Black Neo-Victoriana

Book excerpt: Black Neo-Victoriana is the first book-length study on contemporary re-imaginations of Blackness in the long nineteenth century. Located at the intersections of postcolonial studies, Black studies, and neo-Victorian criticism, this interdisciplinary collection engages with the global trend to reimagine and rewrite Black Victorian subjectivities that have been continually marginalised in both historical and cultural discourses. Contributions cover a range of media, from novels and drama to film, television and material culture, and draw upon cultural formations such as Black fandom, Black dandyism, or steamfunk. The book evidences how neo-Victorian studies benefits from reading re-imaginations of the long nineteenth century vis-à-vis Black epistemologies, which unhinge neo-Victorianism’s dominant spatial and temporal axes and reroute them to conceive of the (neo-)Victorian through Blackness.