Voice has been an ongoing area of interest for literary scholars of British studies who engage with gender, class, and empire. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first century postcolonial scholars of voice base their theoretical foundations on the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. While focusing primarily upon the colonized subject. Amy Wong’s Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk introduces a new dimension to this critical conversation by shifting attention to the voice of the colonizer whose articulacy is under pressure. Four late-Victorian texts are explored for the ways they imagine the end of colonial worlding (a Spivak term the author employs) when speech, as an expressive act of self-possession necessary for the maintenance of the colonial self, unravels. The study posits that colonial selves and colonial worlds, sutured together by imperious speech, are demolished when “speech” disarticulates embarrassingly into what Wong defines as “talk.” Talk, for Wong, constitutes “the expansive, universal condition of unproprietary, un-self-possessed communications that are only most often associated with racialized, disabled, and nonhegemonically classed and gendered bodies” (18).

To explore talk, Wong focuses on a modest but original sample of late-Victorian fiction: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors (1891), and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s jointly authored work, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901). “Talk” for Wong is defined as fundamentally anticolonial and is made manifest in “parroting” (53), and through dysfluency, paralanguage, and embodiment. Scholars of cultural studies will be interested in the evidence for speech as self-possession that the study cites—a compendium of Victorian advice manuals on the art of conversation and the importance of being well-spoken, though the author, mystifyingly, alludes to the discussion of these resources as a “detour” (4). One wishes that the author had focused in greater detail on the potential for mining this little-known, but apparently rich, body of texts that would have shed light on Victorian cultural attitudes to speech. Instead, as the title Refiguring Speech suggests, Wong’s preference for a rhetorical approach dispenses with establishing strong historical evidence for what is, in fact, a fascinating premise.

Wong’s positioning of talk as the binary opposite of speech certainly demands more robust evidence that demonstrates the connection between speech and self-possession which an imperial disposition likely would have emphasized. To that end, her premise might have gained from additional cultural evidence for this nineteenth-century position on speech, such as the repartee and wit associated with Victorian British Parliamentary culture, the prestige of debating societies in the educational institutions that were the nursery of Britain’s ruling elites in the nineteenth century, or the entertainment value of verbal brio in the Victorian theater, as exemplified in the comic operas of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Instead of attempting to locate speech socially, Wong prefers to locate talk theoretically, as the “surround” or “undercommons” which African American theorist Fred Moten, in collaboration with Stefano Harney in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), formulated to describe fugitive or marooned communities within the university (117). In this, as in many critical borrowings, Wong strategically hews toward postcolonial and critical race theory, for the purpose of rendering Victorian Studies relevant for conditions of speech and racially fraught public discourse promulgated in the United States.

Wong’s turn to scholars of race to pursue her thesis is original, and, anticipating allegations of over-reading issues of race and gender in talk that erupts in texts, the author skillfully chooses to argue for an acousmatic reading—hearing what does not seem to have a traceable origin or cause within the text. For theoretical support, the study draws from Martinican critic Edward Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990, trans. 1997), which counters fixed notions of identity implied by the concept of the Other, and Jamaican novelist and critic Sylvia Wynter’s interrogation of the Enlightenment’s legacy of configuring the western European as the standard measure of humanity (“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 [2003]: 257–337). This framing affords fresh insights into the texts analyzed. Chapter 1 examines Treasure Island in terms of speech rights, versus parroting and eavesdropping, as found in what Wong alludes to as “differently white characters” (47) who are demarcated by class, disability, and gender. Chapter 2 reads Dracula for the way multilingualism associated with the racialized Other stands in opposition to monolingualism. Here, too, Wong usefully echoes Glissant’s opposition to monolingualism because it resists relationality. Chapter 3 examines One of Our Conquerors for inarticulacy by commencing with Victor Radnor’s fall on London Bridge as an opportunity for exploring transcriptive disarticulation that includes within its scope nonlinguistic body language. Chapter 4, on The Inheritors, addresses how characters who epitomize imperial English masculinity degenerate into dysfluency, where talk is marked by stuttering, spasms, or gibberish.

Wong’s efforts to place critical race theory at the service of Victorian Studies is laudable. The positive outcome is an attention to language and its social functions for Victorians as citizens of the British Empire. Most specifically, attention to the somatic and sonic effects of dialogue, rather than the lexical focus traditionally favored by scholars of fiction, is particularly valuable. The speech versus talk binary has its own rewards and limitations. It sharpens awareness of anticolonial aesthetics as present in late-Victorian fiction, but cannot easily recognize negotiations or contradictions between polarities. The concept of “worlding,” a term Spivak herself acknowledged as vulgarized, in “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives” (History and Theory 24, no. 3 [1985]: 247–72) does not quite manage to accommodate the insights of more recent scholarship regarding the contentiousness that attended Victorian mappings of colonized spaces and subjects. The study is strongest when examining differently white characters, perhaps because of the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the authors chosen for their oeuvre on articulacy and colonization. They are Scottish (Stevenson), Irish (Stoker), half-Irish and half-Welsh (Meredith), half-German and half-English (Ford), and Polish (Conrad). Ironically, the study’s most regrettable omission, given its focus on articulacy and colonization, is its failure to address how the official suppression of languages such as Irish, Welsh, Gaelic, and Manx, both before and during the nineteenth century, might have contributed to English speech as a means toward the maintenance of the colonial self. Nevertheless, this remains a thought-provoking study, which scholars of fin-de-siècle British imperialism and political linguistics will find useful.