Rethinking Race, Nation and Empire: Charles Dickens, Slavery, and the American Civil War
Book Collection edited by Jude V. Nixon, Carolyn Vellenga Berman, & Jennifer MacLure
Salem State University
Proposal Deadline: September 30, 2025
Rethinking Race, Nation and Empire: Charles Dickens, Slavery, and the American Civil War considers how the writings of Charles Dickens are shaped by—and contribute to—Victorian discourses of race, nation, and empire in the middle of the nineteenth century. The “discursive roots of modern racism lie in British, European, and colonial writings,” writes Patrick Brantlinger. But often unacknowledged is the “extent to which racism informed virtually all aspects of Romantic and Victorian culture” (Taming Cannibals 6-7). Major questions about democracy, nation, and race came to the fore as an emerging democracy in England was negotiated, fragile democracy in the United States was thrown into question by Civil War, and black enfranchisement was debated in the current and former slave colonies of the Americas and the Caribbean. As the Civil War divided the United States, how did British writers imagine free Blacks fitting into the “imagined community” of British nationhood? Were they conceived as an inferior and therefore marginalizable racial unit (Dickens’s “hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples,” in The Tale of Two Cities, for example), against which British subjecthood was defined, or as legitimate partners in the rapidly evolving landscape of British governance? How was England’s sense of itself as a nation tied to its role as an imperial power? Building on foundational work by Michael Banton, Patrick Brantlinger, Linda Colley, Dennis Judd, Catherine Hall, Lillian Nayder, Grace Moore, Robert Young, and others, this volume will examine how these questions were engaged, answered, troubled, and/or evaded in the writings of Charles Dickens.
Authors might wish to explore Dickens’s changing stance on slavery, race, nation, and empire in writings published in the lead-up to and in the shadows of the US Civil War, such as Little Dorrit, “Perils of English Prisoners,” Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Drood (including his work co-written with Wilkie Collins); Dickens’s journals Household Words and All the Year Round; his correspondence; or earlier writings like “O’Thello,” Oliver Twist, American Notes, and Martin Chuzzlewit. We envision a global approach to the American Civil War, in which the fight over slavery pitted whites against whites and threatened the demise of the slaveocracy that was the South, even as Britain’s sense of itself as an imperial power was shaken by events in Niger, the Indian Rebellion, and the Morant Bay Rebellion. Themes could include but are not limited to slavery, race, gender, nation, imperialism, civil war, the colonies, insurrection, and pedagogical approaches to these topics.
Please submit a one-page proposal along with a brief bio no later than September 30, 2025 to the editors, Jude V. Nixon (Jnixon@salemstate.edu), Carolyn Vellenga Berman (BermanC@newschool.edu), and Jennifer MacLure (jmaclure@kent.edu).