Where is the present? Responding to calls for strategic presentism and “undisciplining” that set the nineteenth century into dynamic relation with the twenty-first, this essay stresses the US-centered conception of contemporaneity shaping debates in Victorian studies. If these interventions seem like a swerve from the nationally enclosed historicism for which that field was known, not only the turn to the present but its predominantly American frame of reference are foundational to Victorian studies’ emergence in the 1950s and 1960s. Examining postwar claims for Victorian studies’ relevance to another present shaping scholars’ picture of a “transitional” era and their emphasis on mental life, I argue that the field from its start fashioned Victorian culture as portable historical analogy for US hegemony. Confronting its legacies of empire and whiteness entails attention to the afterlife of its prior entanglement with projects of global statecraft carried out through American intellectual expertise.

This essay argues for the usefulness of a narrow concept of the Victorian within transnational, anticolonial nineteenth-century scholarship through a reading of the 1886–88 Ghanaian novel Marita; or, The Folly of Love. Intervening in debates about periodization and discipline, it suggests that the paradoxical reentrenchment of the word Victorian at the moment of influential calls to undiscipline Victorian studies reflects a shift from a cultural to a scholarly tradition as the presumed unifying object for subfield designation. This shift risks a self-undermining cathexis to institutional norms, calcifying as method contingent practices developed around particular materials. Marita, however, points to a different mode of engaging with the category of the Victorian: by reading the nineteenth century as a global network of intersecting but distinct literary traditions, we might more effectively center objects over methods—that is, we might loosen the self-regarding perpetuation of discipline itself.

These are hard times for Victorianists. Perhaps for all humanists. Indeed, for all those who work in higher education. Such is the argument of Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article. Hayot and Seybold contend,

“Undisciplining Victorian Studies” was published five years ago, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the global uprisings that followed the brutal murder of George Floyd. We are grateful to be given the opportunity to consider its afterlife here among other methodological problems that the two essays anchoring this forum pose: the persistence of the field marker “Victorian” and the partial origin of the field of Victorian studies in Cold War American imperialism and class politics. Nonetheless, we found ourselves unmoored by the terms of this feature’s title, “Victorian Studies and Its Others,” lacking the coordinates for the very conversation we wished to have amid personal and professional shifts (motherhood; the neoliberal realities of higher education, including hiring freezes; the collapse of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and the sharp rise of AI), and ongoing global catastrophe (fascism, the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, the retrenchment of capital in a supposedly “post” pandemic landscape). We proceeded by asking one another questions in the collective spirit of the original essay in the hopes of retracing a scholarly thread between then and now.

For a long time, the story goes, we scholars supported a Victorian racial regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Disciplines were an injunction to silence discussions about race, an affirmation of its nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know. Such was the hypocrisy of our field with its halting logic.

The editor of PMLA has invited us to consider the prospects of “undisciplining” in Victorian studies and beyond. The two rich essays under discussion respond to ongoing critiques that charge the field with “implicit … white universalism and inattention to race,” as Emily Steinlight writes, and to rallying cries such as Nasser Mufti’s unforgettable admonition that we should “hate Victorian Studies properly.” “Undisciplining” means to disrupt or even abandon the field entirely. Jacob Romanow and Steinlight both note that these critiques have ironically placed greater, not lesser, importance on the term Victorian. Yet the two essays take different approaches. Romanow opts to revive Victorian as a word that has continuing critical utility. Steinlight chooses to historicize it. At the center of their essays are different uses of the term Victorian. How significant are these differences? And does history offer alternative versions of Victorian studies that might help us now? Here are some brief thoughts.

S. C. Sanial was a prolific chronicler, preoccupied with a single subject: histories of Indian journalism.1 For four decades, marrying content to format, he published serially in the subcontinent’s monthly and quarterly magazines. Sanial’s earliest account dates to the 1895 “Dr. Sambhu Chandra Mukherjee” in National Magazine, an essay he expanded into the six-part “Story of an Indian Journalist” in the Journal of the Moslem Institute between 1905 and 1907. Sanial’s last essay, “The First Persian Newspaper in India,” appeared in 1934 in Islamic Culture. In between he published on Robert Knight, newsagents, press surveillance, and newspapers of the “later Moghul period” in periodicals as wide-ranging as Calcutta Review, Muslim Review, and Hindustan Review.2 Sanial’s twelve-part “History of Journalism in India” in the Calcutta Review between 1907 and 1911 is his most sustained project, a feat of sleuthing undertaken in the face of colonial policies that blocked access to archives. Though journalism seems to have been his subject, he made forays into Mughal architecture (Fatehpur Sikri, Itimad-ud-Daulah’s tomb), British subjects (William Jones, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Christmas), and, in an early publication, historiography. Aside from “What Should Be the Aims of a Historian”? (Indian Magazine and Review, 1896), Sanial does history rather than theorizes it.

