Project MUSE®: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1972) through current issueLatest Articles: Studies in Eighteenth-Century CultureTWOProject MUSE®Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture1938-61330360-2370Latest articles in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Note from The Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985057
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I hope readers will find that this volume successfully reflects the wonderful energy, diversity, and interdisciplinary commitment of ASECS as a scholarly community, and particularly of our 2024 meeting in Toronto. I am very pleased with our selections of clusters, one on eighteenth-century pirates, modern-day pop culture, and queer identities; another offering a range of responses—and deep eighteenth-century contextualization—for David Graeber and David Wengrow's very provocative book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity; and finally a sampling of the many panels on free indirect discourse, representing a fresh perspective and reengagement with a key concept for the formal analysis of narrative
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallNote from The Editor2026-03-12text/htmlen-USNote from The Editor2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®31372026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12"Frederick disguised as a French Girl": Empire, Masculinity, Race, and the Protean Possibilities of Paper Dolls
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985058
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A dynamic market in paper figures flourished in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, led by the publishers S. and J. Fuller, who sold their wares at the Temple of Fancy and Juvenile Museum, located in Rathbone Place. In September 1810, the Fullers published The History of Little Fanny: in Poetry. Exemplified in a Variety of Figures and The History and Adventures of Little Henry.1 By 1811, Little Fanny had reached its sixth edition, with Little Henry close behind with its fourth.2 Many more titles followed. Most Fuller books range from fifteen to thirty-two pages in length and center the experiences of an individual white child (girl or boy) who embarks on a series of adventures that inevitably require
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmall"Frederick disguised as a French Girl": Empire, Masculinity, Race, and the Protean Possibilities of Paper Dolls2026-03-12text/htmlen-US"Frederick disguised as a French Girl": Empire, Masculinity, Race, and the Protean Possibilities of Paper Dolls2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1120592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Introduction: Speaking of Thought, Thinking of Speech
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985059
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It is my distinct pleasure to introduce to you four papers delivered at the 2024 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) annual conference in Toronto, Canada, focusing on the perhaps unlikely topic of free indirect discourse. A term of narrative analysis associated with the blurring of the lines between speech and thought, reality and perception, FID, as it is commonly called, and as it shall be called here, was an unlikely star of this most recent gathering of eighteenth-century scholars. While the centering of a term drawn from narrative theory might be cynically regarded as an escapist jaunt into the depoliticized world of literary form, a careful reading of the four essays presented here reveals
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallIntroduction: Speaking of Thought, Thinking of Speech2026-03-12text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Speaking of Thought, Thinking of Speech2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®307472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of Temporality
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985060
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Long ago, in a passage I admire from a book I admire, Ann Banfield analogized the two aims of the narration of consciousness, including free indirect discourse, to two historical mechanisms: Huygens's lens and Huygens's clock. The first, in Banfield's words, "captures and eternalizes the gaze behind which the world is represented to the mind."1 The second "'tells time,' counts its discrete units and assigns them an order and like narration, 'incarnates the passage of time.'"2 The two mechanisms, therefore, serve as symbols for two distinct literary aspirations: to reveal the complete thoughts of another person, such as a fictional character, and to render time in some type of "real" capacity, perhaps emulating the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallFree Indirect Discourse and the Problem of Temporality2026-03-12text/htmlen-USFree Indirect Discourse and the Problem of Temporality2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®267922026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Gender and Genre in Free Indirect Discourse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985061
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We take free indirect discourse (FID) very seriously. Indeed, its seriousness has earned it an acronym, rare in our discipline. We place burden upon interpretive burden onto this formal device, which we associate exclusively with the novel. Yet in doing so, what have we missed? This paper attempts to answer this question by introducing a historicist account of FID developed by Paul Dawson and then by challenging that account with a seventeenth-century non-narrative example that does not fit Dawson's mold. Within fictional narratives, free indirect discourse, we are told, expresses more about a character's consciousness than the literal words on the page say. It conveys to a reader some sense of the private
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallGender and Genre in Free Indirect Discourse2026-03-12text/htmlen-USGender and Genre in Free Indirect Discourse2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®336832026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Ironizing Free Indirect Discourse in Mansfield Park: Austen's Technique of Psycho-Narration
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985062
