In the wake of postcolonial and, especially, decolonial thought that has prevailed in the past decades, the legacy of the European Enlightenment has been discussed in increasingly controversial modes. With the growing emphasis on and study of the Enlightenment’s entanglements with colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade on all (personal, infrastructural and economic) levels, both the very notion of universalism that is believed to be the European Enlightenment’s central claim as well as key-concepts such as liberalism, secularism, human rights, liberty and equality have been criticized, if not, at times, abandoned. In short, the horizon of emancipation that was framed by Enlightenment thinkers, and is supposed to be a product of Enlightenment’s politics, has been put to trial.

As a matter of fact, a radical criticism of the Enlightenment is far from new: Nikita Dhawan has recently reminded us of its first, strong instantiation in the Frankfurt School’s conceptualization of the Enlightenment in dialectic terms in the aftermath of the Holocaust, emphasizing the parallels with the postcolonial critique (Dhawan 2024). New, however, are the decolonial premises according to which a criticism of the European Enlightenment can and has to escape the Enlightenment’s very epistemological frame. This challenging claim, essentially rooted in Latin American and Caribbean theory (Mignolo 2011; Wynter 2003), has increasingly found its way into European academic institutions and curatorial practices. To the extent that these fields are themselves, in a strong sense, institutions of the Enlightenment — i.e., institutions that were (re-)shaped in the Age of Enlightenment and that have inherited its (biased) emancipatory politics — this import raises questions related both to its intended and to its real effects. Unquestioned, however, is the postulate according to which the Enlightenment, both conceived of as an age (a historical epoch) and as a conceptual paradigm (Cascardi 1999), is an entirely Western, autochthonic inception with strong ties to Christianity, thus presumptively standing for a genuine and exclusive “Christian” process of “secularization” (see Biale 2011).

Rather than exclusively focusing on questions of legacy, David Graeber and David Wengrow have recently proposed to address the neglected problem of the European Enlightenment’s origins, shedding light on the deep transformation of “Western” thought and perception that occurred in the aftermath of Europe’s cultural contact with the “New World”. Drawing the new Enlightenment concern for equality back to the very pre-conditions that made its emergence — that is, the emergence of modern democratic politics and praxis in Old Europe — thinkable and desirable, they strongly argued that nothing of the like would have occurred without the century-long conversation with “American [indigenous] intellectuals” (Graeber/Wengrow 2021). In so doing, they propose to situate Western liberalism as the product of transcultural encounters that occurred in the aftermath of the colonization of the Americas. What if the European Enlightenment were, rather than the unfolding of the contradictions inherent to a monotheistic Christian scheme, or to a genuinely Western rationality, the consequence of an unacknowledged cultural shock that unsettled the latter’s very foundational ground?

This conceptual shift — unsettling in its own right — might help reopen the field and ask similar challenging questions that, rather than obscuring European colonial politics, shift the attention from their intrinsic rationale to their unexpected transcultural byproducts, emphasizing thus the many ways in which global encounters transformed the fabric of a European imagination and its aesthetic patterns. To begin with, any investigation into cultural contact and cultural transfer in the Age of the European Enlightenment must go beyond the “contact zone” (Pratt 1991; see also Dobie 2009) with the two Americas and include at least one other contact zone, namely with the ‘Orient’, extending the questions asked about the Enlightenment’s inception to the very coining of the terms “Orient” and “America” respectively, as well as the entire related semantic fields.

