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  • Eighteenth-Century Easts and Wests:Introduction
  • Chi-ming Yang (bio)

East-West Encounters of the “Not Quite”

The essays in this “Eighteenth-Century Easts and Wests” issue of Eighteenth Century Studies inaugurate the journal’s institutional relocation from California to New Haven, by way of India, China, Russia, and the Levant. Far from peripheral, the histories and perspectives that emerge from these sites are central to their interdisciplinary remapping of traditional eighteenth-century encounters of enlightenment and of imperialism. The virtues of a collection that is organized at this moment in time by an East-West rubric are several: it signals a regional, relational, and critical orientation that at once refuses the catchall, and too often Eurocentric, categories of the “exotic” or the “global,” and yet invites questions of comparison across and between cultures. Although seemingly axiomatic, it also calls into question its own bipartite structure of analysis by foregrounding the heterogeneity of the Easts and Wests under consideration here. The vector of a Pondichéry, Morocco, Andalusia, or Kiakhta shifts in relation to the particular local or intra-regional network of exchange in which it is situated. At the same time, the attention to place, and the importance of place to textual and archival analysis, keeps us attuned throughout to the larger structures of European and Asian states, companies, and institutions, as well as the continuing role of Western institutions in structuring the distinctions between Orient and Occident that open up fields of inquiry even as they push Asia to the margins of the modern academic mainstream. [End Page 95]

Although the essays in this volume pay passing mention to Orientalism per se, the questions they pose are no doubt variously indebted to Edward Said’s now classic assertion of the co-production of power and knowledge at the heart of not only nineteenth-century but also Enlightenment intellectual and colonial pursuits. What histories are enabled or occluded by the presumed romance—or clash—of cross-civilizational encounters? How do eighteenth-century white-Graeco, Christian-Arab, or Ottoman-Islamic worldviews continue to shape our modes of inquiry (or constitute areas of neglect)? How do they fit within the disciplines of national language literature and historical area studies we have inherited? The problems of Orientalism as a traditional mode of critique are all too familiar: the tendency to reproduce binarisms that reinforce the backwardness or antiquity of the East in contrast to the progress or dominance of the West, or to homogenize the Afro-Eurasian world from Egypt to China. Too often, an East-West frame can also invoke one of two models of encounter: the harmonious “meeting” of one and another, or the antagonism of worlds at war, one “versus” the other. This collection of essays navigates such hazards with subtlety and nuance, in part through productive engagements with language and translation that bring to bear Arabic, Chinese, Tamil, Manchu, French, and German sources upon the particularities of eighteenth-century religious and commercial transactions. As a result, new nodes of knowledge production come to the fore; indeed, the volume as a whole breaches disciplinary divides in a manner that not only challenges, but also invigorates and extends Orientalism’s foundational, “iconoclastic effect.”1

There are numerous, ongoing efforts across the humanities to decenter the study of empires and traverse the terrain of national, linguistic differences—the transnational turn in ethnic American studies, the formulations of alternative or comparative modernities and early modernities, historical cosmopolitanism, informal empires, and newly re-constellated units of Indian Ocean, Eurasia, Zomia, Frontier, and trans-Pacific studies, to name a few.2 It is important to note that when multiple Enlightenments and Orients emerge here, along with the often ghosted figures of go-betweens, translators, company agents, and artisans, the effect is not simply additive. In contesting the paradigm of Western modernity, a collective demand is sounded: our epistemological debts to the East remain largely unpaid. In fact, disputations of all sorts—petitions, debates, embargoes—populate these essays’ interrogations of history writing of the eighteenth century and up through the current day. Moreover, the range of contestations at work, from local to global, suggests that rather than a singular, circumscribed relation of encounter, East-West...

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