Hensley, Forms of Empire

Hensley's Forms of Empire is driven by ethical and, as he puts it, curatorial energies to narrate how Victorian political theorists and literary authors struggled with “the uncanny persistence of violence in a globalized liberal society” (1). It spans the mid- to late Victorian period, tracking how influential authors imagined their modern present as a definitive break from a past imagined as feudal, primitive, clan-based, and hierarchical. Or, in the words of Henry Maine, whose political theory Hensley explains to fine effect, these writers imagined themselves to be living in a modern society of abstract equivalent individuals organized by contract and consent, having broken away from a traditional past structured by a status hierarchy and maintained through coercion. A century later, this contemporary belief in their historical achievement was reified by Cold War intellectuals who deemed the mid-Victorian period in particular to be the “age of equipoise,” an extended period of political and social peace, compared with earlier and later more tumultuous times at home and abroad. As liberalism effloresced, especially across the mid-Victorian period, and the promotion of liberty and equality heightened, such thinkers as John Stuart Mill celebrated their present as an achievement of progress but, Hensley notes, struggled with the spectacles of violence and death that occurred under its sign in the colonies. As Hensley strikingly puts it, “Emancipation and death advanced together” (2). For Hensley, once this apparent paradox is articulated as one that Victorian writers and image-makers, like the photographer Felice Beato, confronted with some degree of consciousness, the next question is, How did this affect their representations?

Hensley shows through at-times virtuosic close readings how this central paradox was “crystallized,” as he puts it, in literary form. Familiar works of Victorian literature such as George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and H. R. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines appear new, while less critically addressed works such as Wilkie Collins's Armadale appear vitally important to understanding how biopower operated in the nineteenth century and how authors both resisted and abetted its aims. Hensley carefully displays these literary works’ idiosyncrasies in form, dismissed by contemporary critics as flaws, as instead heroic efforts to express these contradictions. In his readings, these literary singularities point back to authorial discomfort and labor. For example, in his tour-de-force reading of The Mill on the Floss, Hensley argues that Eliot's historical novel seeks to represent the moment when England entered into a modern political order, a transition that has been difficult for historical narratives to represent. Crucially for Hensley's argument, not only does Eliot use the novel form to narrate this transition, she emphasizes the violence that any such shift into a new political order requires. In his reading, which draws on Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” Eliot's famous flood represents the founding violence of the new modern order, marking for the reader of this historical novel the event by which English society moved from traditional social structures typified by the rural community, status hierarchy, the clannishness of the Dodsons and Tullivers, and the use of violence to resolve conflicts to the new world of imperial modernity, characterized by deterritorialized, abstract individuals, capable of planetary consciousness, who voluntarily enter into contracts with others and make recourse to the law to resolve conflicts peacefully.

Hensley's chapter on Swinburne is also remarkable for its incisive reading of poetic form as manifesting political thought. Taking the brutal massacre of black peasants that occurred in Morant Bay in Jamaica in 1865 alongside the scandal that met Swinburne's publication of his collection of poetry, Hensley argues that together these two seemingly disparate events expose a larger truth about mid-Victorian culture: “[T]he excess of violence and the restraint of law were not opposite terms, as liberal theory was at pains to uphold, but two names for the same thing” (138). In a surprising but convincing reading of prominent liberal and conservative accounts of the insurrection, reactions to Swinburne's poetry, and the tension between its content and form, Hensley argues that “the cases of ‘Morant Bay’ and ‘Swinburne’ help disclose this excess lodged within the law: they shed light, uneasily, on the perverse core of peace itself—a relationship Swinburne's verse stages as the involvement of sublime force within beautiful form” (138).

