Teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature beyond the Pale

In 2017 college students all over the country launched high profile and controversial protests against the tendency to put white art, white culture, and white aesthetics at the center of the humanities classroom. During the now infamous boycott of Humanities 110 at Reed College, for example, students took issue with the fact that the required humanities class focused largely on the translatio studii of intellectual history from the Mediterranean westward. Students argued that the class "perpetuates white supremacy—by centering 'whiteness' as the only required class at Reed."¹ Whethe one agrees with these students' tactics, their complaint prodded a sore spot for those of us who teach historical literatures and whose background and training is in specifically Western literary traditions. Although surveys of eighteenth-century literature might include Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative or Phyllis Wheatley's poetry, the discipline is continually haunted by its Eurocentric canon. Even when we are teaching global or colonial texts like Oroonoko or Robinson Crusoe, we often put whiteness at the center of the curriculum, in part because it seems that our authors inevitably put whiteness at the center of their own worlds.

In the spring of 2017, I taught an advanced undergraduate seminar called Global Crossroads in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, which I then taught as a graduate seminar in the spring of 2018. In these classes, I experimented with strategies to teach literature written largely by white British authors from a more global perspective. I paired these canonical texts with material chosen to encourage students to consider how the discourse, narratives, knowledge, aesthetics, or material culture of non-Europeans became central to how eighteenth-century British writers represented the world (table 1). In other words, instead of starting the class from the premise that the British literary tradition invented the way Britons thought about "the global" in the eighteenth century, we examined the ways that global contact created the British literary tradition. This was a time, after all, when British travelers, readers, and writers were pushing their own intellectual, geographical, and cultural boundaries. There is no reason to assume that this global context—and the figures and discourses that animate this global context—did not have an impact on the British literary imagination.

The course material I chose to illustrate the scale of these crossroads fell into three broad categories. The first category included global texts to which eighteenth-century Western readers had access, either as translations or epitomes, like the writings of early modern Arabic and North African geographers or the Ethiopian story of the Queen of Sheba retold by Hiob Ludolf and James Bruce. The second category included reports from European travel narratives of local informants describing their own cultures (embedded narratives) and reports of local arts and acts of self-representation (music, ritual, or dancing). The third category included non-alphabetic texts and material culture (art objects, artifacts, maps, textiles, goods created specifically for export to Europe, etc.). The organizational structure of the syllabus classified some texts as Western or British and others through the sweeping oppositional categories of non-Western, or non-European, which was in a way antithetical to the aims of the course; however, this structure also served as a concrete example of the paradigm the course was meant to push against and provided an opportunity to discuss the limitations of well-intentioned multicultural approaches to creating an inclusive reading list, neither of which were self-evident to my students. In other words we were not equipped to fully dispense with such geopolitical binaries, but we practiced recognizing them and then using the course readings, assignments, and discussions to sketch out alternatives to them.

Students responded to prompts on Canvas (an online learning management system with a built-in discussion board) that asked them how exposure to this range of materials encouraged them to think differently about the European texts on the syllabus. For example, I paired Oroonoko with a translation of François d'Elbée's description of the luxurious Fon court at Ardra, along with lists of goods published by John Ogilby and Richard Hakluyt that were most...