This is the second edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked.
In the following interview, we are taking a look at the groundbreaking work of Manu Samriti Chander. His book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century examines the international impact of Romantic poetry, and how its ideals and aesthetics were reconstrued into other national literatures and political contexts. In looking at how authors under colonialism utilized Romantic works to interrogate European dominance, Chander provides fascinating insight into how poetry and politics found themselves deeply intertwined during that tumultuous time of revolution and failed promises, and how our understanding of Romanticism must search beyond European confines.
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century!
Manu Samriti Chander (MC): Well, we’ve long associated British Romanticism with a relatively small group of English poets: the so-called “Big Six” of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Of course, Britain in the nineteenth century included colonies across the globe, where, as I show, local poets often wrote in conversation with major English writers. Figures like Henry Derozio in India, Egbert Martin in British Guiana, and Henry Lawson in Australia drew upon and sometimes pushed back against the poetries, philosophies, and politics of their English counterparts. I’m interested in what these poets’ works tell us about the limitations and possibilities of that literary movement we call “Romanticism.” What happens, I ask, when we think of Romanticism outside the relatively limited geographical and historical boundaries convention has encouraged us to draw?
KB: So, part of your argument here is that we should define Romanticism differently, and more capaciously in terms of time and place. As academics, we have some investment in these categories—such that we really have to engage the problem—but are they useful or relevant to the general public?
MC: “Romanticism” is a way of organizing texts, just like, say, alphabetizing your books or ordering them based upon the color of the spine. It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not definitive, but it’s useful for emphasizing certain commonalities. One of the reasons I find the term interesting is that, unlike other literary categories that emphasize a particular moment in history (The Victorian Era), “Romanticism” refers to an “ism,” a set of beliefs about, for example, the relationship between the individual and society, or the privileged role of the poet in shaping the mores of a people. As an “ism,” that is, as an ideology, “Romanticism” is portable: we can track the way people were committed to (in the example I just gave) the specialness of poetry and make unexpected connections between disparate communities. I’m not sure you could say the same about books organized by color (although I’d love to read an essay about that!).
KB: Can you say a little more about how you think about this in a world literature context? It has such European roots as a category—is it also inevitably Eurocentric?
MC: Yes, I think so. One of the thinkers I draw on is the late Pascale Casanova, who has (rightly) drawn a lot of criticism for her Eurocentrism, but whom I find useful for mapping Romanticism in a global context. According to Casanova’s model of world literature, modern nations have continually struggled with (European) centers of literary dominance (especially, she argues, France) for the right to be acknowledged as literary centers. Insofar as colonial Romantics are engaging with European Romantics (and all the poets I look at are), they are doing so as both admirers and rivals of metropolitan writers. Their Romanticism—which, I should add, is just one aspect of their literary projects—has to be understand in relation to Europe. Now, other aspects of their work need not be read this way. Derozio, for instance, can be read as part of a burgeoning local literary scene in Calcutta with its own set of rivalries and alliances. Martin and Lawson, too, in their respective contexts. And there’s important work to be done on the South-South relations between these writers and their contemporaries, but, again, their Romanticism needs to be understood in relation to European cultural imperialism.
KB: People can find works by the “Big Six” pretty easily, but if I want to read these other three poets you write about, where can I find their work?
MC: Two of the three—Derozio and Lawson—have had their works collected in excellent editions: Rosinka Chaudhuri’s Derozio: Poet of India and Colin Roderick’s multi-volume Henry Lawson: Collected Verse and Henry Lawson: Collected Prose. I’m currently compiling the works of the last poet I discuss, Egbert Martin, for Oxford University Press, and I’m using Chaudhuri’s and Roderick’s editions as models of what excellent scholarly editing looks like.
KB: Do you think Romantic poetry is actually appealing to an everyday reader today? Does it hold up?
MC: Which “everyday reader”? I’m not trying to be a smart-ass here, I promise. Romanticism—again as an “ism”—emerged in Europe against the backdrop of a rapidly diversifying reading public. Changes in print technology and rising literacy rates meant that the poet was faced with a particular task: to appeal to an audience they (the poet) couldn’t quite picture and whose tastes they couldn’t quite know. In a sense, Romanticism is about the unreliability of the category of the “everyday reader.”
We can take this further. The Romantic era witnessed the emergence of English literary studies as a discipline. From the outset, the aim of literary education in Britain’s colonies and at home in workers’ colleges was to civilize potentially disruptive subjects: in effect, to stabilize the category of the “everyday reader.” So when I ask “which everyday reader,” I mean to ask: Do we mean the institutionally-produced “normal” reader that stands in for the “everyday reader” or the multitudes of readers who exist at the edges of dominant institutions and are thus considered “unreaderly”? The funny thing about this question is that, for some critics in the nineteenth century, to call a work “Romantic” was to dismiss it as frivolous: that is, to relegate it to margins of serious literature. So the terms—“Romantic,” “everyday,” “reader”—they’re all dynamic. Going back to your earlier question about whether “Romanticism” is a useful category, I’d say part of what “Romantic” does is activate ideas about the everyday in new and interesting ways.