For some time now, Victorian studies as a field has been engaged in a sustained project of self-critique, attending to histories of structural and epistemic violence embedded in the various constituencies of the self—from what and how we study to who we are. Beyond the field, such self-critique forms part of what David Kurnick calls “the burgeoning tradition of disciplinary self-scrutiny” (350). The efflorescence of self-scrutiny in Victorian studies is carefully delineated in the two essays by Emily Steinlight and Jacob Romanow, both of which offer a measured reassessment of the limits not only of such field-specific self-critique but also of self-critique as a metacritical genre.

In his writings on the sociology of culture, Raymond Williams distinguished between institutions and formations. Institutions, in Williams’s framework, facilitate the selection, incorporation, and dissemination of cultural practices into a dominant order. In The Sociology of Culture, Williams begins his analysis of cultural institutionalization with a historical survey of the changing position of medieval Welsh bards; he ends with a long discussion of intellectuals, including their place in the modern university. In both cases, he describes how institutions mediate the relationships between cultural producers and the social systems that organize their worlds. The processes of socialization and education, Williams writes in Marxism and Literature, also depend on the selective transmission of cultural practices and norms through institutions: “Education transmits necessary knowledge and skills, but always by a particular selection from the whole available range, and with intrinsic attitudes, both to learning and social relations, which are in practice virtually inextricable” (117–18).

I studied Victorian literature, or the thing that goes by that name, in three different institutions in three different countries, and each of these experiences, which involved modes of disciplining and undisciplining, consolidation and displacement, taught me that the making of literary fields was a malleable process overdetermined by time and place. As an undergraduate at the University of Nairobi in the late 1970s, I learned that the nineteenth century was the favored period of the new intellectual class not because of what postcolonial criticism claims—that it was the age of empire and hence the fulcrum of decolonial discourses—but because it provided important lessons about the necessity and danger of progress, the most quintessential Victorian idea of all. The industrial novels of Charles Dickens (Hard Times), Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South), and George Eliot (Felix Holt) occupied a prominent position in the Nairobi curriculum; Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England was considered a primary text. The theoretical primer was Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, especially the chapter dealing with industrial novels.

In November 2023, I visited the Tarbela Dam, about fifty kilometers upstream from Attock Fort on the Indus River, or a bit north of the halfway point between Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, and Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the northwest mountainous province that abuts Afghanistan. I was beginning research on two book projects and hoping to reestablish relationships in a part of the country in which my family never really lived. My little daughter had taken her first steps days before—on the day that we landed in Pakistan—and, on her still-unsteady legs, she climbed the stairs of the Tarbela Dam Monument (fig. 1). The site features a replica of the river, the surrounding topography, and the main dam itself. The area is highly militarized. Our permission to enter the dam site, to cross the dam road and stand at the top of the massive spillway, to touch the opal water in the pool below was brokered by the son of a long-ago slain army pilot, on those credentials. After visiting the monument, we were served tea and aloo cutlets at the officers’ rest house, and then another tea after viewing construction progress on the fifth extension hydropower project, which is slated to begin producing energy this year (2026) following nearly 700 million dollars in investments from the World Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In and of itself, the rich variety of insights gathered here decisively confirms Josephine McDonagh’s dictum that “there are many different Victorians and each of them has its own history.” Periodizations and subfield formations, the essays emphasize, are functionalist, structured and restructured for the particular needs of the people using them—according to their “utility,” as Barbara Black writes. McDonagh, Nasser Mufti, and Olivia Lingyi Xu all point to the respective contextual specificities of my and Emily Steinlight’s critiques; likewise, Simon Gikandi elucidates the highly differentiated implications of the Victorian across a range of distinct institutional and cultural contexts. Conversely, Priti Joshi, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, and Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy Wong point to materials and perspectives that Victorian studies has shown itself incapable of assimilating (Zachary Samalin, following Raymond Williams, might prefer “institutionalizing”). These field boundaries, they suggest, are constitutive failures; that is to say, failures that constitute the field through what it excludes.

What is the function of disciplinary self-critique? Why now? The discerning responses collected in this cluster acutely register the timely and untimely conditions of a conversation stretching over the past decade, and they attend from several angles to what is altered or perpetuated in critical reflection on the scope, uses, and locations of a subfield. Echoing Jacob Romanow’s observation that the rubric “Victorian” has become paradoxically more entrenched in the metadiscourses challenging its limits, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong consider whether these further interventions tend toward the same effect. Their landmark essay “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” and related interventions, including Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie’s “Widening the Nineteenth Century,” which have fostered teaching and research beyond the Victorian as such, were circumspect about the force of assimilation—understandably so, since these projects have been ushered into the center of established Victorianist journals and conferences. Efforts to undiscipline, decolonize, or expand the field have appreciably changed how the nineteenth century is studied and taught and have valuably diversified the focus and the demography of conferences that were disproportionately white. But self-criticism, as Olivia Lingyi Xu aptly observes, can also recapitulate the center/periphery dynamic it aims to redress. Programmatic self-correction of Victorian studies’ limits can homogenize categories and harden binaries—sometimes with the result that minoritized and international scholars are courted as “its others,” implicitly personifying a field’s self-critique in the familiar role of native informant. Perhaps this confirms Nasser Mufti’s point that what makes academic disciplines “disciplinary” in Michel Foucault’s sense is not their repression of knowledge but precisely their integrative energies and incitements to speak.