Paris was home to so many eighteenth-century philosophers, there could be no more suitable place in which to revisit the history of the Enlightenment. A symposium ‘Alternative Enlightenments?’ was held on Friday and Saturday, 7-8 March 2014, at Kent’s Paris campus at Reid Hall. Sponsored by the Kent Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century, the Eighteenth-Century MA in Paris, and KIASH, colleagues from York, Exeter, UEA, St. Andrews, and Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, joined Kent staff and students pooling their research findings on a plurality of Enlightenments.
School of English PhD student Kim Simpson gave a paper on eighteenth-century English amatory fiction as pioneering queer gender theory. Eighteenth-Century MA student Abigail Mann attended all sessions and contributed to the final round-table discussion in which the participants agreed that this should be the first of a series of events pursuing such questions as hospitality, historiography, libertinism, cosmopolitanism, Islam, Sufism, and imperial appropriations of colonial technologies.
Conference organiser Professor Donna Landry (Kent, English), Co-Director of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century, said ‘It is remarkable how much fruitful dialogue this event has generated. There are real synchronicities amongst colleagues’ research projects and collaborative connections on this topic across the Schools of History, English, and European Languages and Culture. Together we are pioneering new historical understandings as well as new narratives about what has been regarded for too long as an exclusively European period and mode of radical questioning’.
Addressing religion and the mystical in relation to Islam were Jan Loop (Kent, History) and Ziad Elmarsafy (York, English). Caroline Rooney (Kent, English), who was unable to attend, provided a paper, ‘From Religion and Security to Religion and Liberty’, to be read by Donna Landry. Questions of sexuality and gender were investigated by Marine Ganofsky (St Andrews, French), Declan Kavanagh (Kent, English), James Fowler (Kent, French), Jenny di Placidi (Kent, English), as well as Kim Simpson.
Under the heading of commerce and cosmopolitanism, Will Pettigrew (Kent, History) addressed the ironies of civil rights discourse propounded by British slave traders, while Gerald MacLean (Exeter, English) and Donna Landry explored the question of an Ottoman Enlightenment in the figure of the traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-c.1685). The final session, devoted to empire, science, and improvement, and encompassing case studies from across the globe (China, Jamaica, North America, and India), featured Peter Kitson (UEA, English), Pratik Chakrabarti (Kent, History), Robbie Richardson (Kent, English), and Rajani Sudan (Southern Methodist University, English), leading into a roundtable discussion of common purpose and future plans.
‘Alternative Enlightenments’ was greatly enhanced by invitations to attend the Open Lecture and reception for Kent alumni hosted by Sir Peter Ricketts, the British ambassador in Paris, at his splendid embassy residence. Plans are afoot to hold a second ‘Alternative Enlightenments’ symposium in February 2015 to coincide with the ambassador’s second Kent alumni event.
