The global nineteenth century was a productive site of racial construction, particularly in the transatlantic Victorianism that operated as a dynamic instrument of cultural cultivation. Victorianism as a cultural force and the processes of constructing racial identities were interconnected through the commodification of identity as mediated through an international publishing industry.2 The construction of Black identity in the context of Victorian society and print culture, both interracially and (intra)racially, was engendered by a push-and-pull relationship with the period's publishing conventions. Within that print cultural construction, the self-image of a person racialised as Black who likewise identifies as such is neither limited to a dialogical production of meaning nor restricted to the generative qualities of narrative textual content in the public sphere. Paratextual details, format, graphic design, the relationship between text and image, and other bibliographical dimensions of the book trade all factor into that process of identity construction. The process is at once cognitive and material, iterative and fragmentary, continuous and combinatory, consonant and discordant.

Varied in style and makeup, William Wells Brown's Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave (1849), Edward Wilmot Blyden's From West Africa to Palestine (1873) and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha (1900) each illustrate this market-based and commodified process of Black identity construction through publishing and print.

In the short-lived and much-loved comedy-drama series Pushing Daisies (ABC, 2007–2009), detective Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) has a secret hobby: he likes to knit. In ‘Dummy’ (1.2), the narrator (voiced by Jim Dale) informs us that ‘during times of stress or anxiety, [Emerson] liked to knit … he found the stockinette stitch to be especially relaxing’. Later in the episode, the narrator adds that ‘Emerson Cod did not like to knit in public, but he often left the house with the needles in his pocket, should the opportunity to rib stitch a ski cap present itself ‘. The pairing of this hardboiled detective and his secret hobby is meant to be humorous, a contradiction in terms between a domestic (and feminine) pastime and the tough (and masculine) work of solving crimes. Yet while Emerson's hobby is presented as a meeting of opposites, the relationship between knitting and television is far more compatible. Both are hobbies and pastimes largely performed in the home, both connote feelings of intimacy and care, and both involve routine and repetition, something experienced in the same way over and over again. Crafting is thus an activity that matches the temporal, spatial and affective experiences of watching television. It is thus unsurprising that it can be found throughout a range of programmes and formats, from documentary to competition to lifestyle programming – and even in the most unlikely of places, like the lap of a hardboiled detective.

Harriet Martineau loves being old. Unusually for nineteenth-century women's life-writing, her Autobiography (1877) makes a defiant assertion of personal and professional progress over the life course. Martineau's text is exceptional because, as Mary Jean Corbett notes, “Martineau's life and her writing of it approximate the masculinist standard of significance” that licenses life- writing in the marketplace, or, as Linda Peterson argues, Martineau “invokes the more modern, masculine autobiographer's privilege of focusing primarily on personal development and intellectual progress”2 in ways that resemble John Stuart Mill or John Henry Newman. Martineau's commitment to progress constitutes one feminist response to the rhetorical dilemma presented by the patriarchal assumption that a woman's social and sexual capital declines precipitously with age. For many life-writers on the margins of social respectability in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, however, the preferred strategy was different. Instead of asserting their capacity for or experience of progress, these writers rejected directional change altogether in favor of various nonlinear tem¬poralities. For example, Harriette Wilson's Memoirs (1825) uses a static or cyclical conception of time to represent her encounters with famous men as occurring in a kind of de-temporalized zone. Her text embodies a distinctive literary mode that defamiliarizes the past self and the past in general, and cordons them off as sepa¬rate and self-contained, resistant to genealogical narrative.

In this chapter, I juxtapose Wilson's Memoirs with Martineau's Autobiography in order to suggest surprising parallels in their representations of time. The gendered-male vision of develop¬ment that scholars have identified in Martineau's Autobiography proves remarkably difficult to narrate, rendering her text, while perhaps less radical than Wilson’s, more rhetorically fraught.

Every four years, the Summer Olympic, Paralympic and Winter Olympic Games debut a set of pictograms. These are graphic symbols that visually represent each competition sport, providing a visual aid for international visitors who may not speak the language of the host nation. Pictograms were first used in the 1964 Summer Olympics, held in Tokyo. Fifty-seven years later, the 2020 Summer Olympics were again held in Tokyo, and the pictograms received a significant update – they became ‘kinetic pictograms’. Each pictogram (which consisted of a blue figure on a white background) had an animated version, which was used in television broadcasts and on screens throughout the Games. For example, the static basketball pictogram shows a figure in mid-air with a ball in their hand, leaping towards the basket with the aim of scoring a slam dunk. In the kinetic version, the figure is animated, beginning underneath the basket, then leaping into the air and raising the ball (where it pauses to match the static version), before scoring the slam dunk and swinging briefly from the rim of the basket. According to the official Olympics website, these kinetic pictograms ‘aim to reflect the modern era symbolised by the year 2020 and enhance spectator enjoyment of events.’ Motion designer Kota Iguchi, who led the kinetic project, similarly suggested that the pictograms would ‘broaden the appeal of each sport by means of their beautiful and more easily conveyed expressions’. Taking these two explanations together, we can see that motion is central to both the appeal of sports spectatorship and its representation in today's so-called ‘modern era’.

