the disgusting. In this way, his writing style articulates his argument. Miller moves
beyond the kind of Douglasian prohibitive disgust that threatens social order to explore what
he terms the disgust of surfeit. Miller disputes Douglas model of the disgusting on the
grounds of her assertion that it-does-not-fit. For Miller, the aversive sentiment of disgust is
responsible for (not to) the social and psychic order which maintains the low ranking of
things. So it is not that things dont fit; it is that they fit right at the bottom of the conceptual
grid.67

Further, Miller departs from Douglas by introducing a disgust of surfeit for which the life
soup acts as a useful trope. As opposed to the prohibitive disgust which is commonly
understood to be a defence mechanism, to suppress threat to the body and soul of the
subject, disgust of surfeit acts as post-operative mechanism. The disgust of surfeit is
expressed most economically by the idea of excess. For Miller, this is a disgust borne of the
capacity for life. Capacity for life disgusts not merely because it bears an implicit death, but
because the decay unto death yields its own fertility for disgust. It is not that the object of
disgust might contaminate or pollute the subject, but more that the idea of over-consumption
or excess itself is revolting. In Millers estimation, the capacity for production of excess is the
central organizing principle for disgusting qualities. To take one example, Miller discusses
the temperature of the toilet seat, and the seeming optimal zone for creating maximum
disgust. Extremes of temperature will not revolt, though they may scald or shock. However, a
warm toilet seat has a quite different effect, as this creates the premium temperate
conditions to get the old life soup bubbling, seething, wriggling and writhing but not so great
to as to kill.68 This is the comfort zone, the life-promoting zone of temperature, in which
disgust and disgusting things reside. It is the generative potential, the potential for excess of

66
Ibid,18.
67
Ibid,45.
68
Ibid,64.
40 |

life, which elicits disgust. Miller draws an important point about the way imagery from the life
soup is used as a means for understanding behaviour we deem to be morally despicable.

The descriptive lexicon utilized to describe bad morality has an interesting convergence
across cultures it is slimy, oily, slithery and sticky. Miller attributes this to common beliefs
regarding purity, and in what form the pure manifests. It is this argument that provides the
greatest shock to the Douglasian system. If we return to Douglas, one would be inclined to
argue that bodily secretions snot, sperm, feces, earwax, sweat, saliva are revolting to us
because they are matter that has come out, where it should remain in. Our hygiene
discourse would presume that such matter, since ejected from the body, now posed a
medical threat to that originary site, and hence is considered revolting. But Miller uses the
example of tears to implode this inside-outside schema. Tears, Miller explains, fail by their
very nature to be disgusting. They emerge from the eyes as a clear and aqueous fluid, and
those physicalities align with our concept of that which is pure. By contrast, oily or viscid
fluids hold about them a deep structure of the life-soup, because one perceives generative
qualities in its very nature. It is the potentiality for life, for constant flux and recurrence as
opposed to a fixed-end point, a death, which is built into the structure of disgusting matter.

On this basis Miller proposes that it is the qualities of objects themselves which seem to
organize the contextual systems of perception and judgment. Importantly, Miller does not
hold the fatalist view that sliminess, stickiness, wriggly-ness and viscidity are the only means
by which the category of disgust can be organized. The power to re-organise disgust lies in
the capacity for narrative, such that a culture can override the tendencies of the disgust
affect . . . but it would take more work, a longer story, to do so than to go, so to speak, with
the flow.69 For the purposes of disgust in this thesis, I take both Millers delineation of
disgust of surfeit and his roiling life-soup concept. However, I take roiling soup in a limited
sense, which is to underscore disgusts role as a structural intention of the colonising
process. In this regard, the concept of life-soup is not applied universally here across all
human subjects, but rather to the quasi-abstract subject of the settler. I leave open the
possibility of life-soup as a universal disgust-mechanism, in order to focus on more limited
situations in which this reflex operates to establish borders and boundaries that are colonial
in nature.

69
Ibid,623.
 41

Andreas Krebs: Contextualising the Disgusted Settler in Canada

In the business of reading colonialism and disgust synchronically, which this thesis is
concerned to do, the recent and vital work of Andreas Krebs must here be recognized. Krebs
approaches disgust as a marker of colonial continuity in the context of Canada, where a
contemporary politics of recognition informs official state multiculturalism. Krebs takes
issue with the idea that multicultural rhetoric succeeds in adequately recognizing those
ethnic communities on the margins, formerly considered the revolting Other in colonial
histories of encounter. The overt disgust demonstrated in these histories continues to inform,
in Krebs view, the colonial structures of power which simultaneously marginalize and
assimilate the Other in modern Canada. This unstable site of the Other as respectively
excluded and included is part of the discursive regime of diversity that Canada promotes.
The apparent inclusiveness this regime affords is both unstable and conditional, where the
margins are politically recognized only after the stench of difference has been hosed off.70
At any time, the stench threatens to be returned to its former owner:

The clearing of a political terrain for him insures that his prior disgust-inducing
habits will be strictly circumscribed. Any indication that he does not accept this
position reminds the dominant that the Others essence remains defiling, and the
response is again one that aims at fortifying the structures that comfort the
dominant the response of disgust allows for an immediate degradation of the
71
Other to something outside the moral horizons.

Krebs traces Canadas colonial history from first encounter of Columbus with American
Indians, right up to the present-day circumstance of homeless Aborigines in Canadian cities,
in order to demonstrate the way that visceral disgust for the threatening ethnic other has
been disguised, but not removed by, contemporary political discourse.

It is useful here to explore the way in which Krebs unpacks the term disgust, and how this
might be organized for his purpose. To Krebs, disgust is largely organized around the
Douglasian principle of perceived threat to social order. Therefore, the affect of disgust is,
like all affective responses, a socially constructed phenomenon. Its apparent immediacy and
physicality does not reflect a pre-ordered programmatic of inherently disgusting objects, but
rather the depth with which normative structures have been encod[ed] . . . onto our

70
AndreasKrebs,MulticulturalismandColonialContinuity:TheFunctionofDisgustinthePoliticsof
RecognitioninTravellingConcepts:NegotiatingDiversityinCanadaandEurope,ed.ChristianLammertand
KatjaSarkowsky(Weisbaden:VSVerlagfrSozialwissenschaften/GWVFachverlageGmbH,Wiesbaden,2010),
85,doi:10.1007/9783531921396_5.
71
Ibid,105.
42 |

physiology. 72 Further, Krebs speaks of a characteristic ambivalence to disgust. This

ambivalence is that it exists in an affective dialectic between attraction and repulsion. This
ambivalence extends to the objects of disgust themselves, most notably in the political
sense of the Outsider, a term Krebs borrows from Sean Watson. The most horrific quality
about the Outsider is that he is familiar, indeed, he reflects the existence of potential
Outsider within the being of the disgusted Insider. Since the Outsider threatens the
system by his alien qualities, we are forces to push him away and in doing so repress our
own affinity/recognition towards him. 73 In pushing what lies outside away, in the
expression of disgust, we draw boundaries around what lies inside. Krebs utilizes
Kristevas abject to explore the self and subject-forming capabilities of disgust, by which
the limit of ones selfhood is defined in the moment where the familiar abject object is
refused. In a colonial setting, disgust is defined by Krebs as one of the primary affective
responses in the European/Savage relationship, because of the visceral threat that the
alien poses. 74 However, Douglas comment on the productivity of the disgust affect is
central to Krebs understanding of disgust as a means of colonial continuity. Disgust acts as
a means of re-performing the identities, the boundary markers, of the colonial encounter.
Disgust draws the lines over and over again, acting as a constant site of renewal for colonial
worldviews.

Whilst Krebs makes skilful and convincing work of threading disgust and colonial continuity
together, his understanding of disgust lacks dimension. His rigorous adherence to a socially
constructivist view of affect is convenient to his perception of the ways in which a colonial
state builds exclusion into its very framework. Krebs insight that the marginalized abject is
productive (of both selves and social boundaries) is excellent, but this is premised on his
definition of disgust as ambivalent. Indeed, though disgust has been encoded with our
social norms, it seems to possess an innate quality of ambivalence, which it bestows upon
its objects by the seeming nature-of-its-being. To argue in the mode of Miller, it could surely
be objected that it is not an innately ambivalent disgust that makes its objects ambivalent,
but rather that the quality of ambivalence in these objects demands revulsion, and
commands a social ordering that reflects this affect. In Millers eyes, it is the potentiality of
the margins that is revolting. This liminality imposes a structure on our bodies, which is the
affective response that we term disgust, rather than vice versa.

72
Ibid,87.
73
Ibid,89.
74
Ibid,90.
 43

Further, Krebs restricts his definition of disgust to what is termed prohibitive disgust, which
responds to threat, and makes no mention of the widely recognized secondary function of
disgust in surfeit, or satiation. Lastly, Krebs indicates that disgust is a marginal response
that seems to disappear over time in a colonial context. As the colonial obtains more control
over the discursive identity of the Other, the embodied threat of the outside is gradually
neutralized.75 Its continuity over time exists in two senses: firstly in its ever present threat to
return, and secondly, in the way it informs a ground-state understanding of the other.
Political regimes which celebrate difference and multi-culturalism act to mask this
fundamental production of the other. However, I think to claim that disgust performs an act of
disappearance is a misguided assertion on Krebs part. The apparent abatement of disgust
as a social function over time is an over-simplification of the way disgust operates. As we
shall see in Chapter Three, in a settler-colonial context, disgust works by a disavowal of the
presence of revolting bodies through different means of aesthetic transfer, which is to say
that the absence of disgust in such settings is merely apparent.

Krebs convincingly related the historic and present threat of disgust in Canadian society. To
this extent, the overt disgust of Canadas colonial history inheres within the prevailing
rhetoric of a Canadian multicultural rhetoric, such that this delicate politics of recognition is
threatened by the return of systems of colonial disgust. I value Krebs introduction of a
colonialism premised on sensory rejection. However, I seek more from the understanding of
disgust and colonial power. The remaining section of this chapter will address various
colonial discourses as more complex operations of disgust, in order to understand the
longevity of these power-structures which extend to the present.

Disgust as an Operation of Colonial Othering

In addressing the way in which Others are formed by various colonial discourses through
the embodied signifier of disgust, I want to return momentarily here to the introductory
concept of the quasi-subject. The quasi-subject is a porous being, who has not yet
cognitively hardened her concepts of what she encounters in the new place into coherent
ideas of savages, or nymphs, or monsters. The quasi-subject occupies a moment of
ambivalence, a moment of both recognition and strangeness. It is an unformed experience
of quasi-subjectivity surrounded by quasi-objects, where what one thinks or feels about it is
not yet known. In the moment of an embodied response, a disgust-reflex, this quasi-ness is

75
Ibid.

44 |

cleared out and covered up. Disgust functions as an operation of Othering. It forms the
disgusted subject, and rejects the disgusting object by which this subject is surrounded. It is
only by disavowing the other that the porosity, or quasi-ness, of being disappears. In its
place is formed a powerful whole: the subject.

Since the archive is characteristically lacking in sensorial histories, I must exercise my

(informed) creative powers in imagining the embodied colonial experience in encounter.
The vomitive impulse might rise from the too-sweet smell of frangipani flowers crushing
under his feet, or from the sight of clotted blood on the body of a mourning Mori woman.
He might recoil from the taste of the dirty rim of a kava bowl on the lips, or from the sound of
a bestial grunt from a Melanesian woman offering her sexual favours in trade. In his moment
of disgust, however, these quasi-objects of his surroundings become objects proper. These
objects are disgusting, and hence they are made to participate in certain colonial discourses,
directed by the colonial subject. The disgusting objects (now Others) are made morally
inferior (the bad), diseased or un-clean (the sick), and excessively abject (which as we shall
see, is inherently female object-hood). To return to Mary Douglas momentarily, I am
interested in describing disgust as an Othering operation which works against the
ambivalence it is faced with, and instead attaches the sticky life-soup of this ambivalence to
certain objects which bear blame for the subjects disgust. This is the way in which disgust
invents a subject-hood, by assigning not only inferiority to (diseased, female) but blame
(immorality) toward the objects it delineates, and hence certain kinds of objects become
disgusting in and of themselves. Disgust says of its Others: you are gross, and you are
responsible for it. The subject is left with a satisfying affirmation of their own inherent
goodness, their health and their masculinity.76

In order to answer to some of the weaknesses of Krebs account, I will here outline a
schema of disgust based on three cultural parameters which affect the way it structures
thought. Firstly, we will address disgust as a moralising discourse, by examining the way it
functions in relation to notions of good and bad, in ways which are culturally loaded
toward colonial authority. Secondly, we will examine disgust as a pathologizing discourse, in
that it regulates bodily norms to demarcate bodies as diseased in order to empower

76
Tosaythismuchisnottoignoredisgustfeltbyafemalesubject,butIargueherethattheoccasionofthe
disgustreflexinducesanoperationofmisogynisticotheringwhichimportsaninstitutionalizedmasculinity
ontothefemalesubjecthood.Toisolateaspecificdisgustreflexwhichorganizesitsobjectswithdifferent
genderpossibilitieswouldbetotakeonMilllerscallformoreworkandlongerstoriesinordertodoso.The
sensoryconstellationswithwhichthisthesisisconcernedaretheprevailingoperationsofotheringwhich(itis
arguedhere)constituteracistandmisogynisticassumptionsofcolonialdisgust.
 45

colonial hygiene rhetoric. Thirdly, we will examine disgust as a misogynizing discourse, such
that the disgusting is categorically represented through the body of a woman, which
cements the relation of colonials to place as patriarchal. This triadic structure of object-
making in colonial discourse, which is fuelled by the disgust drive, constructs a putative
white subject. This subject is based on a disgust reflex of colonial desire, a reflex which
inheres in that desire itself, and then acts to cover over the quasi-abstract subject and the
ambivalence of the colonial encounter. The three discursive formations are not mutually
exclusive: they draw power in relation to one another. Nor are they, potentially, the only
ordering systems which function under colonialism. The purpose of the triadic structure is
not to present a totalizing account, but rather to suggest that disgust is integrated into an
embodied colonial storytelling in three specific ways, which obscures the continuing power
of the white male subject in our bodily responses to the world.

(i) The force of disgust in moral colonialism

The embodiment of disgust makes of us steadfast moralists we recognise bad and ugly
things because the fibres of our physiology tell us to reject it this same physiology is less
helpful in the positive recognition of that which is good and beautiful. In the negative
however, a strong schema of right can be drawn from sensory objection to that which is
disgusting: our bodies say wrong. For Miller, this is the powerful moral language of the
disgust idiom in that it puts our body behind our words, pledg[ing] it as security to make
our words something more than mere words. 77 This language has power because it
78
expects concurrence and demands inter-subjective recognition. This vicarious
experience of disgust makes it vital in the act of building social and moral communities. It is
a sentiment which defines boundaries around those who feel it, thus it is extraordinarily
inclusive.79 Those boundaries are premised, however, on a moral degradation of those
things outside. Demarcating inside communities from outside strangers along the
virtue/vice dichotomy is not an unusual affective operation. In fact, disgust is not alone in
this task. Indignation is a similar sort of moral girding of the self it is appalled at vice, it
draws power from virtue. The difference is that indignation does not desire reformation it is
more like a grumbling maintenance worker, keeping things in order. Indignation simply
disapproves and minds its own business. By contrast, disgust is an extreme act of recoil,

77
WilliamIanMiller,TheAnatomyofDisgust(Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress,1997),181;Millers
italics.
78
Ibid,194.
79
Ibid,197.
46 |

one which clearly demarcates those immoral outsiders. I am speaking here of the moral
imperative with which sensorial recoil is inflected. The sensorial objection to the other
(produced by the colonial bodys act of revulsion) forces that other to bear moral
responsibility for their sensory offence.

Since the inflection is a moral one, the colonial body can justifiably be revolted in defence of
the colonial community the Other is made disgusting, and bad for the moral health of the
group. In being disgusting, the Other does not only cause offense to my moral schema (as it
might if I were indignant) rather it threatens to contaminate my moral system entirely. On
grounds of moral contamination, disgust demands that the immoral Other be eradicated.
Their low morals offend my senses and hence disgust me in the first order, but the potential
for contagion is disgusting at a second order. At this second tier, I am disgusted in fear that
we might all take on those offensive characteristics by sheer proximity. In disgust, we make
autonomous our subject-hood, our communal identity. The anxiety of the potential contagion
does not depart, however. As Miller maintains, disgust never allows us to escape clean. It
underpins a sense of despair that impurity and evil are contagious, endure, and take
everything down with them.80 There is a desperation to disgust, in its futile search for pure
identity formations. It is a tireless moralist, scrubbing desperately to remove the traces of
that which it has ejected from itself.

In the making of a colonial subject proper in the New World encounter, disgust is an efficient
affective force. As an informant to systems of morality, however, it is somewhat ambivalent.
It both buttresses the moral framework, and makes it brittle. It appears to gird our sense of
the good on the one hand, and on the other to elucidate the conceptual fragility of morality:
it is under constant threat of contamination. The disgusted colonial, then, is an anxious
creature. The moral scaffolding by which he identifies himself from Others threatens to
collapse beneath him at any time. The moral high ground is fundamentally unstable. If
ensuring that one is good requires a constant vigilance for those contaminating forces of
evil, then the formation of a disgust-heavy morality yields a kind of obsessive state of being.
The sense of a moral order under these conditions is not an exhilirating [order] full of life
and possibility, but rather a cause for withdrawal from life itself.81 It is this sense of moral
communities drawn against the life-forming and generative possibilities of the Other that
indicates the kinds of objects which disgust marks with moral condemnation. Those objects

80
Ibid,2045.
81
Millerdiscusseshowtheaffectofindignationgivesusreasonsforliving,sinceitreturnsalwaystoa
stableworldorderofvirtueovervice,fromwhichweemergetriumphant.Miller,AnatomyofDisgust,204.
 47

in which one perceives potentiality for excess, those who possess the qualities of Millers
life-soup will find that disgust inheres to their make-up, and thus they are irredeemably
immoral.

Nietzsche yokes an aversion to life and possibility specifically to the moral function of the
Christian community. Since colonial expansion saw the exportation of Christian doctrine as
vital to its civilizing mission in the New World, Nietzshes characterisation of disgust
presenting as hostility to life82 is helpful here. Specifically, Nietzsche points to the agenda
of Christian Religion as a moral doctrine, a doctrine constructed around a disgust-based No
in the face of worldly realities. Christianity can afford to frame this earthly reality as
disgusting on the basis that there exists a transcendental location to which believers might
aspire. The Christian faith harbours

a furious distaste for life itself . . . from the start Christianity was, essentially and
fundamentally, disgust and weariness by life for life, which only disguised itself,
83
concealed itself, ornamented itself beneath a belief in an other or better life.

For Nietzsche, Christian belief is the master trope of disgust, 84 since it is a case of the
living rejecting life on moral grounds. Nietzsche himself is revolted by the self-authorising
function of the Christian discourse to reject its others. This secondary disgust, much like the
post-colonial revulsion for colonialism expressed in Chapter One, is metaphorized in
Nietzsche in embodied terms. The assumption by those thoroughly incompetent New
Testament authors that they occupied a judges status is a sanctimonious claim which
leaves a bad taste on Nietzsches tongue.85 The rhetorical inversion of a higher-order
disgust that is cognitively recognised but described in embodied ways is a common trope for
this secondary revulsion. Nietzsche employs it to speak with more than mere words, but the
response is not sensorial, it is a disgust at disgust for life. In mentioning Nietzsche, I am
returned to my own secondary relation to my subject. I feel disgust at colonial disgust
toward indigenous Others. My problem with this moral disgust is that it seems to disavow the
continuity at work in the visceral and sensorial disgust. Since Nietzsches problem is with
Christian doctrine, which is not a historical phenomenon but a continuing schema (brought
here by colonising missionaries, it remains our predominant faith in New Zealand), the

82
FriedrichNietzsche,TheBirthofTragedy(London:PenguinBooks,1993)89.
83
Ibid,89.
84
MenninghausdiscussesNietzscheinrelationtoChristianityasanagentofandcatalystfordisgustinDisgust,
150.
85
Ibid.
48 |

stakes of aversion are different. Nietzsches response, however, is somewhat like my call to
recognise embodied colonial continuity. Nietzsche advocates a disgust-supported cognition
in order to reconnect abstract thought with its corporeal realities. In this we remember the
body we inhabit, and we open ourselves up to the real, to enjoy the unpleasant, stinking and
disappointing object[s] of our disgust.86 The moral inflection of these objects seems to re-
orient the source of their revulsion from inside the objects themselves, since they are made
inherently bad. As such, their rejection as Others is abstracted from the body which performs
this rejection, and is instead made reasonable by a moralising discourse.

(ii) A racist paradigm in the pathology of disgust

Disgust operates to demarcate bodies as Other by a pathologising practice which operates

around a set of arbitrary norms. Pathology understands the world in terms of a simple set of
signifiers, in order to identify the diseased from the healthy. Your body is not normal,
therefore your body is diseased. To perform the act of demarcating the diseased from the
healthy is a powerful act of disembodiment. It Others the body from the subject, reducing
it to a series of quantifiable static norms which can be objectified, discussed and sorted
appropriately. The diseased body is the deviant body. The diseased body is the
disordered body, which refuses to behave in terms of the ordered system of norms which
act as qualifications for a state-of-health.

Characterised as deviant and disorderly, the diseased body must then be disciplined and
returned to good order. There is a necessary morality here the sick body becomes
criminalized. In conjunction with morally inflected disgust, pathology adopts a rhetoric of
blame: the disgusting body wills to offend through disease. This is a potent object, what
becomes the stigmatized object of disgust.

The obese are thus fat because they are unwilling not to be. We even hold the
stigmatized to partial account for those stigmas that we know . . . are not within their
power to change. If we cannot quite blame the blind for their blindness we get around
it by blaming them for not remaining invisible . . . we blame the ill for their sicknesses
87
even as we paradoxically try to exculpate the guilty by defining them as sick.

The paradox of pathology is that it both assigns blame to the ill, for not taking care of
themselves, and yet the morally deviant can be re-characterized as ill in order to escape a

86
Ibid,162.
87
Miller,TheAnatomyofDisgust,203.
 49

certain degree of culpability. The diseased body is a suspect thing, since it seems to
harbour a moral ambivalence. As I write this, my neighbouring computer is occupied by a
body which appears to be experiencing a common cold. The uncontrollable hacking cough
this body expels, at regular intervals, irritates me. The constant drawn-out sniff, the retraction
of mucus up the nasal cavity, has all the aural qualities of a disgusting thing: it is moist and
viscous, it is an excess of fluid which interrupts the bodys breath. I am capable of pity for
this condition, I perform the necessary empathies in my head it is a change of season,
after all. Its not as if I havent had a cold before. My sense of blame appears, then, not for
the body for occurring in this state, but for its presence next to me. This body could make
mine in image of itself. It could infect me. This is the real disgust in the diseased body its
generative potential to infect other bodies, the fear of contamination of the self.

The real sense of colonial disgust, then, does not occur at the idea of the de-formed
indigenous body, but rather at the proximity of this body to the colonizer. The concern for
contamination was asymmetrically ascribed across the colonizer/indigene divide. In this
sense the diseased indigene bears comparison to Mikhail Bakhtins figure of the grotesque.
Bakhtins characterisation of the grotesque body is unmistakeably porous, in that it is not
separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with
animals, with objects.88 The discursive construction of this body as openly mixing with the
world around it presents its potential for excessiveness. The open body brims with
potentiality that is never known. By contrast the colonial body is a closed unit, discursively
constructed as a contained and discrete figure, an always known.

Warwick Anderson elucidates the contained colonial body versus the polluting indigenous
body in an essay on American colonialism in the Philippines, entitled Excremental
Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution. Anderson maintains that this
disparity of representation is extraordinarily effective in the politicising of Filipino bodily
regimes (specifically excreting) in order to assume colonial control over both the
geographical and the corporeal spaces of the Filipino natives. Anderson terms sets up the
characters of colonial engagement, where the American sublime meets the Filipino abject.
The one is an ascetic and complete body, the other is little more than a gaping anus, and
two soiled hands.89 This configuration of bodies in terms of porosity is a specifically disgust-

88
MikhailBakhtin,RabelaisandHisWorld,trans.HeleneIswolsky(Bloomington:IndianaUniversityPress,
1984),27.
89
WarwickAnderson,ExcrementalColonialism:PublicHealthandthePoeticsofPollution,CriticalInquiry21,
no.3(1995):648.
50 |

based schema. Menninghaus draws this relation from classical aesthetics, where beauty is a
function of uninterrupted line in the form of the body. Any break in continuity of form (an
orifice, a mouth, a nipple, an anus, a nostril) is a fall from the classical ideal. Apertures are
the reminder that the body is in an unfinished state of growth, that it has a visceral inside
which threatens to come out and that the body can be penetrated, invaded and punctured.
The multiple coding of these orifices renders body apertures [as] the signified of
disgust. 90 The indigenous body is diseased by virtue of its deviance from the closed
aesthetic ideal of the classical form. A diseased indigenous body is therefore made
disgusting on grounds of its openness, its capacity to pollute the world, and more specifically
to pollute the colonial body.

Disease becomes figured as an indigenous problem to be solved by colonialism. The

reductive principles of purity, taint, and hygiene are extraordinarily helpful to the colonial
task.91 Richard Dyer has argued that the construction of the white race is built around a
simple symbolic relation, where whiteness is equivalent to purity, and darkness (or non-
whiteness) is tantamount to corruption, filth and sin.92 This simplicity would seem to make
white anxiety comparable to the nervous wearing of a new white shirt at a crowded finger-
food buffet. The pressure of the stainlessness, the purity, is realised every time another
person bumps you from behind (red wine in hand) or leans in for a personal conversation,
with a salmon-laden wafer teetering from their fingers. This example may seem out of place
a hideously Pkeh middle-class demonstration. But the trivial comparison reflects the
simplicity of the colonial race/pollution metaphor. The colonial solution to this issue was no
less simple. Stains are removed by soap. The basic conflation of Western cleaning rituals
and sanitation practices with the colonial project is revealed by the slogan of the Unilever
Company which produced commodity soap commercially and distributed it internationally
through the network of empire. Unilever declared boldly Soap is Civilisation.93

Anne McClintock makes a convincing argument for the sheer pervasiveness of soap as a
metaphor for colonial value and identity, since

90
Menninghaus,Disgust,56.
91
WilliamA.Cohen,Introduction:LocatingFilthinFilth:Dirt,DisgustandModernLife,ed.WilliamA.Cohen
andRyanJohnson(Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesotaPress,2005),xvi.
92
SeeRichardDyer,White(London:Routledge,1997),7281.
93
AnneMcClintock,ImperialLeather:Race,GenderandSexualityintheColonialContest(NewYork:Routledge,
1995),207.
 51

the new imperialism found in soap an exemplary mediating form. The emergent middle
class values monogamy (clean sex, which has value), industrial capital (clean
money, which has value), Christianity (being washed in the blood of the lamb), class
control (cleansing the great unwashed) and the imperial civilising mission (washing
and clothing the savage) could be all marvellously embodied in a single household
94
commodity.

Soap stands at the centre of a racist discourse of cleanliness, where domestic hygiene
became a ritualised performance of whiteness, to which all non-white bodies should aspire.
A particularly inflammatory example is in the image for chlorinol, a soda-bleach for clothing,
which two young black boys hold with promise of racial progression from the degenerate
evolutionary former of blackness. His caption reads We are going to use Chlorinol and be
like de white nigger. As McClintock insists, this is more than mere symbolism, the bleach is
performing the civilising mission, as agent of history itself.95 The pathologizing of race
works closely with a moral imperative for improvement, which centres colonial disgust
inside the body of the other. This is the self-disgust of the consumer, revolted by the
degenerate and polluted condition of their body, requiring colonial commodities of hygiene
to allay the projected disgust of the colonizer. By stigmatizing the indigenous body with both
moral responsibilities and hygiene imperatives necessary to remove their disgusting bodily
condition, the colonial sets up a matrix of indigenous desires for which colonial institutions
can provide solace: the church, the hospital, and the commodity economy.

(iii) A misogynising discourse: abjection, excess and the vetula

My third and final mode of disgust is to state that it behaves as a misogynistic enterprise. If
we return momentarily to Millers assertion that there is a deep structure to the objects of
disgust, we begin to see a highly feminised pattern. Bodily fluids are subject to different
indices of control, disgust and revulsion which respond to the different properties these
fluids present.96 The cloudiness of pus, the chunkiness of vomit, [and] the stickiness of
menstrual blood suggest qualitative mechanisms by which to pollute, which the
transparent fluidity of tears fails to possess. 97 Elizabeth Grosz utilizes a theoretical
consensus on the horrific nature of bodily fluids to draw comparisons of cloying viscosity

94
Ibid,208.
95
Ibid,220.
96
ElizabethGrosz,VolatileBodies:TowardsaCorporealFeminism(Bloomington:IndianaUniversityPress,
1994),195.
97
Ibid.
52 |

with the horror of the feminine.98 Viscosity is a borderline state between solidity and fluidity;
it is the indeterminate, threatening to dissolve the clear-cut divisions of subject and object.
Grosz maintains that the key orifice of femininity, the productive site of viscous bloody
matter, is imbued with a moral indeterminacy. The vagina becomes a dangerous site of
productivity, troped as an excessive sexual hunger in the image of vagina dentata.99 The
vagina as gaping space is the physical metaphor for the disgusting feminine: Mary Russos
cave of abjection.100 For Russo, the female anatomy is read as a gendered grotesque,
where its cavernous capacities become a moral pit for all that is repulsive. If body apertures
are the signifieds of disgust, then the vagina is the disgusting aperture par excellence. It
releases, for Freud, the most disgusting substance of all, since menstrual blood is the
abject phenomenon in the development of civilization.101

It is the metaphor of uncontrollability which makes the respective excretion of female

genitalia inferior to male excretions. Semen does meet the qualitative standard of
stickiness, but it does possess a kind of psychic solidity, in so far as it is associated with
the concrete. Semen is related to an object of desire, the sexual experience (a bodily
pleasure) and it normatively ejaculates into an orifice (the vagina, the anus or the mouth).
By contrast, menstruation has no object and no destination. It seems to emulate a seeping
wound, as if the body is injured. The bloody stains and the mess are entirely visible, and the
body is powerless to control it.102 The problem here is one of the aforementioned open
grotesque. Stuff comes out of the female body in an undirected way. The female body is
revolting not by virtue of its lack, but by its productive capacities:

98
MaryDouglasexpressesthepropertiesofthefluidtoimmerseothersasinherentlydisgusting:viscosity
repelsinitsownright,asaprimaryexperience.Aninfant,plungingitshandsintoajarofhoney,isinstantly
involvedincontemplatingtheformalpropertiesofsolidsorliquidsandtheessentialrelationbetweenthe
subjectiveexperiencingselfandtheexperiencedworld.Theviscousisastatehalfwaybetweensolidand
liquid.Itislikeacrosssectioninaprocessofchange.Itisunstable,butitdoesnotflow.Itissoft,yieldingand
compressible.Thereisnoglidingonitssurface.Itsstickinessisatrap,itclingslikealeech;itattacksthe
boundarybetweenmyselfandit.Longcolumnsfallingoffmyfingerssuggestmyownsubstanceflowinginto
thepoolofstickiness...totouchstickinessistoriskdilutingmyselfintoviscosity.Stickinessisclinging,likea
toopossessivedogormistress.InMaryDouglas,PurityandDanger:AnAnalysisofConceptsofPollutionand
Taboo(London:Routledge,1966),47.ThisisaparaphrasingofJeanPaulSartresconceptofviscosityinBeing
andNothingness:AnEssayonPhenomenologicalOntology(NewYork:PhilosophicalLibrary,1956).
99
Grosz,VolatileBodies,194.
100
MaryRusso,TheFemaleGrotesque:Risk,ExcessandModernity(NewYork:Routledge,1995).
101
MenninghausdiscussesFreudstheoryoforganicrepression,whichmaintainsthatmansprogressiontoan
uprightposturewasadirectsymptomofsensoryrevulsion:tothescentofexcrementandmenses.Onlyin
absenceofthemenstrualodourcouldthenecessaryheterosexualcouplingtakeplacewhichwouldformthe
foundationofthenuclearfamilyunit.SeeMenninghaus,Disgust,206.
102
Grosz,VolatileBodies,205.
 53

As a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping,

secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment not a
cracked and porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form,
103
a disorder that threatens all order.

