'Lame Horses' & Alternative Black Humanisms - Jeremy Chow
This talk unites theories of blackness, animality, and disability to evaluate the euphemism "lame horse" in the anonymously written The Woman of Colour (1808). This evocative term appears repeatedly across Black writing of the nineteenth century (Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, etc.) to characterize--always with rhetorical pathos--the experiences of Black enslavement as akin to those of chattel animality. Olivia Fairfield's deployment of "lame horse" elucidates a subversive aesthetic in which Black voices play with and repurpose the black-animal analogy. The novel uses the term, I argue, to articulate modes of alternative humanisms that dissipate taxonomic borders and underwrite formations of blackness, generally, and Black womanhood, specifically.
Deaf Aesthetics and Multisensory Perception - Jason Farr
This talk assesses multisensory theories of perception from the long eighteenth century, dating back to John Bulwer’s Philocophus (1648) and encompassing Denis Diderot’s deaf simulation in a Paris theatre in his 1751 Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of Those who Hear and Speak. For Bulwer and Diderot, gestural communication is a universal language that reveals the innermost passions in an unequivocal manner. These theories of the gestural coincide with ongoing efforts to systematize deaf education, which officially emerges in Britain and France in 1760. Finally, I turn to a deaf author, Pierre Desloges, whose Observations d’un sourd et muet (1779) describes his multisensory experience of sign language, sound, and community. In all, I argue, a radical view of aesthetics must reckon with the multisensory to conceptualize access for deaf and disabled persons.
The Colonial Context of Carolina in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Aesthetics and Ethics - David Alvarez
The first scholarly edition of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s correspondence, edited by Christine Jackson-Holzberg (Volume 1, 2017), reveals connections between his position from 1683 to 1699 as one of the eight “Lord Proprietors” of Carolina and his later aesthetic and ethical theory. Jackson-Holzberg observes, for example, that some aspects of the 1699 version of his Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit are already visible as early as 1691 in his “very active, impassioned concern…as Proprietor.” Building upon Jackson-Holzberg’s work, this paper examines Shaftesbury’s correspondence to better understand both how his aesthetic and ethical theories shape his understanding of the colony in Carolina (for example, his vision of harmonious, mutual self-benefit in Carolina anticipates his work in The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (1709)) and how this colonial context influences his ethical and aesthetic theory.
Jeremy Chow is Assistant professor of English at Bucknell University, which occupies the ancestral homelands of the Susquehannock peoples. Chow is the editor of Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (2023) and Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Eighteenth Century (2024) as well as the author of The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century (2023).
Jason S. Farr is Associate Professor of English at Marquette University. He is the author of Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (2019). He has published numerous book chapters and articles in such venues as the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Romantic Circles, and The Rambling. Currently, he is working on a project provisionally entitled Deaf Resonances: Deafness, Sound, and Multimodal Communication in Eighteenth-Century British Literature.
David Alvarez is Associate Professor of English at DePauw University. He is co-editor with Alison Conway of Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600–1830 (2019).
LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 110 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20240503T180000Z DTEND:20240503T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR