Critically Understanding Specific Periodizations: The Question of Nation Time

[...]Olio's spatial aesthetics suggest that we pay attention to how time proceeds—perhaps especially in African-American and queer sexuality studies which have troubled straightforward singularity and accumulative ideas of time through tropes such as Du Bois's "double consciousness," and here I am thinking of work such as Daphne Brooks's Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1950 (2006) that connects African-American and Victorian or nineteenth-century studies transforming both in the process. ________ Let us turn to the editors' stated parameters of Cusp as spelled out on the publisher's website: Pointedly, the editors do not actually delineate specific dates but suggest a generalized period of time. [...]unlike the recently discontinued journal English Literature in Transition: 1880–1920, the editors of Cusp envision a "dynamic period" that might feature "movements and genres." "5 The conceptualizations undergirded by the editors' selection of a hyphen and solidus or slash in the journal's subtitle fascinate me because I wrote a book on punctuation. [...]seeing periods and periodization in these fundamentally interrogative and relational terms, the editors of this new journal/journey encourage authors to expand the way we conceptualize the boundaries of empire—its global reach beyond the British Isles