What have I forgotten? What have I forgotten??? Just as that question rumbles persistently around a holiday-goer’s head on the way to the airport, or halfway down the motorway, so too does it tend to plague conference organisers in the last days before an event takes place. Catering, tick; AVS support, tick; info to delegates on getting here, tick; name badges, tick; welcome packs, tick; conference paper and presentation, er, well, as ticked as it will ever be…
Most excitingly: access to the test site of the Liberalism in the Americas Digital Archive for demonstration at the conference, TICK! Although some of the snazziest search and presentation features have yet to be added to the database, it was still with an enormous sense of excitement that I browsed page after page of document images and looked forward to using the database in my research when it is completed. Those attending the Liberalism in the Americas conference on 4-5 July, will get a sneak preview of the digital archive, as I’ll be talking briefly about the research materials that it holds and the features of the database that will be available freely to researchers in the near future.
My other major non-organisational appearance at the conference will be to talk about José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, a Mexican intellectual with whose work I have had something of a love-hate relationship for the last 7 odd years of research. He was a major figure in the burgeoning free press in Mexico City during the early nineteenth century, and in the debates about Mexico’s social and political development that took place therein – a considerable selection of his pamphlet writings will be available in the digital library, due to their exploration of key issues in Latin American liberalisms, like Church-State relations, freedom of the press, political representation and office-holding, education, citizenship, and free trade. Lizardi is also famous for several works of fiction, especially El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), widely (if not quite correctly) identified as Latin America’s first novel.
In both his fictional and non-fictional writings, Lizardi frequently referenced and discussed the work of various other intellectuals, many from Europe, and engaged in transnational debates within political philosophy, social reform, and economic policy: the kind of transnational debates that Jeremy Adelman talked so eruditely about in his lecture delivered in May. This is one of the key issues that my paper at the conference will focus on, as I’ll be examining the relationship between Lizardi’s two major novels – El Periquillo Sarniento and La Quijotita y su prima (1818-19) – and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education, Emile (1762). More specifically, I want to think about the critical dialogue that Lizardi enters into with Emile, and what this reveals about debates ongoing in the rapidly changing political environment in Mexico in the 1810s, focusing particularly on Lizardi’s explorations of liberal citizenship, meritocratic political representation, and the social utility of education – especially for women.
And, just as I finish writing that sentence, I’ve remembered what I’ve forgotten: mental note, print out paper!
I’ll be back to report on what other people are talking about at the conference in a few days. Fingers crossed I haven’t forgotten anything else!