When dialogue means refusal

As a point of possibility, of coming together, listening deeply, connecting and nourishing diverse, socially just pathways, dialogue, and particularly a critically affirmative dialogue, is invaluable, not only to human geographers but to all those involved in supporting diverse, life-sustaining worlds. Yet, as the authors of ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’ aptly point out, dialogue as a positive force is in no way to be taken for granted. Dialogue is always riven by power imbalances and may shore up oppression as easily as dismantle it. In thinking through dialogue, the editorial team of Dialogues in Human Geography significantly point to the need to understand dialogue as a form of embodied action, one that has important limits as well as possibilities (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018). They also discuss the importance of disengagement from dialogue if and where needed. Such disengagement is framed with the question posed as follows: ‘Is a refusal to engage in dialogue justified in certain circumstances?’ (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018: 111).

It is this question of refusal that I will reflect on in my response. My aim is to think further about why and where refusal is not merely ‘justified’, but needed, and where refusal itself can be a form of affirmative dialogue. I do so not to undermine or disagree with Rose-Redwood et al.’s examples of online trolling (the imperative not to ‘feed the trolls’) and of the abominable Third World Quarterly piece, ‘The Case for Colonialism’, among others, but rather to support their thoughts around disengagement by attending more deeply to the conditions, meaning, and indeed the possibilities of refusal. Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, Glen Coulthard (2014), Audra Simpson (2007, 2014), and others, in particular, I would suggest that refusal is more than stepping outside dialogue, although it may indeed be this. Rather, refusal may be a way of reframing debate, refocusing the terms of engagement, and re-centering it in productive ways. In doing so, refusal can nourish diverse and flourishing Indigenous worlds, generate and support spaces of autonomy, and abet more-than-human co-becomings.

In this piece, I will begin by discussing refusal and sharing my understanding of Coulthard, Simpson, and others’ work. I will then position myself in relation to this work, as a non-Indigenous human geographer living and working on stolen land, committed to the complex, even intractable, task of supporting decolonization.

Dialogue, as the authors point out, ‘does not take place in a vacuum but within specific and continually changing contexts which raises questions about the terms and terrain upon which dialogue takes place and is conducted’ (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018: 112). The authors importantly emphasize the ways that dialogue ‘is an embodied practice replete with its own power asymmetries and social hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality, age, (dis)ability’ (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018: 112, see also Underhill-Sem, 2017), and they give examples of dialogues organized by the media and academic conferences suggesting a need to question who will ask the questions and set the styles of interaction and rules of engagement. Yet, I would suggest, it is not only the questions and rules that are important, it is the very framing of what might be communicated and how and by whom, discussions that not only take place in context but also make that very context. For dialogue continues to reflect and then remake the very conditions that have enabled it. Yes, this is a question of interaction styles, of rules of engagement, but it is also a question of epistemology and ontology, it sets norms as much as reflects them, makes and supports rules as much as follows them.

Indeed, dialogue’s dominant framing as both verbal or textual, and human-centered, privileges certain ways of being in the world, and begs certain questions. What of more-than-human interlocutions? What of the ways our engagement with others are beyond what we say or write, are embodied, are affective, take place through smell and song, are generated through circulation of emotions? And what of the ways these interactions are not with other beings that stand discrete from us at all but rather take place through our co-becoming? Indeed, 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) (Bawaka et al., 2015, 2016; Johnson and Larsen, 2017; Wright, 2012).

This ‘context’ within which dialogue is carried out, then, is more than context. It shapes what may be said, and thought, and acknowledged, and by who and how, and to engage in such a dialogue is to enable that context, even if one disagrees with it. And this context, what is enabled and enabling, is threaded through with a constellation of logics, power structures, and racist and exclusionary social relations—capitalism, an enduring colonialism, modernism—that dismiss and undermine other kinds of worldings. So great care is needed. Here, I am thinking of the groundbreaking work of Glenn Coulthard (2014) and his critique of a politics of recognition, and dialogue with the State more broadly, for Indigenous people. For Coulthard, a member of Yellowknives Dene First Nation, it is of fundamental importance to address the ‘generative structures’ of capitalism and colonialism that are, after all, forms of ongoing social relations. Drawing on Franz Fanon, Coulthard questions the ‘specific modes of colonial thought, desire and behaviour that implicitly or explicitly commit the colonised to the types of practices and subject positions that are required for their continued domination’ (2014: 16). Dialogue, within a politics of recognition, or on terms set by the State or settler colonial societies, for Coulthard and others, is itself contributing to ongoing colonial processes. Engaging in the modes of behavior of ‘civilized’ dialogue, means allowing, even empowering, the very structures that deem some civilized and some not, and so have enabled the broad-scale theft of land, among other colonizing and genocidal processes (Kam’ayaam, 2014). Instead, Coulthard calls for politics, imagining and enacting alternatives that are outside such dialogue, on terms set by, imagined by, and grounded in specific Indigenous peoples and places.

So the point, then, is that some dialogue can be generative and enabling for capitalism, for colonialism, for racism. Coulthard suggests a need to focus on what might be generative and enabling for Indigenous worlds. And that means sometimes refusing the dialogue on offer, it means refusing to leave the grounds of one’s own states of self-definition (Simpson, 2007).