The female form is then possessed by the problem of excess. She can always become
more, because she cannot shut herself up. Her openness is the signal that she is always in
a state of growth, therefore she always becoming, she is never a discrete being. Indeed in
her pregnant capacity, she is the site of growth, of fertile production.

We are returned here to Kristevas characterisation of the abject as a maternal quantity.

The mother-child relation is a sublimation of subject-object boundaries. It is rather
comprised of fluid heterogeneities, rhythmic streaming of libidinal drives and matter.104
From the perspective of the child, the pregnant body of the mother is a great formlessness,
a mass from which their body is formed. This great undifferentiated, pre-objectival mass
must be rejected in the formation of the ego. The fluid maternal body is the threat to the
boundaries of the body proper, and it is only in the disgusted rejection of this abject body
that the detached subject comes to speak, and that the possibility of objects proper arises.
Kristevas is a grand narrative of disgust, misogyny and being. Our body spasms and gags
at the skin that forms on the surface of milk. We are revolted by its ambiguity. This disgust is
a function of our memory. In that moment we are rejecting the ultimate ambiguous form, the
abject mother. In rejection, we do not expel the abject, but rather we form ourselves. Our
birth from the abject maternal is re-enacted when we experience disgust, I expel myself, I
spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which I claim to establish
myself.105 This is the primal repression. The self is formed in disgust, and the disgust is
always an involuntary recall of our emergence from the (disgusting) body of the mother.

Thomas Schwarz discusses colonial disgust in a specifically Germano-Pacific context,

where the arousal of a sense of disgust in colonial discourse is centred on the exotic
woman. 106 The rhetoric of indigenous woman as the exotic formulates her body as a
paradisical other, yet the beautiful exterior is an illusory one. The metaphorical branding of
the woman in this setting is replete: she is dark, mysterious, breath-taking, yet when one

103
Ibid,203.
104
Menninghaus,Disgust,370.
105
JuliaKristeva,PowersofHorror:AnEssayonAbjection(NewYork:ColumbiaUniversityPress,1982),3.
106
ThomasSchwarz,ColonialDisgust:TheColonialMastersEmotionofSuperiority,inGermanColonialism,
VisualCultureandModernMemory,ed.VolkerLangbehn(NewYork:Routledge,2010),190.
54 |

goes inside they find her rotten.107 Her apparent external ripeness has led her to rot. Her
insides are those filthy fluids of the feminine, and in sexual penetration, the colonial male
has entered that cave of abjection. She is a filthy thing, both morally and physically. Her
purported promiscuity is a sexual deviance of excessive feminine desire. But further, her
body bears potential to contaminate she is the source of sexually transmitted infection, of
malaria, and could be the carrier for most monstrous of social infections: the racial hybrid.
By this, the exotic seductress becomes an instrument of biological warfare against the
colonial invasion.108 In this sense, the pathological insistence of colonialism in the virtue of,
and necessity for, cleanliness must be directed at the most fundamentally disgusting body:
the female.

Indeed, Menninghaus longitudinal survey of disgust theorists seems to converge on a

single disgusting image. The archetype of disgust emerges in the vetula, the figure of the
ugly old woman. The conventions of the vetula seem to address all the defects rejected by a
bodily topography of the disgusting:

This phantasm conventially brings together folds and wrinkles, warts, larger than usual
openings of the body (i.e. mouth and anus), foul, black teeth, sunk-in hollows instead
of beautiful swellings, drooping breasts, stinking breath, revolting habits and a
109
proximity to death and putrefaction.

The vetula is especially offensive, however, not by virtue of her revolting physicalities, but for
the reason that despite her disgusting form she maintains a voracious sexual appetite. The
condition of the female sex as beautiful seems to hinge on the anxiety of both excess and
impending expiration in the female form. The ideal of beauty is a bodily impossibility, of a
not-stinking, not-eating, not-excreting, not-aging, not-opening, and not-copulating human.
That this ideal is a specifically female aspiration reflects an understanding of the female
body as a site which requires the repressive order and discipline that this ideal demands.
Indeed beauty would have no need to be quite so beautiful, quite so ideal, quite so illusory,
if it were not simultaneously covering up a female abyss of disgusting ugliness.110

Colonial identity-forming is reliant on a rejection, a task for which disgust is excellently

designed. Disgust places the body behind the rejections of the bad, the sick, and (as I
have established) the female, in order to shore up an ideology which appears

107
Ibid.
108
Ibid,191.
109
Menninghaus,Disgust,84.
110
Ibid,100101.
 55

unquestionable. These values reaffirm the white colonial body as the subject of the narrative.
This putative subject-hood is manly, firm, moderate, gestalt-endowed . . . goal oriented, a
subject which can only be formed in the creation of Others via the gesture of disgust.111

This chapter has spoken about that complex sensation of disgust, which confronts as a raw
reaction in-the-real. Read as a biological device, disgust would seem to perform the higher
evolutionary task of preventing death by invasion. Disgust spots the enemy, and forces it out.
For Douglas, disgust is a means of identifying a threat to established cultural order, whereas
for Miller disgust is a sudden recognition of the life-soup in which we exist, and in which we
recognise a capacity for excess, from which we recoil. The work of Krebs has yoked the
function of disgust to colonialism in a Canadian context, premised on an understanding of
disgust as an ambivalent phenomenon. Building on his framework, I have offered here a
triadic account of the way colonial discourses are perpetuated by the disgust mechanism.
This frames disgust as an Othering operation, from which colonial subject-hood emerges
reaffirmed as a white, heterosexual male. In the refusal of quasi-abstract being that is
embodied by the disgust recoil, both subject and object emerge autonomous. The power
asymmetries of this subject/object divide are sustained by the moral, pathological and
misogynistic discourses with which the act of disgust is inflected.

111
Menninghaussuggeststhesequalitiesasconvincingbenchmarksforwhatishealthyandcorrectunder
theoftenunarguedperceptionofthedisgusting.Ibid,19.
56 |

Chapter Three:

The Disgust-Beauty Amalgam

The reader may, at this point, have noticed my potholed practice of discussing disgust. The
more I speak about it, the more it becomes a discrete thing. It is a slippery slope from here
into a world of nouns. In noun-world, disgust is made an object among many other objects.
As I effortlessly list off the qualities of moral superiority, pathological stigmatizing and abject
misogynising which disgust seems to possess, I force upon disgust a terrible thing-ness.
The desire to seal my theoretical concept, to make air-tight its odorous, sticky corners, is an
overwhelming temptation. I wish to make it impenetrable and constant. I wish to laminate it,
carry about in my satchel, pull it out for others to inspect. It will not dribble through the
stitching of my bag, it will not leave its fragrance on my palm. It will have a totality that I can
talk about, confidently, and feel exceedingly clever.

But even as I type these words, I am undone. I am aware of the slightly tacky surface of my
computer keyboard and the thin history of oil that separates each fingertip from key.
Undesirable as it is, I imagine every other sweaty fingertip that urgently tapped at this
keyboard in its lifetime. Personally, I consider myself to have a high bar for being disgusted.
However, I cannot write myself into immunity from the sensation. I am returned, always, to
this sweating, oily, menstruating, excreting body. Disgust is no object for possession. I must
find a way to speak about it which protects me from my own intellectual egoism. I must find a
means to make it embodied, relational and present. This is the tension of the intellectual
discourse in which I operate. I address a long tradition of reading culture in a way which has
rendered our history disembodied. My task is read the body back into that culture. Such a
task demands a hybrid of disciplines, somewhere between aesthetic thinking and reflexive
anthropology, an approach which accounts for the sweating, writing I and the messy
complexities that disgust discussion throws up.

It is the throw-up that I must continue to induce in the way I address this thesis topic. In
order to avoid the pitfalls of traditional anthropology, which is both a visually biased and
objectifying practice, 112 I must attend to the hyphenated operations of disgust. I address

112
ThedisciplineofanthropologyisextensivelycritiquedbyJohannsFabianinhisseminalcriticismTimeand
theOther,whichcharacterizestheproblematictemporalcontradictionsofahereandnowanthropologist
 57

culture-disgust: the messy complex. I do so as a protective mechanism against a test-tube

analysis of my subject. This is what disgust demands of its theorists, as a cursory survey of
the key texts quickly reinforces. Much of the definitional discussion of disgust is relational. To
take Millers text as one example, a chapter entitled Disgust and Its Neighbours is devoted
to the understanding of disgust in the context of its neighbourhood, populated by fear, horror,
boredom, contempt, shame, and hate.113

It becomes difficult to prise disgust from its companions, but it would be useful here to select
which companions should figure in a disgust-complex that attends specifically to the structure
of colonialism. Menninghaus comprehensive text, entitled Disgust: Theory and History of a
Strong Sensation, is here useful to our compound analysis. Recall how we have spoken of
disgust as constituting an inescapable sense of the real. It feels primary, sensory and
instinctive. The disgusting is the thing-in-itself, it reads as an unmistakeable truth.
Menninghaus is concerned to address the strain this places upon the boundaries between
unconditional reality and aesthetic illusion. The unavoidable amalgam that forms from this
line of enquiry is a kind of disgust-beauty complex. The relation is dialectic, such that disgust
is both the antithesis of, and bedded into the core of the beautiful. The powerful repulsion
that the disgusting elicits starkly opposes the appreciative mode by which we understand
beauty. Upon reaching a certain critical mass, however, beauty spills over into excess.114

studyingaculturalobjectwhichtheymakeOtherbytheirdistinctionofthatcultureasexistinginathereand
then.ThisdenialofacoexistenceoftimeandspacebetweenanthropologistandOtheriswhatFabianterms
afailuretoadmitcoevalness,creatingtwodifferingexistencesforthewritingsubjectanthropologistandthe
writtenaboutnonsubject(andhencenonperson);theOther.Anthropologicaldiscourseconstructsafrozen
indigenouspersonintimeandspace,whichlegitimatesthepriviligingofvisualunderstandingasthenoblest
sensebywhichcommunicateknowledgeaboutthisobjectifiedperson.Asaresult,thereisasensorydeficitto
thisknowledge,whichIinterprethereasadiscursivedistancewhichmaskstheworkofthedisgustreflex
withinthediscipline.TofollowthelogicofFabiansdemandthattheanthropologicalobserveradmitthe
intersubjectivetimeandspaceinwhichtheyexistwiththeirobject,thecommunicationbetweenthetwomust
becomenecessarilymultisensoryinsuchawayastoadmitthequasisubjectivityofbothparties.Engaging
withthemuckofquasinessismyendeavourhereinapproachingdisgustwithreflexivity,inordertoplace
mydiscussionbeyondtheproblemsofanthropologyauthority.Forfurtherdiscussionoftherelationshipof
anthropologytotime,seeJohannsFabian,TimeandtheOther:HowAnthropologyMakesItsObject(NewYork:
ColumbiaUniversityPress,1983).
113
Miller,TheAnatomyofDisgust,2335.
114
ThistrajectoryofbeautyintoexcessiswhatMenninghaustermsthesimplelawwhichprescribesthatas
soonasthereistoomuchofit,anythingpleasantcancausesatietorydisgust.Menninghaus,Disgust,360.
Thisistheforcethatdrivesphilosophicalrecognitionofthefundamentalcontingencyofform,beauty,and
pleasure.Thereisaquantitativelimitwhichinheresinthecategoriesandconceptsofform,orbeauty,and
whentheselimitsarequantitativelyexceeded,whenthecategoryisfloodedandfilled,theessentialqualityof
beautyisbroughtintoquestion.ForGeorgesBataille,thistendencyofforminexcesstogesturetowardwhat
hetermstheinforme,orformlessnessofbeing,demonstratesthemuckybasematerialfromwhichall
existenceismade.Thisexcrementallifematteroftheformlesswhichprovokesourmostintensedisgustisa
muckyrealitythatweareboundandswornto.(GeorgesBataille,AttractionandRepulsionII:Social
StructuresinTheCollegeofSociology,ed.DenisHollier,trans.BetsyWing(Minneapolis:Universityof
MinnesotaPress,1988),114.ByBataillesreckoning,thisrepulsionexperiencedintheencounterofthatwhich
58 |

The region of excess is the breeding ground for the disgusting, emerging at the locus of
pleasure itself where disgust is the trace . . . of this excess of pleasure.115 Through a
characterisation of disgust-as-trace-of-beauty, Menninghaus performs a theoretical operation
which respects the slipperiness of his content:

As the aesthetics entirely other, [the disgusting] remains basically unrepresentable,

invisible, unidentifiable . . . an empty cipher for that which the world of beautiful forms
cannot appropriate or integrate . . . the phantom, the transcendental signifier real
disgust remains intact . . . [it is] a tabooed reality: one that never stops returning to the
116
field of the aesthetic, in order once again to be ejected.

Menninghaus allows disgust to be that-which-is-ejected, the ejaculate being. Menninghaus

argument hinges on this trace analysis, which acts as a saloon door between his twin
concepts: disgust and beauty. His becomes a two-way system, where the concepts
perform a critical inversion for one another. Just as disgust bears the traces of beauty
similarly the rules of the beautiful are the traces of disgust. 117

This level of abstraction, which Menninghaus navigates deftly, may appear tenuous in this
account. Fundamentally, however, the approach is extraordinarily helpful for our task. It is
attentive to our post-anthropological endeavour. Trace analysis will do nicely. But more
pertinently, the idea of beauty speaks to the colonial and settler-colonial context which we
wish to explore. As we shall see, colonialism is very much concerned with authorising its own
practice in relation to new places. Place is re-made in the colonial consciousness. In order to
perform the necessary mental origami to justify the colonial endeavour, new places are
imagined under certain aesthetic schema, which demand colonial intervention. By
Menninghaus logic, it is in the aesthetic scaffolding of colonial thinking that we may perform
our trace analysis to determine the function of disgust. We shall spend some time here
understanding how this critical act might work. This chapter will demonstrate how a disgust-
beauty trace analysis might function through the work of Pramod Nayar. Nayars context is
colonial India, but her aesthetic categories are related to colonialism in such a way as to be
applicable to other geographical contexts. I will then apply these categories to the colonial

exceedsformisareturntoreality.Thisrealityisthemeaninglessnessofcategoriesofbeautyinthefaceof
inevitableentropicdecaytobasematerialism,andtherecognitionthattheentirecosmosissubjecttothis
informecomposition:thattheuniverseissomethinglikea[squashed,formless]spideror[agobof]spit.
GeorgesBataille,FormlessinVisionsofExcess,ed.AllanStoekl,trans.AllanStoekl,CarlR.LovittandDonald
M.LeslieJr.(Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesotaPress,1985),31.
115
Menninghaus,Disgust,37.
116
Ibid,49.
117
Ibid,96.
 59

Pacific and settler-colonial New Zealand. Here, we seek to understand the disgust-beauty
amalgam in relation to a different colonial place.

The Scenes of the Colonies: Beauty in Empire

Aesthetics invests an extraordinary amount of power in the colonial regime. But what is
aesthetics to the colonial? Whilst the experience of an aesthetic life beyond the banal, or
beauty, did not originate specifically in the colonial period, the eighteenth century appears
as a fertile time for aesthetic discourse.118 The specific shift in this period was the emergence
of the state of disinterestedness119 in aesthetic contemplation. There is a nuanced history to
this term,120 but here we will distil only what is necessary for our purpose. Disinterestedness
has now become thoroughly entrenched in the way we think about the aesthetic object, but
through much of Western history of art, it was not so.121 This is a specifically eighteenth-
century development. For a thing to be considered beautiful, it had to be at a distance from
its perceiving subject. Distance granted the thing autonomy, which became a necessary
condition of the beautiful. Our aforementioned higher sensory perceptions are suitable for
such disinterested contemplation. Seeing and hearing are perceived to be senses that make
distinct our battery of Cartesian boundaries. I see something that is outside of me, it is over
there, not in here. It is an object. I am the subject. In the eighteenth century the community
who were interested in disinterestedness cohered as an overwhelmingly homogenous group,
not least because the discourse of aesthetics itself produces a specific subjecthood. The
disinterested viewing subject is naturalized by aesthetic discourse as the privileged colonial
male: upper-class, white, masculine and European.122

As Britain began to look elsewhere around the globe to expand its imperial and mercantile
interests abroad, the sights (for colonial viewing) became the new sites (of colonial
intervention). Place became the new object of disinterest. Disinterest emerged in the practice
of colonial export, as ideas of the colonies flooded back to the seat of Empire. The

118
JohnW.Draper,EighteenthCenturyAesthetics:ABibliography(NewYork:OctagonBooks,1968),listsover
onethousandentries.
119
DisinterestednessismostcommonlyunderstoodintermsofImmanuelKantsCritiqueofJudgement
(1790),butemergedmuchearlierintheEighteenthCenturywithwriterssuchasShaftesburyandAddison.
120
SeeJeromeStolnitz,OntheOriginsofAestheticDisinterestedness,JournalofAestheticsandArt
Criticism20(19612):13143.
121
Ibid,131.
122
ElizabethA.Bohls,DisinterestednessandDenialoftheParticular:Locke,AdamSmithandtheSubjectof
Aesthetics,inEighteenthCenturyAestheticsandtheReconstructionofArt,ed.PaulMattick(Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversityPress,1993),1651.
60 |

increasingly popular practice of Scenic Tourism, which extended beyond the Grand classical
Tour of Europe, delivered periphery to the centre, framing nature both visually and verbally
into scenes.123 Portraits of the new lands were painted and framed, which advertised place
in the language of the picturesque. Travel narratives were written, bulging with adjectival
vocabulary. As discourse must, such language performed a constitutive (rather than merely
descriptive) function, building place entirely by aesthetic rhetoric. The power of this visual
vocabulary inside our context is central to the way that colonial thinking is organised:

Colonial discourse is peculiarly at home in the register of the visible, predisposed to

paint pictures with words [and with pictures], since colonial rule is based on that most
124
visible and seemingly natural of signs, the colour of skin.

I must be careful here not to align aesthetic contemplation and imperial expansion as merely
temporally related happenings. It is not that some people, on one corner of the globe, were
thinking about disinterested aesthetic practice, and that some people on the same corner of
the globe were thinking about the expansion of trade and Empire, and that some of these
people happened to think about, and perform both at the same time. Nor is there a claim
that the one gave birth to the other. But we would do well not to forget that disinterest serves
the interests of colonial hegemony exceedingly well. Pramod Nayar provides a detailed
account of this history of servitude, specifically in India, where a range of aesthetic languages
are employed inside the genre of travel writing. Nayars account follows an aesthetic
narrative of India, from 1600 to 1920, unveiling the aesthetic sequence required by the
colonial imagination to authorise the British presence in a foreign place over a long time scale.
For Nayar, aesthetics is undoubtedly a colonial project: it has a vital agency about it. The
image of the new place is aestheticised in a way that empowers colonial action. The place is
described in terms of a series of aesthetic problems, which only colonial control can solve.

From Marvellous to Monstrous in Colonial India

It is useful here to survey some of Nayars categories of analysis in India, in order to

understand how Colonizing Aesthetics might be applied to other contexts. Two sequentially
addressed aesthetic categories are seductively entitled: Marvellous Difficulty and the Social
Monstrous. These are Nayars aesthetic complexes, and we would do well to unpack them a
little here. First comes the marvellous. Early travel writing in India was preoccupied by the

123
ElizabethA.Bohls,TheAestheticsofColonialism:JanetSchawintheWestIndies,17741775,Eighteenth
CenturyStudies23,no.3(1994):368.
124
Ibid,372.
 61

act of marvel. The landscape of India was so heterogenous, so extremely varied and so
irrevocably other to anything the British had known that the travel writing of this period was
consumed with describing its variance. The adjectival proliferance of prosperity and excess
in this colonial writing reflects the sheer extra-ordinary quality of the country they arrived in.
The travelling colonial, it seems, could not help but be struck by awe and wonder. But that
which is awe-some or wonder-ful upon encounter has a kind of self-sustaining autonomy.
The colonial cannot fix that which is not broken, thus marvellous variety required reframing.
The natural abundance of Indian land was perceived as an easy fertility, which obscured the
input of local agrarian labour in a way which demanded colonial intervention. This perception
was an easy fit with the colonial theme of native ineptitude and indolence,125 such that the
Indian people were thus undeservedly wealthy. They were resource-rich without entitlement,
since they had not toiled sufficiently to deserve this natural plenitude.

For Nayar, the travel writings of India in this early period are loaded with intensificatory
rhetoric, where the text rises to a crescendo in the aesthetic of the dangerous marvellous.
To marvel is a quantitative act it seems to appreciate scale and breadth of variety above all
else. It is a kind of counting that is a lumping-together: it simply sees a lot and is awe-struck.
This is the difficulty of a marvellous place, it remains unknown to the marvelling spectator.
India is altogether too varied for its colonial viewer to take in. The accumulative description of
botanical and zoological objects builds an image of a land of excess. Superlatives abound in
description, and it is the sheer magnitude of variety in India that feeds into colonial anxieties
of excess. The botanical and zoological variance formed a metaphor which could be applied
universally across categories of analysis in order to make meaning in India. If the land was
excessive, then surely the people were too. Moral restraint cannot function in a place which
seems, to a colonial viewer, to be spilling over with life-forms. Indeed, travel writing performs
the conflat[ion of] . . . physical and and moral topographies [where] climactic conditions,
landscape features, town planning and disease [are read as] symptomatic of moral
conditions126 in the populace. Rationality, restraint and order was required to find a way
through the difficulty of Indias plenitude. India must be made simple to its viewer. The
multiplicity must be reduced, codified, categorized and hermeneutically understood.127 India
demands organization, and this job can only be performed from the putative subject-hood of
the white colonial male.

125
PramodK.Nayar,EnglishWritingandIndia16001920:ColonizingAesthetics(London:Routledge,2008),12.
126
Ibid,24.
127
Ibid,18.
62 |

It is through the enlightening process of understanding that India is made familiar to its
colonial invaders. Through the meticulous mapping of land, inventory of species and
information-gathering in travelogue writing, the mysterious Other constructed by the text is
made knowable. India becomes catalogued, inserted into tables, rationalised into lists. The
place is demystified, no longer dark, marvellous and mysterious. Rather, it is revealed to be a
Social Monstrous, which is Nayars subsequent aesthetic category. The discourse of the
Social Monstrous reads the Indian body as a map of national morality. Logically, then, the
preponderence of corporeal deformity in India speaks to a deformed social functionality. The
colonial perception of a deformed body stood as mirror to the social conditions of India. The
hierarchized Indian caste system and corrupt political structures are therefore deemed
grotesque. Nayars reading here of a monstrous body politic, which produces actual human
monstrosities, follows Jeffrey Cohens concept of the cultural body, which is both a
constructed, and a projected image. An example of this projection is the relation of appetite to
the social poverty gap. The extreme disparities of wealth are processed through the rhetoric
of consumption. Excessive wealth at the top of the political scale becomes characterized as a
devouring monarch,128 exploiting and consuming the wealth of his citizens, such that the
bodies of his population are made to starve, becoming malformed and (of course) monstrous
in the process.

There is a simple aesthetic equation here, where fat-bodied and predatory kings oppose an
emaciated, dehumanized populace. This equation conflates the literal collapsing form of the
Indian beggar with a collapsing social structure. It is as if the delicate spinal columns of the
bony Indian people cannot bear the weight of the gluttonous man at the top of the social food
chain. The instability of design is grotesque and simply cannot function. The relation of form
and function is here crucial to the way in which colonizing aesthetics work. For this aesthetic
schema the act of identifying the Indian body as abject or monstrous (by virtue of its
difference) is not enough. It is insufficient to say: look, these people smell different, and their
bodies are wiry and small. So many of them are unwashed, and hungry, and disease-ridden
they are like monsters to our people. The colonizing aesthetic thinks big. Differences must
be located within a larger, more problematic schema to incite colonial intervention. Further,
this confident problem-solving colonial must authorise his continued activity in a place over
time. He responds to a series of aesthetic puzzles sequentially, first the difficulty, then the
monstrosity. The monstrous emerges from the marvellous because it relies on the
difficulty of excess. The encountered landscape of too-muchness, in this way, required the

128
Ibid,45.
 63

colonial reading act to make sense of it. When the lists had been made, the wealth had been
tabulated, and the maps drawn up, the monster of India was revealed. The awe-striking
marvel was no longer difficult. This is Indias truth: a monstrous social, moral and political
condition.

As Nayar aptly comments, it is the English traveller who writes both problem and solution,
both beautiful marvellous exterior and monstrous real interior. In effect, the traveller
penetrates the sign to locate the signified.129 The truth is the grotesque reality of place,
which lies beneath perceptions of beauty and wonder. It is a short mental trip from a
monstrous thing to a disgusting thing. This is why Nayar is helpful for my task. It seems
there are just so many things in India that it cannot help but spill into rhetorical excess. It is
this excess, this overwhelming presence of stuff (and people) in India that lies pregnant with
a perceived disgusting otherness. The relation between marvellous beauty and repulsive
excess is difficult to convey perhaps pregnancy will suffice. The one seems to conceal the
other, to allow it to hibernate. This is a secrecy which is in itself menacing, merely by fact of
its hidden-ness. This land of beautiful profusion and variety is thus morally suspect; it keeps,
perhaps, a dirty secret. When Elizabeth Bohls opens her essay on colonial aesthetics with
130
the quotation Antigua is beautiful . . . Antigua is too beautiful, she gestures toward this
colonial suspicion. It would seem that that which is beautiful is always fraught with the
danger of that slight modification, that of being too much of its own quality.

The too-muchness of colonial aestheticization is one relation of disgust, but I think there is
also another. There is a metaphor of shifting proximity here that aids the travel from beautiful
exterior to disgusting interior. It would seem that the quality of distance, so vital for
disinterested contemplation, has been rhetorically removed. The burning quest of the
colonial to know, to understand, to satisfy his curiosity about the new place requires a
penetration of the gap between spectator and marvelled sight. One could make an argument
here about the proximity of the senses to the place, and there is probably grounds to assume
that the real grotesque place is experienced with the more visceral sensory perceptors: the
stickiness of the skin in a sweaty crowd of bodies, the invasory smell of Indian cooking,
mingled with the stench of defecation, and the excessive complexity of the spicy food. But
there is another, less visceral, sense of excess here. It is the trajectory of colonial thinking
that elicits the real revulsion. It is the perception that one knows-all about a thing, a sense of

129
Ibid,62.
130
JamaicaKincaid,ASmallPlace(NewYork:FarrarStrausGiroux,1988),77,quotedinBohls,TheAesthetics
ofColonialism,363.
64 |

having arrived at the destination entirely. The colonial belief that he has reached this site of
cognitive completion induces a kind of surfeit revulsion. The thing was only beautiful and
marvellous because it appeared unreachable, and inexpressible. Aesthetic pleasure is only
pleasure, then, if there is still that-which-is-yet-to-be-discovered, something postponing the
maximum satietory value ad in(de)finitum through an unterminable employment of [the
aesthetic idea].131

Bracketed Settler-Colonialism: An Aesthetics of Authenticity

I want to suggest here that a different colonizing aesthetic is at work in the settler-colonial
context. In this context, there is a vested interest in maintaining a distinct level of the
unknown in the relation to place, and the indigenous people that inhabit it. Kojin Karatani
speaks of aesthetic practice as deriving pleasure not from the essentially beautiful qualities
of the object it praises, but from the practice of bracketing off various other reactions to the
object. The pleasure is in the bracketing of displeasure, the comfort is in the bracketing of the
uncomfortable. For Kojin, this has a kind of masochistic desire to it.

An aesthete kneels before something not because he has really submitted to it but
because he derives pleasure out of bracketing the displeasure of obeying an object
that he can dominate if he wants to. We can liken it to a masochist who gets pleasure
out of obeisance only in a relationship wherein his superiority to the master is
confirmed and he can play within a set of rules that does not violate his ultimate
132
security.

We can read from this that the disgusting sensory realities of an object, or even a monstrous
and grotesque interior to a place, are systematically held at bay by a bracketing act of
beautification. The colonial places himself in the position of worshipping aesthete, in relation
to the place he encounters. In the settler-colonial condition, this worship is directed toward a
Sublime landscape, and a romantic figure: the indigene is a noble (and dying) savage. The
seeming respect and appreciation this affords the place appears as the ultimate anti-
colonial gesture. Indeed by forget[ting] to remove the brackets . . . colonialism is
conveniently obscured.133

131
Menninghaus,Disgust,32.
132
KojinKaratani,UsesofAesthetics:AfterOrientalism,boundary225,no.2(1998):151.
133
Ibid,153.
 65

It is this colonial forgetting that is vital to the discursive, and actual, process of settlement in
a new place. The performance of disinterest, forces an eternal dichotomy 134 between
Colonial Settler and Authentic Indigene. An aesthetic exceptionalization 135 takes place,
where an extraordinary (and beautiful) difference constitutes an idea of the native Other.
The act is undoubtedly anthropological, in that it brackets that which it purports to study. Its
objects of study are already closed by the approach of the anthropologist. They encase an
essential being, which can never be known, and this is the beauty of the practice. The
difference of the Other is invented before it is observed. The Other is mysterious,
unknowable, and almost always disappearing. There is a desperate imperative of
preservation here which is borne of the nostalgia for the original thing. Even despite the
rhetoric of disappearance, that thing is already aloof. It is already a never-known.

This stress on an authentic and mysterious native relates disgust specifically to a settler-
colonial context. It is a forcing of a never-disgusted state, since it demands a never-knowing
of the people that inhabit it. Unlike India, a place the colonial penetrates to discover the
monster within, settler nations like New Zealand are never subject to the satietory disgust
that comes with revealing the innards of a place. The settler has already locked the door,
and happily stands outside, appreciating the detail of the frame. Disgust is present in the
tension of this act, it is the pain in the locked elbows of an arms-length aesthetic. It is as
though the colonial settler wanders around in the new place with arms outstretched, in order
to ward off the place itself. Do not come too near me he whispers for I shall be disgusted by
you, or else I shall be in excess of you. I shall know you too well and that will revolt me. For
both our sakes, stay over there, and let me find you beautiful.

