Adriana Craciun

THE SCRAMBLE FOR THE ARCTIC

This essay situtates the intensifying scramble for the Arctic in a larger historical and disciplinary framework, in order to make a case for the Arctics underestimated significance in current social and cultural models of the global and the “planetary.” Focusing on circumpolarity as configured in early modern exploration, Enlightement science, and twentieth-century indigenous and governmental institutions, the essay suggests that the circumpolar Arctics unique reorientation of a planetary vision, combined with its pressing humanitarian and environmental difficulties, should be incorporated in current postcolonial cultural and social theory debates on the global.

Oceanic voyages, maritime books, and eccentric inscriptions

Abstract What does the history of exploration look like when approached from a different disciplinary perspective, that of the history of books? Focusing on the long eighteenth century, this essay reframes exploration histories that typically retrace continuities between explorers, by focusing instead on the discontinuities in the changing conditions of authorship and publication. Specifically, the essay considers the convergence of exploration and book history at three critical junctures: at the turn of the eighteenth century (Dampier), in the mid-to-late eighteenth century (Cook), and in the early nineteenth century (Ross). What if we shifted the ground of inquiry away from the geographic routes these explorers retraced, to the publication protocols that made their books possible in their particular forms, under changing models of authorship? And what if we expanded our inquiry beyond metropolitan print, to include inscriptions in site-specific media-like stone and ice? By looking at the contingent circumstances of publication, inscription, and authorship within eighteenth-century British exploration, the essay uncouples the seemingly unchanging relations between exploration, publication, and authorship.

“EMPIRE WITHOUT END”: CHARLOTTE SMITH AT THE LIMITS OF COSMOPOLITANISM

Charlotte Smiths recurring fantasy of becoming a “female Prospero” opens up her cosmopolitan imagination to encountering its limits, and its Others, whether internal or external. Focusing on two of Smiths later texts, the Italian novel Montalbert (1795) and the Jamaican narrative “The Story of Henrietta” (1800), this essay explores the borderlands of late eighteenth-century Europe and its colonies to examine the intersections of cosmopolitanism, nationalism and race. Exploring how a committed cosmopolitan, Europhile and feminist like Charlotte Smith imagines the borders of Europe and its empires can contribute to the unfolding understanding of how “Europes” internal fissures extended toward its colonies (not only from them) in Romantic literature, and how revolution-era feminist cosmopolitanism coped with its contradictions and exclusions, whether sexual, racial or religious. Beginning with Montalbert and its displacement of The Aeneids imperial vision of transnational romance, and moving to “Henrietta”s troubled vision of the intersection of colonial and gender oppression, the essay considers how Smiths interrogation of gender and national ideologies reveals at once the ideals of her feminist cosmopolitanism and its limits.

The Seeds of Disaster: Relics of La Pérouse

After more than 200 years of searches for the shipwrecks of the legendary La Perouse expedition, in 2011 it seemed that survivors had been located at last. In 1785, Jean Francois de Galaup, Comte de La Perouse, sailed with an army of naturalists, artists, gardeners, and astronomers on a scientific circumnavigation to rival that of the three voyages by James Cook. La Perouse, his ships the Boussole and Astrolabe, and all the crew disappeared into the uncharted Pacific three years later. The subject of ongoing searches and intense speculation, La Perouse’s shipwreck was first located in the 1820s on the reef of Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands. Since then, hundreds of objects recovered from the wreck have been returned to France. In 2003 the Association Solomon repatriated to France skeletal remains believed to be a crewmember’s, which in June 2011 were reinterred beneath a monument to “L’inconnu du Vanikoro” in the grounds of the château de Brest.