To suggest that such refusals are simply about withdrawing, however, misunderstands the potential of refusal and its potential, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, as dialogue. In her groundbreaking work with the Mohawks of Kahnawake, people who she ‘belongs to and works with’ (2007: 68; 2014), Audra Simpson, attends to the ways that Kahnawake Mohawks struggle to express and sustain their sovereignty, as they have continued to do so through centuries of settler colonialism, through refusal. Simpson, for example, elucidates how ‘refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that “this is who we are, this is who you are, these are my rights”’ (2007: 73). This then, is, firstly, about enunciating by Mohawk, for Mohawk, and on the terms set by Mohawk, ‘who we are, who you are and these are my rights’. But, in doing so, there is a communication, an invitation to outsiders to engage with those enunciations. It is, in short, a form of dialogue, a form of complex and embodied engagement. Indeed, Simpson’s work values, above all, the complexities of these subject positions, the ways they shift, and the ways they interact and redefine, as they refuse, colonialism. Refusal is deployed neither as 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, a strong assertion of sovereignty and the terms of dialogue itself. It is a:

political and ethical stance that stands in stark contrast to the desire to have one’s distinctiveness as a culture, as a people, recognised. Refusal comes with the requirement of having one’s political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognising: What is their authority to do so? Where does it come from? Who are they to do so? (Simpson, 2014: 11)

Indeed, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have emphasized the need to understand refusal as well as concealment and evasion (Rubis and Theriault, forthcoming; Theriault, 2017), as, at once, an important response to colonial processes, and as a form of survivance (Vizenor, 1994; 2009), of active presencing that goes beyond victimry to emphasize endurance, active and vital survival. As Mitchell (forthcoming) suggests, ‘Resurgence is a refusal to participate in one’s own elimination and that of one’s relations, but it is also an insistence on the ongoing presence and flourishing of these beings and the worlds they nurture’. Refusal, then, becomes not only a withdrawal from dialogue but at once an important way to resist, redirect, and refuse colonial and capitalist logics.

The role of non-Indigenous academics, such as myself, in such a situation becomes not to own such a refusal, or to resent it, or to attempt to redirect energies back to direct engagement in a misdirected effort to smooth over problems and recommit the subjugated to the terms of their subjugation (Coulthard, 2014), but to try and listen deeply, to understand my own positionality and complicity, to honor refusals, to acknowledge the enunciations, such as those listed by Simpson and others, including those made in diverse ways by diverse beings. For me, that means a dual move associated with interrogating and answering the colonial logics of my own positionality, both the ways I continue to benefit from those logics as a non-Indigenous person in a settler–colonial context and also the ways that the colonial logics constrain my ability to redefine and affectively connect with more-than-human, decolonial worldings, the ways they numb and disrupt, and so prop up the very colonial, capitalist, and exclusionary systems I would dismantle (Battiste, 2008; Bawaka et al., forthcoming; Nxumalo, 2016; Ruddick, 2017).

I do not mean for this to sound easy, for it’s not. And I do not suggest that I have answers or that I do it well, for I know I do not, cannot even. But I can start by attempting to know my place, ¹ beginning with my own positionality and relationships. This is dialogue, yes, but not dialogue that sits outside myself, leaving me as an independent and knowing actor (Haraway, 2015; Ruddick, 2017). Rather, it is a coming to the edge of myself and my ways of knowing and being, an acknowledgement of who I am and where I am placed, and an effort to attend deeply to this place and these connections. It means attending, acknowledging, and privileging (or trying to!) the dynamic, complicated, and sometimes fraught more-than-human entanglements that define, make, and hold me (TallBear, 2014). Part of this is an acknowledgement that we are all connected to, but all positioned differently in relation with, structural processes of injustice (Noxolo et al., 2008). It also means that dialogue, real and ethical, de-colonial and anti-racist dialogue, while an important aspiration is something to continually work toward rather than see as an easy or achievable task.

There is also an imperative to begin from our own lives and respond with our own lives and our owns selves (Hunt, 2014; Smith et al., forthcoming). For me, it means integrating, where and how I can, responses to insights offered by Indigenous scholars and others, including their refusals, seeking to change the way I think and act, in practical ways. I need to take care, as much care as I can, to honor limits and be respectful as I try to navigate the tricky places of dialogue and refusal, honoring acts of survivance, and acknowledging where things are simply not my place. I need to support, where invited, struggles, make change in my life, try to keep space where I can, and redirect resources and time where appropriate (Mitchell, forthcoming; Wright, 2017), among other things.

Rose-Redwood et al. (2018: 110) suggest that dialogue:

is not synonymous with two or more intersecting monologues or polemics; on the contrary, it presupposes the capacity to listen to, and engage with, one’s interlocutors rather than treating them as ‘an enemy…whose very existence constitutes a threat’. (Foucault, 1984: 382)

Yet, acknowledging and understanding refusal as dialogue means more than listening and engaging with interlocutors, it means a generative critique of oneself and one’s own positionality (Wright, 2017), and an acknowledgment of our ‘moral accountability’ (Rose, 2004). Sometimes, for some, it means refusing. Certainly, it means attending to diverse communications, dwelling in and with discomfort if needed, not attempting to smooth over, but hearing critiques on the terms they are made, knowing that one is not always in the center, does not know the answers or even the questions. It also entails cultivating an awareness that not only humans communicate, teach, and guide, that those with whom we enter into dialogue may be more-than-human, may be Country, may and do co-become with us, and that communications are always adamantly more-than-verbal, more-than-textual. Finally, it means understanding that sometimes dialogue is refusal, and refusal is dialogue. And that is a powerful thing.