The purpose of this session is to extend the discussion of the CLCS 18th-Century Forum's guaranteed session on "New Methods in 18th-Century Comparative and Cross-Cultural Reading." Both sessions include proposals sent in response to the call for reflections by scholars working in 18th-century comparative literature and cultural studies on the kinds of methods, orientations, literacies, and forms of relation these fields might prioritize now, and to what political and epistemological purposes. What futures are imaginable through new comparatist methods, we asked, and what scholarly practices might get us there?

We received more excellent proposals than we could accommodate in one session, with little overlap in terms of methodological innovation. The rationale for adding this session to the Forum's offerings at MLA 2025 is to supplement the guaranteed session to include a fuller range of comparatist and cross-cultural methods, particularly by early career researchers, in the conversation we hope these sessions will foster.

While the four presentations included in our guaranteed session fit together in one way, the three presentations gathered in this session model the ways that different global styles of representing 18th-century experience generate specific forms of Enlightenment-era knowledge, forms that have largely gone unnoticed or unappreciated through Eurocentric reading methods. Though focused on different literary traditions of the eighteenth century, all three papers model how, by expanding our understanding of the relevant context of eighteenth-century texts in both time and space, we equip ourselves to better understand how eighteenth-century writing operates culturally in its own time and also in ours.

Allie Gibeily's paper, "Between Enlightenment: Arabic Travel Writing in the Global 18^th Century," shows how we might center a "minor" version of one of the 18th-century's major genres, the travelogue. Focusing on two Arabic travelogues (riḥla) that have been sidelined in Middle East and North African studies and comparative eighteenth-century studies alike, this paper takes an Arabocentric approach to literature as adab – a word whose translations include both written, scholarly knowledge and unwritten, cultural knowhow – not only to bring merchant-class riḥla into the purview of eighteenth-century studies, but even more so to augment the reading practices we bring to bear on the heterogenous literatures of the global majority.

Where Gibeily's paper shows how we might learn to read differently by intensifying our engagement with "minority" styles of the global eighteenth century, Ryan Kaveh Sheldon's paper, "On (and Against) Arithmetic Style," points us to one of the sites where eighteenth-century empire most intensively consolidated some of the racialized populations that today constitute the global majority. By theorizing arithmetic style in the plantation literature of the early British Atlantic world, this paper shows how these texts invite their readers to engage in the activities of bookkeeping—counting, measurement, and computation—in ways that allowed eighteenth-century readers to ignore the violent contradictions of the plantation economies at its center. The paper shows how the reading methods of contemporary Black feminism address quantification as an imaginative technology that has historically doubled as an instrument of racialized meaning-making, and makes a case that such methods are crucial for cultivating critical purchase on how such eighteenth-century styles continue to operate today.

Taking a different approach to redefining the spatial and temporal parameters of distinct eighteenth-century styles of knowing, Taymaz Pour Mohammad's paper, "Obscure Affinities: Beholding and Taste in Sa`di and Addison," follows the footnotes and epigraphs of Anglo-Welsh philologist Sir William Jones’s A Grammar of the Persian Language and his Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages to arrive at a cross-cultural and transhistorical site of common imagining. The paper pairs thirteenth-century Sa`di of Shiraz with eighteenth-century Joseph Addison, to show how Jones’s Poems condenses, in a fleeting line, an expansive meditation on taste and imagination that resonates across premodern and modern sensibilities.

The session includes two PhD candidates and one Assistant Professor, and the three papers include a diversity of eighteenth-century genres (travel writing, realist fiction, plantation history, orientalist grammar, and periodical essays) as well as language traditions (Arabic, English, Persian).