Victorian Review

THE CALL TO UNDISCIPLINE

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, ninety-three graduate-student members of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) called on the organization to address the issue of structural racism:

Victorian Studies continues to be a field in which white authors dominate reading lists and white scholars vastly outnumber scholars of color, and particularly Black scholars. Moreover, we must come to grips with how white supremacist logics under-gird much of our everyday business, as researchers and as members of academic institutions.

(Letter to NAVSA, 12 June 2020)

As the authors of the letter go on to write, “We must turn our full attention to making our conferences and our classrooms into anti-racist spaces in which the realities of Victorian literature and history are persistently faced.” Shortly thereafter, in July 2020, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong published “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), followed by a fuller article published in Victorian Studies in September of that year. Many articles in this collection discuss that article’s challenge to “all scholars, and not just scholars of color”: we should all be addressing “the racism that undergirds Victorian Studies.” We wholeheartedly agree. However, neither the letter from graduate students to NAVSA nor the LARB essay makes it perfectly clear how best to accomplish this feat in the everyday classroom.

COVE AND OPEN ASSEMBLY

Hearing these calls, COVE, which was created under the aegis of NAVSA, has dedicated significant effort over the last two years to encode more and more texts by people of colour, while making this work easily available for the creation of custom anthologies. The work, completed in collaboration especially with Adrian Wisnicki’s One More Voice and Pearl Chaozon Bauer, Ryan D. Fong, Sophia Hsu, and Wisnicki’s Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, has been aided by funding support from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, an internal grant from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two full-year 0.5 FTE research assistantships from Purdue’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies, and a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources NEH grant that will be held from 2022 to 2025. Thanks to this work, you can now easily build an anthology that is not limited by the choices of a print anthology’s editors and that instead allows you to build your own canon of work to teach, one that can more easily bring together diverse works from different cultural traditions and literary periods. If any [End Page 13] work from before 1927 is not yet coded for COVE, you need only ask that it be added to the queue for coding and COVE will prepare it for you, after which COVE shares it with the rest of the “COVE Collective.”

This approach of “open assembly” goes beyond the assemblage of anthologies, however. It also facilitates the assemblage of people into social-networking groups that can effectively discuss such issues without the grandstanding that can occur in the face-to-face classroom. The traditional classroom is a space that some students find inhospitable to their voices while the immediacy of face-to-face communication can make it difficult to reflect upon and respond fully when one is discussing difficult or sensitive subjects. COVE offers a safe space of sorts: annotation allows students to read each other’s words through social annotation and then to make their own interventions as they read the texts assigned to them in COVE anthologies.

TEACHING THE WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF MRS. SEACOLE IN MANY LANDS (1857)

Priyanka Jacob and Rebecca Nesvet illustrated the value of this approach in the two courses they taught in the fall of 2020. Priyanka Jacob’s course was a 300-level Victorian literature survey, consisting of thirty-five students, mostly English majors and minors. The brief was to explore how Victorian literature and culture produced and sometimes contested persistent notions around class, race, gender, and empire. It was entirely online, with one weekly synchronous meeting and other asynchronous materials and activities. Rebecca Nesvet’s course was a 400-level undergraduate capstone that explored the topic of “literary citizenship.” It met in a virtual classroom (synchronously) due to the pandemic. There were seventeen students. The course considered how past writers and current students become “citizens” of the Republic of Letters, especially when alienated or disenfranchised from other communities.

They decided to link their classes—one in Wisconsin, one in Illinois—through COVE’s social-annotation interface, supplemented by a series of Zoom meetings designed to help guide the annotation project. One happy effect of this approach was a friendlier Zoom environment—more cameras on, more facial feedback, wider participation—almost as if students were taking on some of the social responsibility of making one another feel comfortable in this new shared classroom space. Discussion questions were prepared that responded to themes that had emerged in multiple student annotations—such as care work and the raced and gendered power dynamics that structure it. Big-picture questions were also posed about how to understand Seacole in relation to what Caroline Bressey terms “Black Victorian experience.”

Students were especially eager to engage in a metacognitive discussion of the cross-class annotation experience, which they would explore in greater depth in their final essays. Student Tania Bock argued that the collective [End Page 14] annotation of a digital text “allows for the combining of knowledge” in a way that would be nearly impossible to replicate with a print book, unimpeded as COVE is by the spatial dimensions of the page or the portability of the text. The space of the COVE edition can hold, in the margins, every student’s contributions, whereas the time and space of a live class often cannot. What came across in many reflections was the democratic and collectivist promise of such an assignment. Kathryn Bennett wrote that “Rather than reading the memoir as a static text, I found myself entering into dialogue with it. . . . The effect was a transfer of power and destabilization of the book.” Kristin Schlorf, for instance, reported feeling empowered by her peers’ annotations to adopt a critical reader’s lens on the text, rather than taking it entirely at face value. Students reflected on how the resulting edition was composed of both Seacole’s text and their own. The text had thus been altered by the students, who had become co-producers of knowledge. There was a palpable sense of building something together.

Moreover, the project brought them into new relationship with one another and with Seacole. Student Caroline Wood reflected on the “shattered temporal barrier between author and reader,” arguing that the COVE platform highlighted the “temporal threads that are constantly pulling on the work” and connecting the text to readers’ experiences nearly two centuries later. For instance, students repeatedly found echoes between Seacole’s retrospective accounts of the cholera epidemic and their own lived experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic, one obvious reason why this text was assigned at this particular moment in time. Sonja Anderson picked up on specific parallels in the text, such as the role of conspiracy theory and rumour, denial and disbelief, and the physical and psychological toll on front-line workers like Seacole herself.

Reflecting on a peer’s compelling personal anecdote in the margins of the text, Bennett argued that her memory of Seacole’s narrative is “forever” imprinted with the interpretations and stories of her co-readers. This annotation allowed her to “transpose” Seacole’s story onto that of a peer, and thus she connected with both more deeply: “The book grew more tangible, lively, and interesting because I was connecting with many people while reading—not just connecting to the words of a remote author.” The project encouraged connections of all kinds, at a time when online learning sometimes seemed only to deepen our isolation. Hannah Denaer argued that “the collective annotation process broadens the web of connections, allowing for intertwined relationships between the text and its readers.” Social annotation invited students to make themselves present as readers and critics in and alongside the text, with the risks and opportunities for connection that entails. As Chatterjee, Christoff and Wong argue in their LARB article, “discomfort can and should accompany this work, which is intended not to affirm but to destabilize regulatory categories of identity and their concomitant perspectives on the world and the texts we study.” However, [End Page 15] we need mechanisms that can better facilitate the efforts of professors to do such work in the classroom.

Educational and cultural theorist bell hooks explains in her classic Teaching to Trangress (2014) that the vocation of instructors “is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students,” an endeavour we can realistically pursue only by “respect[ing] and car[ing] for the souls of our students”; by acknowledging students “as whole human beings with complex lives and experiences rather than simply as seekers after compartmentalized bits of knowledge”; and by creating “participatory spaces for the sharing of knowledge” (15). This approach was made necessary by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which isolated students within their local or dormitory communities, and even within smaller, more homogenized microcosms such as their family households. COVE provided a reparative, welcoming, accessible space for literary sociability while allowing these two courses to take up the challenge of undisciplining the classroom and even Victorian studies at large.