The Death of Innocence

Abstract

Disrupting historical constructions of innocence is central to the formulation of a critical discussion of racialised, gendered and classed people in the settler capitalist state. By perpetuating embedded constructions of innocence, contemporary anti-racist, feminist, and intersectional projects risk reproducing the violence they seek to undo. This thesis examines how historical and contemporary understandings of identity create contradictory forms of oppression, and suggests a more nuanced view of innocence as a stepping stone towards decolonisation. First, I consider the formation of the innocent subject in the historical context of the settler capitalist state of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Second, I examine empathy and dehumanisation in narratives and modern liberal discourse, arguing that the settler drive to construct an absolute innocent victim may be antithetical to humanising narratives. While innocence suggests settler empathy, it presupposes dehumanisation of raced, mixed-race, and gendered subjects. Third, I turn to contemporary sentencing practices, analysing the role of legal discourse in maintaining constructions of innocence and of prisons as receptacles of the non-innocent. I point to unsettling themes within settler capitalist discourse, to challenge the innocence of social justice projects. This thesis is a prison abolitionist work, insofar as I intend to set out the social conditions required to fundamentally rethink role of the state through innocence. I suggest that the poetic abolitionist imagination can be deployed to materially undo its logic. To imagine the death of innocence is to imagine spaces beyond social constructs of the innocent/guilty binary, to challenge settler capitalist norms, and move towards a lived practice of decolonisation.