Since the publication in 2020 of the groundbreaking “Undisciplining” special issue of Victorian Studies, scholars of 19^th-century British literature have increasingly turned their attention to the ways that Victorian culture itself, as well as the disciplinary formations of the field of Victorian studies, have produced a circumscribed picture of the Victorian world. Embedded in longstanding Eurocentric, colonialist, and white assumptions, this picture has rendered invisible the work of artists of color, the violences that suppressed their inclusion in Victorian canons and histories, and the ways in which non-white cultures and legacies imprinted the cultural phenomena and ideologies of the 19^th-century British imagination. This session probes these invisibilities, not only bringing the subjects of their erasures into view but also investigating how Victorian ways of seeing, thinking, and reading produced the occlusions that the field of Victorian studies has so long taken for granted.

Each of the four panelists approaches the problem of Victorian cultural invisibility differently, challenging archival records, misreadings, Victorian racial theories, and presumptions about how information circulated in the 19^th century. The first paper, “Black Playwrights on the Victorian Stage,” points out that although the National Theatre's Black Playwright's archive lists its first play by a Black playwright as being 1909, in fact there were several earlier Black dramatists whose work regularly appeared on London stages, invisible because they weren't British and mostly weren’t Anglophone. Focusing on the Black playwright Victor Sejour, the paper will examine how adaptations of Sejour’s plays by white writers in London and Paris effaced Sejour himself from the Victorian theatrical record.

The second paper, “Victoria’s Invisible Race: The Cagots, Whiteness, and Racialization,” will argue that we can recover a Victorian theory of “race and racialization” by investigating nineteenth-century interest in an ethnic group known as the Cagots—a group of unknown origin, unclear history, and ambiguous race found in the Pyrenees, on the west-coast of France and in the Basque region of Spain. If (generally speaking) by the mid-nineteenth-century “race” was increasingly being defined as an essential and embodied form of difference, the case of the Cagots offers a history of racial oppression based almost entirely on its invisibility. The paper shows how Victorian writing on the Cagots exposed the instability of the very racial structures that the Victorians are credited with creating and maintaining.

The third paper, “Visible Depth, Invisible Surface: Making Sicily Greek at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,”explores the Victorian touristic gaze in travel writing about Sicily in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. That gaze serves as a technology of inclusion and inclusion, and as both a tool and rationale for a particular rendering of Sicilian history that privileges the island’s Greek inheritance over the legacies of its many other conquerors. Looking at multiple forms of encounter writing, the paper shows how British travellers produced a kind of “deep visibility” that overlooked Arab contributions to Sicily’s history and topography, in favor of underground “traces” in the form of Greek ruins. The paper theorizes the ways acts of seeing make illegible the Arab “sights” of Sicily for Victorian and Edwardian audiences.

Finally, the fourth paper, “Invisible Hand, Invisible Threat: Marx’s Critique of Capital and Victorian Irish Radicalism,” turns to Marx’s critiques of the workings of colonial capital in Ireland, focusing on how this colonial expropriation of Irish land produced an invisible network of Irish anticolonial organizers and radicals who seek vengeance for colonial terror and famine in Ireland. This international network both facilitated the progressive organization of the working classes in Victorian England and threatened British security at home and throughout the empire. The paper examines this invisible network of Irish Victorians and its crucial place in Marx’s political economy.

The panel’s four 12-minute presentations will allow time for lively exchange among panelists and audience members focused on strategies for translating the session’s focus on the race- and ethnicity-based occlusions of Victorian studies into new agendas for scholarly research in our field. Our panel represents diversity across institutions (large public HSIs, small liberal arts colleges, and private research universities) and methodological approaches in order to promote a productive collaborative conversation about how scholars and teachers of nineteenth century literature can challenge the racial and colonial legacies that persist in our present moment.