Clandestine Calculation: School Mathematics and Cultural Self-Assertion in Continental North America During the Long Eighteenth Century

• Applicant: Dr. Lukas Etter
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 546614133

The research project Clandestine Calculation focuses on the long 18th century (ca. 1695–1825) and investigates how individuals on the margins of continental North American society used clandestine settings to pass on to peers their skills in numeracy and mathematics. In complete secrecy and/or under economically precarious circumstances, underprivileged and disenfranchised individuals (enslaved men and women, indigenous people, indentured servants, white women from precarious backgrounds) were trained in arithmetic, geometry and elementary algebra. While the primary intended effect may have been the individuals’ improved legal positions or enhanced economic participation, many of them crafted artifacts and texts (e.g., in Spanish, English, or French) with complex aesthetic-rhetorical forms in the process. In the research project, seven such objects — from a transcribed speech to a notebook to a piece of furniture — will be examined and contextualized. The central question is in what way these objects can be read not only as the result of a strictly economic activity but also, simultaneously, as a means of individual aesthetic expression and, thus, a tool for cultural self-assertion. By pursuing its central question, the research project will substantially advance the prehistory of the North American popularization of mathematics education that began in the late 1820s. A second aim is to develop a vocabulary for clandestine mathematical teaching and learning units that generally took place outside of classrooms — a vocabulary that acknowledges the different types of social marginalization and, in particular, the peculiarities of the institution of slavery. Thirdly, particular attention will be paid to the diverse medial attributes of the seven objects of investigation, thus strengthening the interdisciplinary strand of North American Literary and Cultural Studies and especially Early American Studies. The project will also — fourth and final aim — reflect upon the structures of the chosen collections and archives, which are located in such cities as Mexico City, New Orleans, Boston, and Montreal, in order to address the methodological difficulties arising from gaps in historical evidence.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants