Valentina Arango
Christopher Knight
Adriana Robinson
Kai Rodrigues
Edward Sagarese
Hunter Seigenthaler
Early scholarship has treated Virginia Woolf as a non-political writer, either dismissing her as nothing more than an experimental modernist or categorizing her as solely focused on gendered concerns within early twentieth-century society. However, since 1978 scholars have recognized Woolf as a politically conscious writer whose work engages with the topics of empire, race, and national identity. Carroll begins the discussion of Woolf from this perspective through her article “To Crush Him in Our Own Country: The Political Thought of Virginia Woolf*,”* where she emphasizes the subtlety and indirectness of Woolf’s resistance to imperial structures as opposed to an approach focused on direct criticism and traditional party politics. Other scholars from the late 20th century like Phillips and Tate continue this line of thought, highlighting Woolf’s juxtaposition of domestic spaces with imperial figures and her satirization of the elite upper class in order to show Woolf’s awareness and criticism of the pervasiveness of British imperial structures. The 21st century sees a shift in the perception of Woolf’s critical engagement with racial and imperial issues: where early scholars seek to prove Woolf’s status as a conscious anti-imperialist writer, Sarker, Seshagiri, and Wollaeger maintain that Woolf seems unable to fully exist outside of the very structures she critiques. The works of these three scholars arrive at the idea that Woolf’s criticism of the empire relies on a normative view of Englishness against the racialized “other”, and so her attempts to reclaim an English cultural identity from the oppressive “great men” of history is contradictory (Sarker). As the scholarship surrounding Woolf grows, the conversation surrounding her anti-imperial activism grows more critical. Gerzina’s 2006 article critiques the Bloomsbury group’s usage of blackface in 1910 during their anti-imperial protest as an act that only serves to perpetuate imperial logic and reveals Woolf’s entrenchment in racist imperial ideologies. Similarly, Franks argues that Woolf, despite attempts to criticize racial injustices, ends up reifying and reproducing eugenic logic. These pieces show that, despite her best efforts, Woolf was a product of the empire she was raised in, and that even her earnest attempts at criticizing it were founded in imperial and racialized ideological frameworks.