| Sumario: | How are Victorianists negotiating the almost dizzying challenges posed by Victorian studies' increasingly explicit status as a convergence point—or flashpoint—for emerging, often expressly racialized transnational and transimperial histories? Taking Indo-Anglian poet and translator Toru Dutt's translation of Heinrich Heine's "The Slaver" (1854, trans. 1880) as springboard, this essay recounts a personal experiment in looking outward by standing still. Revisiting familiar ground, intent on setting aside past lessons in how to "unread" (McGann 4), this project explores the effects of pursuing apparent tangents. Intimate, yet fractured, the resulting account of Dutt's relations to Heine suggests that the very project of conceiving transimperial Victorian studies may simultaneously require and transform understandings of the vexed, violent, and ongoing interplays of Victorian—and global—"Abolition time."
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