Dark Enlightenments: An Introduction

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.

Inaugurated deep in the print age in 1966, the seminar series was named in honor of one of the foremost eighteenth-century literature scholars of the twentieth century. David Nichol Smith (1875–1962) was educated in Edinburgh and Paris, and was Goldsmith's Reader in English at Oxford for much of his career. It was in his retirement, after spending much time in Australia and New Zealand, that his affiliation with the region grew. He was professor of English at the University in Adelaide in 1950–51, so it was fitting that the university would cohost the seminar. In 1962, it was decided that his working library, of some 8,000 volumes and 1,500 pamphlets, should pass after his death to the National Library of Australia, Canberra. The first David Nichol Smith Seminar, co-organized by the National Library of Australia and the Australian National University, was held as a public celebration of the arrival of this collection. Now supported by the Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ANZSECS), the seminar is the principal interdisciplinary forum for research into any aspect of the long eighteenth century.

The conference organizers and editors of this issue chose the theme of Dark Enlightenments to acknowledge the waning reputation, in the early twenty-first century, of the so-called Enlightenment as an ideal. The papers in this collection attend in various ways to how eighteenth-century processes of enlightenment—as projects ostensibly geared toward the rational illumination of new knowledge, the promotion of social justice, and the universal progress of humanity—tacitly created and reinforced hierarchies of knowledge and power, which produced social inequality, and privileged narrow views of what constituted humanity. If the Enlightenment and its multiple manifestations are, in Matam Oram's terms, “widely understood to be the foundational moment[s] of modernity,” then we must also recognize their role in fomenting modernity's discontents.¹

Contributors were invited to consider the dark, shadowy aspects of eighteenth-century processes of enlightenment, an invitation illustrated by the conference's promotional image: Joseph Wright of Derby's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768). Wright's long-haired scientist looks directly at us, as if to implicate us in the choice of whether to proceed with the deadly experiment, but our eyes are drawn by the light that illuminates the young, troubled witnesses. One girl looks sadly up at the trapped bird, while the other cannot bear to. Similarly, we asked our contributors to shine a light on the hidden, peripheral, and collateral elements of such processes and experiments. Consequently, we fielded scholarship concerning empire and enlightenment, violence and progress, secrecy and the self, and the numinous and Gothic as irrepressible irrationalities. We also welcomed papers that chose to address the theme aesthetically by considering the interplay of darkness and light and the philosophical and social foundations of this relationship. We hoped the conference theme would emphasize the Enlightenment in its moral complexity and richness, and the wide range of domains (from the mundane to the philosophically elevated) that contributed to its production. In all, we found the theme to be timely, partly owing to the nationalist turn in global politics and the recent “culture wars” controversy stirred in Australia by the establishment of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. Our theme offered us the opportunity to examine and fully understand the costs, benefits, and legacies of eighteenth-century “progress.”

There were two unexpected (and unwanted) complications. First, the conference theme risked being associated with the political and philosophical movement “The Dark Enlightenment.” A reactionary—and often labeled “alt-right” and “neo-fascist”—movement, the Dark Enlightenment is a faction believing libertarianism to be incompatible with democracy, calling instead for a return to traditional forms of government including absolute monarchy and a centralized technocentric economy run by the state. According to proponent Nick Land, Whiggish narratives of social progress that constituted “the accumulation of cultural capital” that was “in nobody's political interest” and that promoted “super-empowered, populist, cannibalistic state[s]” that radically compromised individual liberty have brought us to the brink of extinction.² Opponents like Roger Burrows cite the movement's troubling tendency towards “pro-eugenicist,” “misogynist, racist, and fascist discourses.”³ While the Dark Enlightenment engenders the spirit of enquiry we aimed to foster, we certainly denounce its disturbing, hyper-reactionary vision of the future looking to restore and reify heinous forms of discrimination. But in itself, the movement radically captures the paradoxical nature of enlightenment processes: for every benefit, for every progression, there is inevitably a cost.

The other unforeseen complication was the global COVID-19 pandemic, which plunged the world into a time of isolation, of illness and anguish, of mourning, and of personal and social reassessment, into another process of enlightenment of sorts, although darker and more immediate than one would like. The new conditions forced upon us gave rise to a new kind of international conference—a month-long festival of video presentations made available to delegates via a conference YouTube channel, interspersed with live (and superb) keynote lectures streamed around the world from Kate Fullagar, Freya Gowrley, Sasha Handley, and Eugenia Zuroski. While we all missed the conviviality of meeting friends and valued colleagues face to face, the new format did open new possibilities for reaching a global audience. In all, the conference attracted delegates hailing from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Korea, China, Portugal, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Canada, UAE, UK, and the US—certainly the most international David Nichol Smith Seminar yet.

