Sensitive Negotiations

Nikki Hessell

Description

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous peoples in North America and the Pacific engaged with the latest and most fashionable British Romantic poetry as part of transcontinental and transoceanic cross-cultural negotiations about sovereignty, treaty rights, and land claims. In Sensitive Negotiations, Nikki Hessell uses examples from North America, Africa, and the Pacific to show how these Indigenous figures quoted lines from famous poets like Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans to build sympathy and community with their audience. Hessell makes new connections by setting aside European-derived genre barriers to bring literary studies to bear on the study of diplomacy and scholarship from diplomatic history and Indigenous studies to bear on literary criticism. By connecting British Romantic poetry with Indigenous diplomatic texts, artefacts, and rituals, Hessell reimagines poetry as diplomatic and diplomacy as poetic.
Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction: The Power of (Poetic) Promises

1. Truth and Reconciliation: The Case of "the Monster Brandt"

2. Romanticism and Removal: Elias Boudinot, Felicia Hemans, and the Cherokee Phoenix

3. Digressive Diplomacy: George Copway and Byron's Lines on the Rhine

4. "Always Build a Fence around the King's Word": Sol Plaatje and The Deserted Village

5. Petitions and Repetitions: Rēweti Kōhere and the Ashes of Byron and Macaulay

Conclusion: Coming to Terms with Romantic Poetry

Coda
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Royaume-Uni
• Great Britain
• Stephen Ireland
• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• 19th century
• Reino Unido

