Enlightenment Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems, and Adoption (review)

The ambiguity at the heart of the title of Judith Still's latest hospitality book—she also recently published Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (2010)—is a productive one, which she thematizes at several points therein. "Enlightenment" can function adjectivally so that "Enlightenment hospitality" refers to Enlightenment writers' representations of hospitality. In addition to hospitality of the Enlightenment, though, her title also suggests hospitality towards it. Remarkably, Still gifts late modern readers a set of cautions about a need for a hospitable rather than hostile disposition towards Enlightenment texts on hospitality. In her view, the variety of critical apparatuses by which late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century scholars receive Enlightenment writings can sometimes make us stingy and unwelcoming readers—then again, in other ways, we are not critical enough.

Using a metaphor of border control, Still notes that "one of the filtering devices that we use to control entry into the stories we tell ourselves about the eighteenth century is our sense of 1789 as a culmination of Revolutionary political thought and rejection of the Old Regime; another is our concern about the nineteenth-century imperial gaze to come" (284). Each passport check warps the more distant past anachronistically through a feature of a less-distant moment. In this context, the first passport check leads the "border guard" to give pre-Revolutionary thinkers an easy pass because, as the French magazine L'Histoire exclaimed in its title of March 2006, "Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau ... Ils ont inventé la liberté!" However, Still finds some troublingly inhospitable and even hostile themes in Voltaire's L'Ingénu or Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète. It used to be that this first passport check caused scholars to hold pre-Revolutionary thinkers to a radicalizing standard such that their writings seem either not progressive enough or to presage revolutionary Terror. France now struggles to balance its Revolutionary credentials with its ban on Muslim women's "veiling," and a more critical reception of Voltaire et al. has consequently been jettisoned. Still thus offers a corrective to triumphalist celebrations of the allegedly liberal, tolerant universalist humanism of the philosophes. We become collaterally inhospitable to others in extending uncritically unconditional hospitality to the Lumières.

At the second passport check, certain texts are uncharitably rejected as too orientalist or imperialist. Still discusses Mary Wortley Montagu's The Turkish Embassy Letters as an instance where some interpretations derived from postcolonial studies have run awry of historical context: she finds it questionable that some scholars have imputed a smug Eurocentric superiority to Montagu's descriptions of Ottoman life, when both militarily and diplomatically the Ottoman Empire was politically recognized as a fellow court society. Certainly, eighteenth-century writers often enough revealed proto-orientalist prejudices. It is misleading, however, to attribute Orientalism to the eighteenth century: Edward Said's famous study historicizes nineteenth-century discourses of cultural developmentalism, scientific racism, the comparative science of "religion," and a civilizational superiority that was both signalled and advanced by penetrating central state administrative structures. Still reminds us that, on the whole, Enlightenment views of the Near East and Caucasus were far more plural and ambivalent—odder than Alain Grosrichard's levelling account in Structure du sérail would have us believe. She is not opposed to postcolonial criticism but welcomes greater care in differentiating episodes of European imperial dominance and distinguishing eastern from western theatres.

Enlightenment Hospitality revels in the multiple strangenesses of eighteenth-century texts, and Still has a way of rendering her enthusiasm consistently contagious over the course of this encyclopedic study. After an introduction that surveys the hospitality theme at home in France and England, Still sets out first to the Americas and Oceania (two chapters), then travels east to Persia and the Ottoman Empire (two chapters), and finally returns to Europe to scrutinize the gendered aspects of hospitality on the threshold of revolution (two chapters). Along the way she discusses many of the...