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My argument is that Mansfield Park suffers from critics' intense focus on FID as opposed to the full range of types of psycho-narration Austen employs in the novel. FID, which I will define as third-person narration from within a character's perspective that draws on the character's voice without direct attribution, has long been seen as a key innovation of Austen's. The assumption that FID keeps readers close to the perspective of the characters has led critics to view Mansfield Park as renouncing irony and embracing patriarchal morality. In practice, however, by combining flashes of character voice and perspective via FID with accounts of characters' feelings and beliefs in the voice of a highly ironic narrator
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallIronizing Free Indirect Discourse in Mansfield Park: Austen's Technique of Psycho-Narration2026-03-12text/htmlen-USIronizing Free Indirect Discourse in Mansfield Park: Austen's Technique of Psycho-Narration2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®251962026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12This is FID
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985063
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Formalism was out of its depths when it tried to deal with prose.You are no doubt familiar with Frances Ferguson's claim that free indirect style "is the novel's one and only formal contribution to literature," and that form is form because it operates even when no one is paying attention.1 Like the sonnet in Romeo and Juliet, FID becomes recognizable once it is pointed out. Yet, as Ferguson acknowledges, FID is notoriously hard to recognize, even for experts like narratologists and linguists who continue to disagree and are sometimes mistaken about what counts as FID. And literary critics? We are often mistaken about FID.Timothy Bewes begins the essay "Free Indirect" by asserting:
When Virginia Woolf represents
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallThis is FID2026-03-12text/htmlen-USThis is FID2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®396802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Chardin's Portrait of a Man: "Pastel Crayons as Paintbrushes"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985064
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Jean-Siméon Chardin's idiosyncratic Portrait of a Man (Figure 1) encapsulates his innovative pastel painting technique.1 Its vibrant colors, thickly layered surfaces, and bold gestural strokes thematize the praxis of painting, making the work itself a "repository of process" that reveals its creation.2 Although more formal in presentation, Portrait of a Man resonates on multiple levels with Chardin's intimate self-portraits, featuring eccentric head coverings and colorful madras scarves, a point to which I shall return.3 Expanding on Pierre Rosenberg's observation that the late pastels are a continuation of Chardin's earlier work, this essay provides a sustained visual and critical analysis of his little-studied
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallChardin's Portrait of a Man: "Pastel Crayons as Paintbrushes"2026-03-12text/htmlen-USChardin's Portrait of a Man: "Pastel Crayons as Paintbrushes"2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1356772026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Dangerous Intersections: Streetwalkers and the Circulation of Wealth in Mercier's Tableau de Paris
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985065
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Prostitution in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century had raised the alarm of several reform-minded writers concerned about growing "social disorders" in the capital. The writer, reformer, and prolific chronicler of the city of Paris, Louis Sébastien Mercier, for example, devoted several chapters of his multivolume Tableau de Paris (1781–88) to the topic, with the aim "to establish some order in the heart of disorder itself."1 By "order" Mercier means both understanding (by providing an ordered sketch that can be comprehended at a glance) and effecting change (bringing future order to current disorder). His extended observations on the sex trade in the capital reveal its interconnectedness with larger social
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallDangerous Intersections: Streetwalkers and the Circulation of Wealth in Mercier's Tableau de Paris2026-03-12text/htmlen-USDangerous Intersections: Streetwalkers and the Circulation of Wealth in Mercier's Tableau de Paris2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®784212026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Introduction: Our Flag Means Death and the Queer Eighteenth Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985066
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This collection of essays is based on the ASECS 2024 roundtable titled "Our Flag Means Gay: Our Flag Means Death and Intersectional Directions in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations." The roundtable came about queerly, if you will: we combined one of our calls for papers on piracy and another on Our Flag Means Death (OFMD), the wildly popular HBO Max show that ran for two seasons from 2022 to 2023. OFMD reimagines the early eighteenth century and comically chronicles the adventures of Stede Bonnet, the historical Gentleman Pirate of Barbados, as he leaves his landed gentry life to captain The Revenge, falling in love with Edward "Blackbeard" Teach along the way. The pair end up co-captaining a queer and ethnically
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallIntroduction: Our Flag Means Death and the Queer Eighteenth Century2026-03-12text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Our Flag Means Death and the Queer Eighteenth Century2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®104992026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12"Any good port in a storm": Fragility, Masculinity, and Our Flag Means Death
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985067
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In one scene of John Cleland's Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), the eponymous Fanny, a prostitute who serves as the narrative's heroine, encounters a prospective client, a sailor, in an alleyway. He is described as "tall, manly, and handsome of both body and face."1 Upon finding a suitable room in a nearby tavern, the couple gets to work, hoisting figurative sails and brandishing figurative masts. At first, they fumble, unable to establish a physical position that would suffice for the sailor. Then, without a word, he leads Fanny to a table, bares her backside, and attempts his way into her "posteriors." In reflecting upon this situation, Fanny felt "pretty sensibly that it was not going by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmall"Any good port in a storm": Fragility, Masculinity, and Our Flag Means Death2026-03-12text/htmlen-US"Any good port in a storm": Fragility, Masculinity, and Our Flag Means Death2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®349082026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Fops, Mermaids, and Viking Vampire Clowns: Queer Masculinities in Our Flag Means Death
