Editors' Introduction

We are grateful to our contributors and panel chairs for enabling us to put together what is both a timely and a forward-looking volume. This edition of SECC is, as always, wide-ranging in discipline and geographical reach. The essays address media from print to performance and from digital archives of music and song, as they impact theories, pedagogies, economies, manners, and research, and pertain to the Caribbean, Ireland, North America, Britain, France, and Poland. But these interventions also come together to shed new light on particularly pressing issues of the present.

Barbara Fuch's Clifford Lecture on what can be learned from Robinson Crusoe's absence from his Brazilian sugar plantation introduces discussions of race, empire, slavery, and colonial rule as these material phenomena figure in surviving records and in the classroom. We include here for the first time the Race and Empire Caucus's prize-winning essay, which will be a regular feature of SECC from now on; and we congratulate Kimberley Takahata for being the first winner of this important prize. The essays on critical race theory and pedagogy on the one hand and new databases of slavery and abolition on the other hand robustly reflect on the intersection of eighteenth-century studies with current global events.

Susan Lanser's compelling Presidential Lecture on the mystery of how there came to be a Marie-Antoinette House in Maine and on the persistence of the fakelore attached to it is a fascinating story that delves deeply into the signification of French royalty in a transatlantic context and into the persistent connection of Marie-Antoinette in the U.S. to whiteness. Lanser's deep and wide cultural study heralds several critical essays on diverse eighteenth-century forms of manufacture and transportation. The Material Culture section has a strong and welcome visual component. The study of material culture is a fairly recent addition to our field, but it is clearly one that is very much coming into its own.

The last section consists of forums which address some pressing emerging issues: where might current trends in theory take us in regard to the study of literature? Should we retain healthy skepticism of the past's literary productions or should we adopt a less adversarial approach to literary study? How might new archives and databases alter and reshape the relationship of Irish studies to English literary and cultural studies? How can we defend the humanities in general, and what we do in the eighteenth-century in particular, against defunding and marginalization?

We have learned from all the work we have included and enjoyed it. We hope you will do the same.