@article{ColonizedFutures:Law:7615,
      recid = {7615},
      author = {Velasquez, Rebeca},
      title = {Colonized Futures: Law, Inheritance, and Empire in the  Nineteenth-Century British Novel},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2023-08},
      pages = {142},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines the relationship between  metropolitan fiction and colonial law during the second  half of the nineteenth-century. Building on contemporary  scholarship in postcolonial studies of Victorian  literature, along with recent calls to rethink how we study  racism, whiteness, and empire in Victorian Studies, I show  how the metropolitan novel collaborated with colonial laws  that reshaped British rule abroad from the 1860s onward.  After a series of colonial uprisings that dramatically  challenged the posterity of the British Empire, this period  saw the turning away from liberal justifications of  imperialism to a “culturalist” model of colonial governance  that placed new emphasis on the cultural specificity of  native society, as political theorist Karuna Mantena has  argued. In “Colonized Futures: Law, Inheritance, and Empire  in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel,” I reveal the  novel’s investments in the future of empire by showing how  the inheritance plot furthers some of the most pressing  legal reforms of this period, from the political conflict  over the expansion of citizenship rights in Jamaica, to the  codification movement in India, to the emergence of the  comparative method foundational to Britain’s indirect rule.  I show how realist writers such as George Eliot, Wilkie  Collins, and Thomas Hardy transcode into the inheritance  plot the efforts of colonial lawmakers to reestablish  imperial authority abroad. Alongside their novels, this  dissertation draws on the legalistic work of some of the  most influential jurists and colonial administrators of the  time—Frederic Harrison, James Fitzjames Stephens, and Henry  Maine—to demonstrate how the novel dramatizes, endorses,  and resists the legal order they envisioned for the future  of empire. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/7615},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.7615},
}