Conference: Enlightenment in the Contact Zone

The conference approaches the European Enlightenment as a product of intercultural encounters shaped by scholarly and literary engagements with the “Orient” and the “Americas”, as well as by colonial expansion, violence, and, at times, dialogue. It foregrounds two different yet entangled trajectories: on the one hand, the realization and radicalization of Enlightenment claims to universalism in “peripheral” contexts— most strikingly in the Haitian Revolution. On the other hand, it highlights how intellectual exchanges with Indigenous American and Islamic traditions fed back into European thought, transforming its conceptions of reason, equality, and critique, and thereby decentering the Enlightenment’s purportedly Western and Christian origins.

The conference is organized by the Professorship for German and Comparative Literature, IGL (Maud Meyzaud and Oliver Precht)