The episode ‘Remember Me Tomorrow’ (04/17) of Magnum, P.I. II attempts to bridge the gap between original series and reboot by having Magnum visit a Vietnam veteran who fell out with his brother decades ago over the brother's anti-war protest. As Magnum gets the brothers to reconcile and put their ideological differences aside, the character is deeply aligned with the veteran, who is framed with Magnum in in-person visits. The episode somewhat underlines the nostalgia for the original series and the Vietnam vet status of Selleck's Magnum, but is also in line with the series’ thematic emphasis on the community of veterans. The storyline works well to show how reboots work. Only some viewers will remember Magnum as a Vietnam vet, and for many, it will not matter. What does matter, however, is the way the military creates bonds between men (Magnum and the older veteran) in a manner that, perhaps, is more significant than the familial bonds severed by ideological differences. The older vet invokes a sense of duty that links both the old and new Magnum, suggesting they mean the same concept by it. But the way the conflict is resolved is deeply entwined with the middlebrow: the series sides with the veteran, who gets to present his argument and share screen time with Magnum, while the brother does not. But it also insists that even conflicts as bitterly divisive as those happening in the 1960s and 1970s over the Vietnam war can be overcome. It might take fifty years to do so, but it's possible. Of course, it is the role of the middlebrow to offer a way to mediate as a politically ‘neutral’ space in which change is adopted, not fought for.

In an essay on literary biography, Michael Benton writes: ‘Most … biographers are fans of their subjects’. In the early nineteenth century, Thomas De Quincey was more pragmatic. The best biographies, he noted, are written ‘con odio’ but also ‘con amore’, with the biographer's hate for their subject balanced by love; consequently, De Quincey declared that he would never write the life of a contemporary he hates, ‘for it is too odious a spectacle to imprison a fellow-creature in a book, like a stag in a cart, and turn him out to be hunted through all his doubles for a day's amusement’. I shall return to notions of imprisonment and hunting, but I begin with a biographer's love-hate relationship with their subject as this essay is concerned with one extreme on that spectrum: total abhorrence. Perhaps because it was written entirely con odio, the form of biography this essay is concerned with hovers on the margins of life writing, a fleeting account of a fleeing and ghostly figure.

At the centre of this essay is the figure of Nana Sahib, the ‘butcher of Cawnpore’, as Britons referred to him in the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Uprising. Rather than engage with a standard biography of Nana Sahib – not a single one of which was written in nineteenth-century Britain – I will focus on newspaper accounts of Nana Sahib that appeared in the British and Anglo-Indian press between 1857, when he entered Britons’ consciousness, and the end of the century.

In the January 1827 issue of the Quarterly Review, John Gibson Lockhart published perhaps the most famous and ferocious of all nineteenth-century assessments of autobiography. The review's heading lists ten autobiographies published 1824–6, and its opening paragraph seethes at the cavalcade of ‘driveller[s] … primer-makers … mob-orators … [and] pickpockets’ who have left these miserable ‘confessions behind them, as if they were so many Rousseaus’. Lockhart spends the balance of the review mocking the utter irrelevance of the first five of these autobiographies: by the minor dramatists Frederick Reynolds and Joseph Cradock, the school-master Lindley Murray, the military veteran and radical reformer Major John Cartwright, and the London silversmith Joseph Brasbridge. In Reynolds's case, even the title of the work comes in for abuse. ‘Hide your diminished heads, ye Pitts, Burkes, Cannings … ye Scotts, Byrons, Crabbes’, Lockhart sneers, for it is clearly ‘[t]he “Times of Frederick Reynolds!” … by which the child that is unborn will distinguish the last quarter of the eighteenth century of the Christian era, and the first of that now in progress’. After ridiculing these five autobiographies at length, Lockhart seems finally to fling his pen aside in exasperation, ignoring the last five works on his list and closing instead with an attack on ‘that grand impersonation, “the Reading Public”’, with its ‘mania for this garbage of Confessions, and Recollections, and Reminiscences, and Aniliana’.

This chapter deals with the gender and race swap in action TV reboots. The gender and race swap is one of the most common updates, in Leitch's (1990) sense, of remakes and reboots. It describes the rewriting of one or more central cast characters, in which male characters are reimagined as female or white characters as characters of colour. The strategy is meant to ‘correct’ social injustices of the past, responding to ways in which the original stands in friction with contemporary social values. The swap is, in essence, a comparative gesture, a declaration of ‘look at how far we’ve come’ in relation to the original, made obvious in the visible, the semiotic change. In film, it is often whole casts who are rewritten, on TV, it is usually single characters. This chapter theorises the gender swap as well as the gender and race swap in Magnum, P.I. II and The Equalizer II. As in the last chapter, the focus is on visibility politics and its role in formulating the contemporary middlebrow. In Magnum, P.I. II, the female Higgins serves to disrupt the queer subtext of the original text. Meanwhile, in The Equalizer II, the swap serves to formulate a progressive political agenda regarding race. However, the swap also makes clear how the middlebrow is incapable of considering the intersectionality of the swap. This already was highlighted in the way Matty in MacGyver II is considered in regard to disability.

This chapter continues to rely on last chapter's theorisation of visibility. However, an emphasis here is exploring its intersectional nature and function.