In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction:Undisciplining Victorian Studies
  • Ronjaunee Chatterjee (bio), Alicia Mireles Christoff (bio), and Amy R. Wong (bio)

"We must become undisciplined. The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching; new ways of entering and leaving the archives of slavery, of undoing the 'racial calculus and … political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago' and that live into the present."

—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, with a quotation from Saidiya Hartman's "Venus in Two Acts" (2016)

In her celebrated work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe calls for those who read and study Atlantic slavery to "become undisciplined" (13). Sharpe registers how academic disciplinary norms continually disavow and distort knowledge, particularly "the kinds of knowledge gained from and of the everyday, from what Dionne Brand calls 'sitting in the room with history'" (12). To "become undisciplined" is to reject this partitioning and co-opting of knowledge, and instead to invent "new modes" of research and teaching that offer a "method of encountering" what Sharpe evocatively names "a past that is not past"—that is to say, a climate of [End Page 369] anti-Blackness that extends well beyond the wake of the slave ship and continues to structure our lives and symbolic economies (13). While recognizing that Sharpe is not speaking directly to Victorian studies scholars—and that each reader's experience of inclusion or non-inclusion in relation to her work will differ—we think that scholars in our field have much to learn from her call. Our gesture in taking up Sharpe's "undisciplining" is both material and metaphorical. First, scholars of Victorian literature and culture are, in fact, scholars of Atlantic slavery, even if to date we have largely taken up that study through evasion or non-recognition. Second, while holding the specificity of anti-Blackness very much before us, we suggest that Sharpe's insights are necessary to the broader thinking of race and racialization we wish to perform here.

We understand Sharpe to be calling for a shift in methodology and politics, and we want to enact both. In this special issue, our goal is to interrogate and challenge our field's marked resistance to centering racial logic. Together with our contributors, we want to illuminate how race and racial difference subtend our most cherished objects of study, our most familiar historical and theoretical frameworks, our most engrained scholarly protocols, and the very demographics of our field.1 We seek to challenge the multiple rigidities, cultural and conceptual, that have kept Victorian studies isolated from other fields. In particular, we want to ask why contemporary scholarship on a period and a geographical center that consolidated a modern idea of race—the nineteenth century in and beyond Britain—lacks a robust account of race and racialization. We argue that we need a historical and theoretical account to articulate anew the problems of liberal humanism and capitalism, gender and sexuality, and imperial and state violence. This approach should attend properly to the whiteness (as white supremacy) that structures these problems and our field's scholarly and social practices (for instance, norms of conferencing and networking) alike. This issue thus makes a plea for breaking open but also for re-making: if we can heed Sharpe's call and center race and racialization in our work, we can think about both the nineteenth century and the present with more precision and invite greater urgency, creativity, and care into our scholarship.

This issue began as a reading group, when the three of us came together as early career scholars to continue filling in together what we recognized to be major gaps in our learning and to discuss our lived experiences as non-Black women of color in a predominantly white field. Our first step in undisciplining ourselves was to read more widely in critical race and ethnic studies, and this is our charge to the field as well. We want to move away from narrow versions of disciplinarity that function as tools for partitioning knowledge and managing difference (as scholars such as Rey Chow, Kandice Chuh, and Lisa Lowe have [End Page 370] described), and...

pdf

Share