Jen Reid poses by a statue of a Black Lives Matter protestor in Bristol, England. Credit: CNN and Matthew Horwood/Getty Images.

Recently, a group of early- and mid-career scholars of Victorian literature published a call to “undiscipline” the field of Victorian Studies. The essay, which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, was adapted from the Introduction to a forthcoming special issue of Victorian Studies, the major journal for the field of VS. The essay has drawn a lot of attention on social media, most of which is positive. I don’t want to call the essay, or its authors, brave. “Bravery” suggests a kind of heroic individualism that is counter to the relational and coalition-based ethos of the essay. Instead, it’s a necessary intervention that helps charts a way forward for the field. The authors are right to argue that any effort to forestall this undisciplining will, instead, further entrench the white supremacy at the heart of Victorian Studies. Personally, I avoid describing myself or my work as “activist” because I have tremendous respect for those who do the work of organizing and building coalitions. The authors of “Undisciplining Victorian Studies”—Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong— are doing that work. They demonstrate what Victorianist scholarship might look like when it is aligned with an activism that puts racial justice and decolonialization at its center.

Undisciplining is picked up from Christina Sharpe’s magnificent book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. To become undisciplined, according to Sharpe, is to “disavow” the knowledge formations (disciplines, fields, institutions) that structure how knowledge is produced, understood, and disseminated, particularly as it relates to the study of race and anti-Blackness. Instead of interdisciplinarity, which suggests a polyamorous attachment to multiple, yet discrete, methodological structures, becoming undisciplined is a “suspension of method” with the end of goal of rethinking the formation of bracketed, self-enclosed fields like VS. Alongside Sharpe, the authors gesture to interventionist efforts by the Bigger 6 Romanticism and RaceB4Race networks to suggest that undisciplining is part of a larger effort within literary studies—particularly as it gets defined by and partitioned into historical time periods that reify white, Western frameworks—to account for race and colonialism.

I’m no longer an academic, and I have no academic affiliations. I spent one year as a non-tenure-track adjunct after finishing my PhD, and I quickly realized that I do not have the strength or fortitude to hold on to even the hope of a stable academic career. In August of last year, I left my job and, with it, the career that I had spent a decade working toward. My decision to leave was personal, but it was also shaped by the gradual attenuation of the humanities within higher education. Despite leaving the academy, I remain invested in literary studies, and, in particular, to my former colleagues within the field of Victorian Studies. More than anything, I want to see the many junior scholars in the field discover sustainable, secure positions within literary studies, which is facing coordinated attacks from all sides—whether for being too radical or, conversely, for being too impractical. (That the character of literary studies is perceived to be both corrupting and weak suggests that there’s something of a fantasy of imperial Decadence at work here.) More than anything, I want to see these scholars cultivate spaces for Black, brown, and indigenous students, queer and trans students, poor and disabled students, to live and think within the university and beyond.

Importantly, the authors of “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” discuss how central “evasion and non-recognition” has been to the development of VS as a field. Every decade or so it seems, scholarship blazes into being that undermines the implicit universalism and whiteness of the field—the authors cite Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Gauri Viswanathan, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Vanessa Dickerson, and Caroline Bressey, among others. There is a pattern where this scholarship is acknowledged by many within the field, assimilated into research and qualifying exams, and, then, gradually sanitized of the qualities that made it an intervention. One effect of this sanitization is that it allows the implicit whiteness of the field to remain in effect. As the authors write, “postcolonial scholarship on the Victorian era has not been accepted as central to the field, though the Victorian era has been central to postcolonial scholarship.” By evading the calls to examine the “structures of slavery, colonialism, racism, and humanization together” (to which they also add liberalism), scholars of VS have maintained racial hierarchies within the field that perpetuate white supremacy in thought and in practice.

