Editors: Kerry Sinanan , University of Texas at San Antonio and Mariam Wassif, Carnegie Mellon University.
For review with SUNY Press, Long Nineteenth Century Series
Jane Austen and the Making of Regency Whiteness unsettles Austen criticism to re-examine her novels’ centrality to forging whiteness in the eighteenth century. This “whiteness project” (Gerald Horne) is reproduced by Austen cultures, afterlives, and adaptations, with global ramifications. This volume gathers essays from scholars working at the intersections of Critical Race and Black Studies, Indigenous methodologies, and Postcolonial theory, to argue that Austen’s novels are fundamentally about making white, Anglo subjects of empire who are located in a specific historical period. The Regency whiteness produced in the novels continues to have a huge impact and desirability as Austen is exported, reproduced, and consumed globally. The volume will show that it is specifically the making of Regency white people that has granted Austen her global, iconic status today.
While Edward Said and more recent postcolonial critics have long argued that Austen and empire are interwoven, what has not yet been fully discussed is the powerful race-making work that Austen’s novels perform and the global significance of this work in forging white subjectivity as universal. Austen’s cultural force is part of the assimilationist, universalizing territorial and cultural conquest of the British empire, promulgating a myth of “originality” that enables a sweeping universal signifying of Regency whiteness as a desired norm. Jane Austen and the Making of Regency Whiteness understands Austen as Shakespeare’s heir in this making of the white, Anglo subject who comes to stand in for the universal human (see White People in Shakespeare ed. Arthur Little). In Mansfield Park (1816) Henry Crawford declares, “Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.” Austen draws frequently on the works of Shakespeare and Milton to create a cultural-moral center at the heart of her works: reading shapes her heroines’ inner virtue and social sensibilities, as well as those of her male characters. It forges them as white “English” people. This volume focuses on how culturally and historically contextualized whiteness in the novels has been mobilized, transhistorically and transgeographically, to signify on a global scale.
Austen’s novels produce norms of romance, satire, and comedy which are codified and disseminated as universal, when in fact these modes, and the morals they espouse, understood to be central to “literature,” are coterminous with British imperial expansion and settler colonialism. While some adaptations and fandom practices contest this whiteness, many of them reproduce it.
We invite a broad range of contributors from both inside and outside of the academy to ensure that the collection has relevance for instructors, scholars, students, fans of Austen, social media enthusiasts, and those in the heritage and adaptation industries.
This project has been invited for review by SUNY Press for the Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century series. Please send abstracts of 500 words by 1 April to kerry.sinanan@utsa.ed and mwassif@andrew.cmu.edu.
Topics may include:
Milton and Whiteness in Austen
Shakespeare and Whiteness in Austen
Muslin and Cotton
Hindutva and Austen
Men of Empire and Austen
Challenging whiteness in Austen in inclusive fandoms and adaptations
White women, Romance and Austen
Embroidery and white femininity
Chastity and white femininity
Women’s wit and whiteness
Landed property as whiteness in Austen
Classical Culture and whiteness
Geographies of Whiteness in Austen
Austen at the Borderlands
Money, empire, and whiteness in Austen
Protestantism, Austen and Empire
Fashion, whiteness and Austen
Art, materiality and the making of Regency whiteness
Slavery and racial capital in making Regency whiteness
The music of Regency whiteness in Austen
National Trust and Heritage cultures of whiteness
Austen and the Landed gentry
Class and Whiteness in Austen
Racism and Whiteness in Austen Fandoms