The benefit of this paranoid authenticity of place to the settler is well expressed by Wolfes
concept of repressive authenticity. Repressive authenticity is a representation of the
colonised Other as an essential being. This essence cannot be understood in terms of
context; it is simply a modernist presence in the world. It is de-contextualised, as though
mystically conceived in a void. The Other is the real thing, a true original. Nothing can
stand in for it, it lives in a mode of stasis it is incapable of transforming over time.
Repressive Authenticity functions like a wax museum in the mind of the colonial. And the
waxen figure Wolfe offers as a specific trope for settler societies is the Romantic Savage.
The settler museum in New Zealand, then, would be populated by romantic depictions of

134
Wolfe,SettlerColonialism,180.
135
Kojin,UsesofAesthetics,153.
66 |

savage Maori life. Indulge my imagination here momentarily. The Maori figure stands atop
some hillside pa, engaged in a noble task he prepares for battle. They are a warring and
bloody-minded race, of course. He oils his musket. No, hang on, that will disrupt our time-
capsule. Rather, he sharpens his weaponry a taiaha, or a mere, perhaps. Thats better. His
eyes are wise, and his body is strong. He is a warrior. He is authentically Mori. This image
leaves only room for a spectators admiration. How unshakeably sincere he is in his identity,
how courageous in the face of his own death. It is this sense of death that Wolfe suggests is
encoded into the concept of authenticity, simply because the settler condition demands it.
The butterfly is pinned on the wall to herald its impending extinction. The image of the native
body is preserved only to lay it in a rhetorical coffin. Admire it now in formaldehyde, for it will
not long be here in the flesh. The trope of authenticity is thus repressive. The space of the
settled land cannot be shared in the present, it must be discursively cleared of native bodies,
which means these bodies must be elsewhere, located in another time and place which is
inaccessible to us.136 This elsewhere is best served by a temporal relocation: the native
body is a thing of the past.

From Indian Negative Sublime to Inhabited Missionary Picturesque

We will use Nayars Colonizing Aesthetics to explore some aesthetic categories which might
be helpful to a settler context. We will select two more sequential categories from her
conceptual smorgasbord, firstly the Imperial Sublime, followed by the Missionary
Picturesque. There is a certain terrific quality to the Sublime landscape. It is has the quality

136
Ifthelandiscapableofbeingclearedofnativebodies,thennatureitselfcanbeconvenientlypittedasan
elsewheretomangenerally.GeoffParkcontextualisesthepresentdaynationalismofNewZealandthat
inherestoourconceptofthelandasanauthenticoriginarylandscape,anuntouchedwildernesswhichis
understoodasasceneinhispublishedcollectionofessaysTheatreCountry.Withathirdofournationalland
inprotectedreserves,ourbushhascometorepresentanunshakeableprimaevalqualitytothisplace,whichis
premisedonnatureasanobjectthattouristsandlocalsalikegotolookatandappreciateinavisit,ratherthan
alifeecologyofecosystemswhichweinhabitandareintricatelyconnectedto.Parkrelatesthisaestheticising
oftheNewZealandlandscapeasanuninhabitedandauthenticsceneasadirectresultoftheRomantic
fervourofEighteenthCenturyPaintingfornaturalscenery.Thepreservationistethicwhichprevailsinour
environmentalmanagementpracticesinNewZealand,andthetourismindustrywhichisfundedbyan
internationalreputationofthiscountryasanuntouchedwildernessarepresentdaymanifestationsofthis
conceptoflandasavisualsceneproper.ItismyargumentherethatParksassessmentofournationalist
investmentinsceneryasapremiseforunderstandingourrelationtothisplaceexemplifiesafailureto
removetheaestheticisedandsettlercolonialbrackets.Thisoversightisconsistentwithasettlercolonial
necessitytoviewthelandasuninhabited,whatParktermsourterranullius.Ourinsistenceonthebeautyand
authenticityofourcharacteristicallyunpeopledlandscapemasksthedisgustdriveofthesettlertowardan
inhabitedplace,areflexwhichwouldrevealtheinauthenticityofsettlerhimselfontheland.Seethecollection
ofessayswrittenbyGeoffPark,TheatreCountry:EssaysonLandscapeandWhenua(Wellington:Victoria
UniversityPress,2006),especiallyTheatreCountry,113128,TheEcologyoftheVisit,129142,andOur
TerraNullius,163178.
 67

of the infinite, a threatening vastness which is construed as an empty void. It is a terrifying

absence which constitutes a space, not a place.137 A place has particularities, nodes of
recognition which serve to distinguish its identity. One can settle in a place, one can take
refuge. One cannot settle in the Sublime, it is a null. It is altogether un-settling by virtue of its
emptiness the power to make meaning in this space is undone. Nayar terms this the
Negative Sublime.

In the negative sublime there is an excess of signifiers but no signified, signs but no
clear meanings. Here the landscape is empty, devoid of markers or directions. The
138
desolation frightens because there is no discernable meaning.

Unlike the curiosity that the Marvellous incited, the Sublime simply terrifies. The colonial will
to count things has disappeared. The travelogues of the eighteenth century now abound with
the rhetoric of inflation. All boundaries of understanding are over-run, since the land now
cannot be computed by the colonial counting machine. It is unable to be tabulated, listed or
inventorially accounted for.139 The landscape is horrific because it is undifferentiated. Where
the marvellous was a plentiful land of variety, the Sublime is singular. It is one looming mass
which paralyses its colonial spectator.

This paralysis is only escaped, Nayar maintains, by the insertion of metaphor or allegory . . .
into the chain of signifiers which give opportunity for the emergence of personal meaning-
making.140 These insertions could be quite literal in the landscape, but they are portents of
potentiality. They represent the potential for colonial agency in the face of the negative
sublime. Let us attempt an example. Since in an Indian context the Sublime was chiefly
understood through the experience of unrelenting warfare across the land, the building of
memorials to the soldiers lost provided a locus amoenus for colonial invaders. It claims a little
piece of land for English bodies. It gives the emptiness of death a place, it made its mark on
the land. Nayar notes how a kind of memorial tourism emerges in the travelogues, which
grasps onto the site of the war memorial as an icon of colonial sacrifice. The etching of
individual names into stone emphasized the very personal agency of each soldier, in the face
of the void that is India. The paralysed spectator of the sublime could then hope for their own
agency, and it is this hope that incited the colonial response to the Sublime aesthetic. The

137
A.Bermingham,ThePicturesqueandReadytowearFemininity,inThePoliticsofthePicturesque:
Literature,LandscapeandAestheticsSince1770,ed.S.CopleyandP.Garside(Cambridge:Cambridge
UniversityPress,1997),81119.
138
Nayar,ColonizingAesthetics,65.
139
Ibid,678.
140
Ibid,71.
68 |

rhetoric here turns to one of improvement of providing pockets of safety, help and even
pleasure in the otherwise threatening sublime. 141 One can see in this argument the
downtrodden solo man against unforgiving land logic of the pioneer settler. The Westernized
discourse of private property rights is instrumental here. If land is mine, it is already a kind of
personal refuge, by virtue of my possession of it. I can stand on my land, and no-one can tell
me to get off it. But for the larger colonial project, the land must be transformed into a literal
ecological refuge, a fertile colonial garden off which one may live. The garden is a little
microcosm of the larger colonial endeavour which makes the place habitable, manageable
and meaningful. It is a language of patient progress, where every-little-bit-helps in the vision
of an improved future for the nation. The individual garden plot is a crystal ball, into which
one may read the beautiful future. The colonizing aesthetic in this instance has authorised
the small-scale activity of colonialism by pitching an image of nature as vast, terrifying and
expansive. It is made into a great emptiness, in order for the settling body to rejoice in the
smallest of presences. Anything is better than nothing. It is an inch-by-inch mentality: one
small step for the settler, one giant leap for the realisation of a morally, physically and
economically superior colony.

Once the ominous door of the Imperial Sublime is prised ajar by the rhetoric of improvement,
the Missionary Picturesque can enter the colonial landscape. The picturesque required the
imposition of order upon unruly natural surroundings, and it valorised this human intervention
by declaring it a moral duty. The potential for the landscape to improve through pockets of
safety is now mingled with the evangelical desire to morally reform both the primitive
indigene and the primitive landscape. Nature was invested with a transcendental value: by
observing nature, one observed God.

But passive observation in itself is insufficient to the task of the Christianising mission in the
colonies. As Paul Carter discusses, the picturesque has a driving intentionality, imperative to
both the spirit of the place, and the souls of those within it.142 This spirit of place lay directly
in the land itself, such that the visible landscape mask[ed] . . . the invisible but palpable
potential for a reformed Christian landscape and it is the missionary who discovers this
potential.143 In order to do so, the missionary must get the soil under his or her fingernails,
he must engage in the place. The role of civic labour here is vital to create a civic and moral
picturesque, hard work is required. This is the cultural fable logic by which the picturesque

141
Ibid,84.
142
PaulCarter,TheRoadtoBotanyBay:AnEssayinSpatialHistory(London:FaberandFaber,1987),243.
143
Nayar,ColonizingAesthetics,96.
 69

transforms the land. A cultural fable writes a collective narrative to negotiate the perceived
problems of cultural experience. In the context of India, the cultural fable that Nayar
explicates is a missionary picturesque which identified an aesthetics of poverty, both moral
and physical. The place is, at first, primitive. This calls for the input of missionary labour to
improve the landscape. As we have realised, the physical intervention on the land is also a
spiritual intervention. The final destination of the fable is a Christian Concordia Discors,
where the diversity of the place is homogenized under a moral Christian picturesque.

The importance of the refashioning of both the landscape and the bodies within it, as a site of
labour cannot be stressed enough. The themes of the New Testament are here the
scaffolding for a kind of equation for change, to inform the design of a Christian georgic. In
this way, a husbandry narrative emerges, populated by scenes of missionary cultivation,
hardship, labour, sacrifice and harvest.144 The curious development inside the missionary
picturesque is the perceived devolution of disinterested distance between spectator and
scene. The missionary no longer stands outside of the frame, but rather is now immersed in
the centre of, his aesthetic object. The hardworking missionary must enact a participatory
and embedded picturesque in order to literally and discursively re-form the land and its
people. One might be inclined to suggest that the aesthetic categories have collapsed, and
the missionary is now operating within the apparent real world, not merely an illusory scene.
Certainly this mode of thinking is attractive from a missionary perspective. But it is important
not to be seduced by the rhetoric of moral improvement, social change and pious humility
that the picturesque entails. These are the conditions of the aesthetic schema, not an escape
from it.

I have looked in this chapter to develop an understanding of Nayars critical work on colonial
aesthetics in an Indian context in order to set up a departure point for an analysis of disgust
through the traces of beauty. In hope of developing a more self-reflexive critical practice,
which respects the composition of disgust as a never-object, we can provide an account of
colonial and settler colonial contact which is multidimensional. The complex ways in which
aesthetic schema created a problem for which colonialism served as the only resolution is
vital to the understanding of how a disgust-beauty amalgam operates in complicated ways. It
is a process of re-jecting, re-making, re-moving and re-populating place in order to authorise
the colonial endeavour. Chapter Four will contextualise the operations of this disgust-beauty

144
Ibid,98.
70 |

amalgam in eighteenth century colonial Pacific, by approaching the trope of the Devouring
Savage.

 71

Chapter Four:

The Devouring Savage

I have a photo of myself at age five from a family trip to Vanuatu. It was 1990, and my main
memory from that holiday is constructed around that image. We had been wandering the
street markets on a stinking hot day in Port Vila. I remember the sand on the road adhering
to the sweat between my toes, my fringe glued to my damp forehead, feeling dizzy and dry-
mouthed with heat. We had stopped at yet another fragrant stall of fruit, and my sister and I
were astounded by the attending Vanuatuan woman. She was the most enormous woman I
had ever seen. Her body parts seemed to amalgamate into a great lump between her knees
where she sat. She didnt bother to brush the flies which wandered the vast terrain of her
legs. Her colourful muumuu could not disguise the sheer length of her breasts, which
seemed to run right down her body. She was parked on a stool which was no longer visible
beneath her, and she seemed immovable. When my parents asked if they could take our
picture next to her, she assented, but did not smile her face was a downward droop of
blackness. This was a fascinating and frightening creature. At age five, I already felt that the
world had been put together for my privilege, and the catalogues of Pacific tourism that I had
been scrapbooking affirmed that Vanuatu was an island paradise for my pleasure. I had cut
and pasted scenes of natural splendour, of white-teethed smiles on warm brown faces, of
beautiful women with coconut breasts frozen mid-hip wiggle, and banquets of bountiful
seafood for my consumption alone. The body of the market-stall creature did not compute
with these images. She did not invite my consumption, fitting into neither touristic, nor sexual,
nor food-driven economies of desire. The reason for our interest was the way in which her
body seemed to disavow all the norms of Pacific femininity that characterised the tourism
industry that had lured my family here.

This tourism was and continues to be premised on the geographical isolation of the islands
as sites invested with a Western cultural fantasy of Otherness. As Paul Lyons has suggested,
this tourism has not only emphasised straightforward narratives of temporal displacement
(the Pacific region as a past to the spoiled present condition of modernity), but also the
celebratory rhetoric of tourism as preserving a cultural authenticity or encouraging local
72 |

development.145 In order to do so, however, the industry is forced to mine imagery from a
pre-modern Pacific existence, represented by a primitive otherness. In large part, this
primitivity is expressed in simple terms of a heterosexual longing for the simplistic sexual
invitation of a beautiful Pacific woman dancing for the purposes of the nostalgic touristic
gaze. My parents, I am sure, would be proud of the alter-image that the market-stall woman
offered (and the photographic record of her they took home). This was no synthetic
imaginary object of sexualised Pacific femininity conjured up by commodity tourism. Here
was a real woman of the Pacific. The parameters for choosing this woman as a
representative for the real Pacific woman, however, relies on her being the antithesis to the
slender, coffee-coloured Pacific goddesses of our glossy magazines. She was a body in
excess, both too black and too large, a exemplar of what I will later discuss as the Hottentot
discourse which applied to Melanesian women, and as such she was entirely lacking the
embodied signifiers to fit within my semiotics of desire. The fascination I have with the image
is not merely her mis-fit with Pacific stereotypes, but with the sheer polarity of the skeletal
white frames of me and my sister on either side of the enormity of the Vanuatuan stomach.
In the composition of the image there lies a less flattering revelation. My parents were not
photographing a sense of the socialist real. The photo is a record of voyeuristic disgust. The
lasting images of Pacific femininity that remained imprinted in my brain for a long time
afterward were characterised by a dual scheme. The Pacific woman was either the glossy
touristic beauty, caught in an attractive moment of primitive sexual simplicity, or a corpulent
mass of excessive form, the size of which threatened to consume my own skinny white body.

Despite my young age, these dual representations were not of my own invention. They were
an inherited dichotomy of colonial encounter rhetoric with the Pacific, which locates the
colonial temptations and trepidations in the figure of the indigenous woman. This chapter will
seek to address this affective push-and-pull in the colonial representations of the Pacific.
What appears as repulsion against black and bestial Melanesian savages and attraction
toward the classical goddesses of Polynesia is here understood as the respective
applications of hard and soft disgust against the primitive female. Either cannibalistic or
sexually voracious, these women offer the revolting alternatives of either oral consumption or
vaginal devouring of the colonial male. This is the monstrous inside which lurks under the
Tahitian Eden so fervently praised back in Europe (and now sequestered for the purposes of
luring the West to Pacific tourism). The overwhelming heterosexuality of these
representations will be critiqued as a functional opacity of Pacific discourse, which obscures

145
PaulLyons,PacificScholarship,LiteraryCriticism,andTouristicDesire:TheSpecterofA.GroveDay,
Boundary224,no.2(1997):50.
 73

the potential homoerotic possibility. Lee Wallaces Sexual Encounters helps me to organize
this re-evaluation. Finally, the continuity of disgust in the critical position will be addressed in
relation to stories (and stories of stories) of cannibalism in the Pacific. The meta-textual and
inter-textual insights of Gananath Obeyesekeres Cannibal Talk will be used to critique the
critical position of Paul Moon. Moons text This Horrid Practice addresses the archive from
an already disgusted standpoint, and in doing so displays the wholesale consumption of the
colonial prejudices with which this archive is riddled. The disgust complex is here understood
in relation to the body of the postcolonial critic, as a warning to the embedded continuities of
colonial discourse in the affect of disgust.

Firstly, I shall address the affective dualisms with which the discourse of the primitive is
imbued. The discourse of the primitive aligns itself into a series of dualisms, which organize
neatly around concepts of colonial desire and colonial disgust. This Western attraction-
repulsion dialectic by which the idea of the South Seas is made affectively meaningful is the
result of early exploratory accounts published in Europe, which invested [the Pacific] with
both desire and repulsion.146 This affective split is overtly organized along geographical
lines in representations of the Pacific region, distinguishing the now familiar tropes governing
the islands (and peoples) of Polynesia as paradisical, gorgeous, fertile, and idyllic from
those unsavoury representations of Melanesia, populated by fetid, decaying hellish,
and hostile inhabitants.147 The former reflects the highly sexualised encounter narratives
of Wallis, Bougainville and Banks in their discovery of the Tahitian goddesses of the South
Seas. The latter was made distinct in the journals of Johann Reinhold Forster, whose
physiognomic contrasts of Eastern and Western pacific peoples informed the de-eroticized
and savage constructions of Melanesian peoples. Forsters writings formed the basis for
Dumont dUrvilles geocultural categories, established in 1831, and still used today. Beatrice
Grimshaws account inherits these physical, socio-cultural and affective dualisms in her 1907
ethnographical text From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands, which expresses the stark differences
candidly.

East of Fiji, life is one long lotus eating dream, stirred only by occasional parties of
pleasure, feasting, love-making, dancing . . . a very little cultivating work . . . [and]
friendliness of strangers is carried almost to excess. Westward of the Fijis lie the dark,
wicked cannibal groups of the Solomons, Banks and New Hebrides, where life is more

146
ChristopherB.Balme,PacificPerformances:TheatricalityandCrossCulturalEncounterintheSouthSeas
(Basingstoke:PalgraveMacmillan,2007),9.
147
MichelleKeown,PacificIslandsWriting:ThePostcolonialLiteraturesofAotearoaNewZealandandOceania
(Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress,2007),18.
74 |

like a nightmare than a dream, murder stalks openly in broad daylight, [and] the people
148
are nearer to monkey than to human beings.

Grimshaws account cements a clear image of the geographically apportioned colonial

excitations and anxieties in the Pacific. For McClintock, this ambivalent affective baggage is
the natural companion to the project of imperial discovery. The quintessential scene of
discovery operates between phantasmagorical (and decidedly gendered) alternatives,
suspended between an imperial megalomania, with its fantasy of unstoppable rapine and a
contradictory fear of engulfment, with its fantasy of dismemberment and emasculation.149
The anticipation of sexual conquest and the paranoia of being devoured are, then, the
emotional conditions which accompany the act of discovery of an exoticised other. Bernard
Smith defines these two alternative conceptions as hard and soft primitivism. Regardless of
whether they are site-specific ethnographic alternatives, geographic divisions, ambivalences
inherent in discovery, or a coupling inherent in the discourse of primitivism, they shall here
be yoked under the trope of devouring, in order to suggest that they do indelible work in the
service of, and in relation to, disgust.

Abject sexuality: black and bestial Melanesian women

One must be careful not to overstate the importance of Bernard-Smiths adjectival

categorising of hard and soft. Indulging for a moment, however, it is interesting to see how
this terminology fares in Millers disgust litmus test: the life-soup metaphor. Such a test
demands a determination of capacity for excess, a possibility which is coded into the abject
biological representations of the female form (See Chapter 3). Responding to a long and
phallic history of colonial encounter read as heterosexual intercourse, Patty OBrien
discusses the female embodiment of exotic primitivism in her thorough account of
representations of South Seas women, which she has termed The Pacific Muse. OBriens
work traces the two distinct discourses that are inherited from colonial othering elsewhere
(from the bestial imaging of black African savages to the classical canon of beauty derived
from ancient Greece, and orientalist discourse) in order to code the bodies of women from
Melanesia and Polynesia as respectively hard and soft. It is useful here to trace how
womens bodies from both Western and Eastern Pacific are here found to be sites of excess,
and hence food for the disgust rhetoric of the Other. OBrien prefaces her account with the
fact that the notoriety of the over-sexed and colonized female body in eighteenth century

148
BeatriceGrimshaw,FromFijitotheCannibalIslands(London:EveleighNash,1907),7.
149
McClintock,ImperialLeather,2627.
 75

voyage accounts bears a kernel of truth. 150 Pacific cultures held a relatively un-
problematized view of female sexual freedoms, comparative to the delimited positions of
feminine power afforded by Judeao-Christian traditions. 151 The degree of such apparent
freedoms is arguable, however more interesting to our enquiry is the way in which the
Pacific female body reads as site of either hard or soft sexual possibility, both of which are
problems for the colonial viewer.

The hard female primitive body is represented by a colonial lexicon of the African savage, a
representation which leans heavily on overtly disgusting signifiers. The simplistic equation of
comparative colouring worked to draw the comparisons between myths of Africa and the
people of the Western Pacific. The peoples of the Western Pacific were darker-skinned, a
fact which immediately hauled up a litany of colonial presumptions based on
contemporaneous race theories. Under these theories, blackness was synonymous with a
bestial disposition. This dehumanizing logic was used in an African context to justify
indigenous slavery, but it also functioned to equate blackness with sexual aberrance, most
notably among women. Comte de Buffon argued that black women regularly sought the
sexual attentions of orang-utans, and the animalistic sexual potential of a black womans
body was pushed to excess by a visual and written discourse of exaggerated physicality.152
This body was titled the Hottentot woman, a figure characterised by grossly enlarged
buttocks, labia (the Hottentot apron) and breasts, and for whom fertility and childbirth were
eased by a wide vaginal canal.153 This figure held a sense of sexual monstrosity, by her
charged libidinal voracity as much as her excessive fertility. Excessive sexuality as a racial
phenomenon was aptly expressed by the display of the stereotype in the flesh: South African
native Saartjie Bartmaan, otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus, endured being toured
through early nineteenth century Europe as a monstrous curiosity, and upon her death in
1816 had her apron removed by infamous French naturalist George Cuvier, who likened her
exaggerated labia to that of the female ape.154 The scientific triumph of this moment was its
placement of racial difference on a human-animal continuum, such that famous botanist
Jean-Baptiste-Genevieive-Marcellin Bory de Saint Vincent was able to declare Hottentots an
intermediary genus between homo and gibbon.155 Notably different from the social scale of

150
PattyOBrien,ThePacificMuse:ExoticFemininityandtheColonialPacific(Seattle:UniversityofWashington
Press,2006),12.
151
Ibid.
152
Ibid,34.
153
Ibid.
154
Ibid,35.
155
SergeTcherkezoff,ALongandUnfortunateVoyageTowardstheInventionoftheMelanesia/Polynesia
Distinction15951832,TheJournalofPacificHistory38:2(2003):177.
76 |

racial ranking, from savagery to civilization, the scattering of human races down a
zoological axis rendered some savages more beasts than humans.156

The degenerate physical and moral state recounted in ethnographies of Melanesia, which
rendered the people both physically revolting and sexually monstrous, was motivated [in
part] by the relative failures of European imperialist ventures in Melanesia.157 Violence and
hostility marked the early contact between Europeans and the indigenous Melanesians.158
The animosity of the inhabitants toward colonial intervention is recorded by accounts of their
frightfully cruel and terribly treacherous natures, 159 deemed morally repulsive for their
recourse to savage violence and extreme . . . cruel[ty], void of affection . . . truly
wretches . . . degraded beyond the power of conception.160 A conception of the violent
Hobbesian savage was married with a discourse of physical racial ugliness in the peoples of
the Western Pacific and the coasts of Australia. William Dampiers 1697 account of the New
Hollanders(Australian Aborigines) presented a degraded race of coal black[s] who had the
worst features of all the savages,161 a depiction which largely reflects the lack of commercial
utility he found in the new place. New Holland was an unprofitable site, which failed to offer
the exotic spices, luxurious forests and the peaceful reception of other islands.162 Jonathan
Swift subsequently used Dampiers account to mythologize the ugliness of the primitive
female form as a symbol for the ugliness of all humankind in Part IV of Gullivers Travels

156
Tcherkezoffdiscussestheshiftintheoriesofhumanvarietythatoccurredfromlateeighteenthcentury
(17301790)tonineteenthcenturyandbeyond(18301950),andprovidesabibliographyofreferencesto
supporthisclaimthatthefirstperiodwascharacterisedbyasocialrankingwithinthehumangenus,
preservingastringenthumananimaldivide,illustratedbytheworkofComtedeBuffon.Thesecondperiod,by
contrast,essentialisedtheconceptofrace,bypermittingtheideathatsomeracesweremoreindicativeof
ananimalspeciesthanothers.Ibid,182183.
157
Keown,PacificIslandsWriting,44.
158
SeeChapterThreeofJ.C.Beaglehole,TheExplorationofthePacific(Stanford:StanfordUniversityPress,
1968),C.JackHinton,TheSearchfortheIslandsofSolomon(Oxford:ClarendonPress,1969),andChapterFive
ofJ.A.Bennett,WealthoftheSolomons:AHistoryofaPacificArchipelago18001978(Honolulu:Universityof
HawaiiPress,1987).
159
H.CaleyWebster,ThroughNewGuineaandtheCannibalCountries(London:T.FisherUnwin,1898),135.
160
A.Cheyne,TheTradingVoyagesofAndrewCheyne18411844,ed.D.Shineberg(Honolulu:Universityof
HawaiiPress,1971),53.
161
Dampiers1697accountportraysanuglyanddenigratedpeoples,theworsthehasencountered:The
InhabitantsofthiscountryarethemiserablestPeopleintheworld...noHousesandSkingarments,Sheep,
Poultry,andFruitsoftheEarth...AndsettingasidetheirHumaneShape,theydifferbutlittlefromBrutes.
Theyaretall,straitbodied,andthin...greatHeads,roundForeheadsandgreatBrows.Theireyelidsare
alwayshalfclosedtokeepthefliesoutoftheireyes...theydoneveropentheireyesasotherpeople:and
thereforetheycannotseefar...theyhavegreatbottlenoses...fulllips,andwidemouths.Thetwofore
teethoftheirupperjawarewantinginallofthem...theyarelongvisaged,andofaveryunpleasingaspect,
havingnoonegracefulfeatureintheirfaces.Theirhairisblack,shoretandcurld,likethatoftheNegroes:and
notlongandlanklikethecommonIndians...thecolouroftheirskins...iscoalblack...theyhavenosortof
clothesbutapieceoftherindofatree.WilliamDampier,ANewVoyageRoundTheWorld(London:Adam
andCharlesBlack,1937),chap.17,http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500461h.html#ch17.
162
Tcherkezoff,ALongandUnfortunateVoyage,188.
 77

(1726). His Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms emphasised the revolting embodied
condition of the yahoos with whom Gulliver lived. The text utilizes the signifiers of Dampiers
abject indigenous body in order to suggest that the physical condition of this race points to a
signified reality of all human beings as savage. To this end the engorged buttocks, anus,
pudenda, and dugs of the inhabitants are negatively fetishized. The text represents the
yahoo life experience as tantamount to a bestial condition, limited to menial work, vomiting,
excretion . . . disease and (for the women) excessive sexual function.163

These early accounts set up a simplistic dual vision which coded ugliness into the black skin
of Melanesian and Aboriginal peoples, in contrast to copper-skinned neighbouring
Polynesia.164 The influential natural historian Johann Reinhold Forster, made famous by his
substantial contributions to the early ornithology of Europe and North America accompanied
Captain James Cook on board the Resolution, and his account of this journey maintains the
dualised perception of the Pacific. Forster declared the South Seas to be made up of two
human varieties, differentiated by skin pigmentation, from which could be inferred a racial
temperament. The first race was fair, well-limbed, athletic, of a fine size and a kind
benevolent temper, while the second was blacker, the hair . . . woolly and crisp, the
body . . . slender and low, and their temper . . . mistrustful.165 Tcherzekoff points out the
degree of exploratory coincidence to this Pacific race model, which maintained that the
construction of the latter identity occurred in negative opposition to the apparent racial unity
of the paradisical Polynesian islands encountered in Cooks first voyage.166 To this extent,
the two identities seem to have been rhetorically formed with maximum emphasis on their
oppositional characters. An overt aversion to Melanesian inhabitants provides a necessary
counterbalance to the quantity of desire directed at the Polynesian women.

163
OBrien,ThePacificMuse,58.
164
Tcherkezoff,ALongandUnfortunateVoyage,189.TcherkezofftracesalinefromDampiertothe
distinctionsmadebyCharlesdeBrossesinhismideighteenthcenturyaccountsofracialhierarchyinthe
PacificthatcompareMelanesianthicklips,frizzywoollyhairand...brutishandwildconditiontothefrizzy
blacksofAfrica,whichsuggestsanoldandsavagerace.CharlesdeBrosses,Histoiredesnavigationsaux
TerresAustrales,vol.2.(1756),374383,quotedinTcherkezoff,"ALongandUnfortunateVoyage,18990.
165
JohannReinholdForster,ObservationsMadeDuringaVoyageAroundtheWorld,ed.NicholasThomas,
HarrietGuest,andMichaelDettelbach(Honolulu:UniversityofHawaiiPress,1996),153.
166
Tcherkezoff,ALongandUnfortunateVoyage,193,discusseshowCooksfirstvoyagehadestablished
similaritiesofphysique,cultureandlanguageintheislandsofTahiti,theSocietyIslands,theTuamotus,the
AustralIslandsandNewZealand.ThesecondvoyageextendedthissimilaritytoTongan,EasterIslandand
Marquesaninhabitants.However,CookalsovisitedtheVanuatuanislandsofTannaandMalekula,andNew
Caledonia.Forstersdualraceformulation,Tcherkezoffargues,wasbasedonasetofsimilaritiesamongaset
ofislandslongopentocontact,andencounteredbyapreviousvoyage.Bycontrast,thisvoyagewasamong
thefirstEuropeancontactwithVanuatuanandNewCaledonianinhabitants,andthisalonedrewaseriesof
differencesininteraction,whichwerepresentedasracialdissimilarities.
78 |

Michelle Keown argues to this effect, demonstrating the affective split of disgust-desire over
Pacific female bodies. Keown uses a discussion of Jack Londons 1918 adventure narrative
The Red One to demonstrate that the bestial and sexually aggressive Melanesian is the
inverse of the Romantic image of the neo-Grecian, passive, sexually yielding Polynesian.167
Londons protagonist Bassett is forced into a sexual encounter with an unthinkably
disgusting bushwoman In order to discover the worshipped site of the red one, which lies
in the interior of the Solomon Island which Bassett explores, he must make love to native
woman Balatta. London makes no attempt to disguise her grotesque hideousness, which
is in part due to her inherent racial ugliness. Balatta is endowed with a twisted and wizened
complex of apish features, perforated by upturned, sky-open, Mongolian nostrils . . . a mouth
that sagged from a huge upper-lip and querulous eyes that compare to that of a caged
monkey. But further, Balatta is a revolting animalistic creature by virtue of her sexual conduct.
Whilst the sight of her is provocative of nausea . . . contact with her [is] provocative of
despair. The disgust induced by her dirt-encrusted shoulders . . . and rancid oily and kinky
hair is only surpassed by that evoked in her tendency to mo[w] . . . gibbe[r] and squea[l]
little, queer, pig-like gurgly noises of delight in the throes of intercourse. She is the model of
repulsion, not merely in need of vigorous scrubbing but seemingly in a state of sexual
excess which reflects the bestiality of her racial make-up.

