Land of the long white saviour fiction

Newsroom

4 days ago

William Delisle Hay is despicable. He travelled to and lived in New Zealand in the 1870s as part of the larger 19th-century British imperial project, and his 1880 novella, The Doom of the Great City, imagines the land as a site primed for imperial conquest and repopulation. He posits the North Island as the narrator's reward for surviving a city-destroying toxic fog that has decimated London's population. We have republished this work as scholars of Victorian climate fiction, but we do not want to dismiss the story as simply a product of its time. Imperialist attitudes are not exclusively consigned to stories from the past.
Steve Braunias recently reviewed The Doom of the Great City and pointed to a thread of racist and imperialist attitudes in the text. Colonisation is framed as essentially 'saving' and 'improving' lands that Hay clearly knew were inhabited by Māori. Our new critical edition of this text brings together research identifying these attitudes towards indigenous people and recognising how they persist in far too many climate disaster narratives today.
We witness them in the themes of more recent stories like Avatar (2009), a white saviour story in which a US Marine, Jake Sully, cosplays as an indigenous member of the Na'vi. He 'saves' the Na'vi by doing indigeneity better than any of their own warriors when he inexplicably acquires the ability to ride a mystical beast, the Toruk, a once-in-a-generation skill. More recently, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), portrays the reclamation of indigenous lands as a possible solution to saving an Australia ruined by industrialisation. Furiosa, the heroine, attempts to take others home with her to the 'green place,' a region where matriarchal indigenous practices and agricultural technology have created an oasis amidst the havoc wrecked by fossil fuel consumption. As the film is a prequel, however, audiences know that the series has already casually assumed the death of even this hybrid indigenous society.
Not all climate-induced disaster narratives support the imperialist visions that undergird Hay's book The Doom of the Great City, but working on this edition has taught us that it is past time for disaster film viewers and Cli-Fi readers to take another look at the sources and methods of their enjoyment. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories are fantasies, but many remain tethered to a long and violent legacy of very real assumptions about whose life and land has value – about whose stories deserve to be told and preserved. These same ideas continue to fuel processes of mass extinction and genocide around the world.
Even in 1880, Hay observed that fossil fuels and human activity had started converting naturally occurring phenomena into deadly threats. He writes: 'A London fog was no mere mist: it was the heavy mist, in the first place, that we are accustomed to in most latitudes, but it was that mist supercharged with coal smoke, with minute carbonaceous particles, 'grits' and 'smuts,' with certain heavy gases, and with a vast number of other impurities. It was chiefly the result of the huge and reckless consumption of coal carried on over the wide-extending city, the smoke from which, not being re-consumed or filtered off in any way, was caught up and retained by the vapour-laden air.'
Clearly, recognising human-induced climate change is not new.
His book was one of the first stories of urban apocalypse and a precursor of the popular climate fiction genre. Hay begins his novella with a brief frame story in which New Zealand is empty and full of promise. The British narrator relocates to the North Island as one of the very few survivors of the toxic fog that destroys London. He enjoys the beautiful, open, and fertile land – the inhabitants of which are away or perpetually wandering.
Hay's story is also a haunting account of environmental disaster: a deadly fog annihilates the population of the English capital. The narrator himself identifies the consequences of industrial capitalism and extractive colonialism in The Doom of the Great City. This apocalyptic vision has global implications for how we think about issues such as global warming, urbanisation, and resource exploitation. And with these insights, The Doom of the Great City also invites us to think about how the stories we tell about such issues have also been used to legitimise imperialist activities and white supremacist projects.
Hay was not the first in the 19th century to position New Zealand within an imagined apocalypse.
In 1840, Thomas Macaulay wrote about 'some traveller from New Zealand' who 'shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch on London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.' The famous English historian, politician, and imperialist imagines a mysterious itinerant figure from New Zealand who observes and records the demise of London – the epicentre of the British Empire. Macaulay's treatment became quite popular, and his image of a wandering Māori man informed and supported 19th century understandings of London's future apocalypse.
Indeed, by 1865, Macaulay's image had gained such popularity that Punch satirically banned 'Macaulay's New Zealander,' announcing: 'He can no longer be suffered to impede the Traffic over London Bridge. Much wanted at the present time in his own country. May return when London is in ruins.'
Mr Punch's comments on the cultural representation of Macaulay's wandering post-apocalyptic New Zealander highlight his use and his absence: the Māori figure has been displaced, deprived of his individuality, and made into a hackneyed trope by British thinkers to herald the future desolation of London and signify the availability of colonial lands. Hay's 1860 novel The Doom of the Great City, relies on assumptions about Macaulay's mysterious 'New Zealander' to construct a tale of vast devastation – and renewal in the Global South.
The book's narrator turns to a common trope of climate disaster narratives: the assumption that indigenous peoples are either absent or amenable and available for colonisation by the disaster's survivors. And, the survivor will not just colonise, but colonisation will be described as a process of converting nature into civilisation. Hay's narrator boasts to his progeny that 'Zealandia' was 'almost a solitude, almost a virgin wilderness' that he has, through his own procreation, turned into 'now one of our most populous rural districts'.
Braunias' stark assessment of our new edition of the 1880 book raises many of the questions we consider as scholars and editors of 19th century texts. Together, we think about why many continue to read 19th century literature without recognising the imprint of Britain's imperial project. The value of these texts, however, is in the kinds of reflective questions they generate about disaster stories even today. Why is it that Cli-Fi storytellers still rely on representations of the Global South as a site primed for conquest and repopulation? How do tales of destruction and devastation generate renewed enthusiasm for colonialism under another name or disguise racist actions – in both the past and present? How are characters still used to imagine the relationship between imminent disaster in the Global North and available, lush space in the Global South?
These questions should be considered both on and off university campuses. By asking questions like this about a historical text, we present the following charge to students of 19th century literature and Cli-Fi fans alike: when will all be as able to recognise the toxic ideology in Cli-Fi survivor blockbusters, doomsday-prepper subreddits, and 'white-people-do-indigeneity-best' Disney fantasies as easily as it can be recognised in Hay's writing?
Many Cli-Fi narratives encourage us to positively identify with survivors, provide a vision of hope, or even grant audiences a sense of relief that our 'real world' is not as terrible as the imagined one. Hay's text, however, hinders these kinds of 'feel-good' responses by revealing the imperialist ideology that fuels such disaster-survival fantasies. The Doom of the Great City says the quiet parts out loud – and encourages us to look for similar messages in other stories and films that, despite the entertainment they provide, continue to use accounts of disaster and destruction to justify ongoing colonisation and white supremacy.
The new edition of The Doom of the Great City; Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942 by William Delilse Hay, co-edited by Michael Kramp and Sarita Jayanty Mizin (West Virginia University Press, $US $24.99) is available as an e-book.