Black Lives Matter: Starting Points for the Victorianist

In a review essay eighteen years ago titled ‘Black work from summer 2019 to produce and implement British Studies in the Victorian Period’, Audrey Fisch a BAVS Diversity and Equality Statement. This asked how far the field of Victorian studies had newsletter will support and contribute to this addressed race. Fisch could at that time point to new collective effort. As part of a new feature on the latest scholarship that sought to understand and scholarship in Victorian studies, we commit to interrogate attitudes towards Black people in the showcasing research that addresses race, particularly Victorian period. Yet Fisch avowed some scepticism by scholars of colour. And we encourage requests to as to the impact of this work upon the field more review books in these areas. Further, we offer here a generally. ‘I remain pessimistic’, she wrote, ‘about brief but hopefully useful list of resources addressing how well established Black British Victorian studies Victorian race from the last twenty years, aiming to is and how thoroughly this work is permeating the provide Victorianists at all career stages with some overall field of Victorian studies’.1 ideas and directions for integrating race and anti- Examining the field eighteen years later and racism into their teaching and research in the future, following the recent killing of George Floyd in as well as serving as starting points for those Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter movement in introducing themselves to the period. Although it the UK and USA, we can point to a significant body of features work by scholars of colour, this list, like the scholarship on race in the nineteenth century. One authorship of this editorial, is inevitably affected by important line of enquiry has followed Edward Said’s the racial imbalance in Victorian studies outlined landmark reading of Mansfield Park by examining above. And because these are meant as starting points how the period’s economic, cultural and social for further discussion and reflection, it comes productions were made possible by wealth drawn accompanied with a call to our readers and members from the enslavement of people of colour.2 And new to contribute their own suggestions. Both the up-to- books from Priyamvada Gopal (Insurgent , date list and a submission form for further entries are 2019) and Olivette Otele (African Europeans, 2020) available on the BAVS website (bavs.ac.uk). Finally, mark an important shift in focus away from those we repeat the call by the Postgraduate who upheld racist ideology and towards those Representatives Danielle Dove and Heather Hind to colonial subjects and enslaved peoples who contribute to the BAVS Victorianist Blog with pieces challenged the hold of empire. This work will inform that address race, colonialism, imperialism, police how Victorianists teach, research and otherwise and state violence and related themes in any grapple with a period that elicits critique and Victorian studies context. Taken together, we hope celebration in equal measure — a period which, that these steps will further the work to address the despite its flourishing written and visual culture, historic and continuing injustices that the Black Lives erected a statue of Bristol’s most notorious slave Matter movement has brought into view. owner over 170 years after his death. This work also prompts difficult questions about Victorian studies in Jonathan Godshaw Memel (Bishop Grosseteste the present. Has this field reckoned with the University), Fariha Shaikh (University of possibility that it inadvertently reproduces the racial Birmingham) and Joanna E. Taylor (University of disparities of its period of study? As the recent North Manchester)4 American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Graduate Students’ Antiracist Statement points out, we work in a field in which ‘white scholars vastly outnumber scholars of colour, and particularly Black scholars’ – an imbalance that is even more marked in British universities.3 This summer the BAVS Executive Board will propose a series of measures to collectively think through and address the problem of racism as it affects the field of Victorian studies. This builds on

1 Audrey Fisch, ‘Black British Studies in the Victorian MKHOU0j8RLxv2bPEkEgdV7TJsv2A/edit. Accessed 22 Period,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 30.1, pp. 353-364, June 2020. p. 353, p. 354. 4 We would like to thank Angelique Richardson, Paul 2 Edward Said, ‘Jane Austen and Empire’, in Culture and Young, Heather Hind, Claudia Capancioni, Kate Nichols and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 80-96. the BAVS Executive Committee in general for their 3 Sarah Ross, Lindsey E. R. O’Neil, Austin Lim and Oishani contributions to this editorial and accompanying list of Sengupta, ‘NAVSA Grads Anti-Racism Statement’, resources. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IYlqIx2AJwuZ9Ri Starting Points

Whilst these items cover various periods, each draws valuable connections between the Victorians and the present time. Only resources from the last twenty years are included on this list, but a helpful source for earlier, foundational work encompassing various disciplines is Ankhi Mukherjee’s entry on race in the Victorian Literature section of Oxford Bibliographies (also listed below).

