Romanticism and metonymic decolonization

Abstract

This brief provocation acknowledges the way the term “decolonization” has been used as a metaphor for diversification and has thus erased the anticolonial struggles of those Indigenous scholars and activists for whom diversity is not a stated end. Calling on the opposition between metaphor and metonymy in linguistic theory, I suggest that scholars of literary Romanticism-and by implication literary scholars in general-build our work not over but alongside decolonial movements and, in so doing, align our scholarship with demands for Indigenous sovereignty.