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.

While Rene Ricard published prolifically in multiple genres across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, he is perhaps best known for his role in making Jean-Michel Basquiat well-known. His 1981 Artforum article “The Radiant Child” was the first major publication on Basquiat and is widely seen as an influential text in bringing the artist to a broader audience as he shifted from the aphoristic public graffiti of his SAMO project to painting on canvas within an established gallery system. Ricard’s essay both charts this shift and plays an active role within it: writing after the end of SAMO in 1979, he imagines Basquiat within a genealogy of canonical painters, including Vincent van Gogh, Cy Twombly, and Jean Dubuffet.

Hidden in plain sight in the Beinecke Library’s James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University lies the typescript of “God Sends Sunday,” a hitherto unknown three-act play by the Harlem Renaissance enfant terrible, Wallace Thurman. The 149-page play was only recently added to the collection’s “manuscript miscellany,” and, perhaps also accounting for its status as unknown, it shares the title of the poet Arna Bontemps’s first novel, written as Thurman was writing his God Sends Sunday, sometime between 1929 and 1931.1 After publishing his novel, Bontemps collaborated with the poet Countee Cullen on a “straight play” of it (Bontemps), which eventually became the Broadway musical St. Louis Woman and then a Federal Theater production for which Langston Hughes was brought on board.2

Dana A. Williams’s long-awaited book Toni at Random is a revelatory portrait of the novelist from an unusual vantage point: her innovative and influential work as an editor at Random House from 1971 to 1983. Morrison famously pulled off an unprecedented juggling act, holding a full-time editorial career as one of the very few African American faces in senior roles in the trade publishing world while somehow finding time to complete Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981), as her own reputation as a novelist grew. The book raises fascinating questions not only about Morrison’s singular path but about the complex relationship between editorial practice and writerly practice in general, and about the position of African American literature in the US publishing landscape. As a book mainly concerned with the 1970s, Toni at Random can also be read as an intriguing if oblique reflection on the afterlives of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and the extensive efforts at institution building that had emerged in the previous decade, not only in the Black studies and African American studies programs that were founded in colleges and universities around the country but also in Black independent and small-press publishing.

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,

I want to dedicate my remarks to my parents, both ancestors now. To my mother, an elementary school teacher who, even though she had earned a master’s degree, did not know the fullness of my work as an academic but who knew enough about how much I valued this work to excuse my disappearances during visits home during the holidays. When I heard her tell my visiting aunt, who one day inquired of my whereabouts, that I was in our home library “getting out my lesson”—I was preparing for an MLA presentation during the December convention days—I knew my mother was rooting for me to win. And to my father (a math and science teacher turned architect and contractor), who, despite my repeated requests, pretended to forget each year to build me a window seat because he knew I’d get lost in books and forsake people, when the only reason to read books is to understand people.

“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.

The “theology of forgiveness”: The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, a book of essays by Wole Soyinka published in 1999, pays little attention to this. Just the title alone would outrage anyone familiar with Léopold Sédar Senghor, because for the Senegalese poet forgiveness is not a “muse” and memory is not a burden. Senghor loves memory (and all memories), and if he “forgives France”—a phrase that made him unforgivable to African intellectuals—it is not because he prescribed, for us and for all the “wretched of the earth,” the forgetting of the crimes of colonization. Quite the contrary. Soyinka’s analyses are a web of unfounded, insincere, and unjustifiable allegations. They form a bed of presuppositions that prevent him from reading “Neige sur Paris” (“Snow on Paris”), the last poem in Hosties noires (Black Hosts), a collection by Senghor published in 1948. Soyinka, like many African scholars, did not read it when it was published, but rather read it ten to fifteen years later, when the independence movements of 1960 and the Cold War were in full swing. Hence the total lack of contextualization, for which Senghor pays the price. Soyinka and the African progressives of the time did not bother to read it. And when they did, it was to overwhelm it with ideologies that had nothing to do with it. As I discuss below, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness is full of incomprehensible analyses.

Hello, and thank you for coming. This is not how I expected to be addressing you today, and it was an extraordinarily difficult decision not to travel to DC. I want to begin by offering my deepest thanks to Paula Krebs, Karin Bagnall, and the entire MLA staff, who have worked so hard to hold us together through the pandemic and to make sure that we are having a convention as omicron forces us to change so many of our plans. I also want to thank Isabel Gómez, Jenny Forsythe, Esther Allen, and Patricia Arroyo, who were key interlocutors in planning the presidential theme and sessions and in developing this talk.

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.

Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoples, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized. —Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation

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.