Lights in space (Cultural, historical analysis, 18th-century)

Recent disciplinary reconfigurations have shifted focus from a temporal-historical explanation of social life to one designed to investigate the latter's spatial dimension. This article examines the development of various spaces in the eighteenth century--physical, social, colonized, epistemological, and esthetic--and proposes a mode of cultural analysis and of historical understanding relating to the eighteenth century that takes account of these disciplinary shifts.