This panel asks: How have figures and themes from European Romanticism been repurposed for non-Western literary contexts and minoritarian or anticolonial political projects? Panelists collectively elaborate Romanticism’s redeployment in three distinct comparative cases: the melding of nature and nationalism in interwar Egyptian poetry, the reception of William Hazlitt in the work of Trinidadian critic C.L.R. James, and the uses of German Romanticism among early twentieth century Black U.S. writers.

Different as these cases may sound, they enact a common method to pursue a common aim: each stages a trans-historical comparative reading in order to question the conventional shape of the “Romantic” as a historical period and a field of study. The panel contributes to current debates about how to reorient the study of nineteenth century literatures within a global frame. Recent calls to decolonize or diversify, “undiscipline,” or “widen” Romantic and Victorian Studies have sometimes done so using categories of race indebted to contemporary U.S. theory, in terms set by our political present. This urgent and valuable impulse too easily reverts to the recuperative model of “inclusion,” adding new primary texts and methodologies while neglecting alternative points of departure, as well as other languages or literary traditions. Our panel explores one such alternative: the deep, multilingual, and conflicted archive of post-romantic anticolonial writing. The panelists join three overlapping fields of literary scholarship — Modern Arabic (Drumsta), Postcolonial Victorian (Mufti), and Transatlantic Romantic (Wolff) — to begin reevaluating what we talk about when we talk about Romanticism.

In the panel’s first paper, Professor Emily Drumsta reopens the much-neglected archive of Arabic Romantic poetry to home in on one key figure, the Egyptian poet, journalist, and scientist Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi (1892-1955). The paper shows how nature poetry in British colonial Egypt bore a very different stamp from its European reference points. Abu Shadi responded to European Romantics who saw poetry as an empirical science of the senses (as critics like Amanda Goldstein and Dahlia Porter have detailed) through his poetry, science writing, and active contributions to agricultural journals such as The Bee Kingdom and Chicken Farming. While most accounts have segregated Abu Shadi’s professional activities, this paper takes seriously their coevolution as joint expressions of anticolonial sentiment and Egyptian nationalism.

Professor Nasser Mufti’s paper examines the influence of the Romantic essayist William Hazlitt on Trinidadian anticolonial historian C.L.R. James (1901-1989). Taking their cue from George Lamming’s description of James as “a Victorian with a rebel seed,” James scholars have long recognized his love of Victorian literature and culture. But James’s overlooked reverence for Hazlitt reveals a very different kind of attachment. In Beyond a Boundary, James describes Hazlitt as the most complete expression of English culture before the industrial revolution fully took hold. James inherits the biographical-historical narration of Hazlitt’s final opus The Life of Napoleon (1828) in his heroic history of the French Revolution’s second act: the Haiti of The Black Jacobins (1938). By reconsidering Hazlitt’s impact on James, Mufti’s paper asks how Hazlitt himself might be repurposed to help understand anticolonial thought in the mid-twentieth century era of decolonization.

In the panel’s final paper, Professor Tristram Wolff asks why, for many Black U.S. intellectuals in the early decades of the twentieth century, the project of advancing and contesting theories of race drew extensively on a cross-cultural imaginary that developed out of German ideas about the “folk.” In his 1928 essay “Beauty Instead of Ashes,” Alain Locke wrote that for the Harlem Renaissance writers an emergent “folk temperament” was interpretable through a surprising antecedent: it “stands today, one would say, in the position of the German temperament in Herder’s day.” In readings of Pauline Hopkins, Locke, Du Bois, and Hurston, Wolff shows how the early African-American thought Britt Rusert has called “fugitive science” shifted toward new disciplines of social analysis like sociology and ethnography. Despite ambivalent ties to colonial discourse, in these writers’ hands the idea of “folk” unfolds as a redescription of global racial modernity.

As Hurston wrote in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), “What we really mean by originality is the modification of ideas.” This is true, too, for Romanticism itself, which in its reinvention becomes differently visible and differently active. Despite the at times unpromising or uncomfortable political attachments these papers explore — nature poetry, hero worship, folk pride — the panelists collectively investigate how the afterlives of Romantic thought in anticolonial and minoritarian discourse can offer new ways to study and teach nineteenth-century literature. The three short papers will leave ample time for discussion.