Perm – Biopolitical and Settler Colonial narratives are intrinsically connected and can be read alongside each other.

Chapter 4 Biopolitical Correspondences: Anthropology, Native Administration, and Cultural Nationalism “[P]hysiographic factors work slowly . . . Ultimately the Australian race will be quite different from the ‘English’ race and hence Australian literature will be quite different from the merely English literature, of England.”1 P. R. Stephensen How does (post)colonial literary culture, so often annexed to nationalist concerns, interface with the biopolitical regulation of race and sexuality? Colonial biopolitics can be defined as the regularisation of a population according to the perceived insistence on norms. Unlike the diffuse, microscopic, governmental mechanisms of surveillance that identify the need for disciplinary interventions, biopolitics concerns itself with the regularisation of societies on a large scale, notably through demography. As Ann Laura Stoler has put it, Foucault’s identification of these two forms of power, “the disciplining of individual bodies . . . and the regularization of the life processes of aggregate human populations” has led to much productive work in the postcolonialist critique of “the discursive management of the sexual practices of the colonized,” and the resultant “colonial order of things.”2 Indeed, biopolitics is crucially concerned with what is perceptible at the macroscopic level of an entire population – often rendering its operations blind to more singular, small, identitarian, or even communitarian 184 representations and imaginaries. Certainly one can find representations of disciplinary power across the canon of oft-taught postcolonial texts, from Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s critique of colonial policing in Petals of Blood, to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s meditation on the affective violence of mimicry in Nervous Conditions, to Salman Rushdie’s magical realist parody of Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency in Midnight’s Children.3 Such texts are cognizant of policing, colonial education, and the retention of exceptional measures threatening the democratic form emergent from the subcontinent. But what does one begin to write of the lettered settler colony, particularly since so much of the national imaginary, including its positioning of indigenous peoples, has been conjured as an intertext, a canon, an inheritance by the simultaneously antipodean and (nonetheless) colonizing imaginaries of settler colonists? As Wolfe suggested, settler colonies are not merely premised on the subjection of indigenous peoples, but very often also on their total disappearance. As we have seen, the natal-thanatopolitical, biopolitical, and other mechanisms by which this is attempted are variegated. It is incumbent to similarly survey the cultural correlates of such ideas. In the Australian context, the processes of absorption and assimilation directed toward Aboriginal people in the twentieth century clearly involve disciplinary practices driven by biopolitical projections of future normativity and homogeneity. But literary texts, while making truth claims about such contexts, rarely prescribe policy. Those singular settler imaginaries that traverse the backdrop of the governance and policing of indigenous people—constrained by the inheritance of genre, form, convention, and voice—nonetheless hardly reproduce the fantasies and anxieties of colonial governance as facsimiles of Aborigines Department memoranda. How do we read the narration of subaltern death, survival, or indeed assimilation when such an imaginary of doom in literary and cinematic texts has found itself displaced within the discursive formations of colonial governance: why do Aboriginal characters in novels keep dying after the turn to cultural assimilation? Why do settler poets consistently return to a melancholic lamentation of Aboriginal loss (as though it were their own) after this turn? Is it too much to say (as Foucault did not, at least not in so many words) that postcolonial texts—these small and particular representations—can be read alongside texts from the archive of settler colonial biopolitics? Taking seriously the degree to which such literary frames are not mere carbon copies, this chapter nonetheless insists on a tactical attempt to map the occasional correspondence of such archival and literary expressions. Doing so, I contend, brings into greater relief the moments of non correspondence: when imaginaries of death subsist after the supposed turn to assimilation, when policies about subaltern peoples are debated by white settler characters and not resolved. This notion off correspondence also allows us to tell the story of the way anthropological conceits and practices of colonial administration produced concrete concurrent effects in the cultural sphere, particularly, the emergent literary nationalist public sphere. The projected outcome of both absorption and assimilation was the homogenization of the Australian national polity. Where absorption imagined the disappearance of Aboriginal people via natal-thanatopolitical methods, assimilation— while retaining its disciplinary measures—turned on a more subtle articulation of its outcome vis a vis ideas of race, culture, and national homogeneity. Assimilation’s vision of national homogeneity was paralleled by regularizing functions that correspondingly 186 operated in anthropological discourse as well as literary nationalist discourse; it is these correspondences which I examine here. In the post-war period anthropologists, literary nationalists, and agents of assimilation variously contributed to a networked discursive formation that anxiously concerned itself with the place that Aboriginal culture and social life was to have in the new nation. Mid twentieth century Australian cultural nationalism drew heavily on the physiognomic, racial, and eugenic data that was also significantly in play in the discourse of Aboriginal policy. A key methodological investment of this chapter arises from the assertion that the biopolitical outcome of regularization and homogenization parallels the concerns of cultural nationalism, drawing out imaginaries, forces and desires that exceed