Georgic Fantasies: James Grainger and the Poetry of Colonial Dislocation

This essay argues that James Grainger encodes a form of colonial dislocation in his 1764 “West-India georgic” poem, The Sugar-Cane. This dislocation is most visible in Grainger’s ongoing struggle to represent slave labor in the poem as well as in his commitment to imagining the centrality of poetic labor to the colonial project. Ultimately, the essay reads The Sugar-Cane’s many thematic and formal disruptions--which tend to be represented as evidence of poem’s failures--as the traces of Grainger’s own attempt to aestheticize colonial landscapes in the service of British literary and commercial ambition.