The interior of Balattas sexually available cavities emulates the monstrous interior of the
island itself. The jungle is indeed presented as a roiling soup of life and death, a matted roof
never penetrate[d] by sunlight, maintaining the sinister ambiguity of always twilight. The
jungle itself is an aerial oozed of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life-
forms that rooted in death and lived on death.168 This language is dripping with cumulative
metaphors of disgust, and the sentence culminates in the regenerative potential of the island,
even from death. The productive potential of the womans body, the noises it makes, the
sweat it releases, the dirt it accretes not only gesture towards its animal potential, but also its
ability to produce life, which is the very threat levelled against the fetid jungle itself. Whilst
Londons novel comes some time after the encounter narratives of the Pacific explorers, it
preserves and amplifies the rhetoric set up by these early accounts, fleshing out the
disgusting interior of both the women and the islands. This disgusted sentiment is that
which Keown identifies as a fear of the horrific insides of the other, which maps two counts
of colonial aversion. The first is to the monstrous possibility of failed conquest, which Lenore

167
Keown,PacificIslandsWriting,46.
168
JackLondon,TheRedOne(NewYork:Macmillan,1918),
http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/RedOne/redone.html.
 79

Manderson and Margaret Jolly have argued is the flipside of the desire to colonise: the
agency of the other in a pushing-back that resists colonisation. The second is the disgust of
satiation which peels back the layers of expectation of an exotic other to reveal the sheer
bodily ordinariness of that place. In this, the disgust rises from the perception that the other
is known entirely, and that its truth is a body: simple, crude and revolting.

Excesses of Paradise: the Sexual Appetite of Polynesia

The anterior and oppositional Pacific construction to this monstrous Melanesian vision is that
of the goddesses of the Eastern Pacific islands. Unlike Balattas incarnation of grotesque
corporeality, the propensity for sexual excess [in the Polynesian Pacific was] usually in the
image of the exotically beautiful.169 The deeply heterosexual history of the colonial Pacific is
ripe with accounts of sexual availability and exotic beauty. Louis Antoin de Bougainvilles
recollection of the salacious femininity of classical myth in his equating Tahiti with New
Cythera made over the Pacific in the image of sexual fantasies of the colonial male. The
shameless attitude of the Polynesian women toward both their bodies and their sexual
desires evoked both the voracious and dangerous feminine sexualities of classical myth,
such as the Sirens, Calypso and Circe, and the Edenic purity of pre-lapsarian Eve.170 Both
the classical and the Christian episteme posed a sentimental vision of idyllic feminine beauty,
but both bore an implicit threat. The one warned of a kind of antiquated nymphomania of
which colonizers should beware, and the other sustained a prophesy of inevitable corruption,
equating the demise of colonised women with the fated Fall. There is no need, nor no room
here to recapitulate the extensive scholarly work done on this region as a site of colonial
desire. However, it is interesting how the fetishized female image of the Pacific muse might
suggest a capacity for excess, which is the breeding ground for a theory of colonial disgust.

169
LenoreMandersonandMargaretJolly,eds.,Introduction:SitesofDesire/EconomiesofPleasureinAsia
andthePacificinSitesofDesire,EconomiesofPleasure:SexualitiesinAsiaandthePacific(Chicago:University
ofChicagoPress,1997),8.
170
OBriendiscusseshowtheGreekfableTheOdysseywasusedasamodelforPacificcolonization,inthatthe
shipsofimperialdiscoveryapproachedavastseadottedwithislands,punctuatedbystrangeencountersand
beautifulsexualisedwomen,recallingtheHomericsirenswhosebarrenluresofthefleshofferedaseductive
andtreacherousimmoralitytothetravellingEuropeanman.OBrienprovidesadetaileddiscussionofthe
functionofwetnessinthisimageofthesexualisedwomen,herassociationwiththePacificwaters,with
tears,softbodies,sexualfluids,breastmilkandmenstrualblood,adiscussionwhichrecallstheabjectfluidity
ofKristevastheorisedfemaleform.Further,OBrienexplorestheinfluencesofGenesisontheparadisical
pacificmuseimage,notablyJohnMiltonsseventeenthcenturyaccountofEveinParadiseLost,animageof
eroticappealwhichhousedimminentdestruction.MiltonsEvedirectlyaffectedtheaccountsofJ.R.Forster
onCooksvoyage,whoperceivedherasthetemplatebywhichtoassessrealwomeninawaywhichmade
thedemiseofcolonizedpeopleseeminevitable.OBrien,ThePacificMuse,51.
80 |

The excessive potentiality of feminine sexuality in the Pacific is loaded into the metaphorical
configurations used to describe the phenomenon. These metaphors trace directly from
writings of classical science. An Aristotelian equation of heat with sexuality specifically yokes
sexual maturity with the climactic conditions in which a woman develops. The sexual
appetite of women thrived in the tropics, effectively ripening girls like fruit. 171 These
classical conceptions of female hyper-sexuality were recapitulated in gendered
Enlightenment theories of nymphomania or womb fury which coincided suspiciously with
the discovery of Tahiti. 172 This pathologizing of perceived sexual excess seems to
legitimate the expression of physical disgust toward the female body in the Pacific. Cooks
Endeavour journals from his 1769 expedition to Tahiti express the early amours of the
women as an addict[ion] which yielded inferior female forms with stunted growth.173 Their
bodies are represented as a physical manifestation of their flimsy morality, their feeble
mental acuity and their disease of the flesh. The returning (and ambiguously applied) trope
is one of consumption. The opulent women of Tahiti seem to be both delectable fruits of the
tropics, passively ripening with the heat of the climate, and the diseased consumptive bodies
of addicted sexual maniacs, never satisfying the insatiable appetites of their wombs. The
bodies are at once consumable (beautiful objects of male gaze and desire), consuming
(sexually charged and threatening to devour the male) and consumed (wracked with the
disease of excessive sexuality).

There is further irony in the way in which women became consumers, offering sexual mores
in exchange for the temptations they could [apparently] not withstand, the desire for iron
nails or cloth.174 This rhetoric is overwhelmingly preoccupied with a principle of engulfment.
The warning is twofold: the danger is both in the act of devouring, and in being devoured by
the unrestrained capacities of the female form. The regular instance of venereal disease
among the crews of exploratory vessels was interpreted as evidence for the physiological
ramifications of female excess, 175 which had already led to a reckless sense of moral

171
Ibid,54.
172
OBriencitesScottishPhysicianWilliamAlexander(1782),ComtedeBuffon(1797)andmostnotablyDr.
BienvillesLaNymphomanie,ouTraitedelafureuruterine,publishedin1771,whichalllinkthehotclimatesof
theNewWorldwithastereotypeofprimitivesexualitywhichmaintainedyounggirlsassexuallymature.
OBriennoteshowthisscientificfindingendorsedthesexualexploitationofchildreninthecontextof
colonisation.
173
JamesCook,ChapterIII:TahitiinCaptainCooksJournalduringhisfirstvoyageroundtheworldmadein
H.M.BarkEndeavour176871(London:E.Stock,1893),
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/cook/james/c77j/chapter3.html.
174
Cook,ChapterIII:Tahiti,1893.
175
Cookdiscussesthetwo[sic]freeuseofwomeninTahitianwatersasthecauseoftheworsestateof
health,sincehalfthecrewhadsincecontractedVenerial[sic]disease.Cook,ChapterIII:Tahiti,1893.In
Cookssecondvoyage,intheResolution,theconcernisagainexpressedthatthecrewhasbeencontaminated
 81

abandon.176 This rendered the colonial men entirely irresponsible for their biological and
moral infections. Not only were Wallis crew willing to dismantle the ship itself in order to
source nails to trade for Tahitian womens favours,177 but William Bligh was ready to attribute
the infamous 1789 mutiny of his men to the corrupting influence of the island women. The
mutineers of the H.M.S Bounty could barely be held responsible for their act, being under the
spell of the Paradisical Tahitian femininity, to whom the allurement of . . . luxury and ease
was too great.178

The deep-seated colonial fears of being devoured by the feminine Pacific were further
exemplified by the terror surrounding the discourse of going native. Going native
essentially involved ones entire engulfment by the place itself, and this fear could manifest
itself around different scenarios. The first was in the expansion of the physical European
body to excess: the threat of corpulence. Corpulence bore explicit grotesque connotations in
the female form, specifically as this was a status feature of noble indigenous women, who
occupied positions of political power. As OBrien has pointed out, the aversion is deeply
misogynistic, where politically powerful women in the Pacific embodied the perceived
physical grotesquerie of women in the public realm.179 Feminine corporeal disorder, then,
represented a socio-political disorder and both threatened to engulf masculinity entirely.
Russian Voyager Louis Choris conjures this colonial fantasy in his 1820 image of the
infamously large Hawaiian Queen, Kaahumanu, next to her servant man, with her

bythedisease...[of]thewomenofOtaheiteCookisquotedinJ.C.B.Beaglehole,ed.,TheJournalsof
JamesCook:ResolutionandAdventure(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,1955)2:450.In1804,the
CaptainoftheRussianimperialnavyvesselstheNevaandtheNadesha,UreyLisiansky,refusedtopermitthe
troopofnymphstheyencounteredinHawaiionboardtheshipbecauseofthepollutingpotentialoftheir
bodies,forfearofintroducingacertaindisease.UreyLisiansky,AVoyageRoundtheWorldintheyears1803,
4,5&6(London:J.Booth,1814),101103.Further,OBriendiscusseshowthecolloquialnamesappliedto
venerealdisease,suchasladiesfever,theSandwichislanditch,andtheNewZealandfeverrenderedthe
indigenousfemalebodiesasthesourceofcontagion.SeeOBrien,ThePacificMuse,923.
176
SydneyParkinson,theartistemployedonCooksfirstvoyage,suggestedthatcrewoftheEndeavour
behavedwithfreesexuallicensebecausetheychosetoseemoralityasasitespecificphenomenon,suchthat
thelocationofthePacific,andthebodiescontainedwithinit,madepermissibleadifferentconduct,involving
notonlyvastsexualgratification,butalsotheinstanceofpolygamyamongthecrew,whoprocured
temporarywivesamongstthenatives...asifthechangeofplacealteredthemoralturpitudeoffornication.
SydneyParkinson,AJournalofaVoyagetotheSouthSeasinhisMajestysShiptheEndeavour:Faithfully
TranscribedfromthePapersoftheLateSidneyParkinson(London:JohnFothergill,1784),2526.
177
CaptainSamuelWallisnotedthatunder[theTahitianwomens]temptation[thecrewoftheH.M.S
Dolphin]stolenailsandotherironfromtheship...theydrewseveraloutofdifferentpartsofthevessel,
particularlythosethatfastenedtotheshipsside.JohnHawkesworth,VoyagesintheSouthernHemisphere,
VolumeI.(London:W.Strahan&T.Cadell,1773),459,http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/hv01/459.html.
178
WilliamBligh,Lt.WilliamBlightoSirJosephBanks,October13,1789,HRNSW,vol.1,pt.2,Government
Printer,1892,273quotedinOBrien,ThePacificMuse,84.
179
OBrien,ThePacificMuse,197.
82 |

magnitudedwarf[ing the] mans body. 180 Lee Wallace discusses the way in which
Cooks Endeavour naturalist, Joseph Banks, became sensually immersed in the Pacific, a
perception which biographers have gendered in relation to his weight gain.181 Indeed, the
emphasis on his domestic engulfment in a household women and his running to fat
function as a bodily index to his immersion in an alien, and . . . feminine culture.182

Banks offending slide into native-ness is not merely due to the fact of the excessive size of
his body, but also Banks readiness to make this body subject to spectacle. It is the sheer
theatricality of early cross-cultural sexual engagement which allows the aesthetic
bracket[ing of] moments of action such that they become invested with both desire and
repulsion.183 When the European male body offers itself as a part of this sexual spectacle, it
immerses itself entirely into the Pacific scene of sexual excess. A young Irishman on board
the H.M.S. Dolphin thus became the object of disgust, receiving a severe cobing for
engaging in the first cross-cultural sexual encounter in Tahiti in public view, without the
decency of a bush or tree to protect himself from visual consumption.184 The involuntary
moment of going native in this instance seems to involve not only being consumed by the
scene of sexual fervour, but also being feasted upon by the eyes of the colonial viewer, a
moment which makes self-reflexive the masculinity of the erotic colonial gaze. A similar
process is effected by the hyper-visibility associated with the tattooed body of white natives
as Wallaces discussion of Jean Baptiste Cabri, the French Beachcomber in the Marquesas,
elucidates. Wallace has argued that the tattooing of white skin is more an act of subjectivity
being invaded, as opposed to the act of subjectivity devoured. However, Wallaces use of
Alfred Gell suggests that a consumptive metaphor is possible when the tattooed skin is
devoured by the colonial gaze. Indeed to view tattoo . . . provokes . . . a kind of bodily

180
Ibid,202.
181
SirJosephBanksaccompaniedCaptainCookonhisfirstvoyagefrom17681771buthewasaninfluential
Englishbotanist,naturalistandservedaspatronofthenaturalsciences.Awellknownaristocratandpatronof
thenaturalsciences,BankswasPresidentoftheRoyalSocietyforover41years.Thestarklyopposed
approachesthatCookandBankstooktotheirnewenvironmentswhenvoyagingtogetherhasbeen
documentedbyPaulCarterinhisworkRoadtoBotanyBay:AnExplorationofLandscapeandHistory
(Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesota,2010).Carterscontrastofthetwomencomparestheseeming
opennessofBanksuponencountertothecontainedandimpenetrablequalitiesofCook.Bankspersonaland
culturalporositynecessitatedhisabilitytoengagesensuallywithhisnewenvironments,facilitatingthe
commonbiographicalperceptionthathebecameengulfedordevouredbythealiensettingstowhichhe
travelled.
182
LeeWallace,SexualEncounters:PacificTexts,ModernSexualities(Ithaca,N.Y.:CornellUniversityPress,
2003),1213.
183
Balme,PacificPerformances,69.
184
GeorgeRobertson,TheDiscoveryofTahiti:AJournaloftheSecondVoyageoftheH.M.S.Dolphinroundthe
World17661768,ed.HughCarrington(London:HakluytSociety,1948),180,quotedin
ChristopherB.Balme,SexualSpectacles:TheatricalityandthePerformanceofSexinEarlyEncountersinthe
Pacific,TheDramaReview44:4(2000):72.
 83

looking which is intrinsically sexualised.185 The abhorrence of the white tattooed man to his
colonial contemporaries is in his moment of being feasted on by the sexualised gaze. To go
native is as much being made visual fodder to the voracious colonial appetite to view the
other as it is the threat of being devoured by otherness.

The Disgusting Unrepresentable: homoerotic possibility

My argument thus far has largely mapped colonial disgust along the same trajectories as
colonial desire literature, charting a tour of hetero-normative sexual encounter in the colonial
Pacific. However, as Lee Wallace has demonstrated, there is a constitutive disavowal in the
formulation of the archive of the Pacific as site of frenzied heterosexual fantasy. Wallaces
Sexual Encounter traces the loaded silences of the Pacific archive, reading the ambivalent
spaces of colonial encounter for homosexual possibility. By being attentive to the
assumptions of the archive, Wallace is made aware of the way in which commentators and
explorers alike read and reinforce a heterosexual history of the Pacific by performing the
same conventionalized scenes of heterosexual encounter which have cemented the genre
of Pacific writing. If the Pacific scenes can become conventionalised by colonial
reinforcement, so too do the accompanying emotional clusters of desire and disgust.
Wallace discusses the convention of the sexually active young girl enacting favours on an
older man, a scene emerging in accounts of both Cook and of Captain Adam J. von
Krusenstern, for whom the eight year old child evokes pity and disgust, since she
expresses not . . . the least sense of her melancholy situation.186 Wallace demonstrates
how the outrage of Krusensterns response is his alibi, in that it obscures the implication of
the speaker in the act observed. His revulsion also reveals a perceptive failure, since it
denies the presence of a copulating male body within the disgusting/desirable image. To
Wallace, this is a constitutive (and suspect) failure of the heterosexualised colonial scene.
The girls sexual partner becomes a permanent structural vacancy under the gaze of the
heteronormative voyeur, successfully subjugat[ing] its feminine object while insulating its
male subject beyond the claims of desire.187 The heterosexual vector of disgust seems to
activate a shield of protection around the male form as sexualised object. The possibility of a

185
AlfredGell,WrappinginImages:TattooinginPolynesia(Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress,1993),36.
186
AdamJ.vonKrusenstern,VoyageRoundtheWorldintheYears1803,1804,1805&1806,trans.Richard
BelgraveHopper(London:JohnMurray,1813),I:116.
187
Wallace,SexualEncounters,64.
84 |

male gaze lingering on a male body gestures toward that abhorrent sin that neither bear[s]
representing, nor reading and will hardly bear thinking of.188

The implication here is one of a different amalgam from the Disgust-Beauty amalgam posited
by Chapter Three. Rather, it is a disgust that obscures a disgust, which traces the remnants
of its own not-said. In the rhapsodizing of the sexualised South Seas the discourse remains
tightly wound into the capacities of the female form. Wallace uses Paul Gauguins famed
representation of Pacific sexuality, Manao Tupapao, to demonstrate the potentiality for
affective displacement that this heterosexual fetishizing offers. In the moment the viewer
sees the figure of the native female, face-down on the bed, the sodomitical impulse
becomes relocated onto the body of a woman.189 This gender displacement maintains an
open invitation which preserves the seamless closure considered proper to the male
European body even as it signals the pleasure it is clenched against.190 The male-male
sexual possibility is most tightly clenched against if the archive demonstrates a complete
indifference to the male form. Or rather, as we have seen, drowns out the possibility by
directing obsessive attention toward its gendered counterpart. Krusensterns naturalist
George Langsdorff provides an example of this in his negative attention toward the women
of the Marquesas. Langsdorff makes short work of denigrating the female Marquesan form,
but there is something in this repudiation [which] seems tangled up with its being sexually
available. The native male body . . . is neither priced nor barred sexually.191 The vigour with
which female sexuality in the Pacific is made abject, can be viewed as the enthusiastic
dummy move of the colonial project. In a new place, rich with new, unarticulated, and
inarticulable desires, the agents of colonial encounter remains paralysed to speak about the
disgusting possibilities of sexual invention. As a result, the archive must reek with
testosterone, it must brim with loud (and normative) voices: the fears and desires of the
heterosexual encounter. It opens its mouth to babble about Pacific women: they are
goddesses, they are beasts, they are beautiful nymphs or they are repulsive masses. But the
voice is too eager to speak. It is a history that speaks with a lump in its throat, an anxiety of a
real disgust of homoerotic desire.

In the moment of speaking about the feminine babble that constitutes the (sexual) history of
the Pacific, I realise that I, too, have fallen into the affective trap left by the archive. Faced

188
HermanMelville,TheWritingsofHermanMelville,ed.HarrisonHayford,HershelParker,andG.Thomas
Tanselle,vol.5,WhiteJacket(Evanston:NorthwesternUniversityPressandtheNewberryLibrary,1970),375
76.
189
Wallace,SexualEncounters,136.
190
Ibid.
191
Ibid,74.
 85

with a history which seems to hold colonized women to ransom for the realities of their
bodies, this scholars blood begins to boil. I have found myself propelled on a hermeneutic
mission to root out the misogyny in even the most unsuspecting, dusty corners. In doing so, I
have entered the trapping technologies of the affect: I am researching, writing in a state of
moral repulsion, without understanding the machinations of the amalgam about which I write.
Indeed, the overt disgust about which I read has only accreted power when I, in turn, am
disgusted by it. It is a masterful disguise, by which I lose sight of the colonially sanctioned
hetero-normative presumptions coded into my response. It is a disgust-disgust amalgam,
through which the historical record is able to inflame the modern critic, whilst obscuring the
affective response proper what really disgusted the colonial speaker. Disgust functions
inside the record, then, to enact a scholarly response which perpetuates colonial
presumption, one which performs the very colonial continuity about which this thesis
complains. The design of this affective interaction of the historical record should be
remembered as we move from a metaphorical, to a literal, sense of devouring as we
approach the discourse of Pacific cannibalism.

A consuming paranoia: disgust and the discourse of cannibalism

In keeping with McClintocks assertion that the imperial fear of engulfment is a familiar and
symmetrical anxiety to the presumption of sexual conquest in the New World, it seems
necessary to discuss the disgusting colonial idea of being devoured in terms of cannibalistic
discourse in the Pacific. The contentious discipline of cannibal history has been extensively
discussed both in popular and scholarly genres in relation to the South Seas. This thesis
tends to concur with the assertion that the the pseudo-scientific and literary representation
of so-called primitives practices [such as cannibalism] . . . reveals more about the culture
that produced written texts about the other than it does about the cultures themselves.192 I
shall compare here the critical approaches of two scholars interested in cannibalism,
Gananath Obeyesekere, and Paul Moon, in order to show how disgust functions inside the
critical act in relation to colonial continuity. Obeyesekere approaches cannibalism as a
discursive construct, which is largely indicative of the European imaginings of the South
Seas Other, helpfully disentangling this from the act of people-eating-people, for which he
uses the term anthropophagy. Moon, however, refuses to travel any reflexive distance from
the archive, and thus conflates Obeyesekeres two separate terminologies into one real
thing. For Moon, the textual account of cannibalism functions as a literal description of an

192
BarbaraCreedandJeanetteHoorn,eds.,IntroductioninBodyTrade:Captivity,Cannibalismand
ColonialisminAustraliaandthePacific(NewYork:Routledge,2001),xvi.
86 |

act as opposed to a discourse of British cannibalism.193 The difference in these two critical
positions is stark, and is negotiated mainly by Moons refusal to acknowledge the affective
composition of the archive, and the powerful force that European disgust plays in both the
apparent primary and his own secondary account of cannibalism.

Obeyesekeres brilliant deconstruction of the myth of cannibalism in the Pacific, entitled

Cannibal Talk, engages with the affective colonial fantasies which informed the belief in
flesh-eating monsters inhabiting the South Seas. Obeyesekere is concerned to reveal the
theatrical conventions of this discourse, which hold a self-authorizing power over the
apparent first-hand evidence of anthropophagous practice.194 Obeyesekere is at pains to
emphasize the way in which the European attitude toward, and account of, savagism and
cannibalism are severely complicated by their own cultural history and by their approach of
an alien culture . . . [that was often] hostile to their presence.195 These complications are
demonstrated via a number of textual approaches in Cannibal Talk. Obeyesekere maintains
scepticism about the transparency of the communicative encounter in the South Seas,
showing how the dread of cannibalism inherited from English folklore informed its
prioritisation in Cooks enquiry into native custom in Hawaii.196 Inevitably, the question are
you a cannibal is not straightforward. In the context of a cross-cultural exchange, it relies
heavily on the use of gesture, and is accompanied by a myriad of affective constellations on
both sides. The enquiring European is saddled with an inherited cultural fantasy of
monstrous man-eating savages, toward which they bear disgust, fear, and dread. The
responding native, who is presented with a seemingly left-field enquiry from a pack of

193
PaulMoon,ThisHorridPractice:TheMythandRealityofTraditionalMoriCannibalism(Rosedale:Penguin
Books,2008),221.
194
GananathObeyesekerediscusseshowideasofthemoderncannibalemergedwiththejourneysof
Columbus,astheNewWorldbecameopeneduptoEuropeanvoyagersinCannibalTalk:TheManEatingMyth
andHumanSacrificeintheSouthSeas(Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress,2005),911.Dr.DiegoAlvarez
ChancasauthoritativelywrittenreportofColumbussightingofhumanboneslyingaboutinanativehousein
Caribe,constitutesthebeginningoftheWesternobsessionwithcannibalism,organisedaroundthisreportas
thearchetypalcannibalscene.PeterHulmedemonstrateshowthisscenewasamplifiedandmademore
gruesomeovertime,andObeyesekeremapsthewayitevolvesintoaEuropeanimaginingofthecannibal
feastwhichbecameastructuringconventiontothedesignofreportsofcannibalismfromthesavagesitesof
imperialdiscovery.SeePeterHulme,Introduction:TheCannibalScene,inCannibalismandtheColonial
World,ed.FrancisBarker,PeterHulme,andMargaretIverson(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,1998),
138,andGananathObeyesekere,NarrativesoftheSelf:ChevalierPeterDillonsFijianCannibalAdventures
inCreedandHoorn,BodyTrade,69111.
195
Obeyesekere,CannibalTalk,23.
196
ObeyesekerecommentsthattheBritish...weresocializedintheirnurserieswithgrimtalesofwitches,
ghosts,ogresandbogeymenthatatehumanflesh.Ibid,29.Healsodirectsthereadertotheworkof
MargaretHogden,EarlyAnthropologyintheSixteenthandSeventeethCentury(Philadelphia:Universityof
PhiladelphiaPress,1964),tofindadiscussionofthewayinwhichmedievaldiscoursesofmonstrosityandwild
menbecamefoistedonthesavagesubsequenttothevoyagesofdiscovery,suchthatmonstrositybecame
anintegralcomponentofsavagism.Obeyesekere,CannibalTalk,11.
 87

malnourished sailors, could be forgiven for assuming that the Europeans themselves
practiced anthropophagy.197 The question involves a kind of paranoid dance on both sides,
and it is a suppositional gesture, which predicts and constructs its answer. It becomes a
pantomime of cultural expectation and gestural exaggeration, 198 until the confirmation of
indigenous cannibalism seems to come down to the mimetic quantity of a native man biting
his own arm with relish.199

This sense of cannibalistic relish, which emerges, too, in the indigenous accounts of
cannibalism, is treated with no small degree of suspicion by Obeyesekere, who smells a
parody emerging in the tales reeking with disgust. The surreal improbability which
accompanies an eye-witness account of a Nga Puhi war party seizing, killing and devouring

197
Obeyesekereprovidesaweightofprimaryevidencetotheeffectthatindigenouspeoplesassumed
cannibalismtobethenormoftheircuriousBritishexplorers,astheaccountofLieutenantKingaccompanying
th
CaptainCookdemonstrates.OnFeb15 ,1779,thedayafterCooksdeathinHawaii,Kingdemandedtohave
hiscorpse,onlytobebroughta910lblumpofflesh.Assumingtheworst,Kingenquiredastothefateofthe
restofhisbody,suggestingthatithad,perhaps,beeneaten.Theyimmediatelyshewedasmuchhorroratthe
idea,asanyEuropeanwouldhavedone;andasked,verynaturally,ifthatwasthecustomamongstus?James
King,AVoyagetothePacificOceanundertakenbythecommandofHisMajesty,formakingdiscoveriesinthe
NorthernHemisphere,vol.3(London:G.Nichol,1785),69,quotedinObeyesekere,CannibalTalk,25.Similarly,
fearsthattheEuropeansthemselvesmightbecannibalsemergesearlierinCooksjournals,whereaMori
nativewishingtoenteragunroomportenquiredofthedanger,bywayofaskingifheshouldcomein,we
couldkillandeathim?(CaptainJamesCook,AVoyagetothePacificOceanundertakenbythecommandof
HisMajesty,ed.CanonDouglas,vol.2(London:G.Nichol,1785),214215quotedinObeyesekere,Cannibal
Talk,26.Similarly,Europeananxietyaboutbeingconstruedascannibalsbytheindigenouspeoplesis
evidencedbytheirthrowingoverboardoftheheadsoftwoHawaiiannatives,whohadbeendecapitatedas
retributionforthedeathofCook.Theheadswereconspicuouslydisposedofinthepresenceofanothernative,
lestheshouldsupposeuscannibals.CaptainJamesCook,TheJournalsofCaptainCook:TheVoyageofthe
ResolutionandDiscovery,17761780,ed.J.C.Beaglehole,vol.3,part2(London:CambridgeUniversityPress,
1967),563,quotedinObeyesekere,CannibalTalk,27.OnthePolynesianatollofAitutaki,Cookdiscoversthe
indigenouspeoplecookingsomekindoffleshinanearthoven,andheandhisaccompanyinginterpreter,a
TahitianMai,inferthatthisishumanmeat.Whenasked,thenativesexpressedoutrage,andturnedthe
questionontheinterrogatorsthemselves,enquiringwhetherit[cannibalism]wasthecustomwithus.
Beaglehole(ed.),ResolutionandDiscovery,vol.3,part1,85quotedinObeyesekere,CannibalTalk,28.
Further,Kingacknowledgesthattheindigenouspeoplewouldhavesomegroundsforpresumingthistobethe
case,sincetheyimaginedwecamefromsomecountrywhereprovisionshadfailed;andthatourvisittothem
wasmerelyforthepurposesoffillingourbellies.Indeedthemeagreappearanceofsomeourcrew,thehearty
appetiteswithwhichwesatdowntotheirfreshprovisions,andourgreatanxietytopurchase,andcarrythem
off,asmuchaswewereable,ledthem,naturallyenough,tosuchaconclusion.King,Voyage,26quotedin
Obeyesekere,CannibalTalk,26.
198
Obeyesekerediscusseshowindigenousconfirmationofcannibalismcouldbeutilisedasameansofnative
empowerment,asakindofweaponoftheweak.Facingthethreatofimperialinvasion,indigenouspeoples
couldutilizetheterrificthreatofcannibalismagainsttheBritishtokeepthematbay,asObeyesekeresuggests
wasthecaseinNewZealand,sincethetalesofcannibalismkeptthesettlersawayformorethanfortyyears
fromthetimeofCooksfirstvoyage.Thisistheperformativenatureofthediscussiononthenativeside,
emergingfromtheBritishdiscourseofhorroritself,sinceitbecomesclearthatMoriareatgreatpainsto
provethatnotonlyaretheycannibals,butalsothattheyaretrulyhorribleones...akindofpantomime...
use[d]toscarechildren.Obeyesekere,CannibalTalk,53.
199
Ibid,5354.
88 |

a young Maori girl, is evidenced by the adoption of British cultural references.200 Not only
does one of her killers satirically use her dead legs as walking-sticks (a distinctly missionary
phenomenon), but the flesh was cooked to European standards of taste, until purportedly
soft and pulpy affording it nicely done. 201 There is a distinct possibility that these
exaggerated parodies of normalised cannibalism perform a kind of subversive narrative
intent on the part of the native. Placed under interview conditions, where a supposed
inviolable eye-witness account is committed to record by a colonial ethnographer, the
indigenous temptation to humiliate this po-faced historian is entirely imaginable.202 Disgust
resonates throughout the cannibalistic archive, and its overt presence arouses
Obeyesekeres scholarly doubt. Indeed, William Endicotts grizzly depiction of a cannibal
feast which purportedly occurred in Macuata in the Fiji Islands in March of 1831 seems to
recoil even from its own record, when the author refuses to particularize the
dismemberment of a native because the scene is too revolting.203 Under the auspices of
protecting his reader from too great revulsion, Endicott in fact seeks to underline the first-
handedness of his account. It may only be too much, if he is indeed witnessing a real event.
However, for Obeyesekere, this moment of authorial censorship when disgust reaches
critical mass is also the moment of betrayal as to its un-reality. Endicotts undoing is in the
overplaying of his affective response. By cross-referencing various dated journalistic

