• Editor’s Preface
• Eugenia Zuroski

In September 2019, I drafted a Call for Papers for a roundtable on the program of the 2020 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) in St. Louis, Missouri. The roundtable, titled “The Indigenous Eighteenth Century,” was sponsored by the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS), and extended some questions that CSECS had been grappling with since the 2015 publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report and Calls to Action. Here is the text of the CFP in full:

What does it mean to make studies of the “early modern,” “early American,” or “long eighteenth century” more “inclusive” of Indigenous scholarship and ways of knowing? Since the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015, Canadian universities have turned attention to “Indigenization”—“broadly defined,” according to a 2018 Maclean’s article, “as incorporating Indigenous worldviews, knowledge and perspectives.” Nor are these efforts limited to Canada; institutions in other settler colonial states including the US are similarly considering Indigenous representation as part of broader “diversity and inclusion” mandates.

Yet critics of “Indigenization” point out that without a commitment to decolonization, the “inclusion” of Indigenous knowledges within universities’ existing institutional structures and epistemological frameworks simply reproduces colonial patterns of appropriating aspects of Indigenous cultures and experience while perpetuating material inequity, marginalization, and territorial dispossession.

This roundtable will host a conversation among scholars of various positions in relation to academia, both Indigenous and settler, about whether it is possible to “decolonize” traditionally Eurocentric fields of study, or to practice them in positive relation to broader decolonizing movements. Acknowledging the colonialism inherent to these fields as we currently know them, what must we put in place, and what must we commit to doing and not doing, in order to increase the contributions of Indigenous scholars in ways that are respectful [End Page 177] and transformative, not exploitative? What kinds of structures and practices must we adopt to counter the academy’s entrenched erasure and marginalization of Indigenous ways of knowing? Our panellists will consider what it means, both intellectually and structurally, to make room for an Indigenous intervention in the study of anglophone cultures of the ongoing age of colonization, and strategies for doing so.

ASECS 2020 represented, in some ways, a turning point for that society’s own engagement with calls for “decolonization” efforts across academia. It was the first year that the organization placed a territorial acknowledgement in the meeting program—on page 1, the following statement appeared:

This year’s meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is located on the traditional territories of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe and the Osage Nation. These nations along with numerous others were forcibly removed from ancestral lands under the ongoing occupations of European settlers since the early eighteenth century. The Society recognizes and honors the many Indigenous peoples who were violently displaced from the region currently known as Missouri. As scholars of the period that saw the intensification of colonization culminating in genocide and territorial dispossession, we recognize our responsibility to understand the legacies of this history in our own lives and work, and to continue to make our field a site where Indigenous scholars and knowledges can thrive.

In addition, in preparation for the meeting, I was asked to contribute a guest post to the ASECS Graduate Caucus blog on how to compose land acknowledgments for conference presentations.¹ Although, as several of the papers in this forum point out, the institutional uptake of gestures like land acknowledgment is hardly the objective of decolonization, and may well distract from more meaningful action, the palpable desire among members of ASECS to better recognize the colonial contexts that condition our scholarly work made me hopeful that this roundtable would find an audience in St. Louis eager to listen and learn.

The conference, of course, was not to be. Soon after the release of the program, the scale of the emergency posed by COVID-19’s arrival in North America began to make itself known, and the conference, [End Page 178] which would have been held in March, was cancelled. As grateful as I was that the organizers made this...

• 编者序
• 尤金妮娅（Eugenia Zuroski）

2019年9月，我就密苏里州圣路易斯市的美国18世纪研究学会（ASECS）2020年会议计划的草案起草了一份圆桌会议。该圆桌会议名为“土著十八世纪”，由加拿大十八世纪研究协会（CSECS）赞助，并延伸了自2015年加拿大真相与和解委员会报告和发布以来CSECS一直在努力解决的一些问题。呼吁采取行动。以下是CFP的全文：

使对“早期现代”，“早期美国”或“ 18世纪初”的研究更加“包容”土著学术和知识的方式意味着什么？自2015年真相与和解委员会的最终报告以来，加拿大大学已将注意力转向“土著化”，即“广泛定义”，根据Maclean于2018年发表的一篇文章，“融合了土著世界观，知识和观点”。这些努力也不仅仅限于加拿大。类似地，包括美国在内的其他殖民殖民地国家的机构也正在考虑将土著代表作为更广泛的“多样性和包容性”任务的一部分。

然而，“土著化”的批评者指出，在不致力于非殖民化的情况下，将土著知识“纳入”大学现有的制度结构和认识论框架之内，只是再现了土著文化和经验所占方面的殖民模式，同时使物质不平等，边缘化，和领土剥夺。

这次圆桌会议将就与学术界有关的各种立场的学者（包括土著和定居者）进行一次对话，讨论是否有可能对传统的以欧洲为中心的研究领域进行“非殖民化”，或者以与更广泛的非殖民化运动产生积极关系的方式进行实践。认识到我们目前所知道的这些领域固有的殖民主义，我们必须采取哪些措施，以及我们必须做什么和不做什么，以便以尊重的方式增加土著学者的贡献[完第177页]并具有变革性，而不是剥削性？我们必须采取什么样的结构和实践来应对学院根深蒂固的土著知识认识方式的消除和边缘化？我们的小组成员将在思想上和结构上考虑为在正在进行的殖民时期的英语文化研究中留出空间进行土著干预的意义，以及这样做的策略。

ASECS 2020在某种程度上代表了社会自身参与整个学术界呼吁“非殖民化”努力的转折点。这是该组织在会议计划中加入领土认可的第一年-在第1页上，出现了以下声明：

今年的美国18世纪研究学会会议位于Otoe-Missouria部落和Osage国家的传统领土上。自18世纪初以来，在欧洲定居者不断占领下，这些国家与其他许多国家一起被迫从祖先的土地上迁走。该协会承认并表彰了许多从当前被称为密苏里州的地区流离失所的土著人民。作为那个时期殖民化加剧最终导致种族灭绝和领土剥夺的学者，我们认识到我们有责任在自己的生活和工作中了解这一历史遗留的遗产，并继续使我们的领域成为土著学者和知识的基地可以蓬勃发展。

另外，在准备会议时，我被要求在ASECS研究生核心小组博客上发表客座文章，内容涉及如何为会议演讲撰写土地确认书。¹尽管正如该论坛中的几篇论文所指出的那样，诸如承认土地之类的手势在制度上的接受几乎不是非殖民化的目标，并且可能会分散人们对更有意义的行动的注意力，但ASECS成员之间明显的愿望是更好地认识殖民地。在学术研究的条件下，我希望这次圆桌会议能够使圣路易斯的听众渴望聆听和学习。

会议当然不是。该程序发布后不久，COVID-19到达北美造成的紧急情况规模开始广为人知，原定于3月举行的会议[End Page 178]被取消。我很感激组织者做到了这一点...