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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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October 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2
The October 2005 issue of Atlantic Studies features scholarship by Douglas R. Egerton, Philip Levy, Victor Enthoven, David V. Trotman, Jeremy Smith, and Andreas Hess.
Editorial
Caribbean dreams, Haitian nightmares: Race and class in the competing visions of Denmark Vesey and Simón Bolívar
Trained, as most of us are, to focus on a small corner of the globe during an equally small moment in time, historians too often miss the larger interconnections that help explain regional racial identity and specific types of class formations in the Atlantic world. Denmark Vesey, for example, is too often depicted merely as an “enslaved rebel leader” (despite being free for two decades prior to his execution) rather than a black abolitionist, or a man of the black Atlantic. In the same way, Simón Bolívar is forced into equally simplistic categories. He is a general and a politician, but rarely a resident of Paris at the time of Bonaparte’s coronation, or a visitor to Vesey’s South Carolina, or a refugee in Haiti. But in their later years, and especially in the early 1820s, they both thought much about events in Haiti, and their competing views of the black nation say much about the shifting boundaries of race and class in the western Atlantic. Conventional wisdom holds that for much of the late colonial era and early national periods in both North and South America, the connection between race and class can scarcely be overemphasized. But scholars now acknowledge that racial definitions are always being defined and redefined, just as class status is never static. Nothing better illustrates this understanding than the way these two individuals viewed the possibilities, as well as the dangers, inherent in Haiti’s destruction of old correlations and new perceptions of class structures. If elite whites regarded Haiti as a terrifying example of a world turned upside down, Vesey evidently regarded the black nation as the sort of country where bright, aggressive, ambitious men like himself could prosper and advance in rank. Historians, with a few notable exceptions, have been dismissive and patronizing of post-1804 Haiti, with its governor-generals, emperors, and presidents for life. But as a former resident of Danish St. Thomas, French Saint Domingue, and patriarchal South Carolina (and, most likely, as the child of West Africans), Vesey had never actually seen a truly egalitarian society. If the antislavery ever harbored the sort of communalistic ideals that scholars wish to impose upon black abolitionists, there is now no evidence for it. Vesey appeared to care little about the fact that post-Louverture Haiti was both politically undemocratic and class based. With Christophe’s eradication of the blancs and the gens de couleur, race was no longer a component in its class structure, except to the extent that the old order’s racial structure was turned upside down. For an exceedingly entrepreneurial businessman like Vesey, Boyer’s country was not just liberty or a convenient safe haven; it was the very picture of class mobility.
Man-eating and menace on Richard Hore’s expedition to America
This article is a rereading of Richard Hakluyt’s chronicling of Richard Hore’s 1536 New World expedition which brought a group of sailors and almost thirty-five well-heeled “tourists” to the Labrador coast where near-starvation allegedly drove them to man-eating. The study situates the story of the crew’s privations within larger themes of class and culture in the then emerging Atlantic world. Rather than being a simple case of desperate men driven to even more desperate measures, this analysis emphasizes man-eating, or more precisely talking about man-eating, as a vehicle for a class-based dispute among this unique crew. This use of man-eating menacing mirrors other early modern European examples and shows how the Atlantic discourse on savage “cannibalism” could turn inward in the right situations. Inspired by William Arens’s work on man-eating, this article turns a skeptical lens on the events of 1536 to suggest that the documentation for the expedition’s man-eating moment (a seeming classic case of survival cannibalism) is actually quite vague and murky. In fact, the fragmentary narrative contains only references to cannibalism and no actual witnessed act, no site-specific confession, and none of the rhetoric of ritual which surround other Atlantic mariners’ man-eating. In short, we cannot be sure that the so-called “Cannibal Cruise” even had any real man-eaters in its company—only that the conditions were right for man-eating, and that stories and fears of cannibal crew members ran rampant during the crew’s Labrador ordeal. What we see are Englishmen of very different class backgrounds talking about man-eating, and focusing this heavily freighted discussion, not on Native peoples as was so common, but instead on one another.
Dutch crossings: Migration between the Netherlands and the New World, 1600—1800
This essay presents an overview of two hundred years of demographic consequences of Dutch presence in the Western Hemisphere. It starts with an overview of the Dutch Atlantic World and its settlements. The second section deals with the European Atlantic migration from the Dutch Republic in comparison with the human needs of the Dutch East India Company. In more detail, it addresses the Jewish Diaspora and the migration of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch to the New World.
Transforming Caribbean and Canadian identity: Contesting claims for Toronto’s Caribana
This papers discusses the attempts by peoples of Caribbean origin resident in Toronto, Canada to use a version of the transplanted Trinidad Carnival as a mechanism for creating an ethnic identity in a multi-cultural metropolitan society. The contesting claims to the “ownership’ of this cultural product forms the backdrop against which a younger generation of Canadian born children of Caribbean immigrants also work out their own relationship to Canadian society.
Civilizational sociology and perspectives on the Atlantic
This paper calls for an opening of dialogue on the historical character of the Atlantic world between two fields. To date, historical sociologists researching the significance of inter-civilizational encounters have not paid a great deal of attention to the case of the Americas. While historical and comparative sociology has assimilated the lessons of post-colonial critique, the startling histories of transatlantic colonialism have not had the impact on studies of civilizations carried out in this field that they should have. When it comes to the second field, Atlantic Studies, the paper argues that sociologists working in the first field have something to offer in their re-theorization of the character of long term inter-civilizational contacts. A fresh approach to the study of civilizations is sketched out here that reconstructs theoretical conclusions drawn in historical sociology in a way that will be of interest to specialists in Atlantic Studies. The first part of the paper examines the historical sociology of civilizations and sets out a new framework that revolves around a re-conception of radical difference and Otherness. In the second section, I explore how dimensions of the historical experience of transatlantic colonialism—such as mapping, place-naming and early ethnological curiosity—constituted the Americas as a vital zone of the growing sense of civilizational superiority amongst Europeans between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In this section, the article argues that civilizational sociology would profit from a systematic examination of this crucial historical zone. The conclusion puts out a call for further detailed inter-disciplinary research that combines the best insights of both the fields of Atlantic Studies and civilizational sociology.
“The social” and “the political”: A comparision of the writings of Judith N. Shklar and Hannah Arendt on America
In the context of the rise, ubiquity and overwhelming presence of "the social" and sociological explanations, Hannah Arendt’s critique must be welcomed. However, it is also the author’s contention that Hannah Arendt overstepped the mark and substituted one extreme ("the social" or "the societal") for another ("the political"). This becomes especially clear in her writings on America, most prominently in her book On Revolution (1963). The author argues that we can find an adequate counterweight to the extreme Arendtian position in the writings of Judith N. Shklar, especially in those critical essays that are concerned and deal with American intellectual history.
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
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
October 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2
April 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1