Radical Aesthetics: A Symposium on New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, sponsored by the Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University

  The Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar is pleased to announce our final event of the year,  a symposium, “Radical Aesthetics”   Philosophers in the eighteenth century often defined the “aesthetic” as the science of “sense perception.” This definition had implications for taste, as well as metaphysics. In both cases, aesthetics was connected to sensory experience, reflecting the period’s interest in empiricism. Traditional 18th-century studies perspectives on “aesthetics” have tended to link it, explicitly and implicitly, to elite, able-bodied cis-white male notions of subjectivity.  By thinking about the “aesthetic” in frameworks such as gender, race, class, disability, and sexuality, this symposium seeks to generate conversations on more inclusive approaches to aesthetics in eighteenth-century studies. The event will feature talks by three scholars engaging in new approaches to aesthetics in the long eighteenth century, who consider the varieties of sense perception experienced by diverse individuals at this time. Talks will be followed by Q&A and discussion, as well as refreshments.    All Eighteenth-Century Studies seminars are free and open to the public.  We encourage you to forward this announcement to interested students and colleagues! Free parking is available in the Broadway Garage (enter on Felton Street).  If you cannot attend in person and would like a Zoom link, please fill out the form at this link [forms.gle]. <https://forms.gle/E5yx2pQABu2FnHpk6 [forms.gle]>   We hope you will join us for a lively discussion! See below for further details about our speakers and their talks!   1. Jason Farr,  “Deaf Aesthetics and Multisensory Perception” Abstract: 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.   2. David Alvarez, “The Colonial Context of Carolina in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Aesthetics and Ethics” Abstract: 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.   3. Jeremy Chow,  “'Lame Horses' & Alternative Black Humanisms” Abstract: 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.    Speaker Bios 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). 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).   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).      2023-24 Eighteenth-century Studies Seminar co-chairs Nicole N. Aljoe (Northeastern University-Boston) Sarah Eron (University of Rhode Island) Sue Lanser (Brandeis University)