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985068
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At its heart, Our Flag Means Death (OFMD), created by David Jenkins, is about the relationship between masculinity and queerness. In Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, Hans Turley examines how "history and fiction merge in the representation of the pirate in the early eighteenth century and over the past three centuries," a merging that is particularly evident in Jenkins's short-lived series. Turley notes that "the pirate threatened society because he embodied all kinds of economic criminal desires and cultural transgressions and deviance. Paradoxically, despite his very real criminality, during these same years the pirate came to be seen as the romantic antihero still popular to this day."1 Drawing from the long tradition
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallFops, Mermaids, and Viking Vampire Clowns: Queer Masculinities in Our Flag Means Death2026-03-12text/htmlen-USFops, Mermaids, and Viking Vampire Clowns: Queer Masculinities in Our Flag Means Death2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®436762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Three Coarse Meals: Representations of Pirate Dining
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985069
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The word "buccaneer" and its European cognates stem from the Tupi and Arawakan words for a Central American and Caribbean food-smoking apparatus, mukem/mokaém and buccan, etymologically preserving the literally definitive importance of that technology's adoption by early groups of littoral subsistence hunters and sea rovers.1 Noting that linguistic and technological founding, this essay postulates a critical engagement with buccaneers, pirates, and their kin as a constitutively culinary or gastronomic demographic, rather than merely one with a distinctive diet susceptible to historiographic excavation. I would like to pursue the promise of this naming and its original representation of the sea rover as a kind of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallThree Coarse Meals: Representations of Pirate Dining2026-03-12text/htmlen-USThree Coarse Meals: Representations of Pirate Dining2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®499812026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Fleetwood Mac, Utopianism, and Queer Histories in Our Flag Means Death
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985070
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In England in 1819, James Chandler makes the passing observation that history reads like a map, at least for eighteenth-century poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld.1 Chandler draws on a theory that Barbauld develops in "On the Uses of History," a chapter on the importance of understanding history from her posthumous book of epistolary essays A Legacy for Young Ladies.2 In Chandler's reading, "On the Uses of History" develops a Romantic sense of history that makes frequent recourse to maps as a metaphor for historical understanding. In one striking example, Barbauld argues:To know the transactions of a particular reign, that of Cyrus for instance, in the regular order in which they happened in that reign, but not to know
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallFleetwood Mac, Utopianism, and Queer Histories in Our Flag Means Death2026-03-12text/htmlen-USFleetwood Mac, Utopianism, and Queer Histories in Our Flag Means Death2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®348182026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Between Antiquarianism and the Avant-Garde: Revisiting the Taste Debate through John Brown
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985071
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In November of 1786, the antiquarian Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824) wrote to his close friend and fellow member of the Society of Dilettanti, Charles Townley (1737–1805), to express his approval of John Brown (1749–87), a Scottish draughtsman newly arrived in London:
The Print of Homer which you are so good as to send me is excellent—indeed much more so than I could have supposed any of our Artists capable of producing. It gives one a perfect idea of the original, tis the first engraved Head of the old Bard that looks like a great Poet instead of a blind ballad Singer … I hope Brown & Bovi will go on, and engrave some of the other very fine Heads in your collection, which I am persuaded will amply repay them as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallBetween Antiquarianism and the Avant-Garde: Revisiting the Taste Debate through John Brown2026-03-12text/htmlen-USBetween Antiquarianism and the Avant-Garde: Revisiting the Taste Debate through John Brown2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1230712026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Prestige, Publicity, and the Woman Amateur of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris: A Look at Madame la Présidente de Bandeville
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985072
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She was buying continuously and refused her fantasies nothing; and when she desired something, she bought six times, ten times even what she needed, and her fantasies would often change their object.The disgruntled duc de Luynes's description of his aunt, Jeanne Baptiste d'Albert de Luynes, the comtesse de Verrue—who owned one of the greatest collections of art in eighteenth-century France—conjures up the image of a woman who is insatiable and impulsive, who consumes and accumulates objects without rational judgement or self-control. In other words, the polar opposite image from that of the (male) amateur of art in eighteenth-century France. Gender bias has often kept women from acceptance in the realm of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallPrestige, Publicity, and the Woman Amateur of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris: A Look at Madame la Présidente de Bandeville2026-03-12text/htmlen-USPrestige, Publicity, and the Woman Amateur of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris: A Look at Madame la Présidente de Bandeville2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1110632026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Autodidacts, Commonplacing, and Colonial Affiliations in Ignatius Sancho's Letters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985073
