Naturalization in History: From Calvin's Case to Locke

Date and time:  Friday 21 May 2021, 10:00am AEST

Location: Online through Zoom meeting software. To access the meeting, please copy the below link into your browser and use the password provided.

Join from PC, Mac, iOS or Android: https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/83864621257?pwd=Z0F2NkM3Sy91aDZoZ0ViLytZTm14QT09
Password: 135952

Abstract: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalization had not yet systematically attached to a project of cultural and affective nationalism or to an idea of national security, as it would in the nineteenth century. Instead, in an opposite framework, naturalization in early modern England disconnected immigration from personal and communal identities. Rather than shore up the boundaries of the nation, as it is thought to do today, naturalization carved a bureaucratic and mercantile path for individual liberty regardless of country of birth, simplifying and cheapening national privileges for desirable alien merchants, sailors, and tradesmen. In this crucial period, naturalization came to support the idea of what I call “paranational” liberty: the right of the private individual to roam and settle anywhere they chose. While Jews and Catholics would, with few exceptions, be restricted from naturalization, and, on the whole, naturalization policy in early modern England targeted a relatively select and wealthy group of white and male individuals, the idea that new national subjects could be created by statute, rather than godly and sovereign will, gave rise to a construction of immigration as the opening of the nation to outsiders rather than its hermetic defense.

Professor DeGooyer has provided a chapter for distribution that speaks to this topic. If you would like to be provided with a copy of the chapter to read ahead of the seminar, please contact us at ER-CC@unimelb.edu.au.

Speaker: Stephanie DeGooyer is an ACLS Burkhardt fellow at UCLA and Associate Professor of English at Willamette University. In July, she will join the English Department at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is co-author of The Right to Have Rights (Verso Books) and her book Acts of Naturalization: Immigration and the Early Novel is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. She has held fellowships with the Mellon Foundation, Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, and at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In addition to publishing articles in ELH, American Literary History, and Humanity, DeGooyer has written for The Guardian, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, and Public Books.

Respondent: Dr Marc Mierowsky is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is one of the editors of The Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (Cambridge UP, 2021) and co-editor with Nicholas Seager of Defoe’s Roxana for Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford UP, 2022). His monograph A Spy Amongst Us: Defoe’s Secret Service and the Campaign to End Scottish Independence is forthcoming with Yale University Press. He is currently working on a literary history of Jewish naturalization in the period 1714-1850.

The session will be chaired by Professor Peter Otto. Peter is Executive Director of the ERCC and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, English and Theatre Studies, at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on William Blake, Gothic Fictions, dark Romanticism, popular entertainments, the prehistory of virtual reality, and Romanticism and contemporary culture. Recent publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (OUP 2011); ‘Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes’, an online exhibition housed in the Romantic Circles Gallery of Visual Culture (2013); and William Blake: Selected Works in the ‘21st Century Oxford Authors Series’ (2018). He is consultant editor of The Victorian Popular Culture Portal: Spiritualism, Sensation, and Magic. His current research interests include the history of imagination and of imagination-machines; the pasts and futures of virtual reality; the post-secular; and the exchanges between architecture, fiction, imagination, and experience.