Race and Transnationalism [Special Issue of Victorian Periodicals Review]

Introduction:

On Not Mastering Race and Transnationalism in Victorian Periodicals Studies

This essay addresses the ethical and methodological issues raised when Victorian periodical studies includes the multi-ethnic reading and writing communities of the British Empire within its field of vision, especially with regard to the construction and circulation of ideas about race and Indigeneity. While periodicals are inherently polyvocal, we must also recognise that newspapers and periodicals were also the means by which the British Empire and its settler colonies asserted its discursive control over colonised populations. Following calls to “undiscipline” our field: to approach the nineteenth century with an eye on the racist institutional practices which continue to uncritically accept whiteness and Eurocentrism as intellectual norms, this essay takes the opportunity to consider why widening the geographical reach beyond the Global North might necessitate new methodologies to complement the lively engagement with Black Studies currently reshaping work in both Romanticism and Victorian Studies. We invite periodicals scholars to disentangle the necessary organizational work of bibliographical analysis, attribution research and other aspects of the structure of periodicals from the subject position of ‘mastery’, and recommit ourselves to solidarity with and justice for the marginalized communities whose voices can be located within the nineteenth-century periodical archive.