This panel probes informal imperialism’s renewed significance following the field’s turn to transimperialism (through the work of scholars like Sukanya Banerjee), transatlanticism, Pacific Rim studies, and Greater Britain--all theoretical models that foreground relationality, solidarity, affiliation, and “glocality” as ways to understand layered cultural formations and exchanges. Whereas an earlier wave of critics working with informal imperialism highlighted the cultural effects of the economic preeminence of Britain or other Western powers in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, the current wave also takes into account a number of other crucial factors.

These factors include the competitive arenas in which informal imperialism operated during the long nineteenth century (as in Siam, where the combination of British, French, and American influences helped the Thai monarchy keep formal imperialism at bay, or in Afghanistan, which, as McBratney argues here, was the site for competing Russian and British spheres of influence and cultural projection); the persistence or rise of non-Western informal imperialism and its interaction with Western global networks (as with China and Japan within Asia); the reconceptualization of Western imperialisms prompted by indigenous studies’ methodological challenges; the uneven and unstable relationship between formal and informal imperialisms; and the significance of technologies of communication, such as the telegraph and the railroad to worldmaking. It also includes the renewed focus on genre and form as contact zones for literary expression. Works formerly seen as “failed” attempts at adopting Western literary forms like the novel, as in the work of the first generations of Indian writers in English, are now viewed as fruitful experiments in cultural hybridity. This undertaking also builds on scholarship in American Studies underscoring the US’s global position in the second half of the nineteenth century, beyond manifest destiny and before the formal acquisition of colonies like the Philippines following the 1898 Spanish-American War.

The three papers gathered here (fifteen minutes each, with a short response by Reeder) all work to investigate and complicate these cultural contact zones and in-between literary landscapes. Tackett’s study of Cherokee Nation poet John Rollin Ridge and the genre of laudatory transatlantic cable poems looks to indigenous studies in order to map the conceptual “amalgamation of races” that the telegraph signalled. In so doing, it reveals how indigenous writers like Ridge worked within genre structures like the cable poem to challenge the concept of the “civilized Indian” and to formulate informal empire as a corollary and corrective to prevailing notions of America’s greatness. Similarly, Lee shows how Charles Dickens and Wikie Collins’s Christmas story “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” (1857) is much more than a simple allegory for the “Indian Mutiny” displaced in time to the eighteenth century and in place to the Caribbean and Central America. By reviewing one of the source texts for the depiction of Silver-Store Island and the Mesoamerican ruins that feature in Collins’s portion of the work, Lee looks at how the narrative performs a complex grafting of Indian colonization, American manifest destiny, British aspiration for dominance along the Mosquito Coast, and the East Asian silver trade to inculcate in readers a desire for global dominance. McBratney, in an astute analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) again looks to questions of form--in this case, the tensions between the main narrative and the frame narrative--and to the reuse of history--the revival of Alexander’s conquest of northwestern India--to read the relationship between the narrativization of formal imperialism and the informal imperialism on its edges. The paper nuances ideas of the “buffer zone” through its consideration of the interpenetration of the rival Russian and British Empires.

Collectively, these papers demonstrate that however invisible modes of informal imperialism may be today, in the wake of decolonization and postcolonialism, informal empire was crucial on a variety of fronts to the constitution and consolidation of the long nineteenth century’s sense of global interconnectedness.