Welcome to the Humanities Initiative

Exporting Enlightenment: The Local Careers of a Global Idea

Professor Harry Harootunian
East Asian Studies; History (FAS)
T: 212-998-3825
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Associate Professor Arvind Rajagopal
Media, Culture, and Communication (Steinhardt)
T: 212-998-9032
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This seminar seeks to examine how Enlightenment, as a form of producing a specific kind of knowledge about the world, was exported outside of Euro-America. That Enlightenment has a specific geo-cultural provenance is well known. However the means of its conveyance and exportation have usually been subsumed under terms like 'modernization' and 'capitalist development,' rather than considered through a comparative analysis of the circulation, reception and adaptation of Enlightenment knowledge. Scholars are only now addressing the relationship between Enlightenment's 'origins,' and the local circumstances—the ideational networks, infrastructural forms, and practices of publicity—that mediated receptivity and reshaped knowledge production in these new environments. This project considers the global impact of Enlightenment thinking in shaping key distinctions of social analysis and experience. What perceptual technologies and mediatic orders were brought to bear on exporting Enlightenment? How did the circumstances specific to the new environments shape the kinds of knowledge produced there? As Enlightenment was reconstructed and scaled up from individuals to societies, what range of visions of the good society resulted?

These questions will be pursued in the context of an interdisciplinary seminar that addresses the range of social practices and forms of self-fashioning enabled by the social and political imaginary we call "Enlightenment," and their crucial transformation in the course of their redeployment across geographical and temporal boundaries. The discrepant genealogies and continued afterlives of Enlightenment include a range of social forms and practices, from alternative modernities and utopian socialism, to postcolonial developmentalism and political religion. Seminar participants, including literary scholars, historians, geographers, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists will consider the history of these diverse conjugations of Enlightenment universalism outside the West. They will explore the creative transformation of key thematics associated with Enlightenment, e.g., the relationship of self to society, processes of secularization, and the division between affect and interest as so many instantiations of the staggered temporalities and uneven developments of an exported Enlightenment.

The seminar takes inspiration from two sources when addressing the global traffic of ideas and the variety of material outcomes. The first is Dipesh Chakrabarty's recent call to "provincialize Europe" as the locus of universal ideals and the home of modernity. Though salutary, this suggestion is best explored together with the work of scholars who have usefully deployed the concept of "Oriental Enlightenment" to explore the hybrid social forms and creative intellectual traditions that emerged in the encounter between the "West" and "the East."

Problems in Poetics and Theory

Professor John Hamilton
Comparative Literature; German (FAS)
T: 212-992-7969
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Professor Anselm Haverkamp
English (FAS)
T: 212-998-8848
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Professor Jacques Lezra
Spanish and Portuguese (FAS)
T: 212-998-8780
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Associate Professor Michèle Lowrie
Classics (FAS)
T: 212-998-8596
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Associate Professor Martin Harries
English (FAS)
T: 212-992-9593
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The Working Group in Poetics and Theory is in its second year.  We work alongside NYU’s certificate program in Poetics and Theory, a transdisciplinary graduate program that provides an institutional framework for diverse theoretical initiatives and practices at NYU, tracing a historical progression from the ancient practices of poetics and rhetoric to their modern theoretical counterparts. The intimate but vexed relations between aesthetics and hermeneutics, philosophy and literature, social institutions and the work of art, form the core of the program’s focus.  In 2009-2010 the Poetics and Theory Working Group will meet monthly to discuss precirculated readings.  Last year’s highly successful subject: a return to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, followed by a late essay by Hand Blumenberg.  This year’s meetings will focus on selections from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (precirculated), and will include a lecture-seminar on November 17 on "'…to believe in this world, as it is…' - The Difficult Quest of Immanence in Politics" by Kathrin Thiele (Institut für Philosophie der Universität Potsdam; readings will be distributed), as well as a seminar in February with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, devoted to their groundbreaking interpretation of Gramsci in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.  (We will circulate their chapter on Gramsci as well.)  As in the past, our Working Group will organize a more capacious conference in the spring, devoted this year to the problem of exemplarity in literaty, philosophical, and other texts.  

Poetics and Theory is also in the early stages of planning for a major conference in the fall of 2010, possibly on law and literature, possibly with a focus on Hamlet.

The 21st Century and Critical Perspectives in Africana Studies

Associate Professor Awam Amkpa
Drama (TSOA)
T: 212-998-1856
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Assistant Professor Michael Ralph
Social and Cultural Analysis (FAS)
212-992-9543
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