Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play by Tina Young Choi (review)

Abstract

had their time robbed from them or through processes of scale that are slow and steady, a longue durée of captivity. The question of time throughout Scales of Captivity produces an affective mode of reading reminiscent of the Benjaminian angel of history. The violent wreckages of colonial and capitalist histories pile up into a critical mass, propelling us into some urgent sense of an ever-unfolding present, while we cannot turn away but must witness its many tangled elements. Much of the strength of Brady’s book lies in its holding together and witnessing of the many texts, histories, and theories she engages from one chapter to the next. Nevertheless, it is these strengths of Brady’s text that also leave something to be desired about where this will take us. The conclusion attempts to speak to these loose ends, although it raises the question: what sort of imaginations might be possible if “scale holds a lien on our imagination” (240)? Brady gestures toward the ongoing promise of scalar masquerades and impersonations in Latinx literature that challenge coloniality (244). However, she ultimately posits that possibilities are only revealed through the “reparative witnessing to this violence” (246). This is not a climactic resolution or clean fix, which only ever reinstates scalar logics about a singular world order. Instead, Brady proposes that possibility lies in the recognition that there are many worlds and multiple realities, a “thinking without scale” afforded through Latinx literary figurations of the child.