Area Studies and/or Settler Studies: A New Zealand Example

This article makes an argument for the rapprochement of area studies and settler studies and how the two fields might enrich each other. First of all, it explores how the histories and structures of settler colonialism shape social relationships in contemporary New Zealand through a close reading of Christine Jeffs’ 2001 film Rain as an “allegory of settlement.” To do so, it uses Stephen Turner’s essay “Settlement as Forgetting” and makes reference to the work of Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe in settlement studies. It takes Turner’s claim that settlement requires a forgetting in order to patch over the trauma of dislocation from the mother country and explores how structures of nostalgia, fetishism and trauma construct an image of a failed and broken nation, a settler society seeking to forget its own history. Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989), it is proposed, contains a similar allegory and critique of the fantasmatic elements of settlement, in and through which settlers untiringly strive to envisage themselves as whole. The connection between these two films suggests that settler studies and its models are not restricted to specific national locations and that their lessons may be relevant to and inform the creation of settler colonies across wider geographical areas.