EXHIBITS
ENGL 6330, Spring 2018: Haunted by History: The Deep Eighteenth Century: Student Exhibits
Tearing the White Out: The Haitian Revolution
Jonathan Blake Heaton takes a close look at the Haitian Revolution, an event that was central to the Age of Revolutions but takes a backseat to the American and French Revolutions in many history books today. As Heaton shows, the tendency to ignore or downplay the significance of this event are part of a larger historical process, in which European and North American powers have attempted to deny or undermine the legitimacy of the nation of Haiti—a process that continues today in U.S. policies and in popular representations of events like the 2010 earthquake.
Erasing Native American Religious Traditions
Brady Maynes examines a specific facet of the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans: religious conversion. In his exhibit, Maynes shows how white settlers often imposed their beliefs on the groups they encountered, and exposes the surprising ways that religion was tied up with violent conflicts like the Bear River Massacre. The need to sustain indigenous beliefs and protect them from erasure remains relevant today, and is central to debates over issues like the designation of the Bears Ears National Monument, which includes sacred sites.
Constructing Women's Reputations: Gender and the Public Self
Jessica Griffeth traces the ways that writers like Mary Astell, Hannah More, and Mary Wollstonecraft articulated the challenges women of the period faced in adhering to gendered standards of appearance and behavior, and she reveals how reception of their work likewise reflected perceptions about the ways women should and should not intervene in the public sphere. Griffeth draws striking parallels to the ways that many young women today attempt to construct and maintain the illusion of "effortless perfection" on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook.
Commodifying Children: Images of Misery
Moira Hammons examines the very moment at which the concept of “childhood” was articulated, and she uncovers the ways that this new concept created a crisis for understanding how society should care for poor children whose parents could not provide them with a period of dependency and relative ease. Writers like Jonathan Swift in “A Modest Proposal” captured the attempt to reframe these children, not as burdens on society, but as potential commodities that could create alternative forms of economic value. While such an idea may strike modern readers as horrifying, Hammons reveals the ways in which images of childhood misery continue to circulate as commodities in the present.
Defining Pets in the 18th and 21st Centuries
Gemma Koontz explores petkeeping practices that even predate the modern usage of the term “pet,” and in doing so, she shows how the boundaries between human and animal have been defined and blurred over the past three centuries. From eighteenth-century poems and novels depicting lapdogs to current-day lifestyle features about purse dogs, from Robinson Crusoe’s domestic animals to pet food commercials bidding viewers to “feed them like family,” pets provide a locus for anxieties over gender, consumerism, domesticity, and even the nature of sentience.
Regarding Bees: Symbols in Modern Society
For Emily Withers, beekeeping and the scientific and imaginative exploration of bees provide a window onto eighteenth-century anxieties around the relationship of humans to our natural environment. For writers from Mary Leapor to Bernard Mandeville, bees are both a window onto the natural order and an imaginative tool for understanding how human society should operate. As Withers reveals, bees continue to have this dual role in twenty-first century culture, from popular literature like The Secret Life of Bees to idioms we use in everyday language.
Dividing into Parties: Then and Now
Rebecca Ricks turns to a phenonemon that seems strongly contemporary to many Americans: political polarization. In December 2017, the Pew Research Center found that Americans are more likely to consider conflict between Democrats and Republicans strong than they are to say the same of conflict between racial, socioeconomic, geographic, or generational groups. Pew reported that these numbers were up from similar surveys in 2016 and 2012, reflecting a sense that partisanship is on the rise in the U.S. Yet as Ricks shows, our modern flavor of partisan animosity has deep roots going back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Taken together, these seven studies show us how our very understandings of what it means to be human have roots in the literary and material cultures of the eighteenth century, and they reveal how processes set in motion during the eighteenth century continue to shape power relations in the present. In doing so, they alert us to the urgent need to understand this history in order to participate in ongoing conversations about foreign and domestic policy, proving that—as Roach puts it—the deep eighteenth century “isn’t over yet.”[1]
[1] Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 13.