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In an early letter to Jabez Fisher, Ignatius Sancho thanks him for sending books that depict enslavement's moral repercussions. These texts on "the unchristian and most diabolical usage of my brother Negroes," Sancho hopes, would "produce remorse in every enlightened and candid reader."1 Sancho then describes his interest in reading Phillis Wheatley-Peter's poems by coining a term critics now use to describe Black intellectual labor and agency in the long eighteenth century: "Genius in bondage." Sancho's phrase, they point out, illustrates the promises of exceptional Black authorship in England and its colonies. Yet, as Srinivas Aravamudan observes, scholars rarely "query the fundamental ambivalence" of the epithet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallAutodidacts, Commonplacing, and Colonial Affiliations in Ignatius Sancho's Letters2026-03-12text/htmlen-USAutodidacts, Commonplacing, and Colonial Affiliations in Ignatius Sancho's Letters2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1015412026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Introduction: "Indigenous Critique" and Eighteenth-Century Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985074
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The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a comprehensive attempt to rewrite the long political history of humanity. One of the central claims of the book is that we have become stuck in a system of political organization that revolves around state sovereignty and individual rights, and that there is a very strong and, according to them counterfactual, narrative about the progress of political society that supports and naturalizes this stagnation. They argue that before the last few centuries humans moved much more freely between political systems, and that the world would be a better place if we were able to rediscover this political flexibility and creativity. The book is particularly relevant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallIntroduction: "Indigenous Critique" and Eighteenth-Century Studies2026-03-12text/htmlen-USIntroduction: "Indigenous Critique" and Eighteenth-Century Studies2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®213982026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12John Dennis Asserts Indigenous Liberty
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985075
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Kandiaronk, a historical Huron-Wendat leader, looms large in Graeber and Wengrow's counter-genealogy of "indigenous critique" in The Dawn of Everything. The authors recount how, having been a guest of honor in a sort of proto-salon hosted at Michilimackinac by the governor-general of New France, Kandiaronk outwitted his French settler hosts by modeling both a form (open debate over crucial moral and political issues) and a content (an ethos of radical nondomination) that repeatedly carried the day. Graeber and Wengrow maintain that the New Voyages' debates between Lahontan, deputy to Governor-General Frontenac, and Adario, "A Noted Man among the Savages," reflect real conversations with Kandiaronk.1In the course of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallJohn Dennis Asserts Indigenous Liberty2026-03-12text/htmlen-USJohn Dennis Asserts Indigenous Liberty2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®309882026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Reverse Ethnography in Eighteenth-Century Representations of African Material Culture
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985076
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The majority of scholarship on African material culture has detailed the ways that Europeans dismissed African philosophies of matter as backwards and barbarous "fetish worship" in order to invent themselves as Enlightened, rational subjects by contrast.1 While this was certainly a prevalent motif in the European literary record, it was not a totalizing one. Assuming that it was forecloses possibilities for thinking about Africa's contributions to modernity and redressing its systematic exclusion from intellectual history. My current research tracks how eighteenth-century thinkers and writers engaged Akan ideas about the metaphysical relationship between spirit and matter in order to interrogate the principles of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallReverse Ethnography in Eighteenth-Century Representations of African Material Culture2026-03-12text/htmlen-USReverse Ethnography in Eighteenth-Century Representations of African Material Culture2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®276682026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12"The Strict Ties and Voice of Nature": Coosaponakeesa's Transatlantic "Tribalography"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985077
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Between October 1754 and June 1755, the Anglo-Muscogee translator and merchant Coosaponakeesa (who is also known as Mary Musgrove) spent eight months in London advocating for compensation for her three decades of service to the British Crown in the early days of the Georgia colony.1 During that period, she wrote two memorials, formal accounts of her life and entitlements, the variations between which demonstrate deft political and cultural self-narrativization. While these documents do not initiate suits nor constitute legal action, they are composed in a manner that anticipates bureaucratic scrutiny and are accordingly precise in every turn of phrase. These memorials offer a useful case study for thinking about
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmall"The Strict Ties and Voice of Nature": Coosaponakeesa's Transatlantic "Tribalography"2026-03-12text/htmlen-US"The Strict Ties and Voice of Nature": Coosaponakeesa's Transatlantic "Tribalography"2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®447312026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Joseph Knight, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Indigenous Critique
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985078
