Seminars

Launched in 2019, the open-access London Stage Database (LSDB) includes details about more than 52,000 theatrical performances recorded and advertised in England's capitol between 1660 and 1800. The site is not only a reference resource, but also a media archeological experiment—a recovery of a digital project that became obsolete almost as soon as it was completed in 1978. The problems of precarity, sustainability, and collective memory work haunting the implementation of this project have always had their mirror image in its content, which illustrates the practices of revival, adaptation, and embodied repertoire that sustained British performance culture across a period of near-constant rupture and crisis. These themes have taken on a new urgency in recent weeks, however, as the Trump administration has gutted the federal research funding enterprise and waged war on our institutions of higher education. On April 4, my team's NEH grant for "Extending the London Stage Database" was abruptly terminated, disrupting our plans to grow the dataset, develop new content and features, and shore up our technical infrastructure over the next two and a half years. Against these daunting headwinds, this talk will look to the eighteenth-century stage for insights that might help us defend, maintain, and build community around sites of shared intellectual and cultural production.

We associate the European Enlightenment with individual liberty. We should also keep in mind, however, that the freedom enjoyed by property-owning Europeans in the age of Enlightenment went hand in hand with the unfreedom of millions of enslaved humans. Kant, as a prominent Enlightenment thinker, never unequivocally condemned colonial slavery as an institution or supported the abolitionist movement that began to gain momentum in the late 1780s. He understood the political economy of colonial slavery and was aware of the brutality of its practice, especially in the highly profitable sugar colonies in the Caribbeans. In particular, he recognized that the number of Negersklaven (Negro slaves) in those colonies was “the true measure of wealth,” that the cultivation of sugarcane completely depended on their labor, that the raw sugar they produced was the source of the powdered sugar, for instance, enjoyed by Europeans like him, and that labor was extracted from Negro slaves with extreme cruelty. At the same time, Kant propagated an image of Negroes as physically strong, lazy, stupid, and fearful—a combination of characteristics that made them not only uniquely suited for slavery but also unable to make good of freedom. In this talk, I will consider how an understanding of the economic complexity of colonial slavery coupled with racist assumptions about (enslaved) Negroes limited Kant’s and his contemporaries’ imagination about their political fate.

This talk will reconstruct the eighteenth-century reading practices—the intensive reading of a classical and religious canon, paired with extensive reading in ephemeral and contemporary print—that informed the lifelong melancholy and religious despair of the poet William Cowper. During periods of depression, Cowper was a paranoid reader, unable to read without applying texts to himself. In times of recovery, Cowper used reading as a pastime and diversion, carefully distancing himself psychologically from the contemporary and classical books he read and translated. In his most successful poetry, however, Cowper was able to take the question of resemblance as a topic of poetic investigation, depicting his own mind without falling into despairing paranoia.

In 1713, the British Parliament once and for all did away with the monopoly that the Royal African Company (RAC) had previously held over Britain’s transatlantic slave trade. Although existing literature portrays this as the end of the RAC’s historical significance, the company’s own internal communications reveal that its leaders believed its prospects had never been brighter than they were in 1713. The reason was the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and the opening of Spanish ports to 4,800 enslaved Africans a year to be delivered by Britain’s South Sea Company. This newer company looked to the older one as a subcontractor in charge of supplying them with slaves, thanks to the RAC’s longstanding expertise in the exquisitely complex art of selecting European and Asian trade goods that it could exchange profitably in African markets. The story of how the two companies negotiated their subcontract, and how the RAC then abjectly failed to fulfill it, repositions the RAC as a constant innovator in the business of transatlantic human trafficking—though not a successful one.

What opportunities and what failures were intrinsic to the sincerity project undertaken by Samuel Richardson in 1748? Richardson’s Clarissa, this paper suggests, forges a connection between legal and religious thinking around the subject of sincerity, a connection that serves as a useful starting point for a larger discussion of sincerity’s contemporary modes of engagement. In particular, Clarissa helps us to understand the cultural roots of the “subjective turn” that has informed recent court decisions regarding religious accommodation in North America and Great Britain.

