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Recognizing the Enlightenment as an historical moment with its roots in the early modernity of Spinoza, this chapter argues that enlightenment is also an ongoing possibility for thought, political reform, and social organization, a project that finds itself repeated in multiple places and times in history and across the globe. It explores the dialectic between the Enlightenment as a distinctively Western project whose terms European civilization seems doomed to repeat, and enlightenment as a process of thought and emancipation internal to all cultures and systems of belief. It argues that universalism remains a vexed but urgent mandate for global thought today. While universalism repeatedly falls short of its own goals, it cannot simply be inverted or negated by its opposite (particularism, culture, anthropological difference). Our task is to “tarry” within the contradictions of universalism in order to find ways to displace or disarm them, with the hope of achieving genuine moments of community in contemporary politics, thought, and life.

The chapter will critically assess Chebel’s thought via an engagement with a range of monographs, essays and articles published in France between 2002 and 2016. Despite the wide range of topics under discussion in Chebel’s work, it is possible to nevertheless identify a number of recurring themes such as reason, subjectivity, secularism, the body, love and sexuality in Islam. His approach could be described as a project of cultural translation, where Chebel can be regarded as a cultural mediator who seeks to productively confront non-western and western concepts of religion, spirituality, modernity and humanism. Of specific significance is Chebel’s foregrounding of a language of Islamic secularism, which I argue can be interpreted as an attempt to transform perceptions of Islam and thus to intervene into the symbolic relationship between the Republican ideology of laïcité and France’s Muslim citizens.

Novels such as Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, as well as the focus of “‘Mammy Ain’t Nobody Name’: Power, Privilege, and the Bodying Forth of Resistance,” provoke dialogue with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in important ways. Exploring Williams’s engagement with previous legacies of resistance, Chapter 4 draws attention to her disruption of a “neoliberal problematic” via her distinct problematization of the mind-body split and associated tropes of mediation such as the “as-told-to” dynamic. Like Wilson, Williams interrogates the indecipherability of black rage within both interracial and intra-racial liberal matrices of privilege and authority; like Keckly, she destabilizes the “Mammy” figure and undercuts liberal models of interracial friendship; and like Cooper, Williams cultivates an insurgent politics of sound. Becoming together with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in the aforementioned ways, Williams’s fiction exhibits a comparable attentiveness to situating blackness beyond conventional registers of containment, intervening into Enlightenment-era discourses of knowledge and self.

This chapter narrates the 1692 Salem witchcraft trial. On 9 May of that year, George Burroughs was found guilty of torturing several girls, all under the age of 19. According to this chapter, the events at Salem represented an era of emerging Enlightenment modernity, rather than a sign of fading occultism. With the advent of the Radical Enlightenment philosophers René Descartes, Pierre Bayle, Balthazar Bekker, and Spinoza, in the late seventeenth century, the need was felt to firmly distinguish philosophy from theology, which could be the only way to attain certainty.