200
Ibid,95.
201
StephensonPercySmith,MoriWarsoftheNineteenthCentury:thestruggleofthenorthernagainstthe
southernMoritribespriortothecolonisationofNewZealandin1840(Christchurch:CadsonburyPublications,
2002),100101.
202
Obeyesekere,CannibalTalk,96.
203
WilliamEndicott,WreckedAmongtheCannibalsintheFijis:ANarrativeofShipwreckandAdventureinthe
SouthSeas(Salem,Mass.:MarineResearchSociety,1923),62,quotedinObeyesekere,CannibalTalk,1589.
ThedegreetowhichdisgustingdetailisplayedupintheaccountofEndicott,isevidencedbytheaccountof
dismemberment,whereallthelimbswereseparatedfromthebodyandanoblongsliceoffleshremoved
commencingaboutthechestandpassingdownwardsabouteightinchesandthreeorfourincheswideatthe
broadestpart...theentrailsandvitalswerethentakenoutandcleansedforcooking...thefleshwasthen
cutthroughtheribstothespineofthebackwhichwasbroken,thusthebodywasseparatedintotwopieces.
Endicottthenproceedstodiscusshowreadilythenativeswishtodemonstratetheirsavagenature:toshow
theirexcessivegreedinessforhumanflesh,andtheirsavagethirstforblood...theheadofthesavagewhich
waslasttakenoffwasthrowntowardsthefire,andbeingthrownsomedistanceitrolledafewfeetfromthe
menwhowereemployedaroundit;whenitwasstolenbyoneofthesavageswhocarrieditbehindthetree
whereIwassitting.Hetooktheheadinhislapandaftercombingawaythehairfromthetopofitwithhis
fingerspickedoutthepiecesoftheskullwhichwasbrokenbythewarclubandcommencedeatingthebrains.
Endicott,WreckedAmongtheCannibals,63,quotedinObeyesekere,CannibalTalk,159.Rather,itwouldseem
thegruesomeaccountprovidesevidenceofEndicottsdesiretocommunicateasavagenaturetohisreader.
Thetransferenceoftheburdenofsavageproofseemssomewhatironicinthisinstance.
 89

accounts, Obeyesekere proceeds to demonstrate the virtual impossibility that this event ever
occurred.204

Cannibalism: a disgusted scholar in search of the real thing

There is a wry paradox in the demand on the continent for outrageous accounts of horror
stories abroad. The absurdity of this fact, a British readership with an insatiable hunger for
the disgusting delicacies of the savage appetite is not lost on Paul Moon. He celebrates the
wonderful irony of readers devouring stories of cannibalism as a kind of respectable . . .
pornography for the popular British public.205 The attractive-aversive forcefield in which this
literature situates the reader is amply felt by reading Daniel Defoes graphic depiction of the
disgusted colonial response in the face of Savage Wretches indulging in inhuman
Feastings upon the Bodies of their Fellow-Creatures. Defoes narrator turns away from the
horrid Spectacle; [his] Stomach gr[ows] sick, and . . . just at the Point of Fainting . . . Nature
discharg[es] the Disorder from [his] Stomach, and [he] . . . vomit[s] with an uncommon
Violence.206 Moons appreciation of irony, however, ends here. He draws a vigorous line
between the fictional literature of South Seas cannibalism proliferating in Europe and the
authentic eye-witness accounts of travelling Europeans. The one is comparable to fairytale
fable, the other is an authentic and impartial record. However, as part of a blanket dismissal
of any act of cultural relativism, Moon levels criticism at Herman Melvilles preposterous,
topsy-turvy portrayal of the relative normality of cannibals. 207 Moons desire here is to
maintain an affective stance of horror, and Melvilles textual sympathy is impermissible by
this logic. His fiction is simply not real enough for Moon, and it can escape criticism only so

204
ObeyesekerecomparesthreejournalaccountsofmenwhoworkedontheGlidefrom18291832,onwhich
Endicottservedasthirdmate.Endicottsjournalisaworkofscrupulouslogging,soObeyesekerefindsittobe
anextraordinaryinconsistencythatthespecificdateofthecannibalfeastisnotrecorded.Theaccountofthe
cannibalfeastspecificallybeginsbystatingthatthecrewwereloadingstockintheforenoonwhenthe
invitationtoattendthefeastwasextendedbyFijianwomenonboardtheship.Thisdetaildelimitsthe
nd
possibilityofthecannibalfeastoccurringafterthe22 ofMarch,sinceonthisdatetheshipisrecordedas
nd
wrecked.YetEndicottsownjournaldeclaresthatnothingparticularhappeneduntilthe22 March,1831
Endicott,WreckedAmongtheCannibals,3637,quotedinObeyesekere,CannibalTalk,163.Acorroborating
accountofthecannibalfeastinthejournalofJamesOliver,afellowcrewmemberisanalogoustoEndicotts,
beingvividlydetailed,yetwithoutaspecifieddateofoccurrence.Obeyesekerewrylynotesthattheaccessto
oneanothersjournalsonboardshipwouldgosomewaytoexplainthesimilarityofthetwodescriptionsgiven.
Finally,however,theaccountofWilliamCary,abeachcomberinOvalau,whoworkedonboardtheGlideafter
itsarrivalinFijiandwhodidnothaveaccesstohisshipmatesjournals,concurswithalltheeventsofOliver
andEndicott,butdoesnotmentionthecannibalfeast.Obeyesekere,CannibalTalk,163167.To
Obeyesekere,thismakesitvirtuallycertainthatEndicottfabricatedhiseyewitnessaccountthirteenyears
afterhisvisittoFijitomeettheEuropeandemandforsavagecannibalism.Indeed,Obeyesekerenotes,what
elsebutcannibalismcouldoneexpecttofindintheCannibalIslands?Obeyesekere,CannibalTalk,167.
205
Moon,ThisHorridPractice,37.
206
DanielDefoe,RobinsonCrusoe(London:MacMillanandCo.,1866),167.
207
Moon,ThisHorridPractice,41.
90 |

long as the disgusted sentiment toward indigenous cannibalism is preserved. Moons

complaint gestures towards a general disregard for the power of the colonial imagination.
Despite acknowledging a cultural British history brimming with tall tales of monstrous
humanity below the equator, Moon sees no reason why this would cultivate a paranoid
predisposition to see cannibals around every rock or under every fern frond.208 By Moons
reckoning, the textual account is sterile to colonial disgust, since contempt . . . or
revulsion . . . did not spill over into a need to fabricate accounts of cannibalism.209

The most astonishing feature of Moons attitude is his steadfast faith in the textual record as
fact. He exclaims the remarkabl[e] dependab[ility] of the surviving documents, but the
same cannot be said of Maori oral histories, which remain contaminated by exaggeration
and . . . problems of accuracy, unlike the less affected histories of the Europeans.210 The
result is an obvious bias of whiteness, but Moon adopts a congenial egalitarian tone which
seeks to obliterate the bias by appealing to the fact that the men writing the accounts were
practical men not given to deep theorizing.211 By this logic, the common man is the most
reliable of ethnographers, incapable of describing anything but what they saw in a very plain,
matter-of-fact manner nothing more, nothing less.212 There is a tide of anti-intellectualism
rising here, made clear when the complex textual analysis of Obeyesekere is attacked on
grounds of too much reading between the lines.213 But the most interesting of Moons
myriad criticisms of Obeyesekere is his complaint that he falls into the first person, failing to
maintain the position of dispassionate academic observer.214

The irony of this critique is manifold, since I understand Moons approach to cannibalism as
entirely funded by a sense of residual colonial passion. Having established the inveterate
reliability of the textual record, Moon proceeds to adopt its horrified standpoint. For Moon
the heart of the paradox is that the Maori community could be immensely moved by death,
as evidenced by the practice of tangi, and yet still serve their murderous and cannibalistic
urges. 215 In order to resolve this paradox, Moon explores a variety of explanations,
considering abject hunger (survival cannibalism), a cultural mandate of hair-trigger violence
(rage cannibalism), and finally as a practice coded into the DNA of the racial make-up, as an

208
Ibid,47.
209
Ibid.
210
Ibid,5558.
211
Ibid,225.
212
Ibid.
213
Ibid,201.
214
Ibid,230.
215
Ibid,125.
 91

inherited phenomenon of cannibalism . . . [as] genetic curse.216 However, Moons account

suggests that the problem is a cultural lack of disgust. There is insufficient revulsion (if at
all) in Mori culture toward cannibalism,217 and thus the overt displays of disapproval and
disgust by Europeans missionaries in New Zealand appear to serve as the only proven
means of eradicating its practice.218 Luckily, the problem Moon identifies with Mori culture
cannot be said of his own rhetoric. We can rest assured that Moon will never eat another
human being. The practice disgusts him as much as it does the colonial viewer. Incapable of
acknowledging how the historical archive might be imbued with affect, Moons text reveals a
fundamental disavowal of the presence of the colonial body in the historical record. He
cannot separate the discourse from the literal . . . act, because his own writing is complicit
in its perpetuation of the two things as one and the same. Moons account of cannibalism is
the presumptive act of disembodied colonialism par excellence; it exemplifies the insidious
function of disgust in colonial continuity.

216
Ibid,153.
217
Ibid,134.
218
Ibid,189.
92 |

Chapter Five:

Dying Natives and Dirty Settlers

The documentary Adventures in Moriland, which tracks the making of a Moriland romance
film Hei Tiki produced in 1935, begins with a pan over the nostalgic faces of a Mori viewing
audience. The setting is a screening of Hei Tiki, and two women in the audience are
particularly affected by the images on screen. These two women are the Bradshaws, the
daughters of the films heroine (Mara), played by Ngawara Keriti. The scene is somewhat
elegiac, since Keriti died when her daughters were young. This sense of celebrated loss
runs parallel to the affective contours of the Moriland genre of both film and literature, of
which Alexander Markeys film is a late example. Hei Tiki invites the viewer to journey
backward in time, to a lost origin of Mori authenticity. Markeys narrating prelude entreats
his audience to join [him] on a voyage to the isle of ghosts, a place dotted with thousands
of sacred hidden burial caves . . . and carved treasures, from which the story itself shall be
unearthed, since it is a legendary tale; a love-romance of [Moridoms] buried past.219
Markeys narrative device is a familiar colonial trope. In direct address, he elevates his
fictionalised film to that of an ethnographic enquiry. Markey is the fascinated anthropology
lecturer in the prelude, a civilized (and bespectacled) modern man, noting, with hand
casually tucked into his pocketed blazer, that his film offers sight[s] no living white man has
seen before.220 He expounds on the fascinating [and] . . . exhilarating experience he had
among the Mori, and the indelible authenticity of the people and images of which the film is
comprised.221 There are, indeed, neither actors . . . make-up . . . painted scenery [nor]
studio shot[s] in this film, merely natives in their own habitat.222

This insistence on evidentiary purity is to elicit not only the audience pleasure of
feast[ing] . . . eyes on the real phenomena of the Other, but also to lament the passing of
this phenomenon. The images on screen are fundamentally archival, capturing the
remnants of a vanishing race of native noble men and women, the stalwart people of

219
AlexanderMarkey,HeiTiki:AMoriLegend/PrimitivePassions,AdventuresinMoriland:Alexander
MarkeyandtheMakingofHeiTiki,directedbyGeoffStevens(Auckland:PhaseThreeFilms,1984),VHS.
220
Ibid.
221
Ibid.
222
Ibid.
 93

Moriland. 223 Markeys apparent sentimental investment in this noble race is quickly
undercut in Adventures, a documentary which charts both Markeys personal disgust at a
people he deemed still savages and all that and harbours its own post-colonial disgust at
Markeys behaviour. 224 This response is not unwarranted. Markey maintained a curious
double standard, infuriated by the failure of Mori to paddle their waka properly (not
indigenous enough) and yet insisting on a constant supply of peroxide and sponges in order
to disinfect himself after bodily contact with the locals (too much of the indigenous). Peter
Limbrick shares Geoff Stevens revulsion at Hei Tiki, finding the wiggling naked bottoms and
close-up shots of Keritis cleavage both grotesque [and] exploitative, emblematic of the
kind of leftover junk [of the specifically colonial] . . . ethnographic gaze.225

That both Hei Tiki and the racist colonial gestures of the director are perceived as disgusting
in a modern context is unsurprising. In the figure of Alexander Markey, the schizophrenia of
the colonial gesture is epitomized, which is a simultaneous attraction and aversion to place.
The romanticised vanishing race of noble natives is literalised in the flesh by the dark-
skinned, unforgivably stupid and unclean bodies which actually inhabit the place.226 Markey,
with the safe haven of New York to return to, can afford to display this overt affective schism
toward the indigenous population. However, such displays become impossible for the body
of the settler in ways this chapter will seek to explicate.

In a settler context, the disavowal of affective disgust can be understood as a embodied

transfer which permits the act of settlement itself. Using Lorenzo Veracinis theory of
settlement as a transfer, the repression of disgust is a means to reconcile the
uncomfortable position of the settler as he makes a home away from home. The specific
casting of the indigenous body as a dying native is a re-coding of the disgust drive, a
disavowal of that body in the presence of the settler. I will argue that, in this context, the

223
Ibid.
224
TedCoubray,AdventuresinMoriland,InterviewwithTedCoubray,VHS.
225
PeterLimbrick,TheFlotsamandJetsamofFilmHistory:HeiTikiandPostcolonialRearticulationsJournal
ofVisualCulture6(2007):248.
226
InaninterviewwithMargaretGoulding,whoworkedonthesetofHeiTikiasthecook,shedeclaresthat
Markeysattitudesweresomewhatbaldlyracist,suchthathetreatedthemasadarkraceandjustaninferior
race.TedCoubrayconfirmedthathehadatendencytolookdownonpeople,suchasIthoughtsoanyway,
asregardstotheMoripeople,asbeingstillsavagesandallthatsortofthing...Idontthinkthathereally
thoughtverymuchofthem.CoubrayproceedstorecountanumberofoccasionsonwhichMarkeyhad
verballyabusedtheMoriextrasonracialgrounds.AninterviewwithHenryHopecrossrevealsaspecificcase,
wheretheMorimenstruggledtoadapttotheuseofthewaakabuiltforthefilm,afailingforwhichMarkey
wasespeciallyunforgiving:hetoldemtheywerestupidandcouldntevenuseoneoftheirowncanoesand
thissortofthingandthatitwashedheardalotaboutthemandtheircanoesandnowtheydprovedtohim
theydidntknowathingaboutitatall.AdventuresinMoriland,InterviewswithMargaretGoulding,Ted
CoubrayandHenryHopecross,VHS.
94 |

disavowal of disgust is primary to the structure of settler thinking about New Zealand and the
people in it. The effect is a discursive emptying of place, pushing its indigenous people
nostalgically but firmly into the past in order to repopulate this space with settler bodies in
the present.

The Romance literature of the Moriland period addresses the indigene as the aesthetic
object for colonial revery. In the rapt wonder with which the settler observes the
disappearing race of indigenes, he naturalises his own position here. The seeming
coincidence of the settler, as an impeccably timed appearing race, sets him up as the
regretful European replacement. He is simply stepping into the breach. He settles in what is
virtually (and lamentably) an indigenous void. The genre is overwhelmingly nostalgic, and its
Victorian literary modes have long been subject to the disdain of modernist sensibilities.
Jane Stafford and Mark Williams argue that Moriland cannot be understood in entirely
homogenous (and imported) terms. By examining the departure from genre conventions that
are revealed in moments of disgust in Henri Lawsons A Daughter of Moriland, F.E.
Manings Old New Zealand and Augustus Earles A Narrative of a Nine Months Residence
in New Zealand in 1827, we begin to understand the complex affective functioning of
Moriland thinking as a local settler condition. I also make use of and extend the emotional
complex of abjection, shame, and indignation offered by Stephen Turners concept of
colonial being. Colonial being is embedded with disgust (and its disavowal). It is a primary
affect in the function of settlement. The poetry and prose of Arthur Adams demonstrates
the function of affective disavowal, by coupling the dying race in Moriland and Tussock
Land with a Sublime (unpeopled) New Zealand landscape. This lamentable circumstance is
quickly offered remedy in the figure of New Zealand born Aroha in Tussock Land. Aroha is
a half-caste. She stands as the model for the future of Moriland, as an exemplar of the
depleting indigenous bloodline. In a vision of perfect amalgamation, Mori presence can be
bled out as quickly as it is bred out. Tussock Land also offers narrative resolution for the
uncomfortable settler body. The English-born King is able to comfortably inhabit the land
only via the necessary disavowals of disgust and the proofs of mucky labour that constitute
pioneer existence.

Finally, this chapter will reframe the cultural nationalism designed to critique and depart from
Moriland convention as in fact a marked continuity of the settlement transfer. The literati of
the following generation were quick to debunk Moriland as a feminine, decorative, and
superficial era of New Zealand writing. By contrast, the work of the well-known nationalist
cohort made up of Allen Curnow, Carl Stead and Frank Sargeson declared itself as
 95

masculine, locally-grown, and real. It claimed to speak to a connection with the specific land
of New Zealand, offering an earthy core of nature in place of the synthetic culture of their
Moriland predecessors.227 If the earth itself is positioned as a core which writers-as-
settlers must penetrate in order to real-ly be national, then the literal expression of dirt on the
(distinctively male) self is the means to this end. New Zealands dirt is the access point to the
masculine real, and it is this transfer of dirt onto the body that permits the settler to become
a real New Zealander. Dirt-as-real will be re-visioned here as a disavowal, and hence a
fundamental transfer of the disgust-drive, in which the presence of the other is aesthetically
mediated in order to make room for the body of the settler.

Lorenzo Veracini: Settlement as Transfer

As this thesis argues, colonial disgust is configured in different ways from settler-colonial
disgust. Chapter Four presented the directly aversive response which mediated a colonial
understanding of the South Seas, and which continues to shape constructions of the Pacific
as a sexualised and savage geographical zone. This chapter offers a more complicated
affective arrangement, one which is indirect in its expression. This is a function of the settler-
colonial condition. The complexes of the settled scenario are concordant with the
compromising position the settler holds in the colonial-indigenous dichotomy. The system is
made to shift from the two-point geometry of metropole and periphery. Instead, the
existence of the settler demands a radically different configuration; the model becomes
fundamentally triangula[ted]. 228 Occupying that awkward positionality of being the third
thing, the settler is rendered both diagrammatically and affectively uncomfortable in their
identity, since

there are always two kinds of authority and always two kinds of authenticity that the
settler subject is (con)signed to desire and disavow . . . [since they are caught]
uneasily occupying a place caught between two First Worlds, two origins of authority
229
and authenticity.

The dis-ease of the settler is laid out in both attracted and averted configurations in the new
place. In New Zealand there is a desire to be just like home, to create a little England on
New Zealand soil. Yet in order to justify settler sovereignty, there is a pressing desire to have
emerged from that soil itself, to be homegrown and indigenous. James Belich argues that
the one desire comes to take the place of the other. This attitudinal change favours the place

227
J.C.Reid,CreativeWritinginNewZealand:ABriefCriticalHistory(Auckland:TheAuthorwithWhitcombe
andTombs,1946),19.
228
LorenzoVeracini,SettlerColonialism:ATheoreticalOverview(NewYork:PalgraveMacmillan,2010),6.
229
AnnaJohnstonandAlanLawson,SettlerColonies,inACompaniontoPostcolonialStudies,edHenry
SchwarzandSangeetaRay(Malden,MA:Blackwell,2000),369.
96 |

of settlement over the place of origin and makes way for conditions of explosive settlement
worldwide. This is what Belich terms the settler revolution. 230 Veracini argues that this
reorientation is in fact an inversion, a crucial upturn[ing] . . . [of] the hierarchical relationship
between centre and periphery that is intrinsic to colonialism. Settler colonialism had turned
colonialism upside down.231 In order to declare themselves sovereign, the narrative the
settler adopts must be self-authorising. To write onself seamlessly into authorship over the
new settled place, there is a recurrent need to disavow the (actual and discursive) violence
of colonial intervention.232 As such, the settler evolution is also a convolution, by which the
actual operation of settler colonial practice is concealed behind other occurrences.233 The
settler must resolve the ambiguity of his body existing in a new place over which he claims
sovereignty. He is both a historic event from over there (exogenous to this place) and a
naturally occurring thing in perpetuity (indigenous to this place). At some point, the settler
becomes a New Zealander. The trouble is one can never say at what precise moment this
occurs, since it is an inevitable identity shift inherent to the practice of settlement. Veracinis
Settler Colonialism argues that this occurs via a gesture of displacement, which naturalises
the settler by flushing the body politic of both indigenous Others and exogenous Others.
This chapter argues that the indigenous Other is eliminated by being put to rhetorical death,
a dying race for whom the incoming settler smooths the pillow. Chapter Six will address
Pkeh animosity toward the arrival of the exogenous Other by characterising the Third
World-looking migrant to New Zealand as an abject body which resists national inclusion.
Veracinis text itemises a plethora of ways in which the settler ambiguity can be resolved,
each of which act to mirror dialectically the actual settler transfer from one place to
another.234

Veracinis theoretical account has an arbitrary quality, offering his reader as many forms of
transfer as there are letters in the alphabet, quite literally. Some of these forms are more
applicable for our purposes here than others. Transfer mode (A), that of Necropolitical
transfer, which requires military liquidation of indigenous communities, tantamount to
genocide, might be less relevant to a New Zealand context, than, say, an Amerindian
history. 235 However, two modes of transfer that Veracini offers are complementary to

230
SeeJamesBelich,ReplenishingtheEarth:TheSettlerRevolutionandtheRiseoftheAngloWorld,17831939
(Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress,2009),145176.
231
Veracini,SettlerColonialism,11.
232
Ibid,14.
233
Ibid.
234
Ibid,33.
235
Ibid,35.Fordiscussionofsettlercolonialismandgenocide,seePatrickWolfe,StructureandEvent:Settler
Colonialism,Time,andtheQuestionofGenocide,inEmpire,Colony,Genocide:Conquest,Occupationand
 97

Moriland operations of the Hei Tiki variety. For example, Markeys insistence that the Mori
perform to his standard of perceived indigeneity is an example of repressive authenticity. For
Veracini, this is listed as mode of transfer (H). Repressive authenticity holds indigenous
culture to be a time-frozen phenomenon, such that there is an inalienable standard of Mori-
ness against which actual Mori people can be tested. Markeys outrage at the
incompetence of native canoeing leads him to imply that the tradition of wka is in fact non-
existent, and thus he puts Mori cultural identity in question. Another interpretation of the
wka incident is the commonly held fatal impact narrative (mode of transfer J) around
which the Moriland genre as a whole is oriented. The mood of fatal impact implies the
inevitable deterioration of indigeneity. By this logic, the golden age of indigenous tradition
has now passed. In the present, this tradition experiences a lamentable but unavoidable
decline in the face of a civilised modernity. This modernity is embodied by the arrival of a
genetically superior racial group which will come to supplant the existing stock. Frank racism
and overwrought sentimentality are typical conditions of this nostalgic gesture of settler
transfer.

Nostalgia (for) and Disgust (at) Moriland

In a contemporary climate, the flaws of this nostalgia are somewhat transparent. In the
unflattering light of postcolonial awareness, the desire is either to avert ones eyes, or to be
completely outraged at the baldness of romantic colonialism. Renalto Rosaldos seminal
1989 article Imperialist Nostalgia expressed anger at cultural representations of

SubalternResistanceinWorldHistory,ed.A.DirkMoses(NewYork:BerghahnBooks,2008),120122.The
issueofattributingthetermgenocidetotheMoriexperiencehasbeenhotlydebatedinNewZealand,
especiallyfollowingthecommentsofTarianaTuria(MemberofParliament)inAugust2000,whenshereferred
towhitesettlementinNewZealandascomparabletotheholocaustinaspeechtotheNewZealand
PsychologicalSociety.Thiscomparisonwasmetwithwidespreadoutrage,andledthenPrimeMinisterHelen
ClarktodeclarethatthetermholocausttobeprohibitedfromuseinrelationtoaNewZealandcontext.This
controversywascapitalisedonintheproductionofTeTangataWhaiRawaOWeneti(2002),afilmadaptation
ofShakespearesMerchantofVenice,translatedbyPeiTeHurinuiJonesanddirectedbyDonSelwyn.The
merrybondscene,wherethehistoryofpersecutionisrecountedbyShylock,isjuxtaposedwithimageshung
inanartistsstudiofromcolonialwarsofAotearoa,andthescenecloseswithapantothepainter
(representedbycontemporaryMoriartistSelwynMuru),paintingalargecanvaswhichhasbeenbranded
withthewordholocaust.WhilstitisgenerallyheldthatClarksrulingaroundtheterm,whichspecifiesthat
thespecificandverytragicmeaningofholocaustmeansthatitcannotbevalidlyusedtodescribeaNew
ZealandMoriexperience,itsuseinthecontextofthefilmworksformorethanmerelyinflammatoryeffect.
SinceTeTangataWhaiRawaOWenetiisthefirstfilmtoeverbeproducedinTeReo,theuseofthetermin
thefilmpointstowardthesettlementofNewZealandasaviolentandtraumaticendeavour,whichhashad
lastingimplicationsfortheculturallicenceofMoriinNewZealand.(SeeHelenClarkInterviewcitedinAudrey
Young,HolocaustApologyPutsMinisterinHotWater,NewZealandHerald,September6,2000,
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=150333.
98 |

imperialism as a benign fantasy of indigenous fatalism.236 Jane Stafford and Mark Williams
maintain that the smug paternalism of Moriland literature is a vast source of national
embarrassment.237 The shame is something like the discomfort I feel when my Nana talks
loudly about her affiliations with the MORI community. She cannot resist disclosing the
racial makeup of that lovely MORI girl who lives down the road, who takes real pride in
herself. The pitch at which this word Mori is hurled from my Nanas lips in social situations
is aurally embarrassing. This is not only because it seems to declare her own elevated
status as a Pkeh-who-cares about the plight of Mori, but also because it signals the girl
down the road as the lovely exception to the generally un-lovely rule. Pointing to her own
political correctness, whilst implicitly making a racial criticism is the back-handed Moriland
gesture entirely. The reddening of my face is amplified on a national scale in the
contemporary literary community, and it is not least a result of the barefaced paradox of the
term Mori-land as synonym for literary New Zealand. It is a title which

denies what it seems to state: that New Zealand is a land properly belonging to Mori.
Maoriland is a land of settlers who, having claimed for themselves the designation
New Zealanders once reserved for Mori, now feel comfortable enough about their
238
identity and security to borrow the name of those they have supplanted.

The terms of this borrowing are those of aesthetic exceptionalisation, which results in an
over-fragranced vision of Mori identity. The fragrance is too much for our contemporary
literary community to bear, something like John Macarthurs cloying whiff of pot-pourri used
to describe the cringe of the picturesque.239 In the middle-class Pkeh New Zealand I was
brought up in, pot-pourri has particular resonance. In the social politics of household
presentation, it was a class differential between my two sets of grandparents. The civility to
scent the loo was the privilege of my educated, socialite (Mori-loving) Nana. My pragmatic,
thrifty and working-class Grandma had neither time nor pennies to worry about some little

236
RenatoRosaldo,ImperialistNostalgia,Representations26(Spring1989):107.Importantly,Rosaldos
argumentdoesnotagreewithafrontalattackonnostalgia,anapproachwhichwouldseethenostalgiaof
imperialismasadeviousmiragebehindwhichlurkstheabyssofwhitemoralguilt.Rather,Rosaldoarguesthat
nostalgiaistosomeextentinstinctive,andheinsiststhatitfunctionsideologically,ratherthanasaninvented
phenomenon.Logically,Rosaldoisnotclaimingthatnostalgianeedbeeradicated,butratherthatthe
ethnographershouldbeawareofitsfunctioning.Inthis,hisattemptisnotsomuchtooverpower[the]
ideology,bygrabbingholdanddemystifyingit,astoevokeitandtherebymakeitmoreandmorefullypresent
untilitgraduallycrumblesundertheweightofitsowninconsistencies.(121)Rosaldomaintainsthattofeel
hurt,ang[er],andgriev[ance]inthefaceofimperialisthistoriesandthenostalgiawithwhichtheyobscure
theirownpractice,shouldnotbedetouraround,buttomovethrough,andhopefullybeyond,imperialist
nostalgiabysurrenderandtherecognitionofourcomplicity.Rosaldo,ImperialistNostalgia,120.
237
JaneStaffordandMarkWilliams,Moriland:NewZealandLiterature,18721914(Wellington:Victoria
UniversityPress,2006),10.
238
Ibid,12.
239
JohnMacarthur,ThePicturesque:Architecture,Disgustandotherirregularities(NewYork:Routledge,
2007),57.
 99

pot of bark and dried flowers in her bathroom. The pot-pourri functioned to elevate one
above the other, since it presented a social mask, disguising a lived-in house from its own
bodies those farting, sweating, excreting lumps of flesh which inhabited that scented
space.

The contemporary disgust of the pot-pourri image that Macarthur identifies takes issue with
its self-conscious facade, an unreal beautification which is too readily understood as
overcompensation. This is how Moriland appears now as our revolting inheritance - the
perennial brown-noser. It both kisses the indigenous arse in order to see it out the door, and
masks a desire to graft brown-ness onto our own body in order to possess an indigenous
right to be here. The key complaint served against Alexander Markey is that he is a
sycophant, at once admiring and denigrating the Mori people. The aesthetic bracketing at
work here in the act of admiration is in fact a means of erasure which is complementary to
the settler exercise I have described as the Disgust-Beauty Amalgam. It conveniently yokes
native death with indigenous authenticity, utilising the sign Moriland in order to erase the
referent the indigenous bodies themselves. Veracini claims that the transfer at work here
is one of name confiscation allowing Mori to signify (in title) the land, but not occupy (be
entitled to) the land. Mori-land is more than mere re-titlement of a place. It is a literary
condition, a means of understanding a place and an aesthetic re-modelling of the indigenous
body.