A theoretically rich strand of Enlightenment critical inquiry about global oppression, which comprises texts by (among others) Rousseau, Diderot, Adam Smith, Kant, and Cugoano, sought to diagnose a deep set of pathologies at work in the modern, interconnected, commercial globe from the 1490s onward (some of which, as they argue, were present well before the emergence of the modern world). In these eighteenth-century texts, the global condition is best diagnosed in light of a contemptuous self-criticism, a dystopic self-hatred. The dystopic quality of these writings consists not of an imagined and feared future, but rather, first and foremost, of the realities of the past and of the present. I will discuss three levels of self-criticism in this strand of Enlightenment political thought: (1) the first is about sedentary, agrarian societies (or, relatedly, what were sometimes known as civil societies or as ‘civilizations’) and this offers an analysis both of their internal hierarchical characteristics and external (usually bellicose and imperial) relations; (2) the second level concerns modern Europe in its global relations with the non-European world: at this level of self-criticism, the focus is often upon the development of oceanic, transcontinental practices; (3) the third level has to do with humanity itself as a species at every moment of its history, though in particularly inflamed and corrupted ways in conjunction with the first and second levels of analysis: this concerns the proclivity of humanity to engage in—and to institutionalize—various forms of de-humanization.

For reasons hard to capture and harder to name, there is something distinctly and capaciously queer about Jane Austen’s Persuasion. My talk will suggest that Austen’s representation of time and history and her investigation of how bodies are breached and transformed unmoor the novelistic conventions of heteroerotic intimacy and desire. The queerness of Persuasion is, I will argue, only fully felt and recognized through a reading practice that is guided equally by the insights of queer theory and critical disability studies. In their respective ways, Admiral and Mrs. Croft, Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick, and Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot embody the quirks, surprises, and (bodily and affective) risks of heteroerotic relational forms in a moment of historical rupture, crisis, and transition. By intensifying the contingency and chanciness of abled-bodied hetero-ness as a way of life, Persuasion anticipates—indeed, begins to usher in—a queer future in which bodies, pleasures, and desires are unpredictably reshaped and reoriented.

In 1673, enslaved Africans conspired to rebel against the colonists on Barbados--one of England’s most lucrative sugar islands. The precise details of the conspiracy remain vague and are known to us primarily through three colonial sources: two pamphlets, one of which served as the source for Aphra Behn’s description of a slave rebellion in her iconic novel Oroonoko, the other of which sought to link the rebellion to King’s Phillips war against the New England colonists, and the records of the Barbadian General Assembly. All of these sources narrate the events from a distinctly colonialist perspective and predictably seek to recruit readers’ sympathies on behalf of the beleaguered colonists and their narrow escape from violence. Curiously, however, the archival record dwells less on the conspiracy’s intended violence and the consequent violent retribution against the conspirators than on the friendships and loyalties among the enslaved. Drawing on the work of historians such as Marissa Fuentes, Jennifer Morgan, and Vincent Brown, this paper argues that the colonial archives’ fixation on and perplexity about friendship and affective relations among the enslaved and dispossessed reveals what is best described as a heterodox archive that attends and shadows the hegemonic colonial argument. Documenting and preserving those affective bonds among enslaved and dispossessed peoples, especially in moments of rebellion, the colonial archive fails to foreclose the paths along which dissident knowledge circulated, and in so doing, exposes the fearful fictionality of white English claims of supremacy.

