Fractured Visions, New Horizons: Debates in Eighteenth-Century Studies beyond German Studies

Abstract

Fractured Visions, New Horizons:Debates in Eighteenth-Century Studies beyond German Studies Birgit Tautz The past two years have brought many changes to academic life, one of which promises to be an organizational revamp and opening-up of US-based eighteenth-century studies, at least in their representation through ASECS. Two panels at this year's conference (Baltimore, 2022) are a case in point: the "Presidential Session Roundtable: New Horizons in Enlightenment Studies," and "Visions of Empire."1 While the panelists on the former individually and collectively wrestled with domineering whiteness as a paradigm defining the hitherto accepted scope of Enlightenment reach, the latter offered new impulses for interdisciplinary turns to the global: Historian Junko Takeda offered considerations on cultural erasure of premodern Armenians and their diaspora in the Americas and argued for a reframing of imperial power structures within trade networks (and beyond the carriers of national territory and languages), while literary scholars Hanna Roman and Melanie Conroy urged the reexamination of well-worn tropes in the Western imagination, namely the sunken island of Atlantis and maps, respectively. Roman showed that, while Atlantis is today considered to be thoroughly mythological, it has revealed tremendous power in terms of engineering and reengineering narratives of dominance as well as images of the global North (in juxtaposition with the global South) and thus, ultimately, of European "greatness" and—we might add—mythological whiteness. In the end, Roman put forth an overarching plea for new stories of origin that, unlike the biblical text or sciences with their data and experiments, remain stories of imagination, which, however, encourage us to see the world—and its mythological translations—through a material remnant or illusion, namely a mysterious rock buried beneath an ocean. Conroy explained how three different types of maps circulating in the eighteenth century shaped the visual field for perceiving the world, ultimately establishing scale, dominance, and hierarchies of importance in a visually persuasive though manipulative manner. Finally, Elizabeth Cross cast a critical eye on the French empire—from the perspective of the Indian Ocean world. Reminding listeners not only of the fragile nature of empires whose power postures are always betraying anxieties of impending loss, she delineated how the French empire was subordinated, by both British colonial power and Indian inheritance, and how the French [End Page 115] had to assert their power through trade hegemony. Cross's claims have consequences for debates on national colonial powers that had not been perceived as colonial powers in the eighteenth century or that had been downplayed, relegated to the margins, or excused for playing secondary roles among a cohort of colonial powers—e.g., Germany's stance vis-à-vis colonialism, albeit from a different perspective. Not only does Cross provide additional support for undoing, once and for all, the claim that there were more or less innocent bystanders, such as the Germans, she also invites us to make this claim from outside Europe. Together these examples support one conclusion, namely that our narratives of global engagement must be multidirectional rather than replicating binaries of hierarchy and dominance that always pit West against East or North against South; they also must be truly multifaceted to allow for interdisciplinarity: for example, by intersecting geographical imagination along hemispheric lines with visual perception and representation (e.g., the ways of seeing engendered by certain types of maps) or by complicating one vector (e.g., the national) through the introduction of a transgressive force (e.g., trade networks, eclipsed but persistent indigenous traditions). But it is the "New Horizons" panel that I have been thinking about since March 2022, returning frequently to facets of the discussion as well as to individual books and articles written by a few of the panelists but also to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew Curran's magisterial study Who's Black and Why: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (2022), in which the authors revisit and translate from the French the entries of a 1741 prize competition revolving around the same question. My reflections on the ASECS panel are mostly in sync, as well as in challenge, with the other parts of the present section in Goethe Yearbook. What...