My own research, which circled around the question of empire and colonialism, is negatively (yet rightfully) implicated by this call. In my dissertation, I tried to show how the centrality of characterological paradigms of interiority and psychological depth in scholarship of the nineteenth-century novel implies a universalization of the liberal subject. While I wasn’t successful in arguing for it, I believed there was something implicitly imperial about this universal standard of subjectivity, and I tried to turn to examples that showed how different models of characterization were in competition within one another to resist the epistemic violence of standardization. In my chapter on William Makepeace Thackeray, for example, I argued that Thackeray’s deflation of heroic exemplarity was one way to ironize this universalization. Instead of treating some characters as great/exemplary, Thackeray treats all characters as equivalent in their meanness. (Contemporary reviews of Thackeray hated this ironic deflation, which suggests that he was onto something.) The figure of the “greatest” or “most heroic” character was always ironic, and was just another way for Thackeray to skewer the Victorian cult of personality.

My dissertation was far from successful—another reason to abandon my academic career—but I think one of the more damning criticisms I have for it now is its unexamined whiteness. Both in content and form, my dissertation leaves unexamined the idea that metropolitan authors, like Thackeray, might be the best critics of their own imperial authority. I think there is a way to write about canonical authors in an undisciplined way, but that is impossible within knowledge formations that privilege whiteness. Looking back at my bibliography, I note how few scholars of color I cite or reference. The occasional reference to Spivak or Said suggests less that I had incorporated the insights of these scholars into my research and more that I had learned to treat them representatively. Whenever I do cite Spivak or Said, I do so as a matter of course, as if checking a box for “post-colonial” or “race” while leaving undiagnosed the latent whiteness that unites all of the other citations on my bibliography.

While I think there is recovery work to be done to unmoor the field of VS and decenter the primacy of the white, liberal subject, I think that work should be done in deference to those who have already put in the time and effort. In his essay “Black Women and/in the Shadow of Romanticism,” Bakary Diaby writes that it is important to “think about the everydayness of racial belonging, of racial perception, of claiming a race for yourself or imposing a race on another.”¹ There is work to be done to show how the canon of VS texts—primarily white and metropolitan—both inscribes race and makes that inscription disappear. But, I also think the work of undisciplining rests upon turning to a particular bibliography of scholars of race and colonialism to inform our theoretical knowledge. As Diaby advises, “Citation is a way to enter a conversation and to cede ground to those who are already doing the work.” Moving from “evasion and non-recognition” toward properly anti-racist and intersectional work means examining the politics that inform our citational and research practices.

While I hesitate to offer any advice or issue any directives—really, though, who am I?—I think that it is important to start this work in literary studies because literary criticism is well equipped to do this work. Throughout their essay, the authors turn to various figures of speech to model alternatives to the pattern of “evasion and non-recognition.” Apostrophe and address—especially in the regular use of “we”—help to model a form of social relation both real and ideal. There’s a strategy of truth-telling—calling bullshit—that is rooted as much in the rhetoric of address as in its content. What’s more, citation is an aesthetic, as well as political, concern, insofar as it asks us to see the world in a particular way and to have that our modes of knowledge formation reflect what we see. (That we see the world as it is—anti-Black and organized by multiple systems of oppression—would suggest that this aesthetic is a realist one.)

I take to heart the author’s warning that attachment to form is dangerous, because it is “often code for a latent and unexamined whiteness.” But, I also see a tropology at work in the project of undisciplining. Following Sharpe, the authors describe a method of research that can grasp “a past that is not past”—a past figured as climatological, “that is, the climate of anti-Blackness that spreads beyond the wake of the slave ship and continues to structure our lives and symbolic economies today.” It’s not that materialist or historicist methodologies are ill equipped to address this climate, which is at once totalizing in scope and yet so often non-recognizable in practice. Instead, literary critical methods—particularly those rooted in questions of form, rhetoric, and style—matter because of the distance between the real and the perceived (the climate and its non-recognition). Literature helps to register this distance because that is what literary and figurative language does. At a time when literary criticism (and the humanities more broadly) is being undone by political-economic forces that deem it valueless, I think there is insight to be gained from methods that don’t produce analytical, positivist knowledge. Following the authors: “What would it mean to inhabit that friction in our work?”