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During the period from 1773 to 1778, a native of the Guinea Coast named Joseph Knight sued in the Scottish courts for his right to work for wages, and he won. This was the landmark case Knight v. Wedderburn, a legal episode that is still far more obscure, even to specialists, than the better-known 1772 Somerset decision, but that speaks directly to our collective consideration of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021).1David Graeber and David Wengrow propose that an "indigenous critique" of European hierarchy quietly animated the intellectual movement that we now call the Enlightenment.2 They argue that two signature features of Enlightenment thought originated in European reactions to wisdom
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallJoseph Knight, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Indigenous Critique2026-03-12text/htmlen-USJoseph Knight, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Indigenous Critique2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®592732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12The Line of Development: Conjectural History and the Indigenous Critique
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985079
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David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity purports to be a book that rewrites contemporary understandings of prehistory in order to question familiar narratives of the emergence of inequality in modern society. But it spends its first seventy-five pages revisiting Enlightenment debates over the origins of civilization, arguing that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) provided the two versions of early humanity available in the period: either an innocent state of nature or perpetual war and conflict.1 Contending that neither version is accurate, the work questions key assumptions of Enlightenment
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallThe Line of Development: Conjectural History and the Indigenous Critique2026-03-12text/htmlen-USThe Line of Development: Conjectural History and the Indigenous Critique2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®285962026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Lessons
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985080
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Below, in my first sentence, I refer to "the last six months." At the time of our roundtable (early April 2024) that meant since October 2023, when the Israeli regime intensified, with its latest war on Gaza, its now three-quarters of a century long ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine. Between April and now (late July 2024) that intensification has been itself only further intensified, as Israelis go on and on killing, maiming, and destroying Indigenous Palestinian bodies and lives at horrendous rates in horrendous ways, while the ability to say even this much continues to be aggressively and hysterically challenged where it is not simply erased or silenced—no matter the extensive, indisputable evidence
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallLessons2026-03-12text/htmlen-USLessons2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®182112026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12The Islamic Critique: A Persian Traveler in Regency England's Garden of Eden
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985081
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Human history has often been narrated as a fall from the Garden of Eden. We were small nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers living harmoniously in social equality, without a government, until inevitably forming complex agricultural and industrialized societies; this transformation, so the argument goes, increased bureaucracies, governance, and social stratification. Rejecting this teleological narrative, the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow instead propose that the "origins of inequality" is a myth at odds with the archaeological record, a myth invented by eighteenth-century European philosophers only to become a truism in the humanities and social sciences. The idea of the fall from an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallThe Islamic Critique: A Persian Traveler in Regency England's Garden of Eden2026-03-12text/htmlen-USThe Islamic Critique: A Persian Traveler in Regency England's Garden of Eden2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®527122026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Annotations on the Representation of Race: Performing Edward Young's The Revenge Then and Now
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985082
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As scholar, critic, and theorist Christina Sharpe has so powerfully demonstrated, we are all, whether consciously or unconsciously, living "in the wake."1 Sharpe uses this overarching conception to capture what it means to abide and to draw breath in the twenty-first century amid the enduring aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade with its pervasive legacy of mass displacement, shattering violence, and racialized capitalism. Across a series of meditations on contemporary works by Black artists, including by M. NourbeSe Philip, who will be reading at ASECS later this evening from her extraordinary work Zong!, Sharpe offers an alternative episteme for engaging and interpreting the works not just of the present
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallAnnotations on the Representation of Race: Performing Edward Young's The Revenge Then and Now2026-03-12text/htmlen-USAnnotations on the Representation of Race: Performing Edward Young's The Revenge Then and Now2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®583732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Contributors to Volume 55
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985083
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Victoria Barnett-Woods (she/her) is the associate director of Experiential Learning at the Starr Center in Washington College on Maryland's Eastern Shore. In this position, she aims to bring the history of the eighteenth-century world into a twenty-first-century context. Though her maritime focus has shifted to the Chesapeake region, her heart is in the Caribbean. She has written about pirates before, and promises to do so again.George Boulukos is professor of English and affiliate faculty in Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the editor of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, the author of The Grateful Slave (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and the editor of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/378/image/coversmallContributors to Volume 552026-03-12text/htmlen-USContributors to Volume 552026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®204622026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12