Even to make reference to the indigenous as a body seems anathema to the functioning of
the Moriland rhetoric, since the indigene is understood in a fundamentally dis-embodied
fashion in a settler context. An acceptance of embodiment requires disgusting realities. It
requires a certain life-soup which is leaking and messy. It demands an acknowledgment of
the lived-in realities of inhabiting human flesh. For all the thorough and nuanced offerings
that Veracinis account makes toward settler operations of disavowal, there is no reference
to a disavowal of embodied presence of the other. I want here to address this vital omission
in Veracinis research as an oversight of not merely one more kind of transfer, but as an
occlusion of a supra-transfer process. This supra-transfer is the way in which embodied
knowledges construct, maintain and justify the settlement of a new place. An account of
disgust in settlement, as is given here, begins to address an embodied settler-colonialism.
By exploring Moriland nostalgia, we see a complex settler condition of exalting an
indigenous past in order to deny those indigenous bodies an embodied (potentially
disgusting) presence in the personal space (and now place) of the settler.
100|

Greasy Brutes and Stinking Shark oil: Notes of Disgust in Lawson and Maning

To speak of Moriland as a solely romanticising and mythical enterprise, one which is

always and absolutely in favour of Mori traditions as a desirable location of culture, would
be to simplify the literature considerably. Whilst Stafford and Williams agree that the reason
that Moriland literature is excluded from our cultural memory is one of embarrassment for
its blatant rationalisation of colonial conquest, they want to reframe this literature as more
heterogenous in its scope. In their reading, it is not a blanket confimation of the imperial
effort, nor is it an undisputed exaltation of Mori past in order to appropriate their place in the
present. Rather, they strive to present the complex, various, adaptive and uncertain
strategies that the Moriland literature adopts in order to grapple with the identity-forming
problems of arriving in a place, and claiming it as ones own.240

The inability of the genre to communicate the reality of a peopled place has been
acknowledged by those who actively participated in its conventions. Henry Lawson, in
writing A Daughter of Moriland, claims to be addressing his disillusionment with the genre,
declaring his unflattering account of young Mori girl August as a voice against the
sentimental rot of Moriland literature in general.241 For Lawson, the problem is that the
typical romantic representation of the indigene fails on counts of (an undeniably racist)
realism and a kind of reverse discrimination:

We rush off in imagination to coral isles and other places, and make heroes out of
greasy, brown, loafing brutes, for no other reason, apparently, than that their fathers
were even greasier and more brutal than their children, while thousands of brave, self-
sacrificing white heroes, weeds for the most part, but heroic weeds, live, fight and die
242
unnoticed in our cities and bush, all the year round.

Lawsons frank criticism seems mounted on the problem of a heroic imaginary which
romanticises a greasy embodied reality. The indigenous bodies are offensive to the heroic
ideal not merely because they are brown, nor because they are idle. Rather, the offense lies
in an insult levelled twice at these bodies. It is because they are greased: oily and sweaty.
Further, by Lawsons grease-time equation, the vector of nostalgia is inverted. Not only are
these bodies offensive in the present, if one looks back into history they only become more
offensive: more greasy, more brutal, and more brown. This is no dying race; there are living,
heaving, greasy bodies in this place - right now - and their greasy reminder is the disgusting

240
StaffordandWilliams,Moriland,15.
241
ThisremarkisquotedinW.H.Pearson,HenryLawsonAmongMoris(Canberra:AustralianNational
University,1968),141.Pearsonclaimsthatthepassageitpertainsto(quotedinblocktextabove)
accompaniedthepublicationofADaughterofMoriland,butitwasomittedfromthefirstversionpublished
intheAntipodeanin1897.
242
Ibid.
 101

reality of otherness which must be exposed, in Lawsons view. The revolting quantities of
these bodies are being occluded at the expense of the heroic white weeds. The bodily fluids
of the white weed, which is the presence of sweat on the settler, has a moral fragrance it
is the hard work of a self-sacrificing and brave man of empire. On the indigenous body, it is
presumably the result of a lazy constitution, an uncivilised lack of cleanliness (a condition of
brown-ness, really) and a loafing stupidity, an unwillingness to civilise up.

To support the tone of his sketch, Lawson refers us confidently to the text of one Pkeh
Mori, Old New Zealand by F. E. Maning, a Moriland account which does not fall prey to
rot-ten sentimentality in Lawsons estimation. Maning has escaped rebuke since he is both
author . . . [and] hero, which amounts to having lived [his] book. Old New Zealand, for
Lawson, is the thing itself, a primary account which is unafraid of declaring those greasy,
brown, loafing realities while the rest of literary New Zealand is rushing off into an
imaginary romance. The self-declared social position of the author legitimates this reading to
some extent. As a Pkeh Mori, Maning inhabits that liminal zone of being between
cultures, a space which permits triangulation. Under this model, Maning pretends to the
objectivity of a third place, a cultural hybrid. His preface declares this auto-ethnographic
drive. His text owe[s] nothing to fiction and describes events and peoples exactly as they
occurred. 243 But the affective reality of this third place is not one of cool historical
disinterest. Rather, the matters of Mori life, manners and history is an [in]exhaust[ibly] . . .
interesting subject.244 Manings gesture toward plac[ing] a few sketches . . . on record is
imbued with elegiac repose from the outset, before remembrance of [old Mori life] has
quite passed away.245 The demon of civilisation is held largely responsible for any flaw that
this old Mori life possesses. Modernity fails the traditional, the present fails the past, the
coloniser fails the colonised all that can be done now is remember, and lament, that which
will soon be lost. Manings plaintive opening to his book bears the Moriland markers in toto.

Since Lawsons test of realism is one of greasiness, how does Maning, with all his
remorseful fatal impact guff, make the grade? Manings text, despite its authorial promise to
avoid the raw-head-and-bloody-bones content which might frighten his readers, is not
averse to disgusting this same readership.246 Manings narrator recounts the image of a
lamenting old woman, cutting herself in mourning, as part of the traditional tangi. She

243
F.E.Maning,OldNewZealand,inOldNewZealandandOtherWritings,ed.AlexCalder(London:Leicester
UniversityPress,2001),92.
244
Ibid.
245
Ibid.
246
Ibid,166.
102|

appeared a clot of blood from head to feet with large clots of coagulated blood . . . on the
ground where she stood.247 As Chapter Two established, it is not so much the presence of
blood which elicits revulsion. Blood, in its fluid form, cannot be in and of itself disgusting
matter. Rather, the horrible matter is the clots of coagulated blood on the ground between
her legs. She presents as the Mori vetula, not merely disgusting by virtue of her age, but
also because she has broken her skin-line forcibly with a tool, scoring her face and cheeks
until she is no longer a face and body but rather that formless state between physical and
liquid phases; she is a mere clot of blood.248 The other disgusting figure of Manings text is
the Mori undertaker:

Old, withered, haggard, clothed in the most miserable rags, daubed all over from head
to foot with red paint . . . made of stinking shark oil and red ochre mixed, keeping
always at a distance, silent and solitary, often half insane . . . at night, tightening his
greasy rags around him, he would crawl into some miserable lair of leaves and rubbish,
there, cold, half starved, miserable, and dirty, to pass, in fitful ghost-haunted slumbers,
249
a wretched night, as prelude to another wretched day.

The invariable misogyny of disgust prevails, such that the female equivalent of this figure is
an image too horrible to venture on any description. However, even in this account,
Lawsons craving for greasy reality is realised aptly, described as a condition of the dead-
bearer. The tapu placed on the under-taker is the social sanction associated with his role,
that of delivering the dead to their final resting place. Despite Manings admission that he too
was once the subject of social ostracising when he got tapud, the disgust signifiers do not
transfer to the Pkeh body. While Maning presents the undertaker as disgusting because
he is matter-out-of-place or a social bottom-feeder, it is in fact the sticky excretions which
linger on as contaminants. He is a stinking, greasy, and dirty body, where Manings tapud
body bears none of the same markers he washes his hands obsessively and will not run a
muck by savagely eating raw meat. 250 While these overtly revolting bodies are given

247
Ibid,121.Maninggoesontodocumentingreaterdetailtheextentofherflagellation:Oneoldwoman,in
thecentreofthegroup,wasoneclotofbloodfromheadtofeet,andlargeclotsofcoagulatedbloodlayonthe
groundwhereshestood.Thesightwasabsolutelyhorrible...shewas...howlingadirgelikewail...inher
righthandsheheldapieceoftuhua,orvolcanicglass,assharpasarazor:thissheplaceddeliberatelytoher
leftwrist,drawingitslowlyupwardstoherleftshoulder,thespoutingbloodfollowingasitwent;thenfrom
theleftshoulderdownwards,acrossthebreasttotheshortribsontherightside;thentherudebutkeenknife
wasshiftedfromtherighthandtotheleft,placedtotherightwrist,drawnupwardstotherightshoulder,and
sodownacrossthebreasttotheleftside,thusmakingabloodycrossonthebreast;andsotheoperation
wentonallthetimeIwasthere,theoldcreatureallthetimehowlingintimeandmeasure,andkeepingtime
alsowiththeknife,whichateverycutwasshiftedfromonehandtotheother,asIhavedescribed.Shescored
herforeheadandcheeksbeforeIcame;herfaceandbodywasamereclotofblood,andalittlestreamwas
droppingfromeveryfingeramorehideousobjectcouldscarcelybeconceived.Ibid,121.
248
Ibid.
249
Ibid,153.
250
Ibid,155.
 103

presence in Manings text, they are the exception rather than the rule. They run counter to a
strategy of Moriland nostalgia in his work. Having addressed these disgust nodes in the
Moriland genre, we will now seek to address the larger transfer at work within the literary
tradition.

The Affective Troubles of Maning and Earle: Unsettled, Ashamed and Disgusted

It is now a familiar trope that the condition of the settler is unsettled, and the New Zealand
scholarly community in particular is no stranger to this refrain. Since the emergence of
Settlement Studies in New Zealand, and the subsequent conference held at the University
of Auckland in March 2002, entitled Unsettling Settlement: New World Cultures and the New
Humanities, there has been growing attention paid to the inventions of place as a result of
mass settler migrations to Aotearoa. Veracini describes the settler as an incongruous being,
both departing from their home-land and yet arriving on the shores of a place over which
they presume sovereignty: as home. This is the inherent ambiguity of a home-maker in a
new (and occupied) place, and it demands ambivalent emotional strategies toward both
place and others in order to make a viable life for oneself.251 For Alex Calder and Stephen
Turner, this speaks to the distinguishing mannerism of the discipline, a desire to dwell on
contradictions, those moments when old and new are in the conspicuous act of
hybridising, thus inhabit[ing] and infect[ing] each other.252 Manings title Old New Zealand,
they suggest, places itself along that precise fault-line of settler discomfort.

For Turner, this discomfort rests on the stymied act of Manings straightforward story of the
true settler experience. Lured into (as we have seen, disgusting) cul-de-sacs he would rather
have avoided, his text is laden with the affective difficulties of telling a linear settler narrative.
Tired and bore[d] by the necessity the narrator feels to speak about tapu, Maning must
try back to his real story, which he seems to have dropped along the way.253 For Turner, the

251
Veracini,SettlerColonialism,21.
252
AlexCalderandStephenTurner,Introduction,inSettlementStudies,specialissue,JournalofNew
ZealandLiterature20(2002):9.
253
EvenaslateasChapterXI,Maningisattemptingtoshakeoffthetaleoftapu,whichseemstopossesshis
realstoryinwayshecannotcontrol.(TheironyoftapuasastateofbeingpossessedisnotlostinTurners
analysis).HeinsiststhathemustgetridofthistalkaboutthetaputhebestwayIcan,afterwhichIwillstart
fairandtrynottogetbeforemystory.Maning,OldNewZealand,167.Laterinthischapterheiswontto
complainofgettingtiredofthistapuandpromisingonlytoprovideoneortwomoreexamples.Maning,
OldNewZealand,169.ChapterXIIservesthispurpose,andattheend,Maningadoptsatoneofexhaustion
anddespondency(perhapsanactofsatire,perhapsoneofselfprotection),inwhichhedeclaresthistapuisa
bore,eventowriteabout,andIfearthereaderisbeginningtothinkitaboretoreadabout...lestIshouldkill
myreaderIwillhavedonewithitforthepresent,andtryback,forIhaveleftmystorybehindcompletely.
Maning,OldNewZealand,173.Thisrealstoryheseeksispresentedinthefinalthreechapters,theotherten
havingbeenpresumablyhijackedbytheunavoidablediscussionoftapuinplace.
104|

effort of trying back in the face of present and real contingencies of existence (both getting
oneself tapud, and the telling of a settler narrative which occludes this fact) is the essence of
what he terms colonial being. The intolerable consequence of these present realities make
the overwhelming settler experience one of indignation. On the wrong side of Tapu, and
forced to strip before a horrid tohunga of whose practice he is resoundingly sceptical,
Maning has been brought perilously close to a moral abyss, which must be masked by
rage and indignation at the shameful place in which he found himself.254 Turner suggests this
is the settler self a shamed man.255

Importantly, the moral abyss is also an embodied state of abjection, against which the
settler must set his red-cheeked indignation. The (distinctively settler) infection of old and
new that this moment signifies is also a threat of contamination from that tapud body by
proxy, greased and filthy and stinking. The projection of Manings revolted description of
this outcast body onto his own flesh is too much to bear. The disgust must be disavowed,
the condition must be worked against. By this reading, the shame Turner sees continued in
the identity of the New Zealander is a covering up of the gaping pit (of other bodies in a
place) that a disgusted response offers. This place is no romantic idyll, it has those people in
it. If Turner speaks of a problem of possession because the tapu of place means a past you
cant fully know, in revulsion you know the present all too well. It is a place inhabited right
now.

This reeking moment of recognized inhabitation is also visible in the text of Augustus Earle,
whose Narrative of a Nine Months Residence in New Zealand in 1827 has been critically
examined by Alex Calder. Unlike Maning, Earle does not feel his narrative flow compromised
by the presence of tapu (what he calls taboo). However he demonstrates the same
reluctant story-telling gestures of Maning. The result is a contradictory style of writing, one
that reports against its will. I dont wish to tell you this, but I must. Like Maning, this must is
driven in Earle by the unquestionable evidence of what he has witnessed, the ocular proof
that demands attention.256 Earle is eyewitness to the aftermath of the slaughter of a young
runaway slave girl. As if subpoenaed to the task, Earle and his companion are resolved to
witness this dreadful scene of the preparation of her flesh for the cannibalistic feasting,

254
StephenTurner,BeingColonial/ColonialBeing,inSettlementStudies,specialissue,JournalofNew
ZealandLiterature20(2002):49.
255
Ibid.
256
AugustusEarle,ANarrativeofaNineMonthsResidenceinNewZealandin1827(1909;ProjectGutenberg,
2004),chap.28,http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11933/11933h/11933h.htm.
 105

despite their horrible suspicions of what they will see.257 As Calder has noted, the laboured
phrase ocular proof is borrowed from Shakespeares Othello in a comparative gesture of
reluctant viewing, a compulsion to see what he does not want to.258 Indeed, he is fated to
the task, since it [is his] lot to behold [the disgusting act] in all its horrors!259 The disgusting
sight which he bravely views for the sake of his reader is a sight few would wish to see: a
body quartered and de-boned, with flesh compressed . . . [being] forc[ed] . . . into an
oven.260

Though driven almost to fainting from the nauseating and lip-smacking description of her
flesh . . . as tender as paper in the cooking instructions of her chef, Earle is inevitably
drawn back to the sight of the disgusting mess.261 Eventually resolving to stymy the feast
by burying the cooked flesh, it is not this that lures him to again . . . strol[l] towards the spot,
but rather an attraction to the aversion he feels on arriving.262 The allure is the tantalizing
thought of anthropophagy, responsible for the triggering of a latent wish which
Obeyesekere identifies in the British discourse of cannibalism.263 The deeply fascinating idea
of consuming cooked human flesh draws him in, but his suspicious proximity to the object is
made safe by the stench of the hot, fetid steam which demands the services of an
overpowering disgust.264 This is a disgust-fascination complex that redraws the lines of
western taboos around human death. That the smell of human meat cooking is registered
with disgust is a bodily aversion for which Earle can be thankful, else his presence at the
oven be confused for cannibalistic complicity. This is the work of disgust in a settler context,
in its recognition of the Other, even as it runs contrary to the story of place that Maning or
Earle might like to tell. Were it not for the sheer encounter with bodies of the Other (smelly-
in-life and smelly-in-death), Earle could continue imagin[ing this] country to be totally
unihabited.265 If the indigenous bodies in all their undesirable capacities are right under my
noses, if that stench of shark oil or roasting flesh fills my nostrils, then there cannot be the
discontinuity of history that nostalgia would permit (an indigenous past, and a settler present).
The muck of the indigenous present is right before me, invading my sense receptors, and I
am forced to acknowledge that I am not alone. This gaping pit of disgusting bodies, of

257
Ibid.
258
AlexCalder,AugustusEarleandtheSecretofCannibalism,inLandfall206,ed.JustinPaton(Otago:Otago
UniversityPress,2003),130.
259
Earle,Narrative,chap.28.
260
Ibid.
261
Ibid.
262
Ibid.
263
Obeyesekere,CannibalTalk,10.
264
Earle,Narrative,chap.28.
265
Ibid,chap.4.
106|

greased and dirty flesh, is also the place the settler chooses to call home, and reconciling
revulsion-of with belonging-to is a complicated act.

Sublime Silences and New Amalgamations: Arthur Adams vision of Maoriland

The Moriland genre, then, employs a disgust-beauty amalgam in order to disavow the real
presence of these bodies in place. The place must be de-peopled, and the rhetoric of the
Sublime is inordinately accomplished at this task. As discussed in chapter three, the
negative sublime functions as an undifferentiated emptiness, both a looming massive
presence, and a kind of eerie absence of being. It is the present (and absented) body of the
New Zealand landscape. The viewer is that arriving white settler, the man faced with a
mountain vista and simultaneously confronted by his own loneliness. In Francis Pounds
analysis of silence as a Sublime projection on the New Zealand landscape, the nineteenth-
century spectator views the landscape: he is the man long[ing] for his wife to be with him, or
anyone other than savages, 266 However, as I argue here, it is precisely the aesthetic
gesture of the Sublime which functions to erase these savages. Mori-land literature is
replete with examples, but here one awkward pot-pourri moment will serve to demonstrate.
Arthur Adams 1899 poem Moriland makes the somewhat tired aesthetic gesture, in which
the figure of the land is both grand and austere:

Land of rugged white-clad ranges

Standing proud, impassive, lonely;
Ice and snow, where never change is,
Save the mighty motion only
Where through valleys seared and deep
Slow the serpent glaciers creep.

Land of silent lakes that nestle

Deep as night, girt round with forest;
Water never cut by vessel,
In whose mirror evermore rest
Green-wrapt mountain-side and peak,
267
Reddened by the sunsets streak.

Adams landscape is a pre-historic, untouched wilderness time has almost not begun here,
since it is subject only to the most glacial of paces, the formation of glaciers themselves. It
bears the unbroken promise of Eden, a place of never change and evermore. The problem
of the place emerges later in the poem, when it becomes clear that this impassive quality is
a function of implicit death. Indeed Death! is the one word that all winds whisper, since

266
FrancisPound,TheInventionofNewZealand:ArtandNationalIdentity,19301970(Auckland:Auckland
UniversityPress,2009),31.
267
ArthurA.Adams,Moriland,inMorilandandOtherVerses(Sydney:UniversityofSydneyLibrary,2003),
PDFebook.
 107

her brown warriors fight is over/one by one they yield their place. Their place is the scene
is benignly vacated, simply yielded to the newer nations white.268 Within the space of
thirteen stanzas, Adams is the efficient stage-manager of the classic settler pantomime of
Moriland. He sets up the backdrop: a lone . . . stand[ing] sight of unparalleled beauty; he
waves off the previous characters, lamenting the peace-slain chieftains who leave the
scene; and he cues the arrival of a newer, nobler race. This is the very moment at which
New Zealand itself is invented, he himself has designed: its starting place.

If Adams definitional account of Moriland is a place whose history [is] unwrit, then the
work of Moriland is an unwriting of place, a writing over, a writing-of in order to ensure that
the past is a thing written-off, from which we must start anew. Maning struggles with
start[ing] fair, since he must first purge the place of ungainly and inconvenient cultural and
physical presences (like tapu, and the bodies which eviscerate it). But Adams sidesteps this
quandary. In order to tell the story of the beginning of a Land of children lithe and slim/Fresh
of face and long of limb, of a repopulated New Zealand vista, he must overcome the
interruption of an old race. Their newer, nobler replacements are the result of the original
coupling of New World genesis: a settler Adam and Mori Eve. The trope of amalgamation is
almost always ordered along an identity axis of white boy meets brown girl in Maoriland
literature.269 Adams Tussock Land: A Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth
(1904) begins its story a generation on, where its heroine, Aroha Grey, is the daughter of a
half-caste herself, and falls in love with the English-born King Southern. Aroha stands at the
beginning of a new race, one in which broad, low forehead [and] . . . full lips (taken as
genetic markers of Mori-ness) are being replaced by aestheticized mannerisms of
whiteness, a gracious bearing . . . a lithe, gliding walk, an air of gracious dignity.270 Aroha
herself is caught in a kind of racial triangulation, in a moment of ancestral savagery she is
filled with barbaric frenzy, in another she has virgin strength of a new race, replete with
rich, inexhaustible vitality. Moments later she [is] a pkeh again a simple, unemotional,

268
Ibid.
269
AlfredDomettsepicRanolfandAmohia(firstpublishedin1872)wastheclassictaleofWhiteBritonfalling
inlovewiththechiefsdaughter.AlfredGracestaleTheChiefsDaughter(publishedinhis1895shortstory
collectionMorilandStories)isofthesamevein.HineraufallsinlovewithCraig,anartistwhopaintsher,and
theresultoftheallianceisahappyending.ThesehappyendingsofinterracialromancearethesameTalesofa
DyingRacewhichlamenttheMoripassingaway,andtheDarwinianimplicationisthattheracewillsimplybe
bredoutofexistencebyamalgamationwithastrongerrace.Thisisbothasadinevitability,andyetan
encouragingimprovement.
270
ArthurA.Adams,TussockLand:ARomanceofNewZealandandtheCommonwealth(Christchurch:Kiwi
Publishers,2001),59and23.
108|

self-controlled English girl.271 Adams positions both old races in a state of decadence, of
two pools of genetic stock exhausted with age, in the face of the inexhaustible youth and
energy of the new amalgamated breed.

The contents of this amalgam, however, are not necessarily equally apportioned. In a
mathematics of the veins, it is rarely a half plus a half which equals one amalgamated
bloodline. Aroha is the product of equal fus[ion] and blend[ing] of two long lines of
conquerors, yet she is also the embodiment of fateful Mori destiny. What seemed at first
an innocous task of mixing turns out to be rather a one-way assimilation, a swallowing of one
in favour of the other. Since the settler has so much at stake to make this place home, the
rhetorical winner is unsurprising: brown Mori must cease submerged beneath the greater
number of the whites. 272 This is the former of two opposing perceptions of racial
amalgamation identified in colonial discourse by Robert Young, in which the racial stock is
improved by the uplifting of the savage race, rather than forcing the civilised race to descend
down the evolutionary scale.273 As Arthur Thomsons 1859 historical text The Story of New
Zealand comments, it is therefore satisfactory to find that Caucasian blood already flows in
the veins of two thousand of the native population with the implication that the Mori strain
is diminishing, with a view to complete satisfaction of the process Mori erasure.274

Earning a Place in the Land: Rejected Colonial, Passing Indigene, Successful Settler

As much as the depletion of the Mori bloodline is the fate of genetic mixing, it is
exacerbated by a cultural inadequacy to properly take root in the land itself. If Moriland is
an empty vista, then the measure of belonging is the extent to which one enters that image
of the land. The colonial body is too foreign for the land, as the land is too foreign for the
colonial body. Arohas father is sickened by the distance from England, and in turn the land
rejects his buried body: it is hostile and strange, he is never really at rest, he has not
settled in this place.275 By contrast, the Mori body is rendered insignificant by this test. It
seems to have settled, but lightly. Arohas mothers people, the Moris seem to have hardly
impressed . . . upon the land.276 In a kind of physical metaphor of social Darwinism, the

271
Ibid,24.
272
Ibid,3134.
273
RobertYoung,ColonialDesire:HybridityinTheory,CultureandRace(London:Routledge,1995),143.
274
ArthurS.Thomson,TheStoryofNewZealand:PastandPresent:SavageandCivilised(London:JohnMurray,
1859),305.
275
Adams,TussockLand,30.
276
Ibid,31.
 109

weaker race lack the strength to press their feet into the earth, to make a mark, and now
their footprints are now simply fading. Aroha is not saddled with either problem, she belongs
here in the present, since the past is a place Aroha did not care to go. She was a New
Zealander. This land and she were kin.277

Arohas bonds of kinship with New Zealand rely chiefly on her amalgamated status
(indigenous enough to be native, exogenous enough to demonstrate genetic strength) and
on her being born in this place (this standard still applies). But what of her counterpart, the
English-born King? How is he to make space for himself, possessing neither blood nor birth
rights to become kin with the land? If we recall the logic of the disgust-beauty amalgam from
Chapter Four, the creation of the locus amoenus pitched against an impenetrable landscape
is the gateway for the settler to enter the scene. If he creates a pocket of safety, and then
gets on with civilising the rest, he becomes indistinguishable from the picture of the place,
since he is active inside it. Getting on is also his green card, his means of getting in.
Keeping busy improving the primitive wilderness, under the rubric of progress, proves to be
the means of becoming embedded in the land itself. By the rhetoric of improvement, the
settler not only demonstrates that the fleeting imprint of the Mori race was in part a deficit of
labour, but also defines a sense of being kin as an entitlement one earns. The proof of
ones sweat, then, is the price of belonging.

The graduated shifts in Kings attitude to the land demonstrate the necessary mental (and
physical) processing required to transform foreign colonial to embedded settler. King is at
first comparable to Arohas father, with the form of the effete colonial, thin, sallow-faced,
with . . . lips that were almost a womans and a sullen . . . hat[red] for the sombre, silent
impenetrable bush, wracked by cravings for the hazy English meadows of his youth.278
Further, he despise[s the] common, monotonous work required to work the land, pursuing
instead an intellectual and artistic career in Australia.279 When he finally returns years later,
with more sober sensibilities about how to make his way in the world, he considers with
aesthetic displeasure the progress of the settler against Nature. The sacrifice of superb,
sturdy, slow-growing forest giants (first felled, then burned) for pastoral use hangs a curse
of ugliness upon the landscape,280 yet King recognises the necessities of earning ones
place in this land.

277
Ibid,34.
278
Ibid,17and60.
279
Ibid,44.
280
Ibid,272.
110|

He was coming to a place where life did not go so easily . . . here he touched the
beginnings of life; here the struggle was undisguised and bitterly strenuous. There was
no trifling with the imperturbable strength of Nature; there was no repose, no sloth in
281
the wrestle with that unwounded foe. Work was the word this country said Work!

But even with this local imperative acknowledged, King is revolted by the crude realities this
requires. The muddy surface of the station, the roads of slush and the heavy . . . clumsy
boots of his Waiatua companion, coated thick with half-dried mud elicit from King a feeling
of disgust.282

However, over the space of five industrious years in the community, King is transformed into
the champion of local progress, a vector measured for the most part by the dogged
penetration and clearance of the landscape itself. His physiognomy stands witness to the
conviction of his being here, in the place of work. No longer the feeble form of the city-
dwelling artist, King has the brown face, the steady eyes, the firm mouth, the strong chin,
[and] the robust strength of body which demonstrate not only his growing-up to become a
man, but also a growing-into the land itself.283 He will not suffer the fate of the light-footed
Maori, since the grip of his footwear sinks comfortably into the mud: he [wears] thick-soled
boots now.284 Only in this condition can Aroha truly love him. He is now equipped for the
task of building a nation, both by labour (just check the muck on his shoes) and by
reproduction (of slightly whiter half-caste children), since she could trust the people of the
colony could trust him with his future and theirs.285 Trusting King, accepting his body as a
part of this place and its future, turns out to be much to do with the overcoming of his disgust
at the literal muck thrown up in the act of settling the district of Waiatua.

Really Real? Masculine New Zealand and the disavowal of disgust

To the next generation of writers in New Zealand, texts like Adams were a source of
disgrace, and themselves the object of disgust. Criticism has been levelled at the inability of
Moriland literature to address the real New Zealand, since it is seen as plagued by an
atmosphere of feyness, of fairyland romance, characterised by relentless mythologising of
the Mori, the decorative use of flora and fauna, and an addiction to outmoded verse

281
Ibid,2745.
282
Ibid,275.
283
Ibid,300.
284
Ibid,288.
285
Ibid,309.
 111

styles.286 Stafford and Williams show how this persistent dismissal has continued to inform
the history of New Zealand literature served up by our critical community. On both counts of
(archaic) form and (myth-making) function, Moriland literature was to literary nationalists
like Allen Curnow a false start. If Monte Holcroft could assert in 1940 that Anglo-Saxon roots
suffered from shallow uptake in New Zealand soil, reflected in the borrowed conventions of
the literature, Curnow defines this in 1960 as a failure to really grip the earth of this place
and attend to the actualities of the New Zealand environment.287 It is a failure to isolate the
local and special character of New Zealand-ness. 288 What the actual, the local, the
special and the real come down to, by Nationalist discourse, is the literal land itself. As
Francis Pound observes, this discourse operates by disavowing the apparent unrealities of
the city site (the city is not the land), since it is the place of the woman, the foreigner, the
internationalist, the cosmopolitan, the fashionable, the aesthete, the homosexual and the
Jew.289 The invention of New Zealand, then, is a task best left to a particularly special
species: the heterosexual Pkeh male the real bodies inhabiting and speaking about a
real place. This same species speaks thirty years after Curnow, in the form of Patrick Evans,
maintaining his visceral rejection of the Moriland texts: they are stranded whale[s] . . .
rotting on the beach of New Zealand literature, an embarrassment that no-one knows what
to do with.290 Classified as the un-real representatives of place, this piquant literature seems
to have simply washed-up on these shores. It is a bit whiffy with age and sentimentality.
Returning to attend to it requires Limbricks approach to Hei Tiki, as flotsam and jetsam,
which demands we start fossicking through that unwelcome junk: the accompaniments and
leftovers of colonial intervention.291

286
StaffordandWilliams,Moriland,12.
287
MonteHolcroft,TheDeepeningStream:CulturalInfluencesinNewZealandLiteratureinEnglish,ed.Terry
Sturm(Auckland:OxfordUniversityPress,1998),2021.
288
ThesetwooftquotedconditionsofaNationalpoetrycomefromalargerquoteinCurnowsIntroductionto
thePenguinAnthology,pertainingtoreality.Realitymustbelocalandspecialathepointwherewepickup
thetraces:asmanifoldasthesignsfollowandtherouteswetake.Whateveristruevisionbelongs,here,
uniquelytotheislandsofNewZealand.Thebestofourverseismarkedormouldedeverywherebypeculiar
pressurespressuresarisingfromtheisolationofthecountry,itsphysicalcharacter,anditshistory.Allen
Curnow,introductiontoThePenguinBookofNewZealandVerse(Harmondsworth:Penguin,1960),17.
289
Pound,TheInventionofNewZealand,37.
290
PatrickEvans,ThePenguinHistoryofNewZealandLiterature(Auckland:Penguin,1990),43.PatrickEvansis
speakingspecificallyhereaboutAlfredDomettsepicRanolfandAmohia,buttheuseofdisgustmarkersto
describeitsromanticformandoutmodedsentimentalitybytheimageofputrefactionisindicativeofabattery
ofcriticismslevelledatMorilandliteratureongroundsoftheoverdecorated,saccharineandeffetequalityof
itsconventions.SeeStaffordandWilliams,Introduction:ColonialismandEmbarrassment,inMoriland,10
22.
291
Limbrick,TheFlotsamandJetsamofFilmHistory,248.
112|

Whilst Moriland texts such as Adams Tussock Land are the source of disgust and
embarrassment for the next generation of New Zealand writers, their logic of how to belong
in place follows much the same pathway as King Southern. King arrives at Pkeh
absolution by adequately filling his pioneer boots, and by getting em dirty. In order to be
from-this-place, a truly native born New Zealander, one must establish Holcrofts
deepening root structures by the masculine proof of setting ones hands deeper into the
earth itself. A. R. D. Fairburns remedy to the seeming erectile dysfunction of our national
identity, since New Zealands penis is yet-to-be-erect, is simply to hoist it up ourselves, to
get some mud out of a creek and make [our] own.292 The apparent mucky reality to phallic
nationalism invests in the literal soil a virile masculinity, and thus all one need to do to be a
real New Zealander is to get grubby. For Curnow, however, the dirt on his boots is different
from that on King Southerns. A grubby body alone is insufficient, since nineteenth-century
colonists inhabit the land bodily, but not in spirit.293 A spiritual inhabitance of place requires
the re-earthing of the twentieth-century settler body, in order to proffer an un-earthing of
authentic New Zealand, the thing in-the-raw. New Zealand must not only be accumulated on
ones boots, but attended to by the literary mind, in order to realise spiritual occupation, as
Pound explains:
The fertile ground of the invented New Zealand is at once that of earth, and that of the
canvas or page: fibrous, a humus, a compost, a vegetable tissue, a compound manure.
The need is to make out of New Zealands gross earth a finer loam with arts pestle
to grind from the non-fugitive earth under our feet a permanent and specifically local
294
colour. And to get rooted in it in every sense of the word.

