Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Lecture at the Conference "Enlightenment in the World", August 29, 2024.
The talk will interrogate a claim that has had a great deal of traction in recent times: the claim that Enlightenment(s) were Eurocentric processes that went on to justify the logic of imperialism. At its worst, it holds that the study of Enlightenment(s) is not useful: it was specific to a moment in time and space and neglected the stories of people from the “Global South”. I argue that this reading of Enlightenment(s) is both an oversimplification of Enlightenments high and low, as well as a construction born of empirical evidence from the very Enlightenments that now stand cancelled. Beginning with a specific focus on this recent challenge to Enlightenment historiography, I will examine wider contexts that ultimately illustrate the senselessness of the category “global south” itself.
Lecture at the Conference "Enlightenment in the World", August 29, 2024.
The talk will interrogate a claim that has had a great deal of traction in recent times: the claim that Enlightenment(s) were Eurocentric processes that went on to justify the logic of imperialism. At its worst, it holds that the study of Enlightenment(s) is not useful: it was specific to a moment in time and space and neglected the stories of people from the “Global South”. I argue that this reading of Enlightenment(s) is both an oversimplification of Enlightenments high and low, as well as a construction born of empirical evidence from the very Enlightenments that now stand cancelled. Beginning with a specific focus on this recent challenge to Enlightenment historiography, I will examine wider contexts that ultimately illustrate the senselessness of the category “global south” itself.
