NAVSA Anti-Racism Panel

NAVSA Anti-Racism Panel 8-12-20

• Panelists: Alisha Walters (Penn State Abingdon), Jane Hu (Phd candidate Berkeley), Nassar Mufti (UI Chicago), Oishani Sengupta* (PhD candidate Rochester), Ryan Fong (K-zoo), Tanya Agathocleous (Hunter College)
• how did you come to VS? Thru parents from former British colonies, theory that privileges Victorian novels, "shock and alienation" of seeing serial Victorian novels after growing up with cheap and plentiful Wordsworth Classics (OS), Ryan: "I read Bleak House and everything changed"

• What does antiracism mean to you and what can it look like in British C19 studies?
  • RF: a series of commitments rather than an agenda. Qs around canon formation aren't enough, thinking epistemologically about critical frames through which we read. This in tension and framed by institutional questions: whose bodies are in conferences, tenured?
  • AW: not one party line. Christina Sharpe, The Fire Now l/u -- we need to bear witness to ever-mutating racism. We teach racism in C19 as "over there": if we are presentist we deny the false dangerous innocence line about it being distinct rather than directly connected. The enduring structures of racism and empire require a lateral, global approach
  • TA: it also has to be activist work for our students, who are often of color. The Victorian/imperial history of education and how that bears on the university now (FOLLOW UP)
  • IMPORTANT OS: Antiracism can saturate all aspect of works, but in counteracting the distancing from C19 framings of race, asking how are those longterm, successful framings of race so successful? Vic authors are often obviously racist -- does that mean they're not part of antiracism? Actually, no: they perform the formation of these ideologies. A lot of racist Vic authors seem to be trying to convince themselves that this is true.
  • JH: political and aesthetic formations -- ethnic studies originated in activist moments. It was first a political movement and now aesthetic, a reversal of VS. The aesthetic attraction of racist formations: understanding what the appeal was is something we can track as lit scholars. (The history of disciplinarity is implicitly important in this.)
  • NM: The way the c19 produced the category of race and modern empire. Race becomes central to the org of politics in C19. Orientalism is a system of knowledge but it's not a misrepresentation: it's representation as such. Said: "Orientalism created the orient the easterner lives in." One is inside and so necessarily reproducing it. Antiracism is a relation to a body of knnowledge.
  • RF: racialized subjects themselves thinking about these formations and what they mean, leading to conversations for our time. Mary Seacole: What does the category of blackness do in this text? Forms of failed solidarity? "Her politics don't line up the way I want them to!" Resisting the urge to tokenize a "native informant"
  • OS jingoistic coverage of the colonies came from the way news orgs funded correspondents -- it wasn't a monolith, but rather contingent and economically based
  • Priti says the c19 is 1776-1914

• Empire: where does it belong in these questions, and what does it conceptually prevent us from doing?
  • Catherine Hall work on Caribbean empire l/u
  • NM: "pro-Empire" -- useful for thinking about our present. The figure of native informant, central to the imperial project. You get 8 informants to tell us about race -- it's this panel! We're on the cusp of a new formation of the native informant -- diversity hires will move private bc those universities have the funding.
  • TA: the difference of tokenism and native informancy (Fareed Zakaria?); in VS, inordinate focus on South Asia, African countries and Caribbean (those tend to be siloed). We can't think of empire outside of race, making Indians tools of the working class hierarchized above Africans was how empire functioned.
  • JH: contingency of categories of race. Oriental other in "flexible position" to European itself. Racialization through categorization in C19 empire. It's not the same but using some of the same technologies, it's hidden everywhere, that's how empire works.
  • AW: Fenians referring to Morant Bay in Jamaica in thinking about liberation. Also, racial scientists like Cope deeply involved in race-making. Race-making is global, a function of international empire
  • RF: What are we studying when we study empire? Identifying imperial ideologies and systems. That's one of the frames that needs to be broken -- going back to old chesnut texts to make the same observations from Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, etc. His work offers a way of reframing the question: empire was not the totality it expressed itself as. IMPORTANT -- empire as a limited and contingent category, not an end point. It's in relationship with others. We're in these discourses.

• In C19 American studies, whiteness is central to thinking about race; in British c19 studies, whiteness doesn't get quite as much attention as such. Should we pay more attention to it?
  • Priti: Jeff Chang: corporatization of diversity l/u for K
  • AW: has published on this. Impt to historicize whiteness, how it's constructed geographically, environmentally, in terms of class, different visual markers (to be white is not always to appear as such -- Kim or Murthwaite in Moonstone). Making things visible that are rendered purposely invisible -- it's also structuring how we see white bodies, and you can see a deep anxiety about what they're doing in these texts. Emotional construction of whiteness, too, in affect.
  • TA: it's weird, "whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness," that is, darkness (Toni Morrison). Bertha is racialized but not necessarily black, we don't know. Jane and her cousins are the ones who are explicitly categorized as virtuous and white.
  • OS: "not-white-enough" as a category: urban poor in Mayhew or Dickens. Afterlives of categories of race after British imperialism (skin whitening cream in India, "fair and lovely," which didn't get repudiated til after George Floyd's death)
  • RF: whenever we turn to whiteness in white-dominated fields it can be risky -- we can't just have white academics talking about whiteness and checking the box that we've talked about race. Thinking about the how the category of racial difference itself is constituted, and how whiteness fits into this. We don't want it to become whiteness studies -- a certain solipsism in that, rather than relation.

• who is a scholar from c19 studies or not that you feel like we should know/read?
  • NM: Vanessa Dickason's Dark Victorians, even Said's Culture and Imperialism. The stuff is there, we just haven't looked at it this way.
  • Eve Tuck and someone else, "Decolonization is not a metaphor" -- putting the question of land back into play
  • Sarah Ahmed; Toward a Global Idea of Race
  • Srinavasan special issue in Interventions on global anglophone. What does that displace?
  • TA: Elisabeth Kulski White Violence and the Rule of Law -- history of India imperial justice
  • OS: Victorian Anthropology