Following Pounds direction, I look to the possibilities of exploring every sense of getting
rooted in this place. By Curnows logic, those who get to root are indigenised by a
Nationalist insistence on robust masculinity and a willingness to submit ones soul to the
ancient temple of the New Zealand earth.295 In the West Auckland vernacular that I grew up
with, however, to get rooting or to root around was to be rampantly sexual, a kind of crude
parody of that pastoral English euphemism: the sowing of oats. This sense of the word is
surely not lost on Pound. Trevor Bentleys reports of the prodigious breeding capacity of the
amalgamated unions of settler New Zealand seem to confirm the fact. There were those who
considered it their patriotic duty to populate desolate areas, working . . . to propagate,

292
A.R.D.Fairburn,lettertoCliftonFirth,23December1931,TheLettersofA.R.DFairburn,ed.ByLauris
Edmond(Auckland:OxfordUniversityPress,1981),60,citedbyPound,TheInventionofNewZealand,51.
293
Curnow,introductiontoThePenguinBookofNewZealandVerse,20.
294
Pound,TheInventionofNewZealand,53.
295
Ibid,51.
 113

increase and multiply the population.296 Determining who exactly is getting rooted (done-
over) by this process seems another matter entirely. Those left-over quantities of the
population, who fail to meet the bronzed (not pale, not brown), dirty (in mind and body) and
phallic standards of Nationalist New Zealand, are those who have been rooted, buggered,
or fucked by the definition of a real New Zealander. The exclusions are obvious, in the
heap of left-over bodies are the women, the homosexuals and the indigenous.

What is not obvious, however, is the way in which the literal insistence on dirt as identity
functions as a specific disavowal. The transfer of muck onto the body of the settler is part
and parcel of the template of masculinity that the identity New Zealander offers. The girding
of New Zealand identity around an acknowledged dirtiness to existence can make one feel
as though we in fact lack a disgust-drive. We are the realists, knee-deep in sheep-shit, who,
like King Southern, simply cannot afford to feel disgust at the crude and muddied state of our
footwear. Any afternoon listening to talkback radio will confirm the continuing ethic of
common-sense and mucking-in that much of the Pkeh male population still lives by in
relation to this country. I empathise with this sensibility enormously my sense of self-worth
is often grounded by my ability to get stuck-in. To empty the contents of the camping toilet
and to turn the compost heap. I take pride in performing these tasks without fuss. Im not
going to faint, or vomit. Im no genteel Englishwoman. I live here, thats why it doesnt gross
me out. This is my land. But this seemingly innocuous gesture of real living is the settlers
infrastructure of disgust. It is not that the disgust-drive is not present, but that segregating
those objects-of-disgust from oneself is entirely impossible, since the settler has to live in the
new place. Surrounded by the muck of settling in a new land with greasy indigenous
bodies and the filth of progress the drive to reject must be disavowed entirely. The muck,
and our approach of it, is never unmediated. Even if I am covered in it, the moment is
aestheticised: it can be made beautiful, dying, noble or real. So long as it brings me
closer to having been here all along.

296
TrevorBentleydescribesthewelldeservingreputation[ofPkehMori]asprodigiousbreeders.John
Howellfathered19childrenatJacobsRiverandJamesCoburn25childrenontheMokau.JackyMarmon
claimedtohaveraisedcoloniesofchildrenattheBayofIslandsandtheHokianga.Familiesofninechildren
(ThomasHalbert)totwelvechildren(JohnFaulkner)werethenorm.ManingwithfourchildrenandTapsell
withsixwereraritiesamongtheirpeersinPkehMori:TheExtraordinaryStoryoftheEuropeansWhoLived
asMoriinEarlyNewZealand(Auckland:Penguin,1999),204.
114|

Mucky Weeds and Possum Entrails: The Disgusted Eco-Nationalist

Getting covered in the muck, it seems, is a constitutive component of the Pkeh fantasy of
New Zealand living. If the test of national identity seems to depend on a masculine
willingness to get grubby, then this is strikingly concordant with the requirements of what
Franklin Ginn terms Eco-Nationalism, which is used here to describe our contemporary
approach to the environment in New Zealand. This departs somewhat from King Southerns
pioneer ethic of working the land in the name of progress. Getting into the muck of it all was
a welcome side-effect of transforming the land for civilized settlement, the flung dirt as a
badge-of-honor worn by the bush-clearing, earth-scorching, town-building Pkeh. Our
contemporary concern for preserving New Zealands native flora and fauna seems to
contradict these prior efforts. Importantly, however, the condition of the land remains the
mirror for our national identity, and the measure of our indigeneity is still tested by the
collection of dirt underneath our fingernails.

This dirt can be accrued through a stoic adherence to our natural environment as a site of

un-change, which requires a massive and constant project of national gardening. However,

this is no feminised colonial flower garden we are maintaining. We dont want imports. We

want the native New Zealand nature, un-touched, un-peopled and distinctively un-colonised.

This is that familiar masculine search for the real, which we can keep pure by preserving a

third of our country as conservation estates. This purification297 keeps the exotic from the

native, in search of some originary moment of pre-historic New Zealand wilderness. This is

Ginns eco-nationalist endeavour which requires sorting beings on a grand-scale. It

differentiates indigenous from alien, authentic from synthetic, and true from false. In

this way the Pkeh relation to the land bears no small amount of irony. By the measures of

indigeneity often called upon in contemporary discourse (my grandparents were born here),

the possum has been here for almost 200 (marsupial) generations.298 This makes them more

297
Thetermpurificationisdoublyloadedhere.Firstly,itrecallsBrunoLatourscosmologicalandnational
sortingprocessasoneofpurification,inwhichthingsofnaturearedifferentiatedfromthingsofsociety.(See
BrunoLatour,WeHaveNeverBeenModern(Massachusetts:HarvardUniversityPress,1993).Ifnaturecanbe
isolatedfromtheworldofpolitics,fromthehistoryofsettlementandultimatelyfromthepresenceofpeople
thenwecangosomewaytoerasingthesehistoriesfromourmemory.PurityisalsodeemedtobeNew
Zealandvaluebythe100%PureNewZealandadvertisingcampaignlaunchedbyTourismNewZealandin
1999.ThiscampaignrecentlycelebrateditsdecadelongsuccessinapublicationPureAs,whichdirectlylinked
itslongevitytotheunderlyingtruthofNewZealandasanauthenticcountry[and]...landscape.
298
Brushtailedpossumswereintroducedin1827tostimulatethegrowthofthefurtradeinNewZealand.The
femalebeginstoreproduceat12months,andwithnopredatorsinNewZealandandanamplesupplyoffresh
 115

indigenous than me. But eco-nationalism prevents the application of settler logic across the

human-animal divide. The implication is that if we muck in ever more fervently, elbows deep

in weeded kikuyu, ginger, gorse, and the fragrant carcasses of possums, our own status as

settlers here will go unnoticed. Once weeded of exogenous others, including ourselves,

nature can become scenery for our appreciation, a static original moment of time and a

museum we can tramp through. The moment that this scene preserves is loaded with

extraordinary significance. It is a-political, a-historical and a-cultural. It is a passionate

ground on which Mori and Pkeh can meet. Lets all agree, its a great country we live in.

Sinking our fingers into the earth, planting a kauri, and pulling up the kikuyu is the means of

turning a settler into a native. With muddy hands on hips we can admire the view with

satisfaction. Mutual reverence for the authenticity of the land itself can thus act as the

reference point for our national identity.299

The passion with which we regard this place as a special and unique natural environment

is counter-balanced by the aggressive removal of perceived threats to this estate. The

Department of Conservation has a vigorous regime of ordering and managing our non-

human objects in order to prevent a messy and hybridised nature. The management regimes

are overwhelmingly directed toward keeping New Zealand biodiversity native and pure.

Ginn levels three criticisms at this eco-nationalist imagining of nature. The first is on grounds

that it is ideological, constructing wilderness as an elsewhere both spatially (nature is over-

there) and temporally (nature is an object from back-in-the-day). The second criticism that

econationalism is simply, in Ginns estimation, ecologically wrong300 is because it assumes

a closed and steady-state eco-system model. This forces an ecological divide between

native and exotic biota, but assigning these dual set of signs to a vast world of things is

seemingly arbitrary, when one considers the complex behaviours of fauna in an open

ecosystem.301 The third critique is that the performance of eco-nationalism is ontologically

problematic, in that it assumes that the rational human culture has the autonomy to

greeneryandnativebirdstofeedon,thereispotentialforthepossumtobreedprodigiouslyinthiscountry.By
thislogic,in2027,200generationsofpossumswillhaveinhabitedtheseshores.
299
FranklinGinn,Extension,Subversion,Containment:EcoNationalismand(Post)colonialNatureinAotearoa
NewZealand,TransactionsoftheInstituteofBritishGeographers33,no.3(2008).
300
Ibid,7.
301
Ginnusestheexampleofgorse,whichhasbeenvilifiedasaninvasiveexoticandyetitcaninfactplayan
importantroleinunderstoreyplantregeneration,whereasanedgedwellingpioneeritsheltersyoung
natives.Ibid.
116|

differentiate authentic nature from synthetic culture (which includes introduced species, as

an extension of human settlement). As an ideological, inaccurate and ontological force, eco-

nationalism feeds a resentment and a revulsion toward those beings it determines to be

threatening outsiders to the definition of the national interior.

Disgust enters eco-nationalism in two significant ways. The outsider is made both physically

and morally revolting, by virtue of their populating presence. Weeds and invaders are

understood as biota who have the potential for excess by decimating the resources of their

native competition. As a result, the disgusted response is actively encouraged by eco-

nationalist discourse. Take for example our national ecological villain, the possum.

Decorating our highways with possum intestines seems to have become a national sport.

Their inner organs are strewn across our main highways and this fact is a celebrated as the

necessary eradication of a threatening invader. An exhibition at the Wellington National

Museum Te Papa demonstrated precisely the gleeful sentiment New Zealand bears toward

possum extermination. The exhibit displayed the stages of road-kill decay, from the fresh

meat of the possum carcass right up to its eventual dissolution into a tarsealed grave.302 The

visceral disgust that the exhibition sought to elicit was a function of the ontological status of

the animal itself. To attempt the same exhibition with a native bird a takahe or a kea, for

example, would be virtually impossible. Our performance of eco-nationalism could only ever

cast these species as indigenous victims, as footage of a possum devouring a keas remains

posted on the Department of Conservation website demonstrates. The short film is designed

to demonstrate the extraordinary cruelty of the possum as night-predator, levelling a further

moral disgust at the stealthy intruders activities.

We seem entirely willing to inspect the revolting innards of what we deem exotic and

invasive species, but we are unwilling to turn this scrutiny onto the native bodies of this

place (not only birds, but Mori, and Pkeh). The Pkeha cannot be rendered as an

invader, lest his eradication become the necessary result of his own eco-nationalist project.

Our fuzzy bottom line for indigeneity makes eco-nationalism a specifically settler-colonial

condition of national forgetting. If we can employ amnesia in relation to how we arrived, it is

all the easier to be outraged at the invasion of this place by others. It is on this basis that

302
Ibid,14.
 117

exotic and invasive species are rendered as refugees and nomads . . . antithetic to the

modern nation state rootless and cultureless, this renders them killable.303 In our moment

of blood-thirsty disgust for the weeds that invade our land, we enact a transfer of

settlement. This transfer is the supplanting of historically layered relations to place in favour

of a fixe[d] nature . . . external to colonialism.304 As human inhabitants, we rise to (our own)

nationalist call to defend this nature from the realities of an open and shifting ecosystem.

The transfer is also one of dirt onto the settler body, a kind of front-line ethos of working with

nature against a common enemy. In this, the wilderness-appreciating tramper and the

zealous backyard gardener are united by their vision of New Zealands natural environment.

The mud on their boots and in the creases of their fingers tells them so: they value nature,

and themselves, as native originals.

The irony of the dirt-transfer analogy for settlement is that despite the physical muck it coats

on the soles of ones boots, there is a seeming disavowal of what Ginn terms the muddled

geography of the open environment.305 Where an ecosystem is understood as a network of

flows, which are relational to one another, the idea of Latours natureculture is helpful. The

natureculture concept gives (human, animal, vegetable and mineral) objects a quality of

relational agency within a network. The binaries of the Maoriland/Modernist antagonism

would here be dissolved into a set of mudd[y] . . . notions . . .[where] prehistoric survivor

lives quite happily with exotic invader.306 The battery of oppositions that settler-colonialism

sets up: Moriland/Modernist, imported/local, synthetic/authentic, imaginary/real, clean/dirty,

irrational/rational, feminine/masculine and disembodied/embodied must be re-contextualised

in terms of muddied and porous borders. This is the condition of mutual infecting and

inhabiting by which settlement studies has defined itself. This mucky co-inhabitance of self

and other is taken up in Chapter Six, where the human migration of perceived Third World

others is met with an embodied nationalist disgust. Ien Angs criticism levelled at this disgust

bears striking similarity to Ginns muddy realities of the natureculture. For Ang, the national

idealized fantasy of . . . purified squeaky clean utopia . . . blinds us to the always less-than-

303
Ibid.
304
Ibid,15.
305
FranklinGinn,ColonialTransformations:Nature,ProgressandScienceintheChristchurchBotanic
Gardens,NewZealandGeographer65(2009):42.
306
Ginn,Extension,Subversion,Containment,15.
118|

perfect messiness of daily life in social space. As this chapter has argued, the continuity of

the affect of disgust in New Zealand reveals the repeated disavowal of these messy

inhabited spaces in our Moriland fantasy, our masculine real and our contemporary eco-

nationalism.
 119

Chapter Six

The Abject Migrants

According to the function of disavowal in which disgust presents itself in a New Zealand
context, the lamentations of a disappearing noble race that the term Moriland suggests
appear not so squeaky clean after all. In Alison Wongs The Earth Turns Silver, set in the
early twentieth century, her Chinese protagonist Yung compares the inevitable wip[ing] out
of the dark-skinned people to a white handkerchief wip[ing] sweat from the face.307 If we
recall Lawsons Mori as greasy brutes, then the image is apt. The clean colonial kerchief
wipes the brow of the nation, cleansing away the embodied realities of the place to reveal
the clean (white) face of the nation. Extending our analysis from Chapter Five, this quality of
sweatiness is doubly loaded in the Moriland gesture. The sweat is a marker of the settlers
anxiety, suggesting the tenuous position of being a foreign body in a new place. He is
unsettled, ashamed and disgusted. But the sweat also stands for an in-bodiment of place. It
is the slick and oily presence of the indigenous inhabitants, the bodies one finds in a place
that is already occupied. Even as these bodies are wiped out, however, the settlers anxiety
cannot be laid to rest. Contrary to Morilands literary representations, there are more than
departing brown and arriving white bodies in settler New Zealand. Indeed, Wongs text
addresses a much more pressing threat to the Pkeh body politic than the indigenous
problem. Her characters are the despised Chinese settlers of the 1910s in Wellington, and
the visceral disgust expressed toward their presence is undisguised.

Wongs text plots the doomed romance that develops between Chung-Yung, a Chinese
settler, and Katherine McKechnie, a Pkeh widow. The inter-racial trope might evoke the
amalgamated romances of the Moriland era, but Wongs heroine bears no small degree of
postcolonial skepticism toward racial stereotypes. Katherine is a seeming model of racial
inclusion when set against her male counterparts, who must bear the affective burden of
disgust to compensate for Katherines remarkable tolerance. This disgust is expressed most
fervently by Wongs inclusion of the historical figure Lionel Terry, who famously murdered
Joe Kum-Yung in Haining Street in 1905. His original poetry is preserved in Wongs text, and
is worth quoting in full.

307
AlisonWong,AsTheEarthTurnsSilver(Auckland:PenguinGroup,2009),14.
120|

See, advancing, grim, relentless, as a scourge sent forth from hell,

Comes the blighting curse of Mammon, in the white mans land to dwell;
Mongol, Ethiop, nameless horror, human brute from many a clime,
Vomited from earths dark pestholes; bred of plague, diseases, and crime.
Swathed in rags and noisome odours, gaunt and fleshless, dwarfed of limb,
Visages like the grisly jackal seeking dead midst shadows dim;
See the horde of drug besotten, sin begotten, fiends of filth,
Swarming oer thy nations bulwarks; pillaging thy nations wealth.

The narrative displacement of the disgust-drive onto Terry and his chief followers (Donald,
Katherines revoltingly portrayed husband,308 and Robbie, their son) is as essential for the
flowering of the forbidden romance as it is necessary to acquire the sympathies of a twenty-
first century New Zealand readership. These sympathies are garnered, however, on the
comforting assumption that the rhetoric around Chinese immigration is now more
enlightened. Terrys sentiments are the misguided beliefs of a different time, a colonial past.
This flagrant racism can be contextualized, disavowed, and made ridiculous. I attended a
central city Auckland school, with a high Chinese quota. It is impossible to define the fellow
occupants of my seventh-form calculus class as fiends of filth vomited up by the earth, or
as odorous beasts threatening to overwhelm and thieve the natural resources of the nation.
Surely we can hold Wongs prize-winning book under our arm and congratulate ourselves.
Our country has come a long way. If a Chinese New Zealander is now receiving national
literary prizes, then those real and masculinist notions that have plagued our national
literature must have been (at least somewhat) dismantled.

This chapter seeks to debunk these notions of a national arrival at multicultural tolerance, by
examining the contemporary climate of disgust rhetoric by which immigrant communities are
understood in New Zealand. Utilising Ghassan Hages concepts of limits of tolerance and
cultural capital, the presence of this disgust will be read as a specifically nationalist project
of identity forming. Extending Hages analysis of the limitations placed on the inclusion of a
Third World-looking community in a multicultural state, the implications of the smells, tastes
and sounds the migrant body brings to a place will be explored as overtly disgust-driven
limits of inclusion. Aversive racism is here understood as a multisensory endeavor. By

308
Thedisgustresponseseemstoworkasakindofchainreaction.DonaldpossessesthearchetypicalPkeh
maleviewsofhistime(LionelTerryenjoyedvastpopularsupportforhisovertlyracistviewpoint).Alongside
Terry,heisdisgustedbythepresenceoftheChineseinNewZealand.InturnKatherineisdisgustedbyDonald,
whoseangrydispositionandsexistremarksmakehimanextraordinarilyundesirablecharacter.Heisred
face[d]andconstantlycriticalofhiswife.Hereek[s]ofwhiskyandtobaccoandatonepointKatherine
disfavourablycompareshimtoagiantsnail,with...awaxedmoustache,slimingacrosstheroom.(29)Her
intercoursewithhimamountstoaroughgropingandthrustingofbodypartswhichleavesherwet,
suddenlycoldwithhissweat.Ibid,50.
 121

following William Millers examination of George Orwell, we can begin to understand the
crippling stalemate which inclusion meets in the face of the undeniable odor of the Other.
Orwells unassailable disgust in his olfactory encounter with the lower classes will suggest
that the impassable exclusion of the Other is based on the smells of the migrant body. The
involuntariness of this embodied response is here made to bear the political
(ir)responsibilities of colonial continuity in New Zealand.

Swamped with Immigrants: The Persistence of Disgust

A survey of the public profiling of Chinese immigrants over the last twenty years, however,
would beg to differ. The characterization of immigration post-1987 legislation as an Inv-
Asian was a popular design in the media. Opinion polls of the early and mid-nineties
suggested aversion to not only Asian immigration, but also Asian investment, and Asian
tourists.309 Winston Peters was to capitalize on this aversive sentiment, equating immigrants
as gatecrashers from an alien culture310 with whom our country will be swamped if they
choose to let them share in our resource-rich bounty.311 The invasory rhetoric rehearses
some of Terrys accusations, as a 2006 article in North and South demonstrates, since

in the past fifteen years weve opened our borders to people from North Asia and all
they needed was money and a clean bill of health . . . they also brought murder,
extortion, kidnapping, assassinations and disease. Welcome to New Zealand, the new
home of Asian drug runners, illegal suburban brothels, health cheats, student P
312
pushers, business crooks and paua smugglers.

Seemingly, these Asian immigrants are still disease-riddled, crime-addled and greed-driven.
They continue to pillage [our] nations wealth. A culture of looting has been cast as an
essentially Asian phenomenon, and thus the plenitude of our natural resources is deemed to
be at stake. Immigration is to blame, then, for ecosystem depletion since Asian people
come in and their culture is to take everything.313 They buy up our coastline, they overfish,

309
M.McKinnon,ImmigrantsandCitizens:NewZealandersandAsianImmigrationinHistoricalContext
(Wellington:VictoriaUniversityPress,1996),6061.
310
WinstonPeterswasquotedinanAustralianNewspaperasaccusingskilledAsianimmigrantsoftaking
employmentandeducationalopportunitiesfromrightfulNewZealanders.WinstonPetersasquotedinLouise
Williams,ClarksBirdintheHand,TheSydneyMorningHerald,July22,2002,
http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/
311
LeaderoftheNewZealandFirstParty,WinstonPeters,deliveredaspeechtothiseffectintheleadupto
the2002generalelection,rehearsingantiimmigrantandantiAsianargumentswhichhadmappedhis
meteoricrisetopopularityinthe1996elections.In1996,herosetothepositionofDeputyPrimeMinisterdue
topopularsympathyforhisvisionofmaintainingawhitefacetoNewZealand.Thisspeechwasdeliveredata
PublicMeetingintheKilbirnie/LyallBayCommunityCentre.Rt.HonWinstonPeters,ImmigrationMatters,
June5,2002,transcript,ScoopIndependentNews,http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0206/S00046.htm.
312
DeborahCoddington,AsianAngst,NorthandSouth:NewZealandsLifestyleMagazine,December1,
2006,38.
313
K.Scherer,CalltoTeachAsiansAboutTreaty,EveningPost,Wellington,1994,3.
122|

and they collect shellfish above quota not for their kids, but for their businesses.314 Its no
wonder Tau Henare (NZ First Mori MP) declared Asian immigration to be tantamount to the
raping [of] our coastline.315

The call to protect our native resources from the invading multitude of profit-driven
unscrupulous Asian immigrants is recast in the environmental metaphors that describe the
problem itself. If immigration is uncontrolled, then immigrants are the horde, the swarm,
the torrent, which are swamping the demographic make-up of New Zealand. The complaint
is made on grounds of quantity, which Ghassan Hage explains as the limit of tolerance. The
limit of tolerance is a principle bedded into state narratives of nationalist inclusion of
minorities, such as multiculturalism. The tolerance threshold, Hage explains, is an arbitrary
ceiling beyond which is excess. Too many is a loss of control for the tolerant inclusionary
(distinctively white) majority, who might lose their subjectivity and the power they possess to
manage space. One Chinese family moving in down the road is celebrated as difference in a
community. Three families moving in is tolerated. A whole street occupied by Chinese-
owned homes begins to suggest a threat to the nation-space. The threat is of numerical
jeopardy. It threatens the right of the white inhabitants to be the speaking subject, who
decides to tolerate or value the ethnic minority. This logic is the quantitative valuing to
disgust that parallels the work of Miller, as he identifies disgust in the natural world:

A single weed . . . is unlikely to be disgusting; but a host of them is a different matter,

much as the difference in affect raised by one cockroach and a thousand, one social
inferior and a convocation of them . . . [A]ny large assembly of the low that has not
been authorized by the high, ha[s] the capacity to generate uneasiness and on
316
occasion even to disgust.

The premise of revulsion for that which is low, is a measure of excess. In excess, the object
of disgust threatens to overwhelm the very disgusted subject, and to reverse their
positionality entirely. Disgust-for-other is elicited on fear of losing the power (and the socially
mandated right) to demonstrate this disgust at all.

The metaphor of Asian immigration as a kind of uncontrolled introduction of exotic weeds is

strikingly functional. A weed is a presence defined by its objectionable qualities. It possesses
neither use [n]or beauty and is regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth
of superior vegetation.317 The superior growths on (and in) New Zealand soil, then, must be

314
NZPA,AsiansRapeCoast,SaysHenare,ThePress,Christchurch,1994,7.
315
NZPA,AsiansRapeCoast,SaysHenare,ThePress,Christchurch,1994,7.
316
Miller,TheAnatomyofDisgust,42.
317
TheOxfordEnglishDictionaryOnline,s.v.Weed,accessedJuly3,2011,
http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/226761.
 123

either the useful and progressive settler, or the beautiful and dying native (See Chapter
Five). The inferior quotient of New Zealand society is that which is excluded by the bi-
cultural definition of our national racial character. Despite the longevity of the Chinese
presence in New Zealand, Manying Ip comments that by majoritarian Pkeh standards, the
Chinese are still (and always will be) new and foreign [since] . . . New Zealand has not yet
worked through its national identity, and the presence of a sizeable group of culturally
different people is a constant challenge. 318 The challenge is to reconcile the official
biculturalism with the de facto multiculturalism of the New Zealand nation state, and the
solution is to prioritize the definition of national identity via a system of historical linearity. By
this model, the Pkeh-Mori issue must be resolved prior to a debate on multiculturalism,
which is a linear simplicity that Shuchi Kothari characterizes as a fundamental avoid[ance of]
talking [about multiculturalism] in this place.319

The explici[t] deferral of multiculturalism in New Zealand is a national condition to which

Kothari strenuously objects.320 Kotharis position suggests her belief in the success of a truly
multicultural state of New Zealand, one based on the equal recognition of the cultural
specificities and national rights of all minority communities (Mori included). Kothari and
Pearsons ideal multiculturalism is both attentive (to the peculiarities of difference) and
pragmatic (with regard to the demographic reality of migrants in New Zealand). This
multiculturalism is differentiated from a boutique multiculturalism, which Kothari and
Pearson stridently critique in the New Zealand fusion food culture. Boutique
multiculturalism subsumes (and as we shall see later in the chapter, con-sumes) certain
desirable components of difference into the dominant mainstream culture. Kothari and
Pearson admit, however, that Mori culture is equally subject to the cultural tokenism of a
self-selected and self-congratulatory Pkeh identity in New Zealand. Whilst admitting that
the degree, intensity and implementation of Treaty commitment toward an indigenous
community falls well short of the bi-cultural obligation of Mori cultural sovereignty in
everyday life, here the authors reach the limits of their empathy.321 The implication is that

318
ManyingIp,MoriChineseEncounters:IndigineImmigrantInteractioninNewZealand,AsianStudies
Review27,no.2(June2003):249.
319
InaninterviewwithUniversityLecturerShuchiKothariintheInsideNewZealandDocumentaryon
ImmigrationentitledChinks,CoconutsandCurryMunchers,Kotharicommentsonthenationalresistanceto
talkaboutmulticulturalismwhichistheresultofaneedtosort...outMoriPkehrelationsfirst.As
Kothariargues,youcantdoitinalinearway[sincethereisnow]...defactomulticulturalismhere.Shuchi
Kothari,Chinks,CoconutsandCurryMunchers,InsideNewZealand,interviewwithShuchiKothari,directed
byLibbyHakaraia,airedNovember14,2002(Auckland,NZ:KiwaProductions,2002),VHS.
320
ShuchiKothariandSarinaPearson,MenusforaMulticulturalNewZealand,Continuum:JournalofMedia
andCulturalStudies21,no.1(March2007):47.
321
Ibid.
124|

the constitutionally ratified rights of Mori should not be privileged over those of their fellow
immigrant populations in New Zealand. This standpoint characterizes the make-up of the
New Zealand population as one of dominant majority accompanied by sub-dominant
minorities, and reduces the equation of ethnic recognition to ostensibly one of here, or not
here. This assumption supports an ignorance of the historical context to how we all got
here, and explicitly denies the rights and histories of Mori as first peoples in this place, a
knowledge which is integral to the context of immigrant presence, which implies Pkeh to
be as Other as every other immigrant.

As I argue here, the disgust-complex functions differently toward what it perceives as first
and third comers to this nation. Pkeh were second in the queue. The condition of
settlement requires a clearing of space for the second settler identity, which bears the
asymptotic quality of tending as closely as possible to, but never quite touching, the quality
of First-ness in this place. As chapter five has argued, by developing an aesthetics of
nostalgia toward Mori, the disgust for the native is disavowed by a sense of respect for their
authentic (and disappearing) traditions, an implicit cultural (and actual) death. Such a
disavowal makes room for the thriving life of a new race in New Zealand, which is supplied
by the presence of the hard-working settler body in the land, mucking in and getting native.
By contrast, the disgust for the Third-comer manifests itself overtly. This bears resemblence
to Kotharis description of the immigrant consciousness as one of personal exceptionalism,
since every immigrant is the last one in the door . . . want[ing] to get in and close the door
behind them.322 The difference, however, is one of specifically white colonial disgust, which
marks the bodies of other Third-comers as defiled by their Third World-ness. As we shall see,
the reaction to Third-comers as abject migrants is explicitly related to the settler problem of
establishing a national identity which obscures their own colonial history of immigration. This
thesis cannot follow Kotharis direction and lump Mori in with the rest of the disadvantaged
minorities, because it argues that the problem of bodily disgust is not simply one of white
majority versus revolting others. Rather, the disgust-complex in which my Pkeh body is
implicated is an embodied condition of settler-colonialism, which bears a specific historical
and place-based context of making oneself at home in a place, uninvited.