This talk considers the operations of empire in the highly contested Pacific Northwest, where in the eighteenth century Britain, Spain, and Russia vied for control over the lucrative fur trade and curried favor with Indigenous people to achieve it. Depictions of the Nuučaan̂uuł people of this region are rarely included in art histories of the British Empire. An extraordinary surviving model for a stage set, designed by Philip James de Loutherbourg in 1785 demonstrates the rich exchange of images and ideas throughout the global British empire. In a fascinating turn, the play for which Loutherbourg designed this set is none other than the blockbuster pantomime Omai, in which Harlequin Omai takes the audience on a whirlwind tour around the Pacific rim. This object demonstrates the ease with which British artists viewed mediated images of the Indigenous inhabitants and locations of the Pacific Northwest as interchangeable. At the same time, it also gives permission to what I term the “Colonial Harlequin” to perform his disruptive role, and I argue that other depictions of the Indigenous people of this region – in prints and paintings, and in pantomime plays – can also be read in a way that dislocates notions of British identity and empire.

This talk gathers up the brief, but tantalizing, descriptions of the Ottoman Empire in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in order to examine our different ways of knowing, talking, and writing, about Turkey. The Ottoman Empire occupies a curiously in-between space in the literary and critical imagination; a part of Europe but also (tantalizingly) Other. What did it represent to Equiano, that led him to declare his intention “at last to set out for Turkey, and there to end my days” even as he also noted the oppression of Greeks, and the seclusion of women? What do we learn from various silences and gaps in his narrative? As I revisit debates about Orientalism, and examine ideas of exilic consciousness and what Katherine McKittrick calls “method-making,” I consider what Turkey meant to Equiano, and how he may teach us to know it differently.

Visiting the Ladies of Llangollen in 1822, the diarist Anne Lister (1791-1840) records that she “Contrived to ask if they were classical.” “No,” Sarah Ponsonby replies, “Thank God from Latin and Greek I am free.” Classical reading was central to Lister’s self-construction, as Anna Clark argues, as well as to her coded conversations with other women who loved women. Chris Roulston reads Lister’s response to her encounters with the ancients as a complex mixture of identification and disidentification, but also as enabling her “to articulate the unthinkable and the forbidden.” This paper explores the queer associations of ‘being classical’ for real and fictional women in the long eighteenth century: the gender nonconformity of Lister and her “blue and masculine” friend Miss “Frank” Pickford; the ways in which classical learning becomes the ground of intimacy between women for the sculptor Anne Damer (1748/9-1828) and the writer Mary Berry (1763-1852); and finally the significance of the fictional classicist Fanny Derham in Mary Shelley’s novel Lodore (1835), a fascinating but peripheral figure described as "a woman more made to be loved by her own sex than by the opposite one", and a character whose story the novel is not yet able to tell.

The policy paper and its corollary notion of informed policymaking was once a transformative intangible information technology. This was especially the case in the Spanish Empire, where the king secured political legitimacy by processing petitions and maintaining an ongoing dialogue with his subjects. The rise of the policy paper during the eighteenth century disrupted this paradigm of governance by positing that policymaking should be based on empirical information, not dialogue. Investigating the emergence of this new empirical form of policymaking, this project shows that the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic became a vast laboratory of the modern information age, a development that brought to the fore both the promise of informed governance and the perils of misinformation.

This talk explores how attention to the early history of English deaf education illuminates the signed language shared between Imoinda and Oroonoko of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). Behn portrays these characters’ visual transmissions as a silent language that is distinctive from–but no less important than–the spoken languages that otherwise populate the narrative. Readerly attention to the multimodal, multisensory dimensions of deaf and disabled sociability helps us to understand Oroonoko’s ambivalence regarding audism/ableism, colonialism, and enslavement. The long history of American Indian Sign Language, however, offers a stirring counternarrative to the seeming inevitability of these violent systemic arrangements.

Despite the growing scholarship on Madame de Staël, not much has been said about her relationship with Napoleon. The relative inattention to Madame de Stael is odd when you consider the reputation she enjoyed in her own lifetime. Regarded as one of the most important French writers of all time and the most politically powerful salonnière, she was, at one point, probably Europe’s best-known enemy of Napoleon. When she arrived in London in June of 1813, after the 10 year exile that Napoleon imposed on her, she received a heroine’s welcome. It was said that there were three powers in Europe: England, Russia and Madame de Staël. My paper will describe this enmity and suggest that there is much that we can learn from it.