Adopted Colors: Identity, Race, and the Passion for Other People's Nationalism

Feminist and postcolonial studies have shed light on the politics of Victorian literature. The concerns of women and race call for universal sympathy. In the case of nationalism, such "universal" appeal is not so easily forthcoming. Nevertheless, the place of nation-building in the 19th century is caught between empires and colonies, families and loyalties, where women writers, barred from the public sphere, imagined political possibility for the notoriously landless and disenfranchised. Examining the cultural construction of Italians, Gypsies, and Jews in the 19th century, this book investigates the "timeless" fantasies of liberation associated with nationless "dark Others," and how Victorian writers appropriated them into narratives of racial duty. From Elizabeth Barrett Browning's imagined kinship with the nascent Italian republic, to George Eliot's wandering races in The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda, the romance of lost children is juxtaposed with the grander histories of future nations. This book offers a crucial analysis of the politics of postcolonialism for those interested in the critique of identity, race, and imagining nation, outside the borders of empire.