Hybridity and indigeneity: historical narratives and post-colonial myths of identity

Abstract

This thesis investigates the ways in which colonial settler identity is rewritten as indigenous through the medium of narrative history. William Satchell's novel The Greenstone Door and James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans are the two nineteenth century texts I focus on, using non-fictional historical narratives with the same historical period of concern to contextualise their representations of history. Two contemporary cinematic narratives of history are also analysed - the New Zealand movie Utu and the American production The Last of the Mohicans - to expose contemporary fictions of history and of identity still in circulation. For my examination of the representation of history is inextricably linked to that of the construction of identity, particularly the recovery, out of a chaotic series of past events and processes, of a moment of (white) nation formation. The white settler must overcome the contradiction and ambivalence inherent in the position he occupies between the imperial and native cultures in order to become indigenous, preferably with his ethical and moral integrity intact. Though these narratives set out to resolve the ambiguities of the settler identity, they fail in the attempt, presenting hybridity as a solution to those innate contradictions. Hybridity though, is not a resolution but an encoding of contradiction, and these narratives can find no resolution which fits into the colonial ideology which overtly structures their rewriting of history.