"Thunders of White Silence": Racialized Ways of Seeing and "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave"

Abstract

Victorian poetry, visuality, race, racialization: where better to explore these topics’ convergence than in this special issue of Victorian Poetry? Now, as students of Victorian studies are increasingly challenging disciplinary traditions of refusing to “see” race, perhaps especially where poetry is concerned,1 visuality’s relations to poetics seem poised to emerge as invaluable resources for moving beyond longstanding, if often tacit, training in evasive, exclusionary reading.2 Here, in turning towards those relations, I’ll be tracing a sharp, idiosyncratic line through an increasingly rich, expansive constellation of critical and poetic writings and disciplinary fields.3 “What is ‘Victorian poetry’? How do we know? And who are “we”?: blunt as these questions are, they carry a gathering urgency. They drive conversations at once speculative, structural, passionately theoretical— and, in all these things, distinctly everyday.4 Here, I’d like to approach such conversations from odd angles, in part through a series of sharply defined invitational gestures. Each plays out through some form of materializing visualization; all have been inspired by Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s recent questions to readers of PMLA. “How promiscuously sensual can we be in relation to the literary?” Tompkins asks: “What is the place of lit er a ture in the forming, schooling, and historical disciplining of the senses? Here I would call for a deeply disciplinary interdisciplinarity or even antidisciplinarity, by which I mean a close listening to our multiple objects of interest as they travel across history, across borders, and between media.”5 “More, more, more;” Tompkins goes on to urge: “can we not make and have more than we do now?” (p. 422).