Forms of Empire’s attention to the violence that lies at the heart of liberalism is an important intervention and has the capacity to significantly reshape the field and, in particular, studies of liberalism. I did wonder, though, if the book's account of its interpretive method was absolutely necessary for its argument and whether, perhaps, it conflicted with some of the close readings. The book avows a curatorial approach to cultural objects, asserting that it seeks to practice a dispensation of care toward them, as mentioned above, as opposed to performing symptomatic or diagnostic readings, such as Marxian ones, that presume to know more than the literary object, sounding out its unconscious. However, moving beyond surface readings to another less immediate understanding of the text's signification is simply the work of smart interpretation, and Hensley's dazzling close readings do just that. Also, the book at times seems to figure its Victorian writers as heroically grappling with, being conflicted about, disavowing, or expressing shame around the contradiction of the use of violence in the founding and maintenance of legal modernity. It made me wonder if the book's effort to position literary objects as “particular kinds of subjects” displaces an imputed unconscious from the literary object, now a thinking subject endowed only with a consciousness, to the literary author.

I also wondered about the silence around the book's cover art, which, by being the first thing the reader sees, mediates our reading of what follows. A Beato photograph entitled “Woman Using Cosmetics” (1867–68), it features a young Japanese woman in profile, kneeling on the floor, applying makeup, her loose wrap exposing her shoulder, neck, and upper back. Her gaze is directed neither at the viewer nor to the mirror set up in front of her, but off to the side. The readings of Beato's famous war images that follow in the introductory pages of Forms of Empire are stunning, but this particular photograph, which foregrounds themes of surface/depth, private/public, reality/artifice, Eastern/Western ideals of femininity, the erotic, the exotic, and the gaze, is left to speak for itself. What is it saying? The image makes one wonder if sexualized racial difference played a more important role in the Victorian poetics of sovereignty than Hensley's account suggests.

Mufti, Civilizing War

Like Hensley, Mufti starts with a seeming contradiction: how is it that civil war in early Victorian discourse is configured as something that “civilized” countries do on their path to progress, liberal peace, and capitalist modernity, but now, in current neoliberal discourses of the Global North, it is something in which only “uncivilized” countries engage? Examining current social science expert discourse and official discourses such as the 2003 World Bank report, Mufti starts us in the neoliberal present and in the center of power. Mufti's insight is profound, and it productively enables him to cross nations and periods in exhilarating ways as he pursues how those in power resignify the meaning of words to maintain their hegemony. With him, we look at conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, deemed civil wars by the West, and follow the discursive and narrative mechanisms by which the West then projects the term upon others in order to entrench its power. The savage and primitive engage in civil war, and it is up to the civilized to intervene on behalf, not only of their hapless victims, but also of the world, which is in danger of being dragged back to a medieval-like dystopia. The World Bank, Mufti points out, claims the position of authority to deem which side of a conflict is criminal and which is victim and to advocate for intervention on one side or the other accordingly. In fact, Mufti claims, the Orientalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Edward Said so influentially named and analyzed has shifted from describing academic knowledges about Eastern cultures—their languages, religions, literatures, etc.—in the service of imperial control to describing academic knowledges about the schisms, warring sects, and civil conflicts of the Global South.

To analyze how the West went from projecting the term “civil war” from its ancient past and its industrial present to applying it exclusively to the present of its imperial peripheries and the Global South, Mufti develops what he calls a poetics of rupture: “By attending to national rupture as a textual effect rather than a historical episode or a crisis to sovereignty, we learn that nationalism doesn't only desire or presuppose unity but often valorizes its internal antagonisms and disunity for articulating and realizing its imperial and postcolonial ambitions” (9). In the first section of the book, Mufti examines how Victorians used the term “civil war” to describe conflicts in Europe and the United States, such as the class struggles within England between the rich and the poor and the American Civil War. Mufti argues that writers like Friedrich Engels and Elizabeth Gaskell as well as Carlyle and Disraeli cast the antagonisms between workers and owners in the nineteenth century as a civil war taking place under otherwise stable social conditions. The next section takes us from the 1840s to the turn of the century and the age of high imperialism. At this point, the term “civil war” began to be applied to other nations and to serve as a reason for the British Empire to interfere. In Mufti's readings, Rudyard Kipling's writings on the Second Boer War, such as “A Sahibs’ War” (1902), and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904) begin to expose the historical change in Western interpretations of black and brown resistance to outside forces from colonial treachery (as the 1857 Indian Rebellion was described) to civil war. Kipling and Conrad cast this violence as backward and savage and as, therefore, the justification for redoubled Western interference. In other words, the imputation of civil war became a way to keep hold of power when formal colonialism began to crumble. In the final section, Mufti turns to V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979) and Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981), published during the early decades of neoliberalism. Here, formal colonialism is over, but, the novels show us, the West justifies interference by claiming to redress the human-rights atrocities of what it deems those backward nations’ civil wars. Now, the West need only declare “civil war” to deploy military force outside its borders.

