When dialogue means refusal

Abstract

In my response to Rose-Redwood et al.’s (2018) ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’ (Dialogues in Human Geography 8(2): 109–123), I attend to the question of what it means to refuse dialogue. Dialogue as it is often deployed is supported by a host of colonial logics that position many marginalized humans, and nonhumans, as unable to communicate ‘rationally’ (that is to dialogue). Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, Glen Coulthard ((2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.), Audra Simpson ((2007) Ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67–80; (2014) Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.), and others, I suggest that refusal can mean more than merely stepping outside dialogue, allowing the problematic to pass unchallenged. Rather, refusal may be a way of resisting, reframing, and redirecting colonial and capitalist logics, constituting both an important political strategy and an assertion of diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Refusal, in these contexts, is neither a negation of the need for dialogue nor a withdrawal from the need to counter colonialism, but a refusal to be drawn into politics that enable colonialism, and so can be a strong assertion of sovereignty. I then position myself in relation to this work, thinking through what refusal as dialogue might mean as a non-Indigenous human geographer living and working on stolen land, committed to the complex, even intractable, task of supporting decolonization.