Is it time? Andrew Thibaudeau, ‘”The Last of the Monacan”: Settler Time and Queer Time in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”‘, Poe Studies, 59, 2026, pp. 93-116 | settler colonial studies blog

Is it time? Andrew Thibaudeau, ‘”The Last of the Monacan”: Settler Time and Queer Time in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”‘, Poe Studies, 59, 2026, pp. 93-116

09Nov26

Abstract: This essay not only reassesses Edgar Allan Poe’s legacy in conversation with widely circulated Early American myths about Indigenous people but also uncovers a radical, queer nineteenthcentury temporality in Poe’s work. Examining his lesser-read story, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), it argues that Poe confronts fictions of settler time, like the myth of disappearance, by queering time and space to champion the survivance of the Monacan people in the Ragged Mountains. With his story, Poe rewrites decades of fabulated Monacan demise, following accounts of their assimilation into other tribes and of Jefferson’s own excavation of their remains in Notes on the State of Virginia. Poe transforms the Ragged Mountains from a space of colonial occupation and archaeology to a land queerly haunted by sensuous Indian contact and unsettling rehearsals of colonial violence. Shifting supernaturally between the past in 1780 India and 1827 America to the speculative near-future of 1845, Poe both weaves British colonialism into American imperialism and forecasts the continued survival of the Monacan in the Ragged Mountains. Queer time supersedes settler time in the queer space of Poe’s Ragged Mountains, dispelling continued myths about the “last of the Monacan”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed