Enlightenment Studies and Decolonisation

Following Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), many scholars have seen the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as having fostered some of modernity's most destructive impulses: materialist instrumentalism; the exclusive privileging of rationality and universalism; the assertion of the self/individual over the community; a hubristic striving to manipulate nature; and the epistemological primacy of empirical science over humane values.

Although European imperialism and colonialism originated in the sixteenth century and climaxed in the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment is held to be a critical phase. The "scientific racism," modern ethnocentricity, and economic logics that provided enabling rationalisations of colonialism, are all often ascribed to Enlightenment thinkers.

At the same time, other Enlightenment figures formulated modern human rights theory, ideas of constitutional government, and the right of national self-determination. They also critiqued colonialism, appreciatively studied non-European cultures, and successfully campaigned for slave emancipation and the abolition of the slave trade. The place of sentiment, virtue, and sympathy in the period's literature have been seen as part of a humane critique of modernity's excesses. Moreover, in recent years some scholars have controversially asserted that in the ethos of the Enlightenment we can find valuable resources for facing the challenges of the twenty-first century (Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century (2000); Heath, Enlightenment 2.0.  (2015); and Pinker, Enlightenment Now (2018)).

Papers exploring the ambiguities and contested legacy of the Enlightenment and the challenges of teaching this controversial period of history are particularly encouraged. Topics may include but are not confined to:

- laudatory versus critical historiographies of the Enlightenment or Enlightenment figures;

- eighteenth-century debates over the legitimacy of colonialism;

- human rights discourses in the eighteenth century;

- representations of Indigenous people in European art and literature;

- teaching about the Enlightenment under the imperatives of reconciliation and decolonisation;

- the work of Enlightenment thinkers in relation to our contemporary social and cultural conditions.