Like other historical periods, the âlong eighteenth centuryâ (1660â1800) persists in our present through screen and performance media, writing, and visual art. These afterlives are a form of cultural memory, whose emerging and changing forms this book traces from the 1980s to the present. The idea that âthe past [âŠ] derives its meaning increasingly from the presentâ1 is one of the central disciplinary tenets of memory studies, and I begin with an encounter illustrating the currency of such representations. On 18 November 2016, Mike Pence, then Vice President-elect of the United States, attended a performance of Hamilton : An American Musical at the Richard Rogers Theater in New York. When they realized who he was, audience members began to boo Pence. They continued to do so sporadically during the performance and again at the end as he walked out. As Pence was leaving, he was called back from the stage by one of the showâs lead actors, Brandon Dixon, who had played the part of vice president Aaron Burr. Encouraging the audience to film and share the speech on social media, he addressed the following words to Pence:
I see you walking out, but I hope you will hear us, just a few moments. [âŠ] We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend our inalienable rights. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us.2
Almost gratuitous in its potential for symbolism, the encounter between the cast, the audience, and the politician can be interpreted in many ways: as an affront to the new presidency to be denounced as such by Donald Trump; as an object lesson in irony where a fictional vice president addressed an unlikely one; and as an amusing but also sobering instance of the combined power of social media and the traditional public sphere of the theatre. From the point of view of this book, however, the encounter represents a contest over and between its two central concepts: memory and enlightenment.
Hamilton is an example of the kind of work that this book is about. A retelling of the life of the United Statesâ founding father, initially inspired by Ron Chernowâs biography Alexander Hamilton (2004), the play remediates historical biography as musical drama. It works in ways typical of those ascribed to historical fiction by Jerome de Groot in Remaking History (2015). Like the texts discussed by de Groot, Hamilton performs functions traditionally split between primary and secondary historical sources, having at once âan almost pedagogical aspect in allowing a culture to âunderstandâ past momentsâ but also providing through âreflection upon the representational processes [âŠ] a means to critique, conceptualize, engage with and reject the processes of representationâ.3 Hamilton, like the other texts I discuss, undoubtedly enables such reflective responses. But to consider it as a memory text is to widen this reflective focus to include not just the process of representation but also its motives and its effects. Because it places a particular emphasis on the meaning for present audiences of its narrated content, meaning which acquired a particularly urgent charge during the encounter of November 2016, Hamilton is a mnemotechnic text as well as an historiographic one. Cultural memory, as defined by Astrid Erll, always includes âan expressive indication of the needs and interests of the person or group doing the rememberingâ. As a discipline, memory studies therefore directs its interest ânot toward the shape of the remembered past, but rather toward the particular presents of the rememberingâ.4 In the case of Hamilton, these needs and interests are explicitly political. According to Jeremy McCarter, who was closely involved with its conception and commissioning, the play âdoesnât just dramatize Hamiltonâs revolution: It continues itâ.5 In this reading, the values which Pence was asked from the stage to protect and defendâequality, diversity, and stewardship of the environmentârepresent modern, concrete expressions of the abstract principles underpinning the historical foundation of the United States. In performance, Hamilton reproduces and reframes a relationship of culture to politics instituted during the revolutionary period and exemplified, for McCarter, in the effort of General George Washington to raise the morale of his exhausted troops with a performance of Joseph Addisonâs Cato during the winter of 1777â78. Hamilton becomes a memory text in performance, commemorating and continuing a set of previously existing historical conditions for a new audience.
The cast and friends of Hamilton were not, however, the only ones claiming in the winter of 2016â17 to extend and inherit the memory of the American revolution. The Tea Party, to take one obvious example, similarly appropriated a familiar revolutionary name to agitate for a radically different agenda. It is one broadly shared by right-wing Republicans such as Pence, who is a climate change sceptic, opponent of LGBT civil rights, and proponent of intelligent design. Some of these values and beliefs can technically at least be aligned with those of the revolutionariesâaccording to the document invoked and quoted from the stage of Hamilton, for example, unalienable rights are endowed in humans âby their Creatorâ. A more common response, however, has been to cite the American political movement that includes Trump, Pence, and the Tea Party as abandoning not just their republicâs founding values but the broader philosophical dispensation from which they emerged. Whether this is conceived as a reversion to âa pre-enlightenment form of thinkingâ or a turn to a post-enlightenment worldview,6 it reflects a general anxiety that recent political and cultural modernity has begun irreversibly to diverge from traditions of political liberalism and scientific rationalism associated with the period named in this bookâs title. The idea that we may be witnessing the end of enlightenment is voiced in Europe as well as the United States. Emmanuel Macron, who is perhaps alone among world leaders in having contributed to an important work in the field of memory studies, saw his election to the French presidency in 2017 as a chance âto defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many placesâ.7 Meanwhile, the United Kingdomâs vote in 2016 to leave the European Union was regarded as the beginning of a new politics of intolerance which âset at risk fundamental liberal values and the universal, progressive principles that Britain, since the eighteenth-century Age of the Enlightenment, has been instrumental in spreading around the globeâ.8
These expressions of fear and hope reveal a number of common assumptions. Western political modernity is based on values inherited from a period called the (age of the) enlightenment, broadly identifiable with the eighteenth century, but often encompassing the latter half of the seventeenth. These values are currently under threat from reactionary and aggressive forms of individualism, intolerance, and anti-rationalism. Although political change in 2016â17 made the issue newsworthy, debate over enlightenmentâs legacy and fate has preoccupied the academic humanities for a much longer time. It has fallen across two areas of research. On the one hand, much recent work looks at the cultural history of the period and generally emphasizes its positive legacy, notably in high-profile books by Jonathan Israel and Anthony Pagden. Enlightenment studies is enjoying a resurgence which is producing significant works by public intellectuals aimed at general audiences as well as specialized treatments by academic writers.9
This recent return to enlightenment comes partly in response to neo-reactionary politicsâ destructive efforts, but it also addresses a much more sophisticated and enduring critique launched by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimerâs Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), and which initially gained widespread currency with the rise to prominence of critical theory in the 1980s. This critique has been caricatured as a reflex which tends automatically âto lay responsibility for all injustices at the feet of technology, progress, and the Enlightenmentâ.10 But even in the face of an increasingly confident rejection of enlightenment as a single âmonolithic edifice [âŠ] responsible for modernityâ,11 this critique remains pertinent and compelling. Any historically sensitive discussion of the period must address its unsettling temporal compaction of progressive discourses and oppressive acts. It is an era marked, as Carey notes by âa disjunction [âŠ] between a politics of liberation and autonomy, which coincid...