Refusing Settler Georgics

Abstract

This essay recovers and seeks to refuse a harmful and enduring eighteenth-century fiction: settler georgic, an imperial mode that North American settlers used to foreclose refusal, naturalize British understandings of cultivation and use, and figure violent dispossession as both inevitable and in the past. Tracing this history helps to show the damage that such logics continue to do as well as the assumptions that govern literary historical methods. I look to the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (2020) is premised on the refusal of settler narrative, to think through alternate modes of literary history. Read alongside Audra Simpson’s important study of refusal, Mohawk Interruptus (2014), Leanne Simpson’s text opens up possibilities for reading the quieter, everyday refusals that are sometimes overlooked in eighteenth-century archives. This work also suggests the limits of refusal in academic and university contexts, and the ways in which institutional acknowledgements of refusal risk strengthening the settler colonial structures that they claim to refuse.