This article offers a critical analysis of a video-art installation by Māori artist Lisa Reihana titled in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015–2017), a live-action reimagining of and contemporary response to the early nineteenth-century wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804), designed by Jean Gabriel Charvet under the commission of wallpaper manufacturer Joseph Dufour et Cie. Locating the power of Reihana’s critical response to the wallpaper in her parodic mimicry of its fabulated landscape, this article contextualizes both works within the scope of scientific discovery and colonial encounter during the long eighteenth century as they are depicted through visual representation. It argues that the landscape shared by the wallpaper and the video installation is the site of contestation on which Reihana critiques and reclaims control over the historical visual narrative through her use of parody, contradiction, and video technology.

In this article, I read Thomas Southerne’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to reveal moments of reciprocal establishment of Blackness and whiteness through the racializing proximities and orientations around bodies within the play as well as between the play and the Restoration audience. In tracing the formal, epidermal, and thematic changes that accompany the adaptation, we see the emergence of what I call a ‘self-effacing whiteness’ that forgets itself in its own process of establishment. Here, whiteness acts not just to forget what it erases but also to forget itself as a racialized perpetrator. Reading the process of racialization in Oroonoko: A Tragedy phenomenologically through Sara Ahmed, I read the changes that accompany this cultural recreation as what Joseph Roach calls ‘surrogation’. Ultimately, this article achieves the two pronged end of identifying attempts at racial fixity, as well as revealing the self-effacing nature of whiteness emerging in the eighteenth century.

Rétif’s rendering of the speech of working-class women in Les Contemporaines du commun offers unique access to a world neglected by many of the author’s own contemporaries. However, in the two chapters titled “Les jolies crieuses,” the authenticity of this approach is mediated not only by Rétif’s personal preoccupations but by a long tradition of other artistic representations of urban food hawkers in collections of words and images known as Les Cris de Paris. In providing a transcription of the crieuses’ speech in these chapters, Rétif seems to offer an accurate documentation of what he hears, but in further characterizing them as seductive sirens, he actively aestheticizes and objectifies these hard-working women. At the same time, however, in allowing them agency to narrate their own lifestories, Rétif invites his heroines to reconstitute themselves as subjects, showing these supposedly simple women to be capable of complex, creative uses of language.

This article considers the neglected practice of writing on ivory in the eighteenth century. It places the ivory tablet, or memorandum-book, within the history of erasable writing, demonstrating the purposes for which it was used, and the affective meanings it could carry. Like other forms of writing technology it reveals much about contemporary conceptions of memory and the mind. The properties of ivory are considered along with its role in global trade. Detailed attention to two late eighteenth-century novels, Miss/Mrs Pilkington’s Delia, a Pathetic and Interesting Tale (1790) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) shows how the representation of the ivory tablet in fiction raises crucial questions regarding the interplay between remembering and forgetting, as well as the perils of female authorship. Though its contents are designed to be erased, the ivory tablet makes a lasting contribution to the period’s literary and philosophical debates.

Hau Kiou Choaan, an English translation of the seventeenth-century Chinese fiction Haoqiu Zhuan, attained recognition from publishers after Thomas Percy made substantial alterations. Percy and his fellow writers referred to this process as “naturalization.” This article explores Percy’s translation and editing practices within the context of the eighteenth-century debates on naturalization acts. The naturalization of Chinese fiction, as embodied in alterations, annotations, and character adjustments, mirrors the complexities inherent in the struggles of naturalizing foreigners in Britain. Percy’s editorial endeavours also reflect his desire to regulate and reshape both the Chinese literary genre and its Chinese characters. Instances of mistranslation and additional cultural footnotes in Percy’s English version further underscore the Chinese text’s resistance to complete naturalization and the difficulties involved. Percy and his publishers’ treatment of this Chinese work reveals the intricate dynamics of debates over citizenship, belonging, and the reception of foreign literature featuring non-British characters.