and outlast their concrete governmental implementation. Many of these imaginaries insist on the symbolic value of settler nativity over against the voice of the too often expendible indigene. As Chadwick Allen suggests, “Aboriginal inhabitants of what are now First World nations have been forced to compete for indigenous status with European settlers and their descendants eager to construct new identities that separate them from European antecedents.”4 This is often the way indigenous characters operate in settler texts heavily concerned with indigeneity. While Aboriginality is avowed to the point of fetishization, it is also often made so at the expense of the indigenous body and mind as living presence. One organizing question, which precipitates this observation asks: how, as the physical anthropological and absorptionist elements retained by assimilationist doctrine called for the biological incorporation of the “Australoid race” into the settler nation’s normative population, were the correlative cultural appropriations disseminated as a party to the settler nation’s cultural uniqueness and homogeneity? How does the settler nation 187 imagine its coherence and independence through the sublation of an indigenous identity which it simultaneously destroys, constrains, and normativizes? Here I explore the way a certain artifactual Aboriginal constellation would have to be regularized and presented as acceptable to the dominant white population of the nation. Assimilation required that Aboriginal tradition be regularized as a “primitive” social form adaptable to the settler cultural model of nuclear familialism. If orientation to an environment hostile to whiteness was a problem for what Warwick Anderson has called Australia’s “reproductive frontier,” and if adaptation to this environment could (for many assimilationists) benefit from the biological absorption of Aboriginality, would there emerge an analogous desire for cultural adaptation?5 Discourses of Aboriginality were disseminated alongside government policies of assimilation in order to negotiate a form of nativist primitivism that would be acceptable to the nation’s future cultural homogeneity. The late 1930s are a key period in the government of Aboriginal people in Australia. I want to mark three further dates from the late 1930s that index three acutely biopolitical instances of the settler nationalist imaginary: October 1937. Elkin would continue a correspondence with his lay-ethnographer contact, W. E. “Bill” Harney, who was gathering ethnographic data at the Missions on Bathurst and Melville Islands. In this particular letter, alongside notes on the subsection systems of neighbouring peoples, the Anula and the Mudbura, Harney would insert his opinion about the potential normativization of the Aboriginal family and what precisely could be “abolished or modified”: 188 The system of polygamy seems to me to be quite OK in a nomadic race and can be eradicated without going to extreme means as I have found that the natives try to imitate the white and this they do in marriage and it is incredible the amount of natives in the bush working with the white man that have only one wife, they do not want another and when questioned on this, they remark that two women would be a nuisance as they would be jealous of each other.6 For Harney, the “imitat[ion of] the white” was a process that was already taking its course. Harney would elsewhere criticize the attitude (among missionaries and government agents) of “no compromise” in approaching the modification of native customs.7 His correspondence with Elkin would help produce a genre of popular narrative inviting settlers into the transforming Aboriginal life-world. January 1936. After its first two instalments had been published in The Australian Mercury, P.R. Stephensen’s The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Toward National Self Respect is published in book form by W.J. Miles. A short way into the essay’s third instalment, Stephensen would declare, ‘[a]ll parties agree that population is Australia’s paramount need’ (149). For Stephensen, a large population was one of the preconditions of a culturally nationalist Australia, independent of the British metropole. Yet, questions of race, hybridity, and the legitimacy of settler belonging would also not be absent from his prose. Coinciding with key transformations in Australian Aboriginal policy, Stephensen’s tract would influence a number of nativist and nationalist writers who desired both cultural independence and the incorporation of Aboriginal motifs into their writing; these included Rex Ingamells, Ian Mudie, and, most notably, Xavier Herbert. 189 June 1936. Herbert writes to his friend Arthur Dibley, a manuscript reader at P.R. Stephensen and Co., from the veranda of his house in the Kahlin Aboriginal Compound in Darwin.8 In early 1934, Herbert and Stephensen had worked closely on the revision of Capricornia;9 indeed, in the early 1960s Stephensen even claimed his role in editing to be so extensive as to warrant co-authorship.10 When Herbert wrote to Dibley, he was employed as acting superintendent of the compound—an agent of the surveillance and discipline of Aboriginal people. In his letter, Herbert clearly related his literary ambitions to grandiloquent dreams of nationalism and race-consciousness: Do you know what I’ve been dreaming of doing? Why, no less than teaching the Aboriginal race to accept citizenship & win a place in the Nation, & honourable place [sic], so that they may cross with the invaders & enrich the new Nation with their blood. Already I have founded a Euraustralian League, the members of which are Halfcastes and Quartercastes whose blood is pure Aboriginal and European, the aim of which is to teach pride of race to these people & to teach others to honour them & ultimately to found a Nation.11 Herbert’s imagined project of a hybrid nation was not only premised on the citizenship of Aboriginal Australians. It was also an appeal to contemporary population and attitudes toward potential preservation of ‘full blood’ natives through reserve land12. Before turning to limn the correspondences between these events, it is incumbent upon me to say something further about the methodological stakes of correspondence itself.