What Are You Reading?: Manu Samriti Chander
Welcome to a new series of posts on the K-SAA Blog entitled ‘What are you reading?’
We want to use this space to support and encourage discussions relating to the latest Romantic-period scholarship, especially those publications (online and in print) concerned with the second generation of Romantic writers: Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, and their circles. Initially we will be asking Romanticism scholars about new and recent work that they might have encountered that will be of interest to our followers, and then we’ll give them the chance to comment on some of their favorite studies in general. We also want to know about what they might be reading more broadly – contemporary poetry, perhaps, or a new novel…
Our next interviewee is Manu Samriti Chander, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. His first monograph, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell, 2017), examined the appropriation of British Romantic tropes by colonial poets throughout the nineteenth century. He has also edited a collection of short fiction by the nineteenth-century Guyanese author, Egbert Martin (Caribbean Press, 2014), and co-edited, with Tricia A. Matthew, a special issue of European Romantic Review on generic experimentation in Romantic abolitionist literature. Professor Chander is currently working on The Collected Works of Egbert Martin, with the support of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant, and developing a second monograph, Art Fights: Aesthetic Controversy and the Lessons of Modernity, which traces a trajectory from the controversial poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the films of Griffith and Kubrick and the novels of Nabokov and Rushdie.
What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now?
I’m obsessed with Nikki Hessell’s Romantic Literature and the Colonised World—have also been reading forthcoming works on Romanticism and Race by Deanna Koretsky and Matt Sandler…both fantastic!
Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?
Totally. These scholars are opening up Romanticism in new directions, breaking with traditional canons and traditional periodization. I find myself scribbling frantic notes and exclamation marks in the margins. And, yeah, they’ve changed me. Nikki’s book has gotten to me to start thinking about the ways that reading audiences in Guyana specifically are positioned against a native other presumed illiterate. I’ve been encouraged to reconsider the ways that the othering of orality becomes central to the consolidation of a reading nation.
What’s the critical book that figured most significantly in your most recent monograph?
I can’t pick one—I can hardly pick two, but if I had to I’d say Jon Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences and Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest. The former led me to consider the ways competing tastes shaped an understanding of the nation not only in England but in the colonies as well. The latter was essential to my thinking about the ways Romanticism was not just carried out to the colonies through colonial education, but also forged in the colonies as colonial writers explored both the problems and possibilities of Romantic poetics and politics.
What books are in your 'to read next' pile right now? (poetry, fiction, theory, anything!)
It’s not a pile—or rather it’s a digital pile, a list I keep on my phone. Kate Bergren’s The Global Wordsworth and Julius S Scott’s The Common Wind are at the top of my Romanticism list—been dying to get my hands on those. Outside the field, it’s Aruna D’Souza’s Whitewalling and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake.
What books are on your night table or desk?
Coolie Woman by my new Rutgers colleague Gaiutra Bahadur; The Selected Poems of Martin Carter; Under Representation by David Lloyd; and Fred Moten’s Stolen Life. Non-book things on my nightstand include a lamp, a bottle of contact lens solution, and a stack of notes I haven’t had time to type up.
Which book do you most frequently recommend to your students? Which students? Why?
Hmmm. One of them is definitely Wide Sargasso Sea, on account of I regularly teach Jane Eyre to undergrads in my class, "Nation and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” For grad students, I often recommend Rey Chow’s Ethics after Idealism, which helped me learn how to write critically, and Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which is one of my favorite books on Kant and very legible for a range of readers.
Have there been any mainstream articles or publications on the Romantics you’d like to draw our attention to?
Yeah, everyone should be reading Devoney Looser and Tricia Matthew—Tricia’s piece on Jane Austen in The Atlantic was absolutely terrific. Also, I recommend folks follow the Bigger 6 Collective on Twitter (@Bigger6Romantix)—the account regularly boosts new and exciting work.