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438484785
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sensitive Negotiations
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
Sensitive Negotiations
Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry
N IKKI H ESSELL
Cover image: Photo by Takeshi Arai from Pexels.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hessell, Nikki, author.
Title: Sensitive negotiations : indigenous diplomacy and British Romantic poetry / Nikki Hessell.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048370 | ISBN 9781438484778 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438484785 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. | Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Indigenous peoples—Government relations. | Diplomacy—Language. | Great Britain—Foreign relations—19th century. | Politics and culture—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Romanticism—Great Britain.
Classification: LCC PR590 .H47 2021 | DDC 821/.709145—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048370
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Evan and Chele Truth—Dignity—Justice
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: The Power of (Poetic) Promises
1 Truth and Reconciliation: The Case of “the Monster Brandt”
2 Romanticism and Removal: Elias Boudinot, Felicia Hemans, and the Cherokee Phoenix
3 Digressive Diplomacy: George Copway and Byron’s Lines on the Rhine
4 “Always Build a Fence around the King’s Word”: Sol Plaatje and The Deserted Village
5 Petitions and Repetitions: Rēweti Kōhere and the Ashes of Byron and Macaulay
Conclusion: Coming to Terms with Romantic Poetry
Coda
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Diplomacy, by its very nature, generates an enormous global archive. I am very grateful to the librarians and archivists who helped me navigate this material, including those at the Victoria University of Wellington Library, National Library, Alexander Turnbull Library, and National Archives in New Zealand; the British Library, National Archives, Guildhall Library, School of Oriental and African Studies Library, and Special Collections at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom; the Beinecke Library, Wisconsin Historical Society, Newberry Library, Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University, and American Antiquarian Society in the United States; the Ontario Archives in Canada; and the Australian National University (ANU) Library and National Library of Australia in Canberra.
Some of these places provided very generous fellowship schemes that made the work both possible and enjoyable. My deepest thanks go to the American Antiquarian Society (especially Nan Wolverton and all the wonderful visiting fellows who were there in early 2019); the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University; and the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, whose generous scholarly community, led by Will Christie, provided a home away from home.
My own institution has been similarly generous in both financial and intellectual support. I am grateful to the Joint Research Committee of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences for the grants that made parts of this work possible, especially in the early phases of the project, and to the Enriching National Culture group, led by Lydia Wevers and Maria Bargh, which awarded me an internal Treaty of Waitangi Fellowship and a chance to work at the Stout Centre and Te Kawa a Māui (the School of Māori Studies). These investments in research and collegiality laid the foundation for an application to the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund, to which I am likewise exceptionally grateful. The Marsden grant has made this book a reality, and it has generated opportunities to collaborate with colleagues and students that would have been out of the question without such financial support.
The list of places that I visited represents a great deal of travel, and my colleagues in the English Programme at Victoria could not have been more generous in their support for this project, including at times when they needed to take on additional work to make it possible for me to be away. The selflessness of program members, at a time of biting budget cuts and rapidly increasing workloads, was appreciated more than I can say. I was also very fortunate to be able to talk about the ideas underpinning this project with a wonderful group of students in seminars on Romanticism and Indigeneity in 2019 and 2020. The challenges and insights of those students will stay with me for a long time. Of that group, I would particularly like to thank Millie Godfery, who has been an intelligent, skillful, and supportive research assistant, not to mention an exceptional researcher in this area in her own right.
My foremost collegial debts are, as always, to the best writing group anyone could wish for. Ingrid Horrocks, Sarah Ross, and Elizabeth Gray have been, for more than a decade, incisive readers and generous friends. You have read big chunks of this work, and you have provided the support and the laughter that underpinned the whole thing. Much of this book was written as I worked alongside you on the Kāpiti Coast, and I’m very grateful to my Aunt Sally and Uncle Brian for being willing to share their space with us while we wrote. I am lucky also to have a virtual network in my field, in the form of the Bigger6 Collective, which is always there to cheer me on. Special thanks go to Manu Chander and Tricia Matthew for being there during some of the tougher times. Rebecca Colesworthy and James Peltz at SUNY Press, along with series editor Pamela Gilbert, the expert production team, and the two anonymous readers, who provided generous feedback on the manuscript, have all made the experience of finishing this book a great pleasure. An abbreviated version of chapter 1 appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 1 (2020), and a section of chapter 4 was published in Modern Philology 112, no. 2 (2015). An abbreviated version of chapter 5 is forthcoming in a collection edited by Porsca Fermanis and Sarah Comyn, Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern British Colonies .
To my “Wilson cousins,” thanks so much for your hospitality and the many games of cards in Canberra. And to all my family, especially Carwyn, Kohurangi, Ruaariki, and Te Rauhina, I love you more than you will ever know.
Preface
Perhaps appropriately for a project about quotation, this book was born out of another book. In the years in which I was working on Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations , I would occasionally come across examples where Indigenous intellectuals and writers quoted British Romantic poetry in the original English. Because I was looking for translations and also because I considered the urgent intervention needed in my field of Romantic Studies to be one involving colonial bi- and multilingualism, I didn’t think much about what these examples meant.
During the same period of time, my partner was involved, on behalf of his iwi (tribe or nation), in negotiations with the government to settle a claim under the Treaty of Waitangi, the 1840 document that ushered in the modern nation-state of Aotearoa New Zealand. Because this process involved an enormous amount of time and frequent travel back to the traditional center of his community, the negotiations became a core feature of our lives. Work and family time were organized around his absences and the gradual process of settling the claim was woven into our timelines and our conversations.
Two things stood out to me as I watched these events unfold. One was that, because the Crown (the term we use for the government in the context of treaty settlements) controls the process, the negotiators always had to make use of the language and what we in literary studies would call the “forms” that the Crown chose to recognize. In order to communicate and connect with the Crown negotiators, mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) had to be processed via these languages and forms, and being a skilled negotiator meant comprehending how to do this processing. Ideas and histories that came out of this land and its people had to be connected somehow to the Crown’s own cultural understandings of the relevant relationships and processes. This involves something more than simply expressing oneself in English; instead it means understanding, at a deep level, what values are cherished by the Crown and what languages and forms from within the Crown’s cultural frames of reference can be effectively mobilized to make the necessary arguments. It means knowing which English texts and vocabularies to use, in what form, and when, in order to hold the Crown to account. Mos