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.