Back to the Future

Abstract: This issue of L'Esprit Créateur is devoted to a form of 'creative disruption' that aims to question the self-contained time periods of academic specialization, bringing into focus interdisciplinary connections between the contemporary Francophone and the early modern. Introducing each article's particular 'disruption', Thomas provides an example by exploring potential connections between early-modern representations of the fête galante and France's growing colonial ambitions. Thomas argues that the ambiguity of the fête galante as simultaneously revealing and concealing alluring visions of global mercantilism offered a veiled glimpse of the forced labor that fueled it.