For if Graeber and Wengrow are right to assume that without “the indigenous critique” of European patterns of thought and behavior (Graeber/Wengrow 2021: 27-77) there might never have been a way out of a non-liberal, more or less fundamentalistic Western European society, we should recall that the same can be said about the intense and complicated debate with Islam that reached a peak around 1700. While mediated during late Middle-Age and Renaissance by the Sephardic Jewish scholarship rooted in the Iberic peninsula, this century-long theological debate occasioned by the centuries-long Islamic rule in al Andalus (711-1492) was revived — and intensified — in the wake of the enormous cultural transfer enacted by early Oriental Studies in the 17th century. Not only was it more concerned with “internal others,” than practicing “othering” in a proper Saidian sense (Said 1978): the medieval cultural politics al Andalus’ Golden Age als well as the subsequent Almohad “Western cultural hegemony” (López Lázaro 2013), including its knowledge production, poetic imagination and philosophical challenges, developed in ways very similar to what has since been called “the Enlightenment.” Confronted with the “Enlightened” scholarly and literary culture of so-called Islamic Spain — encompassing everything from infrastructures of knowledge and the flourishing of poetry to the philosophical tradition rooted in ancient Greek thought, as well as the complex negotiations between philosophy, religion, worldly power, theology, and mysticism — we must ask to what extent, for what purposes, and on which false premises Western Europe came to assert, more or less explicitly, a kind of “copyright” or “property right” over the notion of “Enlightenment” (Nesbitt 2011, Todorov  2010). 

Viewed from this perspective, the Enlightenment emerges not as a singular Western, historical epoch, but as a conceptual paradigm that invites us to decenter its cultural instantiations. However, while the influence of cultural transfers from both the ‘West’ and ‘East Indies’ in shaping European Enlightenment thought, tropes, and aesthetic imagination, can hardly be overstated, on a methodological level, though, the articulation of both phenomena requires competences from various philological disciplinary fields as well as a conceptual framework capable of linking historical knowledge to far-reaching theoretical issues such as secularization, Enlightenment’s “Orientalism” (Said 1978), or the political and philosophical imagination of a “state of nature”. Conceptualizing this articulation also requires serious engagement with the (trans-)cultural imagination of the European Enlightenment and its mental cartographies, encompassing several specific Enlightenment tropes that clearly emerged in the wake of intensified cultural contacts across both the Atlantic and the Pacific — such as “natural man,” “natural religion”, insularity—as well as representations of colonialism, slavery, globality, and of Islam, mysticism, indigenous knowledge, historicity, up to the operational modes chosen by Enlightenment writers, especially their practices and genres of criticism.

The planned conference will feature panel contributions and a keynote-lecture on “Decentering the Enlightenment” (language: English) as well as two workshops dedicated to “the transcultural inception of the European Enlightenment” (languages: English, French, German, Spanish).

“Decentering the Enlightenment”: The conference panel and keynote-lecture challenge the European Enlightenment’s core universalist belief by decentering it historically, culturally, and geographically. They aim to show how its very premises were “radically” unfolded elsewhere (as in the Caribbean context of colonialism and slavery), and to identify specific features of the epoch that have been culturally “translated” and conflated with “vernacular” intellectual claims and beliefs (as in Haskala or in 19th century Iran), while the very translatability of Western European universalist belief urges us not only to compare, but also to heuristically entangle the European Enlightenment with its medieval precedent on European soil, the Islamic “Enlightenment” in Al Andalus.

“The transcultural inception of the European Enlightenment”: If the European Enlightenment—especially in its political dimension (critique as the Enlightenment stance par excellence, equality, liberty, and rights as the concepts underpinning liberal democratic praxis and subjectivity) — is to be understood as the unfolding of an unprecedented cultural shock (Graeber/Wengrow 2021), and if, at the same time, its intelligibility relies on “Enlightenment Orientalism” (Aravamudan 2012), broadly conceived, then how can we make sense of the two cultural transfers and their multiple sources that contributed to its very inception? How can we, for example, trace the Enlightenment notion of a natural religion back to both Islam as Christianity’s rival and monotheistic other and to the indigenous American world(s) that constituted a radical epistemic challenge? How is this philosophical concept linked to a broader collective imagination, to mental landscapes, and to the power of fiction (staged in literary and philosophical texts, but also in iconography and cartography)? 

