Hey Bakary!

I wanted to get the ball rolling with a confession: I’m a little apprehensive about this review. I’m not sure that these two books, Fred Moten’s Stolen Life and Ryan Hanley’s Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing c. 1770-1830, have much to say to each other. While they’re ostensibly concerned with many of the same topics -- most centrally, black intellectual life -- Moten and Hanley are so different in terms of their epistemological groundings that I wonder how they can be put into conversation productively.

     Over the last decade, literary scholars have diversified our understanding of long nineteenth-century networks of connection and communication between the British and Qing Empires. Written in response to the pioneering studies of Elizabeth Hope Chang, Peter Kitson, Robert Markley, and David Porter, these cross-cultural studies continue to identify new points of intersection between these behemoth empires, intersections that illuminate and revise our understanding of interimperial relations.

Bysshe Coffey’s Shelley’s Broken World is a broad-ranging study: one part old-fashioned history of ideas; one part monograph on Shelley’s heretofore underappreciated practice of bringing much of his verse to life within the pauses and “limit-points” of sensory perception, cognition, and prosody―in the domain of the “[i]ntermittent states of being, vacancies, suspensions, strange immaterial formulations, [and] tenuous and porous networks” that “lace throughout his poetry” (8); and one part close reading of individual passages in several poems, carefully chosen to reinforce