Refusing Eighteenth-Century Fictions: Introduction

Abstract

In this introductory essay, we take issue with David Hume’s distinction between “fiction” and “belief ” by arguing that the relationship between these categories depends as much on existing structures of authority and power as it does on individual judgment or feeling. We then describe the objectives of the two-part ECF special issue “Refusing 18th-Century Fictions”: to provide critical analyses of how particular eighteenth-century fictions attained the status of material realities that continue to condition lived worlds in the twenty-first century, and to prompt ongoing and future efforts to imagine and materialize realities beyond racial capitalism and settler colonialism.