Audio

Gary Girod and Robin Mitchell, ‘Black Venus: African Women in Nineteenth Century France’, French History Podcast (2020), https://www.thefrenchhistorypodcast.com/podcast/black- venus-african-women-in-19th-century-france-with-dr-robin-mitchell/

Reni Eddo Lodge, About Race (2018), https://www.aboutracepodcast.com/

Eddie Glaude and Autumn Womack, ‘The Pulse of Black Life in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Princeton University African American Studies (2017), https://aas.princeton.edu/news/aas21- podcast-episode-10-pulse-black-life-long-19th-century

Online

Adom Getachew and Christopher Taylor, ‘The Global Plantation: An Exchange’, B20 (2020), https://www.boundary2.org/2020/06/the-global-plantation-an-exchange-between-adom- getachew-and-christopher-taylor/

‘Syllabus Bank’, V21 (2015-2020), http://v21collective.org/syllabus-bank/ Includes sample teaching materials that address empire and race

UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, Online Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership (2009-2020), https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

Adrian Wisnicki and Megan Ward (eds.), Livingstone Online: Illuminating Imperial Exploration (2017), https://www.livingstoneonline.org/

Wisnicki (ed.), One More Voice: Lost Voices from the ’s Archives (2020), https://onemorevoice.org/

Ankhi Mukherjee, ‘Race’, Oxford Bibliographies, Victorian Literature (2013), doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780199799558-0097)

Visual

David Olusoga, ‘Black British History You’re Not Taught in Schools’, BBC: Alt History (2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgrou4Ohy68

---, ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners’, BBC Two (2015), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b063db18 Draws on UCL database above

‘Hidden Histories’, Guardian (2014), https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/sep/15/hidden-histories-the-first- black-people-photographed-in-britain-in-pictures

Books

Olivette Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History (2020)

Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (2019)

Susheila Nasta and Mark U. Stein (eds.), The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (2019)

Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (2019)

Reni Eddo Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2018)

Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2018)

Fariha Shaikh, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art (2018)

Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to (2017)

David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2017)

Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (2017)

Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (2014)

C. L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain (2013)

Laura Peters, Dickens and Race (2013)

Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann (eds.), Slavery and the British Country House (2013) Open access: historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/slavery-and-british- country-house/

Caroline Bressey, Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste (2013)

Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage and the Victorian British Empire (2012)

Sadiah Qureshi, People on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011)

Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (2011)

Edward Beasley, The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences (2010)

Robert J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (2007)

Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (2006)

Jan Marsh (ed.), Black Victorians: Black People in British Art, 1800-1900 (2005)

Gretchen Gerzina, Black Victorians, Black Victoriana (2003)

Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (2003)

Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (2002)

Audrey Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England (2000)

Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780-1865 (2000)

Articles

Earnestine Jenkins, ‘Elite Colored Women: The Material Culture of Photography and Victorian era Womanhood in Reconstruction era Memphis’, Slavery and Abolition 41 (2020), pp. 29–63.

Decolonising Working Group, University of Exeter, ‘Who Wants Yesterday’s Statues?’, Imperial and Global Forum (2020), https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2020/06/15/who-wants- yesterdays-statues/

Keisha N. Blain, ‘The Black Women Who Paved the Way for This Moment’, Atlantic (2020), www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/pioneering-black-women-who-paved-way- moment/612838/

Olivette Otele, ‘These Anti-Racism Protests Show it’s Time for Britain to Grapple with its Difficult History’, Guardian (2020)

Carolyn Betensky, ‘Casual Racism in Victorian Literature’, Victorian Literature and Culture 47 (2019), pp. 723-751

Roger Ball, ‘Edward Colston and That Statue’, Bristol Radical History Group (2018), https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/myths-within- myths/?fbclid=IwAR0Kk1_uVpAlBEhDxhAbxCdCOid2AeLnauWFQwcfsUjVvoW-qSiKDJkirBg

Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, ‘Part-Victorian Imagination: On Being a Victorianist of Color’, V21 (2018), http://v21collective.org/part-victorian-imagination-victorianist-color There are many (if not enough) iterations of being a Victorianist of colour, and while some of the experiences described in this piece might be felt similarly across the board, people are of course differently positioned.

Caitlin Beach, ‘John Bell’s American Slave in the Context of Production and Patronage’, Nineteenth- Century Art Worldwide 15 (2016), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/beach-on- john-bell-american-slave-context-of-production-and-patronage

Caroline Bressey, ‘The City of Others: Photographs from the City of London Asylum Archive’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2011), doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.625

Nick Draper, ‘Possessing Slaves: Ownership, Compensation and Metropolitan Society in Britain at the Time of Emancipation, 1834–1840’, History Workshop Journal 64 (2007): pp. 74–102.

Madge Dresser, ‘Set in Stone? Statues and Slavery in London’, History Workshop Journal 64 (2007), pp. 162-199.

Primary Texts

Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen (eds.), Black Writers in Britain, 1760-1890 (1991)

Joan R. Sherman (ed.), Collected Black Women’s Poetry, 4 vols (1988)

Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Sonnets (1893) and Poems (1910)

John E. Ocansey, African Trading; or the Trials of William Narh Ocansey (1881)

Africanus Horton, Vindication of the African Race (1868)

Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857)

John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia (1855)

Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831)