Imagining an emotional nation: the print media and Anzac Day commemorations in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This article explores affect, discourse and emotion in national life. Drawing on recent thinking on discourse and affect, alongside previous work on nation and communities of practice, we focus on the print media’s use of Anzac Day in Aotearoa New Zealand, as a site through which settler identity and cultural hegemony are reproduced. One hegemonic interpretive repertoire is observed throughout, that Anzac Day is a sacred day of respectful remembrance. Within this frame, a series of associated affective-discursive positions are deployed covering issues that range from inclusion and exclusion, to conformity and dissent. We argue that this repertoire and its associated positions constitute citizens engaging with the day as a homogeneous group of national subjects, bound together as a particular kind of affected community. This imagined community and the affective practices attributed to it, however, largely ignore the bicultural makeup of Aotearoa New Zealand, narrowing down the diverse range of potential emotional positions to a just a few. Popular journalism fails readers and limits debate though its thin portrayals of community, legitimate affect and engaged citizenship. National life is impoverished when print media lack the cultural competence necessary to effectively engage in broader debates and political discourse.

‘Pissed Off and Confused’/‘Grateful and (Re)Moved’: Affect, Privilege and National Commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Anzac Day, on the other hand, pulls together collectivist patterns of feeling and an appreciation for the role of history in the formation of Pākehā identities (McConville et al, ). As noted at the outset, Pākehā affective‐discursive privilege is assembled in ways that allows actors to reproduce familiar emotional episodes and interactive sequences in ways that maintain ethnic supremacy.…”

“…Each national day surfaces us‐and‐them binaries recurrently reproduced through highly ethnicized representations. Waitangi Day is frequently designated as ‘their’ (Māori) day (e.g., McConville et al ), while Anzac Day becomes ‘our’ (Pākehā) day (e.g., McConville, McCreanor, Wetherell, & Moewaka Barnes, ). Indeed, nationalism becomes particularly intensified when an ethnicity or nation's interests are perceived as being placed under threats both real and imagined (Hastings, ).…”

“…The affective‐discursive practices put to work around Anzac Day echo the ethnically normative flows of emotion modeled by news‐making practices of the mainstream media where Anzac Day is regularly positioned as a sacred day of respectful remembrance (McConville et al, ). Akin to these media representations, participants similarly experience the day as a tightly bound affective community where emotion is a positively shared uniform experience.…”

Representing War: Cultural Histories of the First World War in Australia and New Zealand, 2013–2020

“…Katherine Smits has shown how the official, bicultural representation of Anzac mythology in New Zealand ignores the complexities of Māori participation, including their subjugation by the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture, and the tensions that existed between those Māori who supported the war effort and those who were opposed to it. 54 55 Analysing print media coverage of Anzac Day, they argue that commemoration is a medium through which "hegemony is assumed, national unity is performed and settler identity is effectively reproduced". 56 In addition to exploring the evolving trends in domestic commemoration of the war, histories examining commemorative activity overseas and battlefield tourism continued to be the subject of research about representations of Anzac during the centenary period.…”

Conceptualising historical privilege: the flip side of historical trauma, a brief examination

“…Whereas historical trauma constructs memory of loss and oppression as well as healing, resilience and survival, historical privilege tends to use memory to construct representations of progress and nationhood, the hardworking pioneer, or of events that contribute to a collective “coming of age”. In Aotearoa New Zealand, no other act of commemoration perhaps encompasses this use of memory as constructed representation better than recent commemorations of Anzac Day (McConville, McCreanor, Wetherell, & Moewaka Barnes, 2016; Mein Smith, 2016; Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2005; O’Malley & Kidman, 2017; Wetherell, McCreanor, McConville, Moewaka Barnes, & le Grice, 2015). Indeed, the populist catch phrases used in commemorations of the day lead with “Lest we forget” and mark the anniversary of the landing of New Zealand and Australian soldiers on the Gallipoli peninsula in modern-day Turkey in 1915 (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2005).…”