Britain, Empire, and Global Afterlives: 1850–1950

Sengupta, Oishani; Sengupta, Oishani

This special session responds to the urgent need to rethink traditional periodization in studies of the British empire. Scholarship on the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries has recently articulated this imperative. In Victorian studies, renewed focus on empire’s global context has “outstripped chronology”(Banerjee, Fong, Michie) and become more attentive to lateral and vertical “crossings” (Reeder). Arguments for “hating” (Mufti), “undisciplining” (Chatterjee, Christoff, Wong), and “widening” (Banerjee, Fong, Michie) traditional limits of the Victorian canon articulate the task of decentering whiteness in the field. Intersections with Black, South Asian, East Asian, and postcolonial studies prioritize the invisible politics of racialization (Eng and Han, Cheng, Hall). Similarly, the shift in twentieth-century studies towards the global Anglophone centers “travel and translation” (Kalliney) as incorporating modes of heterogeneity.

Building on Said’s notion of modernism as non-biological, cross-racial, and networked instead of a naturalized “blood and soil” filiation, our session recovers intercontinental attachments (Gikandi, Vadde) and inter-imperial intimacies (Doyle, Lowe). These formations ask us to rethink empire studies as overflowing accepted boundaries of space and time. Our panel proposes 1850-1950 as an alternative period unsettling existing temporal containers and emphasizing new strands of transcontinental violence (Hensley, Mufti, Gopal) through affective attachments. Through this re-periodization, our panel draws out a more capacious set of connections, integrating the paratextual and ephemeral (letters, newspapers, oral histories, adaptations) to reveal the messy workings of emotion from Raj nostalgia to interimperial solidarity.

This session topic is timely: the MLA 2021 Session “Victorian and Modernist Studies: Collective Imaginaries” highlighted the rising acknowledgement in adjacent sub-fields to pursue more holistic methods of historical and cultural inquiry. Our session models such an interdisciplinary engagement, demonstrating the generative possibilities of reframing periodization. To leave ample time for discussion, our session presiders Oishani Sengupta and Anwesha Kundu will keep each of the four panelists’ papers to 10 minutes. Our respondent Nasser Mufti will then offer a short response, leaving over 15 minutes for Q&A.

This session begins with Sungmey Lee’s paper, which conceptualizes imperial and racial attachment as threading the “racial century” of 1850-1950. Lee situates love for the motherland as an extension of white solidarity foundational to colonial and fascist genocides. Lee reads Schreiner’s Thoughts on South Africa as an attempt to construct a fragile alliance between the Boers and British during the second Anglo-Boer war. Emphasizing similar origins and shared “South Africanness,” Lee shows Schreiner overwriting British genocidal violence with common “love object” of national identity uniting “center and periphery” at the moment of conflict.

Bassam Sidiki’s paper reframes this concept of racial solidarity to connect two empires: British and American. Using the figure of Mary Curzon née Leiter, the American Vicereine of India (1899-1905), Sidiki reveals the “parasitic” interimperial contract between an established empire and a rising one. The marriage of Leiter, an American heiress, to Curzon, an impoverished British nobleman, is emblematic of the larger economic networks linking America and Britain. Through her personal correspondence and contemporary media coverage, Sidiki reads this economic interdependence as arising from a “common Anglo Saxon identity” that became essential in context of the international imperial conflicts that connected the two global empires.

While Lee and Sidiki illustrate the imperialist consequences of racial attachment through individual case studies, Kellie Holzer’s paper strings together a “new constellation” of texts that articulate hidden relationships in intercultural forms of adaptation. Holzer traces the genealogy of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Delicia Hatya (1922), a Bengali-language retelling of Marie Corelli’s The Murder of Delicia (1896), itself a partial adaptation of Catherine Dickens’s infamous exploitation by her husband, Charles Dickens. Reconstructing the text’s repetition of the core ingredients of gender violence in center and periphery, Holzer fractures traditional periodicity by showing how Hossain’s work contributes to a “palimpsest of protest” that straddles Victorian and Modernist temporalities through narrative mutation.

The three papers argue for a reading of minoritized voices and texts as essential to challenging anglocentric periodization. This imperative is made explicit in Adrian Wisnicki’s concluding paper, which employs archival methodologies to decenter whiteness as the normative authorial voice of empire. His digital humanities project One More Voice (https://onemorevoice.org/) recovers non-European voices in Victorian colonial archives. Replacing the concept of authorship with “contributions,” Wisnicki advocates for the inclusion of marginal actors in textual production through the recuperation of “travel narratives, letters, diaries, interviews, treaties, oral histories, and vocabularies'' often ignored in literary research. Wisnicki argues that populating the systematic gaps in colonial archives unsettles periodicity and other related boundaries, entailing a disciplinary shift towards a multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial global corpus.

187V Britain, Empire, and Global Afterlives: 1850–1950: Calls for Papers