Two interconnected workshops will pursue these and other related questions through philological readings and theoretical approaches. The discussion will be respectively based on a reader entailing both a selection of historical materials and some research chapters.

a) “Oriental Illumination: Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān in the European Enlightenment”(1st Workshop)

The now almost forgotten philosophical tale Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, (English: “Alive, Son of the Awake”), written in Marrakesh around 1180 by the Andalusian philosopher and Sufi-practitioner Ibn Tufayl, was, from late 17th to the mid-18th century, an international bestseller, as well known as the Arabian Nights. Once edited and translated to Latin by Edward Pococke (father and son, respectively) in 1671, this classical Islamic work was transformed into a treaty on the “autodidact philosopher” (Philosophus autodidactus) and became as such “the quintessential forerunner of the Enlightenment” (Ben-Zaken 2011: 105). Subsequently, it was subjected to further translations, comments, adaptations, parodies and pamphlets throughout England, Scottland, the Neverlands, Germany and France, each shaped by the particular agendas of the historical actors involved. While there is some evidence that its main tropes — insularity, self-learning, natural man, natural religion, mysticism — influenced the European imagination at the very threshold of its Enlightenment epoch, its main character was also merged with “American intellectuals” or staged as an interlocutor of Marana’s Turkish Spy. Importantly, it becomes a main reference in late editions of Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Traité de l’origine des romans, and it might have been a source of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, whose author was interested in both the “Orient” and the Caribbean.

b) “Who enlightens whom? Indigenous Thought and European Projections in Lahontan’s Dialogues avec un sauvage” (2d Workshop)

Following a decade-long stay in North America — during which he traveled extensively through what is now the United States and Canada, engaging with numerous Indigenous peoples — Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan (1666–1716), published two works that would exert a decisive influence on the European Enlightenment. In addition to his Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique Septentrionale (1703), it was above all his Dialogues avec un sauvage that captured the attention of an international readership. In the tradition of Montaigne’s “Des cannibales,” Lahontan introduces an Indigenous interlocutor who articulates a radical and far-reaching critique of European society and thought. This remarkable text was swiftly translated into several European languages and became a staple of the 18th-century collections of travel writing and "curiosities" from the so-called New World. Widely circulated across Europe, the Dialogues had a profound impact on numerous philosophical and literary works of the Enlightenment and contributed significantly to the emergence of the idea of the “noble savage.” As David Graeber and David Wengrow argue in The Dawn of Everything, this influence can be traced to an actual historical encounter: the critique voiced in the Dialogues draws on real conversations Lahontan had with the prominent Huron-Wendat (Wyandot) leader Kondiaronk, thus revealing a significant non-European source of Enlightenment thought. The contributions to this workshop explore both the history of the texts’ translation and reception, and the broader question of how to conceive a decentered Enlightenment—one that cannot be separated from its many encounters with cultural alterity: To which extent do the Dialogues depict real encounters? What effect did the latter have on the European discourses and practices? What does Lahontan’s text tell us on the uses of the literary genre of the dialogue around 1700 — about the status of fiction and the „regime of truth“ (Foucault) of this age? 

Quoted Works:

Aravamudan, Srinivas (2012): Enlightenment Orientalism. Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Ben-Zaken, Avner (2011): Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqẓān: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Biale, David (2011): Not in the Heaven. The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cascardi, Anthony (1999): Consequences of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dhawan, Nikita (2024): Die Aufklärung vor Europa retten. Kritisch Theorien der Dekolonialisierung. Frankfurt: Campus.

Dobie, Madeleine (2009): “Translation in the Contact Zone”, in: The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West, ed. by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 25-49.

Graeber, David/Wengrow, David (2021): The Dawn of Everything. A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane.

López Lázaro, Fabio (2013): “The Rise and Global Signification of the First ‘West’: The Medieval Islamic Maghrib.” Journal of World History 24(2), 259–307.

Mignolo, Walter D. (2011): The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press.

Nesbitt, Nick (2008): Universal Emancipation. The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville, VA/London: University of Virginia Press.

Pratt, Mary-Louise (1991): “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 1991, 33-40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469.

Said, Edward (1979): Orientalism. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Todorov, Tzvetan (2010): In Defence of Enlightenment. London: Atlantic Books.

Wynter, Sylvia (2003): “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3), 257-337. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.