Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: T HERE is no dearth, as we know, of references to "empire" in our dis- cussion of the Victorians.The term "transimperial," however, remains relatively underused.This anomaly, I suggest, can be attributed to our critical understanding of the category of "empire" itself, an understanding that has more readily (and somewhat counterintuitively) lent itself to "global," "transatlantic," or "transnational" critical approaches rather than a transimperial one.Empire, it can be argued, functions more in a descriptive mode than an analytic.It provides an expanded canvas or site for examining "British" actions, exchanges, or negotiations and yields a logic that is more additive than comparative or contiguous.This may be so because our assumptions of "Victorian," British, and "nation" seem to cohere along a continuum that fuses a geoethnically bound sense of place with time. 1 References to empire, therefore, proceed along an accretional logic that includes what lies beyond the "nation" without adequately querying who or what constitutes "Victorian" or "British" in the first place, or if the idea of a defined nation is not a tad bit anachronistic in the context of the nineteenth century.In fact, even as ideas of the global or transnational valuably enhance the scope of Victorian studies, they can do so without necessarily troubling those spatial and temporal solidities that cohere in the name of "nation" (which tends to conflate "British" with "Victorian").It is significant, then, to consider how empire can conceptually put pressure on the idea of the nation if we adopt a transimperial analytical framework that places Britain in constant tension and connection with its imperial constituencies (particularly those marked as the "non-West") by continually questioning the discrete solidities of the (British) nation and placing it in an inexhaustible relation of contiguity and interconstitutiveness with the empire "out there."To be sure, for nearly two decades, literary scholars as well as historians of the British empire have prodded the boundaries of the "British" nation and, relatedly, also argued for the mutually constitutive nature of colony and metropole.2 Empire, they have suggested, was not necessarily "away" from "home" and neither was metropolitan Englishness a discrete formation that could be considered in splendid isolation.Rather, the two need to be studied in tandem and in terms of a relation that is centripetal.The full potential of this valuable line of enquiry is yet to be realized;
Source: Victorian Literature and Culture
Author: Sukanya Banerjee
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4240972971