Mufti's Civilizing War charts a promising path forward for Victorian studies, not only by its argument about civil war but by its clear commitments to showing how looking at the nineteenth century is critical for understanding the present. The trajectory of the book is exciting because it suggests ways that Victorian studies projects can include readings of novels by Disraeli and Gordimer alongside readings of the World Bank reports in the same extended book-length study. This is significant for scholars, as we are continuously asked not only “why the humanities?” but also “why the Victorians?” But, as with Forms of Empire, I wondered if attention to gender or sexual difference would alter its main argument. The drama in Civilizing War remains mostly among men, even though the novels under discussion feature domestic plots. Western intervention in civil wars in the twentieth century has often emphasized the violation of women's rights to justify invasion and occupation (think Afghanistan and the Taliban). How might those aspects of narrative and discourse matter to Civilizing War’s incisive transnational and transhistorical argument?

Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling

With Schuller, we cross the pond, following in the wake of major evolutionary works by British and French figures, namely Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, Charles Darwin, and Francis Galton, as they were imported and taken up by evolutionary race scientists in the United States. Like Mufti, Schuller's book locates us in the present first, addressing in particular the phenomenon of white anger in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement and its mass protests of police brutality against African Americans. She forwards a claim that the rest of the book will nuance, historicize, and elaborate: “… white emotional well-being is produced in part by the ritualized entertainments of the security state, which hinge on the regularized death of black people” (2). If, for Hensley, the dead and broken bodies are offshore in the global peripheries, their images painfully lodged in the Victorian mind; and, for Mufti, they are in the English past, late-Victorian colonies, and Global South present, returning to the United States or Europe in the figure of the refugee; for Schuller, those bodies are within the U.S. nation. Here, representations of black bodies in pain or in death, as they circulate in a sentimental affective economy, serve as an ever-replenishing naturalized resource for cultivating white sensibility and the security state. Her work focuses on sentimental discourse in the nineteenth century, which, along with evolutionary theories, presupposed a feeling and impressible body. To manage that impressibility, she argues, biopower differentiated among the population between those whose impressibility, that is, capacity to be impressed upon by sensation, leads to their further civilization, and those who might receive and impart sensations but who were essentially unchanged by them, remained unimpressed by them, and thus static, primitive, stuck in time, rapidly outpaced by the civilizing race.

As with Hensley and Mufti, “liberalism” is an operative term for Schuller. Its notion of the possibility of individual development and self-cultivation, the processes that Matthew Arnold famously referred to as culture, aligns with its notions of progress and supports a biopolitical logic that divides the population into those who can change and those who cannot. But change could also be negative. In sentimental and evolutionary race science, the body of the civilized individual can grow more refined but could also devolve. Sentimentality could guard against that, ensuring the forward development of the white privileged body, furthering the divide between it and the primitive bodies that might contaminate or drag it back down. Instead of being negatively affected by primitive bodies, Schuller shows how nineteenth-century sentimentalism aimed to foster the privileged subject's capacity to sympathize with primitive bodies’ sensations, using those bodies as stimulants for further civilization, that is, as culture rather than contaminants. She deftly shows how nineteenth-century sentimentalism emerged from eighteenth-century Anglo-American sensibility discourse, “which predicated civilization on refined capacities of emotional and physiological feeling” (10). Sensibility also presumes a changeable body, one that is plastic, not fixed. In the nineteenth century, impressibility discourse takes this up and combines it with evolutionary theories and new notions of geology, which brought new ideas about time and the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

