Dark Enlightenments: An Introduction

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Darkness and light—the binary opposition most deeply embedded in the Enlightenment—also shaped the 2020 David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, hosted by Flinders University and the University of Adelaide. Conceived as a face-to-face conference to be held on Kaurna land, never ceded by the original inhabitants to the colonizing Europeans bringing the supposed “blessings of civilization,” it was forced online by COVID, into the world of universal connection enabled by fiber-optic energy and light. This meant that a much wider range of scholars could get, virtually, to Adelaide than would normally have been the case, but they were conferring in the dark shadows of colonialist expropriation. The conference theme of Dark Enlightenments spoke directly to the tension between the universal and the particular that shaped the event. This was certainly fortuitous and we are still trying to work out the complexity of the attendant ironies.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-6
Number of pages6
JournalEighteenth-Century Life
Volume48
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2024

Keywords

  • eighteenth century
  • Enlightenment
  • literature

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