Vanessa Smith

Two-Way Traffic

adapts frameworks from Laurence Sterne’s sentimental novels and Hume’s and Smith’s theoretical writings on sympathy to new transatlantic ends. Readers looking for essays more specifically focused on the Scottish Enlightenment, however, will want to turn to the contributions by Daniel W. Howe, Emma Rothschild, and Peter S. Onuf. Howe’s piece, on the transatlantic career of John Witherspoon, ably demonstrates how the westerly trajectory of Witherspoon’s life enabled him to become “a key figure in several transitions of momentous significance not just for Princeton [Witherspoon assumed the presidency of Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey) in 1768] but for American culture as a whole” (79). Rothschild, by contrast, focuses on the rhetorical and theoretical influence of the Atlantic in Hume’s life and writings. Although he never crossed that ocean (getting only as far west as the French port of Lorient), Rothschild argues persuasively that Hume’s oeuvre, especially his political writings, is suffused with images of distance and exchange that depend in no small part on Hume’s exposure to the Atlantic world. In this regard, Rothschild’s contextualization of Hume’s notorious footnote stating his suspicion that “negroes [are] naturally inferior to the whites” (quoted 92) is particularly helpful. Equally engaging is Onuf’s contribution on the multifaceted influence of Smith’s Wealth of Nations in America. From its reception in colonial America as an attack on British mercantilism that licensed the Revolution, to its later interpretation by Southerners intent on using its “nationalist logic” to justify their seccession (164), Onuf sheds light on how Smith’s influential text spoke to American readers of all political stripes by providing what they wanted to hear.

Performance Anxieties: Grief and Theatre in European Writing on Tahiti

This essay investigates a prevalent skepticism about the veracity of Oceanic sentiments, evident in accounts of early contact in Tahiti. It places this skepticism in the context of broader philosophical concerns about the capacity of individuals to evaluate the emotions of others as genuine or false. It focuses on Tahitian mourning, which incorporates an element of excess, including practices of self-mutilation, whose ethical value must be negotiated within European accounts. Adducing the insights of eighteenth-century performance theory, the essay argues that the dismissal of such practices as false theatrics involves a justification of comparative European reserve that chimes with contemporary philosophical writing on the emotions, in seeking to invest performativity with suspicion.

Crusoe in the South Seas: Beachcombers, Missionaries and the Myth of the Castaway

If Robinson Crusoe is the fictional elaboration of a non-fictional adventure – the story of the castaway Alexander Selkirk – subsequent non-fictional accounts by castaways and first settlers among island communities are equally indebted to Defoe. Here I look at one such group of accounts: the narratives of those beachcombers and missionaries who were the initial settlers of the Polynesian islands in the period between exploration and colonisation. The London Missionary Society (LMS) began sending evangelists to Polynesia in 1796, and were joined by other missionary groups after 1822.1 During the early contact period, beachcombers – escaped convicts, deserting sailors and itinerant traders who ‘went native’ in the South Pacific – also acted as initial Western representatives to specific island communities.

Banks, Tupaia, and Mai: Cross-cultural exchanges and friendship in the Pacific

Joseph Banks’s relationships with two Oceanians, Tupaia and Mai, offer case studies for an examination of the role of friendship in cross-cultural scientific exchange. Tupaia, a Raiatean priest, travelled in the Endeavour through the Society Islands and to New Zealand and Australia, perishing in Batavia. Mai came to London with Tobias Furneaux in 1774 and was taken up by Banks and fêted by London society, returning to Tahiti with Cook in 1777. Scholarship has tended to emphasize the cynicism on both sides of these relationships: however the sources indicate that affective attachment and a degree of identification figured both in Banks’s depiction of the two friendships, and in the willingness of Tupaia and Mai to act as cultural informants.

Transferred debts: Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own and the limits of analysis

ABSTRACT Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both disciplinarily and generically. Written before Milner trained as a psychoanalyst but delving into the Unconscious, and with a title that apparently alludes to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the book marks a point of intersection between incipient psychoanalysis and Modernist writing, of the kind represented more explicitly in the Strachey and Stephen circles with which Milner was tenuously linked. Yet Milner’s insistence on the term “own” in her title and throughout the volume also makes this a useful text via which to explore the reflexes by which critics examine such crossings. This essay interrogates the critical impulse to figure intertextuality and discursive exchange as forms of debt. Turning to the manuscript source material of Milner’s book, it asks what might the concept of work of “one’s own” have to offer in terms of rethinking critical practice.

‘How Very Little He Can Learn’: Exotic Visitors and the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge in Eighteenth Century London

Taking the animadversions of Samuel Johnson as its starting point, this essay explores an eighteenth-century skepticism regarding the possibility of exchanges of knowledge between metropolitan and peripheral societies. It suggests that encounters with Inuit and Oceanic traveller-savants in the streets and salons of London lead both members of the Royal Society and patrons of the arts to question the translatability of ideas across cultural boundaries, and to articulate a distinction between ethnographic and practical knowledge. It argues that this meta-critical dimension to the dialogues between Europeans and visitors from the peripheries of Empire ultimately constituted one of the most nuanced intellectual exchanges instigated by Enlightenment travel.