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History, Literature, Cultural Studies |
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Editors: William Boelhower - Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA Dorothea Fischer-Hornung - Heidelberg University, Germany Richard Follett - University of Sussex, UK Neil Safier - University of British columbia, Canada
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Please send all contributions as email attachments (doc, docx or rtf format) to Atlantic-Studies@mesea.org. Articles should, in general, be under 10,000 words, written in English, double spaced (including all notes and references), and follow the Chicago Humanities style. An abstract of approximately 300 words should accompany the article. In addition a list of up to 6 key words, suitable for indexing and abstracting services, should be supplied. A brief biographical sketch of the author should be provided on a separate sheet. The author’s email and full postal address must be supplied. Submissions will be subjected to blind review before acceptance. |
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Atlantic Studies
 The quarterly Atlantic Studies provides an international forum for research and debate on historical, cultural and literary issues within the Atlantic world. Published on behalf of MESEA (The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) , the journal challenges nationalist historiographies and literatures by focusing on the Atlantic as an area of cultural change and exchange, translation and interference, communication and passages. Atlantic Studies welcomes submissions in the areas of cultural studies, history, geography, critical theory, and literature.
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April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
In Memoriam Antonio Benitez-Rojo
Editorial
“New Worlds, New Selves” Montaigne, “the Atlantic” and the emergence of modern autobiography
This essay argues that Montaigne's Essays expresses the emergence of the early Modern European Self in a canonical form. This emergence is substantially affected by means of Montaigne's comparative reflections on the non-Western Self, most notably the inhabitants of the “New World” opened up by transatlantic explorations. To this extent, “the Atlantic” is crucial not just to the construction of the western Self, but to the evolution of autobiography as a genre. Montaigne's negotiations with “New World” peoples proceed along three main axes, which the article defines through the work of Tzvetan Todorov. The article also argues that while Montaigne's writing of the Other is conventionally seen as exemplifying a healthy cultural relativism, it is in fact more complex in its ideological effects. In particular, Montaigne anticipates many of the problems that Said has identified in the discourses of “Orientalism.” This is not surprising, given the extent to which Montaigne conceptualises the recently “discovered” inhabitants of the “New World” in terms of long-established western tropes about eastern peoples.
C. L. R. James’s American Civilization
Here I locate the intellectual positions which underwrote C. L. R. James's mammoth American Civilization, arguing that it is the close conceptual precursor of James's more well-known and celebrated study of English civilization, Beyond a Boundary. To understand these Atlantic, or black Atlantic, locations which inform Beyond a Boundary we can begin to discern the degree that this latter text, putatively James's most “English” of books, carries unseen within it the larger imprint of America and the wider Atlantic world.
The creative Constraints of Tradition: ethnic art and social intervention in the Afro-Brazilian context
The historic 2002 election victory of the Workers Party in Brazil promised a more democratic cultural policy. A key symbol of change was the appointment as Minister of Culture of Gilberto Gil, pop star of the 1960s tropicalist counter-culture movement, organic activist of the afro-centric carnival of Bahia state and Green Party politician. In racial and cultural politics, the moment coincides with steady assimilation into the Brazilian academic landscape of both North American quantitative sociological approaches and of British and other North-Atlantic Cultural Studies movements, and separately, with consolidation of cultural tourism predicated on Afro-Brazilian ethnic identity, both as heritage and performance. This essay elucidates relations between these heterogeneous progressive strands informing cultural policy, explores implicit divergences in their respective understandings of ethnic identity and outlines subjacent theoretical contradictions. Ethnicity is then considered in pragmatic instances, first in its contrastive acceptations as a term in common parlance in Brazil versus the U.S., then in terms of subjective awareness and creative implementation of ethnic identity in popular practice, notably in Afro-Brazilian religion. Such living traditions orient prospective creative agendas as much as they invoke the past and thus dialogue with contemporaneous critical views. The pragmatics of performative competence constitute a third domain in the composite construction of ethnicity. Whereas ideological values inform both academic and consumer constructions of ethnicity, the symbolic language of the stylistic repertoire of performative modes linking to ethnic identity – in this case, percussion – partly eludes both incorporation in ideological rationalizations and commodification, with the crucial incidental effect of sustaining the mystery of ethnic essence. Ethnicity is predicated on subjective associations and appropriations between abstract values, creative practices and social effects; the complexity of these elements and their relations affords considerable autonomy, particularly to ethnic art.
“Our Irish copper-farthen dean”: Swift’s Drapier’s Letters, the” forging” of a modernist Anglo-Irish literature and the Atlantic world of paper credit
Situating its analysis in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world of print, this essay explores literature associated with experiments with paper currency in Massachusetts, Barbados, South Carolina, and Ireland. These currencies not only helped form imagined local publics for these provinces, but also produced imaginary notions of sovereignty for provincial legislative assemblies and their subjects. It comments on Jurgen Habermas's argument that a free and rational “bourgeois public sphere” emerged in Britain in this period by showing how writers like Swift, in both his British and Irish pamphleteering, persuaded readers into believing that they were part of an inclusive sovereign public. The work of Swift in defeating monetary experiments of all kinds in Ireland, written on behalf of an Anglo-Irish ruling elite that was the only demographic for whom the term “the public” truly applied, mobilized more common Irish readers with patriotic rhetoric. Swift's Drapier's Letters, in particular, thereby created an Irish counter-public to the more strictly elite “political public”—a counter-public that nonetheless became constituted as a popular market for the satire of Swift and others. This reading of the Drapier's Letters, following observations put forward by Clifford Siskin and Christian Thorne-Miano about the “invention” of British literature in this period, argues that the first modern Anglo-Irish discipline of literature is “forged” through such Swiftian publicity.
Edward Said: American theory and the politics of knowledge
Edward Said’s career was consciously launched as early as the late 1960s under the influence of Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams – not the figures typically associated with his thinking during the rise of postcolonial studies. These influences accompanied his introduction to the history of the anti-colonial liberation movements, to which he was introduced by college friends like Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (to whom he later dedicated Orientalism.) His particular inflection given to the philological humanism of such thinkers as Giambattista Vico (a constant reference point in his work and the thinker to whom he was introduced by Lukács and Auerbach) led him to emphasize, and to translate for contemporary American use, motifs developed by that initial constellation of thinkers. Among them, the idea of the “gentile intellect,” the “transitive intelligence,” and the affiliative belief-cultures of political position taking as distinct from the filiative grounds of inheritance and birth. Above all, he continually returned to the concepts of authority as intellectual will and intention, underlining concepts like responsibility and influence (that is, the choosing of one‘s traditions) against the reigning views in theory of those years: the “systems of discourse,” the “death of the author” and a disembodied, permeating “power.”
Other Issues
September 2011, Vol. 8, No. 3
March 2011, Volume 8, Number 1
June 2011, Volume 8, Number 2
Special issue, Itineraries of Atlantic science - new questions, new approaches, new directions, Vol. 7, No. 4
September 2010, Vol. 7, No. 3
June 2010, Vol. 7, No. 2
March 2010, Volume 7, Number 1
December 2009, Volume 6, Number 3
August 2009, Volume 6, Number 2
April 2009, Volume 6, Number 1
December 2008, Vol. 5, No. 3
August 2008, Vol. 5, No. 2
October 2007, Vol. 4, No. 2
April 2007
, Vol. 4, No. 1
October 2006 , Vol. 3, No. 2
April 2006, Vol. 3, No. 1
October 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
October 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2
April 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1