Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry by Nikki Hessell (review)

Abstract

Framed by two personal and intergenerational diplomatic events surrounding ongoing treaty negotiations in Aotearoa New Zealand, Sensitive Negotiations asks readers to move beyond the aesthetic implications of poetic quotation to consider not only the political and legislative but also the ethical demands made by the repetition of lines of Romantic poetry across the settler colonies. Employing her own citational bookends—“It’s all diplomacy. It’s all a negotiation”—Nikki Hessell explicitly challenges Romantic scholars, particularly those working in settler colonies, to pay attention to the “living legacies of the poetry we study” and to ask ourselves, “At what price our aesthetics?” (xv, 221, 19, 59). Such a challenge requires us to study and teach the settler colonial history and its ongoing injustices that are entwined within Romanticism, while it also encourages us to move beyond the fetishization of artistic individuality and originality. Emphasizing the “rhetorical sovereignty” of Indigenous diplomatic agents from the nineteenth century onwards, Hessell situates the citation of Romantic poetry within the “petitioning and treating culture[s]” of Indigenous community (4).1 This situatedness of Romantic poetry within Indigenous-settler diplomatic history treats poetic citation as a “boundary marker” that troubles both the genre of diplomacy and Romantic authenticity (1), allowing Hessell to build on Manu Samriti Chander’s work in rethinking our critical understandings of imitation and derivativeness.2 Treating poetry as a diplomatic text, Hessell reframes, for instance, the “unoriginality” of Mississaugas Ojibwa writer George Copway’s Running Sketches (1851) to demonstrate instead how, if read within its “wider Indigenous diplomatic history,” Copway’s frequent quotations of Byron’s Childe Harold (1812–18) are illustrative of a purposively jarring collage meant to juxtapose and thus align bureaucratic reportage with poetic citation (107). Flipping the analytical lens, Hessell shows how Copway deploys Byron as a “useful diplomatic text,” thereby rescuing Running Sketches from Bernd C. Peyer’s critical censure of banality (107).3