The conference also attracted exciting work from new as well as experienced scholars, and the essays reflect both the high standard of scholarship and the intellectual trends that emerged from submissions. Lucy Powell's “Jakob Bogdani's Stuffed Titmouse: Birds, Still-Life Painting, and the Global Imaginary” traces the dark contours of empire and an axiomatically global enlightenment project through Bogdani's still-life paintings of entrapped, transported, and “naturalized” exotic birds. By tracing the lives and afterlives of his bird models, Powell exposes how they both endorse and subvert Britain's colonial expansion, and the enlightenment project itself. Angelina Del Balzo's essay, “Making Whiteness Visible: Slavery and Oriental She-Tragedy in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko,” turns to the theater to reveal one of the Enlightenment's most injurious legacies: the development of modern race categories. Reading Thomas Southerne's 1696 stage adaptation of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), and its subsequent reworking by John Hawkesworth in 1759, Del Balzo argues that these plays contributed to the racialization of female pathos as white, while eliding the horrors of Black women in bondage. David Garrioch examines the dark side of light, if you will, in “Playing with Fire: Love of Light and Nocturnal Shadows,” bringing a more literal interpretation to the consideration of light and darkness. Focusing on the material culture of light, Garrioch exposes the increased fire risks attendant with the expansion of domestic and urban illumination, and how light functioned as a “civilizing” force while endangering the lives and property of many. As expected, empire, race, and the interplay of darkness and light emerged as key themes of the conference, as expertly reflected by these essays.

Figurative, poetic spaces also emerge as darkened enclaves of enlightenment. Ileana Baird, in “The Enlightenment's Dark Spaces,” turns to Alexander Pope's Dunciad (1728–43), examining Colley Cibber's “Gothic Library” as a heterotopic space that encapsulates the destructive and deceiving tendencies of the Enlightenment as “modernity gone wild.” James Morland's essay, “Poetic Mourning in the Darkness of Solitude,” focuses on the poetry of Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Thomas Gray to explore the darkened solitude of grief, where light and vision are eschewed in favor of sound, but where echoes of the past and the silence of failed conversation with the dead ultimately compound grief. While Baird's essay allies darkened spaces with perverse epistemic practices—or, the Enlightenment's failings—Morland's doleful spaces reflect the denial of eschatological revelation and the persistence of sorrowful ignorance—or, a failure of enlightenment.

The conference theme also attracted a number of responses dedicated to exploring the traditionally antithetical relation between the Enlightenment and the Gothic. The Gothic is often constructed as Reason's Other, as the irruption of what the Enlightenment attempted but failed to repress, as most famously depicted in Francisco de Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799, Los Caprichos, plate 43). Two articles in this special issue complicate this simplified view. Jane Lim's “ ‘Open House’: Hospitality and Decentered Subjects in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor” situates gothic terror not in conventional tropes of gothic confinement, but in Dacre's dismantling of the comforting constructions of the Enlightenment household and the stable modern subject. Under the perpetual decentering forces of hospitality, Lim argues that the binaries of self and other, host and guest, and master and slave collapse in Dacre's novel, pointing forward to anxieties associated with the urban Gothic of the later nineteenth century, and further still, to the porousness of the self and home in times of pandemic disease. Lim's article is a complex analysis of the customarily antagonistic relation between the Enlightenment and the Gothic. Elizabeth King, in “Anti-Gothic Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria,” demonstrates how, in addition, the Gothic itself can function as an enlightening force; she goes on to invoke the “anti-Gothic” as a mode that both adopts and subverts gothic imagery, in this case to illustrate the oppressed lives of women. As King explains, Wollstonecraft's eponymous character is animalized at various points in the novel, exposing the savagery of oppressive, patriarchal structures of Enlightenment society. Her article reveals how the bilateral relation between the Enlightenment and the Gothic can be disrupted and reframed as mutually supportive, each with equal claims to be as illuminating or as frightening as the other.

This special issue brings together articles from various disciplines to shed light on the theme of Dark Enlightenments, commemorating what was a productive and rewarding period of learning amidst the dark and lonely time of the pandemic. Together, they not only explore the costs and benefits of eighteenth-century processes of enlightenment, but also reflect the kinds of challenges, paradoxes, and incongruities encountered as we grapple with the profound legacies of the eighteenth century.

Notes