| Working Research Groups 2008-2010 |
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Exporting Enlightenment: The Local Careers of a Global Idea Professor Harry Harootunian Associate Professor Arvind Rajagopal 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? 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." Professor John Hamilton Professor Anselm Haverkamp Professor Jacques Lezra Associate Professor Michèle Lowrie Associate Professor Martin Harries 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. Associate Professor Awam Amkpa Assistant Professor Michael Ralph |
Working Research Group Grant Deadline Monday, January 24, 2011 Working Research Groups by Year |
WRG 2008-2010
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