“Undisciplining Romanticism”
In 2017, a group of Romanticism scholars formed The Bigger 6 Collective as a way “to challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism” and ground studies of the global 18th and 19th-centuries in anti-racist and decolonial pedagogies. Following their example, in 2020 a group of Victorianists asked to “undiscipline” the field of Victorian Studies: they called out the field’s whiteness, its lingering colonial influences, and its “marked resistance to centering racial logic.” Following the work of Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe and her claims that we need to “become undisciplined” to reject anti-Black logics and practices, scholars working in the long 18th and 19th-centuries are re-imagining their fields to make them more inclusive, anti-racist, and anti-colonial in both research and teaching. What new modes and methods can we imagine for doing this kind of work, especially here in Hawaiʻi?
This class follows these manifestos by undisciplining late 18th and early 19th-century “British” literature and placing it in a global context that foregrounds race, empire, and slavery. We will read a selection of writers broadly conceived as “Romantic,” and place them in the history of trans-Atlantic slavery, the expanding British empire, and resistance to these structures. We will read and analyze a wide variety of texts and genres, exploring their political impulses and placing seemingly disparate texts and contexts in conversation with one another. For example, what does Jane Austen’s positive representation of the navy in Persuasion look like when read next to Kapihe Nāihekukui, the admiral of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s Royal Fleet and Honolulu Harbor Master? How does the Caribbean writer Aimé Cesaire counter the whiteness of Leonara Sansay’s novel about the Haitian Revolution, Secret History? These are the kinds of connections we’ll make as we seek new modes and methods for rethinking and reanalyzing the past.
Thus throughout the course we will think deeply about the methods we use to read and analyze our texts, while also grounding our discussions in place. To that end, we will explore connections between our readings and Hawai’i in the Romantic era and today. Our primary texts will be situated within theoretical work on Black Studies, Indigenous studies, and scholarship on undisciplining 18th and 19th century studies. As this is a 400-level writing-intensive class, students will develop a research project of interest to them, and we will discuss research strategies, modes of analysis, and how to write with multiple sources. Shorter assignments will be geared toward both helping us “undiscipline” Romanticism and cultivating the skills needed to write a longer research essay.
Required Texts:
- Leonara Sansay, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)
- Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831)
- Anonymous, The Woman of Color (1808)
- Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817)
- Honore Fanon Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (2020)
- Selected primary and secondary sources available on Laulima
Possible Assignments and Requirements:
- ‘Ōlelo no‘eau presentation and short essay
- Short writing assignments
- Research paper and components
- Reading quizzes
- In-class final conversation (to take place during the day and time of our scheduled final)