Victorians of Color/Victorian Empire
The Victorian period, as we know it, is foundational in our understanding of literary histories, forms, and canons. The Victorian period, as we know it, is also foundational in our understanding of global empire, race, and gender. We will look at imperial subjects of the British empire as they formed themselves as “Victorian,” sometimes in keeping with and sometimes in opposition to metropolitan culture and its global circulation. For instance, what did non-white subjects of Victorian empire think of this empire? Did they really even think of it? If metropolitan Victorians exploited and appropriated the cultures that they colonized (and even ones they did not), how do we reckon with imperial subjects who appropriated “English” material, literary, and aesthetic ideas as their “own”? Victorians of Color asks these questions to conceptualize nineteenth-century literary and cultural history as the legacy and inheritance of its people of color. We will see what the Victorian Anglophone world looks like when seen through the works of its second and third language English speakers and non-English speakers, its colonial subjects, and its people and places whose histories still cannot be written about without reference to Britain, even as British history behooves no reference to them.
Image Details:
Section tile (on previous page): David Martin, Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804) and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1760-1825) (1778), Wikimedia Commons.
Left: Front cover of Seamen's hospital booklet: Illustration: “An empire on which the sun never sets”: including all crests of British colonies: Australia, Canada, India, Fiji, etc. Wellcome Collection.
Women & Empire
Our course looks at how women imagined, encountered, and experienced global empires. Barred from political suffrage for all of human history except the last century or so, how did women participate in the creation and sustenance of empire as a political project? We will examine how women understood and represented key imperial discourses and events, like settler colonialism, Abolition, marriage reform, partitions, and global diasporas. Gendered identities help conceptualize imperial endeavors—often undertaken in the name of “women and children.” Imperial gender norms also simultaneously transform global understandings of gender. Our course focuses on women’s literary production as they are frequently viewed as imperial helpmeets but overlooked as the intellectual interlocutors of imperial thought. Overall, we will investigate not just the role that empire plays in shaping women’s identity but also how certain versions of feminine identity continue to depend on imperial myths.
Image Details: Indian suffragettes in the Women's Coronation Procession, London, on June 17, 1911 [Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images]