KB: Romanticism, as a movement, was in part about poetry being the art of “the people,” and public access to art in new ways. Meanwhile, nowadays, poetry is kind of becoming cool again, especially on social media. Is this comparable? How so? Are there good and bad examples of this kind of poetry?
MC: I’m not going to get into “good” and “bad” examples; it’s easy to dunk on Rupi Kaur and others whose social media presence has boosted their fanbase, but I don’t think it’s useful for thinking. I do think that poetry has had an interesting run from the 1970s through the present, as spoken work and hip-hop have increasingly shaped the way we think about what counts as poetry, who it’s for, and what it can do. Those are certainly the questions that I’m always engaging with: what is poetry, who is it for, and what can it do? It’s especially interesting when we think about the place of poetry within resistance movements. For a while in grad school, I was obsessed with Dalit poetry—political works written by those most oppressed by the caste system in India. That would have been the focus of my dissertation, actually, but I didn’t have the language skills or resources to work with many of the original texts.
KB: You’re also dedicated to thinking about the structures and institutions of academia, and are active in doing really important organizational work to improve them. Could you talk a little about that, and how you see it as connected (or not) to your research? I mean, in a basic sense, of course, it makes research possible by changing the working conditions, but it also seems connected to Romanticism as an idea and ideal—do you experience it that way?
MC: That’s interesting. One of the things I’ve been thinking about in terms of Romanticism is how we associate it with revolution and political radicalism. In truth, Romanticism is probably more closely bound up with what we now think of as liberalism. Now, I’m not against liberalism, but, like many others I work with, I can’t help but think about how liberal ideals—liberté, égalité, fraternité—continually discover their limits in racialized others. There’s a long tradition of radical thought founded precisely on the failure of (Romantic!) liberalism to make good on supposedly radical promises. Politically, that’s where I and many of the people I work with stand, and practically speaking, this means working toward equal access to institutions and resources.
KB: You’re also working on a few new projects: can you tell me about them?
MC: Too many projects, probably! As I mentioned earlier, I’m doing the Collected Works of Egbert Martin; I’m also editing the Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race, which should come out in 2024. It’s a collection of fourteen essays, each of which approaches the question of romanticism and race from a different angle. I’m also working more gradually on a follow-up to Brown Romantics called Browntology. This monograph takes a closer look at the emergence of “brownness” as a racial category in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and considers the usefulness of the term for radical politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some of the writers central to this book are Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant (in the earlier centuries) and W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, and José Esteban Muñoz (in the later centuries).
KB: What goes into editing an author’s collected works? What does that process entail?
MC: Well, it’s been a long process, in this case. It started when I discovered a number of uncollected poems by Martin in nineteenth-century Guyanese periodicals held at the British Library. After that, I traveled on a Fulbright Fellowship to Georgetown, Guyana, to track down other primary materials at the National Archives and University of Guyana Library. During that period, there was a lot of squinting at documents and transcribing materials, and while in Guyana I also did a bit of detective work to find out more about Martin’s life, since the biographical details we have are a bit sketchy.
One of the most exciting moments was finding the site of his burial in Le Repentir Cemetery (New General Division, Space 30, Grave 108). It was what they call a “mud grave,” meaning, because no tombstone existed, it would be resold after ten years and another body would be buried with him. I don’t know how many times the site was resold or how many bodies are buried at that site, but there’s still no grave marker there today.
Upon returning to the U.S., I began comparing versions of poems that had appeared in local newspapers and were later collected in Martin’s two volumes of poetry. I started annotating each piece, noting important changes and providing glosses for words that might be unfamiliar readers—and I’m still in that process now. He wrote almost three hundred poems and several short stories and essays, all of which I’m including in my volume. My hope is that, at the end of this, scholars will have a definitive edition to work with, and I also think of the book as the grave marker never erected at Le Repentir.
Manu Samriti Chander is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University Newark, and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century, published by Bucknell UP in 2017. His second book, Browntology is under contract with SUNY Press, and he is also the editor of two forthcoming works, an multi-author collection entitled the Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP, 2024), and the Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford UP). He is the co-editor, with Tricia A. Matthew, of the Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture book series at Oxford University Press.
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures in English and the Program of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. She is the author of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2021). She is also a translator, most recently, of Zygmunt Bauman’s Culture and Art, and Sketches in the Theory of Culture (Polity, 2021: 2018).
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