Re-Examining (White) Enlightenment Legacies through a German Lens: An Introduction

Summary

THIS SECTION HAS four parts that collectively try to pinpoint the emergence of a complex notion of racial thinking and of marking a concept hitherto largely unmarked, namely whiteness; in the process, it delineates a focus area in eighteenth-century German studies but seeks to project an open discussion, one we’d love to see continued for years to come. I t is a discussion that anticipates not as much revision, as it foretells a dynamic exchange and new impulses for a field that has been forced, on more than one occasion, to defend its relevancy. C alls for reexamining names of organizations and the perceived narrow focus of the field, which on the surface Goethe Society and Goethe Yearbook might imply, and which one of the contributors discusses in this volume, are facets of this debate. What is the role that whiteness and, more broadly, debates on race, the world, and the diversification of scholarly narratives play in eighteenth-century German studies?

To be sure, the section's focus does not come out of nowhere but arises, almost naturally, from an increasing engagement with German materials in their non-German and/or comparative contexts, aiming at including “the outside Germany” as a constitutive element. These reference points and reconsiderations of the German eighteenth century indicate, perhaps, global thinking; equally possible, they might be merely a transatlantic figure of thought posing as global. O r they recall, somewhat well-worn at this point, the category of the transnational or transcultural. A gainst and alongside these rubrics, inquiries into race, whiteness, the Black Atlantic, and the scope of eighteenth-century thinking unfold.

In the following section, “Fractured Visions, New Horizons,” Birgit Tautz will discuss recent new work and forward-directed lines of thinking presented at ASECS 2022, a conference that unfortunately saw very few German studies contributions, followed by Patricia Anne Simpson's reflection on Penn State's symposium on the Legacy of Enlightenment Race Theory in the context of eighteenth-century studies, Sarah Eldridge's implied dialog with emergent comparative work as she previews her own book-length project on the centrality of the “white subject,” and a glimpse into a research network in progress, organized by our colleagues Claudia Nitschke and Sigrid Köhler in Durham and Tübingen, respectively, and featured here through a report on a preliminary area of investigation.