In her chapters, Schuller examines those in power, such as Edward Drinker Cope, a paleontologist in the American school of evolution. He forwarded the concept of “right feeling” as the ability to regulate one's feelings, which he claimed was the reason behind U.S. civilization's superiority, its ability to “restrain animalistic impulses and maintain the sexual differentiation of the civilized” (36). She also examines the discourses of gyno-neurology by prominent white female physicians who argued that the vagina was the “apex of the refined nervous system” (100). White women under biopower, Schuller shows us, were assigned the “role as preeminent vectors of the plasticity, absorptiveness, and vitality of whiteness, capacities located in the vaginal nerves” (132). Because of that role, white women could take on agency, thus exposing how the category of “woman” was used to stabilize this racialized affective economy. Schuller also turns to the work of nineteenth-century black feminist and poet Frances E. W. Harper, whose work aimed to claim impressibility for black bodies, and makes the argument for not dismissing the tactics of the oppressed. Schuller also provides us with a highly nuanced reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's appropriation of the sentimental politics of life.

In a point of contact with Hensley's chapter on reform and Collins and the way that sensation novels sought to claim unfit bodies back into the fold of life, Schuller's chapter on reform movements in the United States shows us how sentimental fiction about orphans served as a blueprint for philanthropic organizations that separated poor urban children. Like sensation novels, these movements sought to redeem parts of the population seen as unfit, whether Native peoples, seen as “animated fossils destined to go the way of the dinosaurs” (12), or poor urban children, growing up in the streets and crowded slums of New York. Transporting orphans and children with living parents to rural areas where they would be trained to farm and provide domestic service, this mode of philanthropy relied on that plastic notion of self presupposed by evolutionary science and sentimentalism. However, at the turn of the century and into the twentieth century, genetics and heredity would change this notion of plasticity, that the primitive and unfit could be made to imitate the civilized and fit, and the former would be cast simply as unredeemable, overdetermined by their genes. Biophilanthropy, which sought to force the unfit to imitate the fit by changing their environment, would give way to sterilization projects that sought to prevent altogether the unfit from biologically reproducing.

Schuller's The Biopolitics of Feeling brings together critiques of sentimentalism and of biopower in ways that can inspire Victorianist work on affect and biopolitics in the nineteenth century within the British Isles and across the empire. As a Victorianist, I approached her work a bit as a visitor or perhaps even a tourist might, taking stock of the concerns that seem to grip scholars in her field. Rather than advocate that we simply poach from these kinds of works, however, I might point to the ways that literary Victorian studies, like Hensley's and Mufti's, could contribute to American, ethnic, and science studies. Attention to literary form and literary narrative might tell us more about resistance and historical disruptions of the sentimental biopolitics that Schuller lays out for us, providing us with ideas, no matter how small, for how to reconceive of life in ways outside of a biopolitical logic. And nineteenth-century England offers the scene of the realization of industrial capitalism. It would be interesting to see how factory workers and the total exploitation of labor that occurred in the nineteenth century in the United States—which government regulations mitigated, in effect, preventing deaths, but also allowing that labor force to live enough to reproduce—also figure into Schuller's argument.

Original and impassioned, all three books pair their imperatives to expose injustice and critique power with rigorous research and analysis. They show how biopower works from the level of the individual to the nation to the world at large. Victorian literary form appears deeply engaged in bearing witness to the violence at the heart of liberalism. Victorian and anglophone postcolonial novels show how Western global hegemony shores itself up by controlling the term “civil war.” And scientific and sentimental discourses expose how “right feeling” and sympathy are deeply connected to the production of the very suffering and structural injustices they supposedly decry. These studies give us multiple footholds from which to critique the biopolitical world in which we currently live and to recognize the efforts of those struggling to transform it into a world where resources are used to meet our collective needs, binding us together rather than driving us apart.