The analogy of New Zealand to a home begs the question of who is the host and who is the
guest. Garth George of the New Zealand Herald argued that his unwillingness to assimilate
alien cultures could be justified by the analogy of his (White, Pkeh) self as host. I am
careful whom I invite into my home. Because its my home I am entitled to be choosy. And

322
Kothari,Chinks,CoconutsandCurryMunchers,VHS.
 125

New Zealand is as much my home as the house I live in. New Zealand Chinese comedian
Raybon Kan retorts in an essay entitled Can Immigrants Please Be Less Foreign? that
society is not a house.323 This pin-pricking remark disguises Kans real objection, that the
Chinese faces next door cannot be considered guests by virtue of their Asian-ness alone.
As he roundly sums up: if you dont want to live next to Chinese people, get out of our
country! 324 Ip adds the third category of gate-crasher to the guest/host debate, a
distinction which clarifies the obligations of manners required by those who are here in the
home, discerning whether the guest is an innocent victim of domestic arguments [between
Mori and Pkeh] or someone who is conspiring to subvert the status of the host.325
Whilst Ip demands that the rights and liabilities of these [Chinese] guests need[s] to be
clarified, I would suggest characterizing the host as a distinctively Mori indigenous body is
an important part of this clarification. In dealing with the differences of Pkeh disgust
toward both Mori host and migrant guest, this thesis hopes to open up a discussion
obscured by Kotharis mosaic multiculturalism. In this discussion, it is the Pkeh body
which has ostensibly gate-crashed this place, and assumed responsibility for those who are
allowed in and those who are kept out, for discerning those who are beautiful and those who
are disgusting, as a means to emerging as the deserving host of this place after all.326

Not white enough: Hages multicultural limit on national capital

If the lingo of multiculturalism is an unspoken dialect in New Zealands bi-cultural politics, it

might be because of the affective thickness of the issues at stake. Perhaps we are not
speaking because we are simply that revolted. Disgust is leveled not only at the immigrants
themselves, but with the concept of multicultural recognition per se, as one kuia interviewed
by Ip reveals:

We are marginalized enough! Now theres suddenly a whole lot of other ethnic groups,
and I have to say, much more fuss is made over them than over us. Every other group
327
of immigrants who came in, gets mollycoddled. Thats just disgusting!

323
RaybonKan,CanImmigrantsPleaseBeLessForeign?,AnAsianatmyTable(Auckland:PenguinGroup,
2004),32.
324
RaybonKan,Chinks,CoconutsandCurryMunchers,StandupcomedyperformedbyRaybonKan,VHS.
325
Ip,MoriChineseEncounters,251.
326
SeeTzeMingMokscharminglypersonalandconfrontationalargumentinherprizewinningessayfeatured
inLandfall,regardingtheplaceoftheAsianthirdcomerinasomewhatxenophobicandPkehdominant,
MorimarginalethnicmakeupinNewZealand.TzeMingMok,RaceYouThere,Landfall208:NewAge
(2004):1826.
327
InterviewwithkuiaonJuly11,2001,quotedinIp,MoriChineseEncounters,249.
126|

If this speaker is revolted by the governments mollycoddling, they are figuring the state as
an excessively affectionate and protective mother of migrant communities. In this
construction, the issue appears to resemble one of parental favoritism. The filial insecurity,
which breeds aversion toward inclusive migrant policies is funded by a sociopolitical system
where the power of whiteness remains largely invisible and unquestioned.328 The problem, it
seems, stems from the assumed whiteness of the parents themselves.

In Hages text White Nation, the power of whiteness in the project of nation-making is
interrogated in order to unveil the discourse of internal orientalism that functions within an
outwardly multicultural system.329 As Hage maintains, the aversive sentiment that arises
from reaching ones limit of tolerance is specifically related to the perceived scarcity of
territorial space. Too many migrants cannot exist in the abstract, it must be related spatially
to the speaker.330 The concern is not simply that the white racial majority will be swarmed,
but that the privilege of whiteness in relation to a territory is at risk. By this logic, Hage
redefines an anti-immigration stance as an instrument of nationalism rather than as an
instrument of racism. The nationalist assumes a certain right to parentage, or control over,
the design of the nation space. This right-to-design is the entitlement to decide on degrees of
inclusiveness (or exclusiveness) that the above accusation of minority mollycoddling
obscures. This presumption of white power reduces both indigenes and migrants to mere
national objects to be moved or removed according to White national will.331

This subject/object relation might express itself as a positive appreciation and celebration of
migrant difference, but it also assumes a dominant we which is divorced from, as opposed
to a part of, the object of diversity. This dominant community sustains an implicit power over
the others it purports to celebrate, such that it is never part of the multicultural mosaic;
everyone else is.332 The mosaic remains the property and design of the white majority, and
is notably organized around a series of visible signifiers. As Hage explains, the measure of
those who are in a state of national being (we New Zealanders) versus those who are in a
state of national possession (those minorities we include) is a visible differential: those who
are Third World-looking, and those who are not.333 If the principle is one of visible signifiers,

328
Ibid,250.
329
GhassanHage,WhiteNation:FantasiesofWhiteSupremacyinaMulticulturalSociety(Annandale,NSW:
PlutoPressAustralia,1998),17.
330
Ibid,37.
331
Ibid,18.
332
VijayMishra,Multiculturalism,TheYearsWorkinCriticalandCulturalTheory12(2004):181,doi:
10.1093/ywcct/mbh013.
333
Hage,WhiteNation,19.
 127

then the woolly category of Asian third-comers becomes coherent in a New Zealand context.
I, too, am guilty of using this category in a way which fails to define the contextual
specificities of the Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysian, Singaporean and Hong Kong
derived minorities which have settled in New Zealand. But I do so because the category is
so functionally coherent to the White Pkeh majority. It is the grounds on which the face of
a fourth generation Chinese New Zealander is conflated with the face of a Korean immigrant
of the late nineties wave, an error which induces the common reactionary assertion: so,
where are you from? 334 Ang argues that this constitutive curiosity about otherness
occupies an ambivalent territory.335 Whilst the intent is often of genuine interest in the face of
difference (a recognition, rather than a refusal), the question withdraws the possibilities of
obtaining Pkeh privilege, the freedom to be no one and no place in ways that non-
Pkeh are not.336

Whilst Pkeh are permitted the freedom to simply be, the face of the Other represented a
thing which is had by Pkeh society. Third World-faces are always representing diversity,
which is a quality possessed by Pkeh national community. The enquiry of where one is
from implies an appreciation of diversity, which differs from the equivalency of simply being
diverse.337 To be Third World-looking is to be an eternal object (a signifier of a diverse
condition) and thus to be considered the property of the national Pkeh subject. The Third
World-looking object can seemingly never gain sufficient cultural capital to enter this
community entirely. In an Inside New Zealand Documentary, bar manager Jagdis Ranchod
experienced a failure of accrued capital when a customer retorted dont call me mate, I dont
like it.338 Denied access to the mate-ship of popular New Zealand male identity, he was left
confused by the implied alternative he has available to him. His Indian-ness is too overt a
visual signifier to register as a Pkeh, but as a New Zealand-born Indian, he cant figure
out what they expect [him] to be.339 If hes not a mate, then the implication is that Jagdis

334
IenAngdiscussesthewaythatthisquestionmarksaprofoundlyambivalentqualitytomulticulturalism
whichenactsakindofsocialdanceperformingacuriosityofothernesswhichimpliesafailureoftotal
belonging.Manyofushavebecomeextremely(over)sensitiveaboutthisquestionbecause(weknowthat)it
isoftenaskedinthecontextofadenaturalizationofourstatusascoinhabitantsofthiscountryandthe
automaticassumptionthatbecausewedontquitefitintothestereotypicalimageofthetypicalAustralian,we
somehowdont(quite)belonghere.Asaresultweanticipate,oftencorrectly,thatthe(white)personasking
usthequestionwouldexpecttheanswertobesomedistant,alienorexoticland.IenAng,TheCurseofthe
Smile:AmbivalenceandtheAsianWomaninAustralianMulticulturalism,FeministTheory52(Spring1996):
43.
335
Ang,TheCurseoftheSmile,43.
336
KothariandPearson,MenusforaMulticulturalNewZealand,48.
337
Hage,WhiteNation,139.
338
JagdisRanchod,Chinks,CoconutsandCurryMunchers,interviewwithJagdisRanchod,VHS.
339
Ibid.
128|

should retreat into an essential and original Otherness constructed by his customer. The
specificities of this identity are puzzling: god knows what [or where] that thing is.
Regardless, we are left with the evidence of social exclusion. The test of mate-ship is one of
accumulated Whiteness, and Jagdis has failed.340 Jagdis was born in New Zealand. He
speaks with a New Zealand accent. He manages a pub that provides a den for the
expression of masculine nationalism, rugby-watching and beer-drinking. The sum total of
these nationalist proofs, however, remains insufficient in the eyes of the customer. Similarly
structured were the inflammatory remarks in 2010 of Paul Henry toward the Auckland-born
Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand. In his complaint that the loo[k] and sound of Sir
Anand begged the question if he was even a New Zealander, is the blatant assumption of a
national identity organized around the accumulation of whiteness.341 Even if Sir Anand had
spoken differently, the objection would be the same. He just isnt white enough to truly
belong here.

The Multisensory Recognition of the Third World Body

Whilst this example reveals a sight-based assessment of national insufficiency, I want to

argue that the Pkeh body recognizes Third World-ness in multiple embodied ways. To be
Third World-looking is one thing. As Ang explains, one cannot say no to Chineseness,
since the signifiers of yellow skin and slanty eyes (outward Chineseness) inevitably lead
to an assumption of an internal signified of cultural identity (inward Chineseness). This is the
same standard of cultural essentialism by which Jagdis is held hostage. The ethnic body
reads as a lack of New Zealand national capital, and this is inoffensive enough, until the
moment when this body pretends to an inclusion it cannot possess. At that moment, the gulf
of otherness is revealed: they are not one of our mates. Poking holes in this position is not
difficult, on grounds of an aversion based on visible discrimination. But what about aversion
based on the invisible signifiers of difference? Can the senses of smell, touch, sound and
taste be held as accountable for discrimination as sight? What if, for example, Martin Luther
Kings dream had been articulated as: a land where [we] will not be judged by the smell of
our skin, but by the content of our character.

In a New Zealand context, anecdotal examples spring to mind the complaint of a Pkeh
friend at the offensive volume at which a conversation between two Chinese students is held,

340
Hage,WhiteNation,67.
341
PaulHenry,InterviewwithJohnKey,Breakfast,airedOctober4,2010(Auckland:TelevisionNewZealand,
2010)quotedinCyrilWashbrook,TVNZsPaulHenrySlammedOverGovernorGeneralRemarks,TheSpy
Report:NewsfromMediaSpy,October4,2010,http://www.mediaspy.org/.
 129

the disgust that rises in me at the sound of phlegm being collected in the back of the throat
on High Street in Auckland (the pre-cursor of street spitting), the thick smell of curry caked
onto the curtains of a family-owned rental property that I cleaned after Indian tenants had left.
These are aversive moments to which my body responds, and they signify the whiteness of
my embodied condition. The scent of the curtains was itself a kind of nasal essentialism, I
experienced the smell as curry. Only after attending a vegan cooking course was I able to
identify the specific offending spice as fenugreek, which later began to excrete itself through
my own pores. The experience was disarming. My nose identified the smell as disgusting, as
a signifier of otherness of which an ethnic, othered body is usually the signified. At the time, I
was embarrassed to recognize that my olfactory disgust meant that the workings of my nose
were structured by a colonial sentiment. My very act of smelling myself was a form of
embodied racism. By Hages reckoning, rather, this smelling is an embodied nationalism a
realization of my bodys definition of Other-ness with regard to an established (scentless)
baseline of Pkeh -ness. My olfactory complaint that I dont smell like a New Zealander
anymore mirrors that of an Australian garbage collector in Marrickville, objecting that it
doesnt smell like Australia anymore around here, because of the peculiarities of
Vietnamese rubbish.342

The nationalist moment of my fenugreek emission reveals something about the apparent
multicultural tolerance of diversity through food incorporation. The seemingly benign . . .
invo[cation of] food whenever multiculturalism is represented, figures the Pkeh body as
corporeal microcosm of the national body, such that ingestion of butter chicken from the
local food-court signals the integration of the Indian community into New Zealand itself.343 As
Sneja Gunew points out, the trajectory of multiculturalism moves from bodily abjection to
bodily accommodation, in order to symbolize the incorporation of the other into the nation
proper. However there is an implication of macro-symbolic power here that is too great a
burden for the forkful of fragrant curry to bear. The act is reductive: eating is presumed to be
enough. Here the food becomes a displacement of dialogue, erasing the need for words
between national body and ethnic other to be exchanged at all. This is the oxymoron of food
and nationalism that bothers Kothari in New Zealand, that you can eat someones food . . .

342
Hage,WhiteNation,39.
343
SnejaGunew,TheMeltingPotofAssimilation:CannibalizingtheMulticulturalBody,inTransnationalAsia
Pacific:Gender,CultureandthePublicSphere,ed.ShirleyGeokLinLim,LarryE.Smith,andWimalDissanayake
(Urbana:UniversityofIllinoisPress,1999),151.
130|

and go on about, you know, this is such a good curry, man, and just hate the bastards at the
same time.344

The ambivalent politics of eating multi-culturally is taken up by Robyn Longhurst in her co-
authored article Using the Body as an Instrument of Research: Kimchi and Pavlova. In
exploring migrant women and food in Hamilton, Longhurst, Li and Johnston presented a
vignette of a shared lunch among migrants to demonstrate how the researcher is related to
an embodied cultural experience. In her account, Longhurst maps her bodily impulses of
desire or disgust in relation to the diverse fare offered. Her body objected in particular to the
digestion of spicy sheep stomach, but she found herself unable to express this aversion to
an enquiring host, an insincerity which she defines as an unspoken and unexplained
slippage between the food and the people at the lunch.345 To say no and it makes me feel
sick is tantamount to declaring no and you make me feel sick.346 This slippage between
food of the other and body of the other is an especially slippery slope when the food elicits a
smell on the body, just as the potent fenugreek on mine was to demonstrate.

At an Impasse of Inclusion: Smelly Otherness

The problem of disgust at smell is one articulated by George Orwell and picked up in William
Millers final chapter of The Anatomy of Disgust. Both men maintain that a bad smell exists
as an impassable barrier for the offended nose.

No feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred,

religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even
differences of moral code can be got over; but a physical repulsion cannot. You can
have affection for a murderer or sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man
347
whose breath stinks habitually stinks, I mean.

In the Documentary New Zealand production New Faces, Old Fears, it is this knowledge of
smell as cultural impasse that drove Korean immigrant Hyeeun Kim to stop eating Korean
food altogether upon arriving in New Zealand. For fear that potential employers and
community members from whom she strenuously sought approval would smell [her]
Kimchi, Hyeeun embarked on a personal endeavor to remove her traces of otherness,
which she experienced as having lost [her] identity. 348 To Hyeeun, suppression of her
offending breath is the necessary means by which to integrate. To be Third World-smelling

344
Kothari,Chinks,CoconutsandCurryMunchers,VHS.
345
RobynLonghurst,ElsieHoandLyndaJohnston,UsingtheBodyasanInstrumentofResearch:Kimchi
andPavlova,Area40,no.2(2008):212.
346
Ibid.
347
GeorgeOrwell,TheRoadtoWiganPier(NewYork:Harcourt,Brace,1958),128.
348
HyeeunKim,NewFaces,OldFears,DocumentaryNewZealand,interviewwithHyeeunKim,directedby
JohnBatesandManyingIp,airedJuly2004(Auckland:BatesProductionsLtd,2004),VHS.
 131

elicits disgust not only because it invades the spatial cavity of my nostrils with an undesirable
scent, but also because it is a signal of a body of the Other in the spatial territory of my
nation. It is a body of difference, and by my aversion I demonstrate an embodied act of
exclusion from the national Pkeh identity.

William Millers discussion of Orwell explores his failure to overcome the fragrant truth of
four frightful words . . . the lower classes smell.349 In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell
records his experience of living with a lower-class family above a tripe shop. This experiment
stands as his attempt to address, and to deconstruct, the disgust of the upper class with their
filthy lower class counterparts. The gesture is both personal (it is his own body), and
political (he wants to eradicate the embodied barriers to embracing the cause of socialism).
Orwells act is precisely the act of using body as instrument of research which Longhurst
and her colleagues so avidly promoted. In his seeking (and failing) to personally overcome a
feeling of revulsion for his surrounding squalor, Orwell has succeeded in injecting his text
with an undeniable gag-reflex. Gagging against his will and his powers of critical reflection,
Orwell is left surmising that there are, indeed, essential objects of disgust. Miller is inclined to
agree. He argues that some things are revolting, and it can be construed no other way by
the nose. To this effect, just because an odor might be socially constructed, does not mean
it is not there . . . it [remains] as long as the structures that gave rise to it [do].350

If the structures that give intent to my olfactory experience are indeed colonial (as I have
argued), then the odor is unlikely to dissipate. Once disgust has been registered, the
lingering fact of the migrant as abject is the precarious principle of their apparent inclusion.
In Multiculturalism and Colonial Continuity Andreas Krebs reflects that a politics of
recognition, whereby the marginalized other is incorporated into the body politic, is both a
conditional and circumscribed inclusion. The requirement . . . that he not smell is
accompanied by the clearing of a political terrain for him that ensures that his prior disgust
inducing habits will be strictly circumscribed.351 This is Hyeeung Kims understanding, that
her opportunities to inhabit a clearing in the national identity are reliant on the suppression
of her stinking breath. She must become a body that is not her own, one that does not smell,
or spit, or talk too loudly. Even then, the cultural capital accrued might be insufficient. As
Krebs duly notes, the circumscribed scent-less position is a precarious one, which the
dominant order can claim back in order to reinstate colonially developed hierarchies that

349
Orwell,TheRoadtoWiganPier,127;Orwellsitalics.
350
Miller,TheAnatomyofDisgust,248.
351
Krebs,MulticulturalismandColonialContinuity,105.
132|

equate difference with inferiority and continue to validate negative affective reactions to such
difference.352

Convenient Disgust: Ignoring Indigenes and Defining New Zealanders

As New Zealanders the aversion to this visible, olfactory and auditory difference requires
these colonial hierarchies in order to validate our continued settlement in this place. The
presence of migrant difference serves a specific purpose in the girding of our national
identity. By Hages terms, the Other is a convenient thorn in the side of the fantasy of a white
supremacy in Australia. Their convenience lies in their aptitude for blame, as an embodied
obstacle to the realization of this white nation fantasy. In New Zealand the matter is
different. The embodied presence of the Other is utilized to excuse our failure to arrive at bi-
cultural harmony. Third-comers have interrupted our progress toward the resolution of the
indigenous problem, the realities of settling in a place that was not ours for the taking. The
heralded arrival of this resolution is a spatial imaginary. If Moriland could be sublimely
conceived of as a space of emptiness (from which the natives depart), then Hages space
of fullness is an ontological condition of simply fattening our being in this place, of filling the
place up (with Pkeh). To see the promise of Pkeh indigeneity ful-filled, Treaty claims
must be resolved and the sins of settlement absolved.

The loud, smelly, spitting bodies that inhabit this place now suggest a nation-space which is
visibly filling, fast. Some would say it is on its way to being over-filled, to over-flowing. This is
the space of too-fullness that the presence of abject migrant bodies brings to bear. It is a
revolting reality, because it is makes all the more impossible our beautiful imaginary
articulated above. However, the visible existence of the third-comer performs a crucial
function in this imaginary destination. Hage argues that far from disturbing this fantasy, the
presence of the migrant face perpetuates it as fantasy, since it helps [the white Pkeh
majority] avoid having to face the impossible nature of what they are pursuing, the traumatic
kernel of the real, by constructing the other as that which stands in the way of its
attainment.353 To bypass the trauma of an actual attention to bi-cultural responsibilities, the
abject migrant is inserted into the picture. The apparent act of bringing the migrant into the
frame is the dummy-move of immigration policy. It is an invitation countered by a forcing-
back-outside of the borders of the national family portrait. This is the seeming moment of
inclusion that permits an actual exclusion from the national identity of what a New
Zealander looks, eats, smells, sweats, excretes and sounds like. This is the ambivalent

352
Ibid.
353
Hage,WhiteNation,74.
 133

gesture of being revolted by the Third Word body in this place. If we keep insisting with our
bodies that those abject migrants go home, we necessitate their presence as a welcome
distraction from the realities of our own condition as (uninvited) house-sitters in a Mori
home. We need to believe that they drive haphazardly on our roads. We require them to
spit near our shoes. We want them to reek of fenugreek and Kimchi. Since it is those who
disgust us [that] define who we are and whom we are connected with, the smelly fact of
Otherness is what makes me a New Zealander.354 The reality is that we need them too
downwind.355 In the alternative scenario, we might have to address the moral and affective
responsibilities our history leaves, and be made to realize the truth in the traces: colonialism
stinks.

354
Miller,TheAnatomyofDisgust,251.
355
Ibid.
134|

Epilogue

In writing about embodied colonialism, I have experienced a range of affective responses

from others, but they always seem to occur in a predictable series. Answering the keenly
enquiring stranger so, what is your thesis topic, exactly? I am met with nods of approval
at the mention of colonialism and disgust. I have their attention, and their sympathy for my
cause. The two terms quickly marry in the mind: firstly, colonial people were disgusted (by
anything other than themselves). Secondly, our colonial history is now disgusting to us, by
virtue of its cultural tunnel vision. On this we can agree. I find myself markedly less popular
as the conversation continues, usually about the point where I claim that colonialism itself is
a continuing force, especially in a New Zealand context. When I present the terms of my
argument, that this continuation is explicitly coded into our bodies as a disgust-complex, we
part ways entirely. How dare I go around telling them how their body behaves, that their eyes,
ears, mouths and nostrils bear the sensory hierarchies of colonial history.

My presumptuousness is met with a declaration of complete innocence. It would seem that

much of my audience is entirely immune from the affect of disgust, that it hardly bears a
presence in their lives, and especially not toward migrants. I have been told either that I
need to get out into the real world among real people in the community (rather than hiding
out in the academy, I presume) or that perhaps if I was more well-travelled my body would
become more politically correct, would stop being revolted by the smells of difference, for
example. It is a slippery slope from speaking of a continuing colonial aversion to a speedy
conversational diversion. I have lost my audience. Getting people to consider settler-
colonialism as more than ancient history is as challenging as suggesting that disgust as
more than simple biology. The impasse is seemingly that of their skin, at the moment their
own body is implicated in the act of disgusted colonialism. At the moment I threaten to cross
the border from the workings of my flesh, into the workings of theirs, I reach the limits of their
tolerance.

To return to our discussion of Douglas and Miller, a question could be posed. Is the aversion
of my listener invoked on grounds of matter-out-of-place (the academy invading the body) or
on its internal structure of ambivalence, of roiling life-soup? I would hope that the latter is the
case. I have attempted to address the ambivalent slippage of disgust itself in the design of
 135

the thesis. I have approached a long time scale, to slip between past and present. I have put
my own body into the text, in order to slip between critical writer and theoretical text. I have
addressed disgust as a hyphenated complex, a disgust-beauty amalgam, in order to prevent
its complete object-ness in a world of subjects like the stranger above. This kind of subject is
the one who lives in an enlightened post-colonial New Zealand, where others arent
disgusting, theyre just different. To write the slippage into my theoretical act is the challenge
to the self-declared tolerant and diverse society I inhabit. It is my means to keeping the
life-soup simmering in my text. Slippage is the informing principle for this thesis because
addresses a distinct ignorance of ambivalence within the practice of settler-colonialism and
the performance of disgust itself. Both fail to acknowledge the muck of the nature-culture in
which we exist where historical time is continuous, and where bodies are structurally
related to the places in which they live. This is how it comes about that embodied colonialism
obscures the conditions of its own production.356

I have attended to the ways in which critical discourse itself might obscure these conditions.
There are numerous ways that the critic themselves can slip-up in the mucky matrix, and in
the Pacific context this is largely because the filmy lens through which the critic looks
appears relatively clean, and transparent. This amounts to a faith in the primary texts, in the
things-they-saw and the disgust or desire they felt towards those things. In the colonial
Pacific, the glut of sexualized (both abject and excessive) femininity in the archive has
obscured the potential for speaking about more embedded societal disgusts, those directed
toward homoerotic possibility. In the discussion of cannibal literature, discourse itself
becomes a dirty word. Paul Moon accuses Gananath Obeyesekere of obscuring the literal
reporting of people-eating-people in the Pacific. Moons unshakeable faith that the record
from which he draws is not dirtied with context, inter-text and subtext is the means by which
he obscures from himself the production of his own disgust at cannibalism, and hence the
colonial assumptions which inform it.

In the New Zealand context, the critical slip-ups are what inform our national identity. The
presumption that the feminine nostalgia of the Moriland literature has been abandoned is
exemplified by a nationalist disgust. The way in which this disgust is explained is as a
function of the Moriland penchant for beauty, for fairytale romance and noble dying
savages. Disavowing this aesthetic beauty is understood as a rejection of aesthetics entirely,
as providing vital access to real New Zealand, both site-specific and unique. The disgust
leveled at the past, however, obscures the way in which the present is similarly aestheticised.

356
Veracini,SettlerColonialism,14.
136|

Settler-colonialism is indeed a thing which transfers people from one site to another without
recall of this fact-of-origin. Framing up an identity of the real New Zealander as an anti-
aesthetic gesture, as an authentic kiwi bloke, is a means to this amnesiac settlement. The
literal transfer of dirt to pioneer skin, mingled with the sweat of hard work in the land,
performs the necessary pinocchio miracle. By abandoning the wooden Romantic
conventions of the colonial settler, and getting stuck into the truth of the land, these men
earn the right to become real New Zealanders masculine, sweating and dirty. This thrilled
nationalistic grubbiness is echoed in the environmental practices in present-day New
Zealand, the eco-nationalist discourse we inhabit. Assuming ourselves already in-the-muck,
we obscure the arbitrary order we impose on the natural world by dividing native originals
from exotic imposters. Our aversion to a nature contaminated by weeds obscures the
logical inconsistency of settlers themselves here. As imported quantities ourselves, by what
right do we impose this strict regime of indigenous authenticity on our natural environment?
The slippage between categories of culture and nature, self and other, native and exotic,
human and animal, and past and present is here obscured by a disgusted nationalism for the
non-indigenous.

This is nowhere more evident that in both our official and unofficial resistance to the de facto
multiculturalism that immigration has wrought on our nation state. The aversion to the visible
presence of Third World-looking migrants in New Zealand is no secret. Only a week before
this thesis was published, the national media was inflamed with news of a young Saudi
Arabian student refused a bus-ride in Wellington because she was wearing a full-face burqa,
or niqab.357 Bus discrimination bears a loaded history in other countries, but there are few
heroes of the Rosa Parks variety in our national history. However, the burqa/bus incident
bears similarities to the story of Angela Zivkovic, a Dalmation-New Zealander who suffered
bus-discrimination in the 1980s. At age eleven, the bus driver forced her off the school bus
because of the offending stench of her garlic breath.358 The stakes are somewhat different in
Angelas case. The animosity toward burqas bears its own post-9/11 paranoia of invisible

357
PaulHolmesdemonstratesbothfearandrevulsiontowardtheniqabinhisNewZealandHeraldarticle.For
Holmes,theburqajustlookssillybuttheniqaborfacemaskisadifferentmatter,itisintimidating.This
intimidationisderived,accordingtoHolmes,fromtheassumptionofsuperiorityinMuslimwomenwhichis
thebasisforresistingassimilationintomainstreamNewZealandculture.Heappropriatesthevoiceofthe
Muslimwomaninordertoarguehiscase.Iamnotpartofyourfilthyheathencommunity.Imhereenjoying
alloftheprivilegestheenlightenedWestcanprovide,butIdontreallyapproveofyouallandhavenodesire
tobepartofyou.Iamhappytobealongwayfromtheatrocities,monstronsitiesandmedievalismofthe
countryIfled,butstill,Icannotbepartofyou.PaulHolmes,NoPlaceHereForBurqa,NewZealandHerald
July9,2011,http://www.nzherald.co.nz/crime/news/article.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10737262.
358
KothariandPearson,MenusforaMulticulturalNewZealand,53.
 137

bodies, and hence invisible terrorist threats to national security. Angelas is a distinctly
sensory aversion pertaining to ethnic difference. Unlike the burqa, Angelas problem is not
visual. Of European origin, she lacks the signifiers of visibility that would permit her to be
discriminated against as Third World-looking. Besides, one could argue, that wouldnt
happen now. Garlic is now everyday in the New Zealand diet. But this is the slippery moment
of obscured exclusion. The use of literal involution of ethnic food as a metaphor for minority
recognition in the nation-state is a poor analogy. Multiculturalism is not simply conjured in
the act of eating a curry. Rather, the impasse of inclusion remains in the receptors of the
Pkeh nasal cavity, in which the smell of ethnicity is recognized as undeniably Other. The
aversions of the nose turn out to be the symbol of the disgust-matrix: the ultimate embodied
structure of a colonial present.

To this end, this thesis gestures towards other interesting and more detailed projects of
embodied national identity in contemporary New Zealand. My emphasis here has been to
demonstrate the continuations of colonial past and colonial present, by attending to the
disavowal of and appeal to an embodied condition of being in place. With this premise of
continuity established, there is potential to explore the peculiarities of specific Pkeh
aversions with regard to different sectors of the migrant community, which the limits of space
in this thesis could not accommodate. This thesis also leaves space for an object-based
account of disgust, one which could attend to the changing objects of disgust with time, as
the example of Angela, above suggests. Garlic is now one of us, but fenugreek and its
smelly embodiments remain as Others. There are questions here as to whether Third
World-ness remains the test of inclusion, or if familiarity with the Other will allow our aversion
to yield to indifference. A detailed project of the principles of nationalist exclusion in a
distinctly olfactory colonialism of place lies beyond the work of this thesis also. Ultimately this
thesis hopes to act as a productive site of disgusting marginality for future research of
embodied colonialism. This is the sheer generative potential of the ambivalent life-soup the
possibilities for self-reflexive research are as abundant as the muck of living corporeally in
place itself.

I am returned, at the last, to the place I began. I entered the thesis as a snotty settler, crying
out with Michel Serres that my body was an extra-discursive entity, and that I was left in a
crisis of New Zealand identity. I am left standing in this place, sniffing at its others, and
reaffirming this identity as my own. With the self-reflexive knowledge of my body as colonial,
however, I might attend to this place in different ways, ways that recognize my embodied
resistance to muddy nature-cultures and continuous histories. In order to do this, I might
138|

leave aside the nose-pegs and sniff harder. I might demand more of my body in order to
approach inclusionary belonging. But to presume to rights of inclusion, is to ignore the muck
that coats my own historical arrival here, the right that tangata whenua possess to exclude
me. My body bears poltical responsibility. Rather than slipping-up in the muck, we should
slip in, and engage with the complexities of the bodies that are already in this place.
 139

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