Enfilade

From the conference website:

Alternative Enlightenments: An Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, 26-28 April 2013

Proposals due by 1 December 2012

Keynote Speakers

Wijnand Mijnhardt, Professor of History and Director of the Descartes Centre, University of Utrecht
Felicity Nussbaum, Professor of English, UCLA

From Kant’s seminal essay “What is Enlightenment?” through the manifold critical responses of the twentieth century, the ambiguity of a term designating both a paradigmatic approach to human intellect or autonomy, and a specific historical period, remains. How distinct is the concept of Enlightenment from the era of European history long taken to have discovered or invented it? This symposium proposes an examination of Enlightenments in the plural, welcoming both revisionary accounts of the Age of Enlightenment and explorations of Enlightenment in other times and places.

With an eye to translating the idea of Enlightenment, scholars have traced its many national and regional varieties. Discussions of an Ionian or an Athenian Enlightenment, of movements of Enlightenment in the medieval caliphate or the Ottoman Empire, share the contemporary intellectual landscape with debates on the continuing relevance of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the current global order. We are interested in the way the term has been borrowed and translated, creating a constellation of “Enlightenments” bound together by family resemblances. Is there still a singular project of Enlightenment (i.e. the critique of received ideas and inherited values, in particular religious ones; the promotion of rational or empirical methods; the creation of cosmopolitan and secular spaces), or has the term broken out of its historical mold to designate a more fluid set of cultural projects and practices?

Where do we stand today with regard to the Enlightenment? After all, the continuation of a politics and practice of Enlightenment may depend on the spatial and temporal translations we propose to explore. Such displacements give new life to the idea of Enlightenment, even as the term is contested, criticized and transformed.

Topics of interest include:

• Ionian / Athenian Enlightenment
• Secularism, materialism, the immanent frame
• Literatures of Worldliness in East and West: Renaissance, Tanzimat, Arab and Near Eastern Enlightenments
• Orientalism and Occidentalism
• Diplomacy, correspondence, the figure of the court philosopher
• What is Enlightenment: Kant, Foucault and beyond
• (The) Enlightenment in the Americas
• The public and the private: cross-cultural studies of an Enlightenment distinction
• Travel literature, satire, and utopian fiction
• Nineteenth century national Enlightenments, nationalism vs. internationalism
• Enlightenment and Empire
• The rhetoric of Enlightenment in geopolitics, the claims of the West
• Material culture, exchange, circulation, accumulation, dispersal
• Enlightenment and its others: mysticism, hermeticism and the arcane
• The metaphorics of Enlightenment: illumination, dawn, twilight and dusk
• Where do we stand today with regard to (the) Enlightenment? Critical theory / social and political practice

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to wcoker@bilkent.edu.tr by 1 December 2012.