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Thinking about how this is a moment of reckoning for ASECS, and how there is potential to push it in the right direction. I know that this has happened historically, and I'm curious to hear from people with that institutional memory about how things might proceed now.
One of the things that is so galling about this plenary is that it reactivates debates that have been settled to a large extent—it is a reactionary move to unwind the clock on a problem that has been debated to death (productively but often unnecessarily) forever.
It is asking questions that were exhausting four years ago—a repetition of a repetition. Even if the talk is surprising in its tone or argument (unlikely), or even if it is robustly challenged in the Q&A, we're forced to legitimize premises of necessary work AGAIN.
That is unfortunate. It prevents the field from moving into more radical territory—or, at least, delays that movement.
At the same time, I'm wondering how this event and its contestation might challenge how many C18 scholars conceptualize the work that we're doing.
I think that many of us assume our work has an implicit politics, that it has a radical critical edge because of the forms of violence and associated cultural scaffolding that it historicizes and critiques. We need to trouble that easiness where it exists.
Don't get me wrong: this is why I do C18 studies to begin with! That work *can be* so meaningful, at least within the limited ambit of the academy (and that is way more limited than we like to tell ourselves, to be sure).
But idk, I wonder if many people simply assumed that that climate wouldn't permit the airing of overtly reactionary sentiments from senior colleagues. I also wonder about how much compensatory detachment that allows outside of the posture of scholarship.
(Certainly not true for everyone. But it's an issue, and many of us notice it in the work and professional comportment of colleagues that we like and respect.)
That is to say: I think that many people (across fields, for sure) are comfortable picking up the language of radicality for the purposes of (incredibly) circumscribed critique and then defaulting to a (maybe, barely left-) liberal orientation in the rest of their lives.
I really believe is part of the problem here. What happens on the page—with respect to a particular archive of texts or historical window—doesn't connect with what happens in broader institutional, social, and political life.
Again, that's not true for everyone—there are people in this field who are willing to publicly break with liberalism in meaningful and inspiring ways, and have been doing so for a long time. I'm grateful for that.
& in general I'm not offering this as a denunciation. I just hope that, increasingly, we're really about the politics that we are picking up in conference presentations, articles, and (occasionally) in the seminar room.
