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History, Literature, Cultural Studies |
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Editors: William Boelhower - University of Padova, Italy Stephen Fender - University of Sussex, UK Dorothea Fischer-Hornung - University of Heidelberg, Germany Richard Follett - University of Sussex, UK Maria Lauret - University of Sussex, UK Reviews Editors: Susan Currell - University of Sussex, UK William O’Reilly - Cambridge University, UK |
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Please send all contributions as an email attachments (Word or rtf format) to . Articles should be no longer than 7,000 words, written in English, and typed in double spacing (including all notes and references), following the Chicago Humanities style. An abstract of the paper, of up to 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 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. Submission of a paper to the journal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished, work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Permission to quote from or reproduce copyright material must be obtained by the authors before submission and any acknowledgements should be included in the typescript, preferably in the form of an acknowledgements section at the end of the paper. Where photographs or figures are reproduced, acknowledgement of source and copyright should be given in the caption. An abstract of the paper, of up to 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 about each author should be supplied on a separate sheet. Details should be given of author’s full postal and email addresses as well as telephone and fax numbers. Copyright. It is a condition of publication that authors assign copyright or license the publication rights in their articles, including abstracts, to Taylor & Francis. This enables us to ensure full copyright protection and to disseminate the article, and of course the Journal, to the widest possible readership in print and electronic formats as appropriate. Authors may, of course, use the article elsewhere after publication without prior permission from Taylor & Francis, provided that acknowledgement is given to the Journal as original source of publication, and that Taylor & Francis is notified so that our records show that its use is properly authorised. Authors retain a number of other rights under the Taylor & Francis rights policies documents. These policies are referred available in detail. Authors are themselves responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyright material from other sources. |
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Atlantic Studies
Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives|
Atlantic Studies provides an international forum for research and debate on historical, cultural and literary issues arising within the new disciplinary matrix of the circumatlantic world. In particular, it seeks to foster a transcultural dialogue between the two hemispheres and, specifically, among the nations of Europe, the Americas and Africa. The Journal aims to celebrate the original Atlantic mappemonde: a highly critical space, centered not on a single nation or land mass but on a new cosmopolitan interchange of ships and peoples, cultures and texts, ideas and tools. Atlantic Studies accordingly invites submissions in the areas of history, cultural studies, critical theory, and literature from academics, public intellectuals, contemporary commentators, and activists whose focus of interest lies in circumatlantic perspectives. The Journal will also publish work based on such visual materials as photography, film, and information media. Each volume will also include book and media reviews. Atlantic Studies encourages both scholarly research and timely critical debate on current issues within its chosen paradigm. In as much as they develop a comparative and intercultural perspective, essays on race, class, gender, ethnicity and on human rights, citizenship and identity politics will also be welcomed. Brief history of the journal, affiliations, editorial board members Atlantic Studies is published on behalf of MESEA (The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas). The Journal aims to be an important site for scholarship on the comparative study of multi-ethnic cultures and societies. It challenges nationalist histories and literatures by focusing on the Atlantic as an arena of cultural change and exchange, translation and interference, communication and passage. |
October 2007, Vol. 4, No. 2
The October 2007 issue of Atlantic Studies features scholarship by Jeremy Rich, Solimar Otero, Laura Doyle, Carl Plasa, Jeffrey A. Fortin, Will Kaufman, and Alan Rice.
Editorial
When, on 25 March 1807 the London House of Commons passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it brought to a close two-hundred and forty-five years of slave trading in the English, and later British, empire. From the actions of John Hawkins to the Zong massacre of 1781 and after, the slave trade was the cold blood of a cadaverous Atlantic trade, flowing away from Africa and giving life to new Atlantic colonies and an old, but rejuvenating, European economy. On 9 June 1815, all signatories to the international treaty at the Congress of Vienna, which brought the period of post-French Revolution warfare to an end, agreed to the abolition of the slave trade, and in 1825 slave trading became a crime punishable by death under British law.
After the Last Slave Ship, the Sea Remains: Mobility and Atlantic Networks in Gabon, Ca. 1860-1920
Too often the black Atlantic has been conflated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, without consideration for the ways different parts of West and Central Africa became more closely tied together by Atlantic networks after 1860. This essay explores the formation of a multinational group of migrant workers in Gabon. Men from Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast found skilled work in Gabon. Gabonese men and women also moved to other colonies. While men entered high-paying jobs in the same manner as their counterparts from West Africa, young women often became the mistresses of Europeans.
Barrio, Bodega, and Botanica Aesthetics: The Layered Traditions of the Latino Imaginary
This essay explores notions of Nuyorican, or Diasporic Puerto Rican culture found in New York as expressed in literature, poetry, and memoir. The concept of the Latino imaginary is invoked to both explain and critically analyze the variety of transnational, especially Atlantic, inflections that are drawn upon by Puerto Rican authors locating a tropical identity in urban America through their writing. Yoruba religious culture, as reinterpreted by the Caribbean folk religion of Santerķa, becomes an avenue for exploring how transatlantic concepts of the journey and home help to formulate Nuyorican identity and community-making through literature. A comparative analysis of Diasporic traditions found in writing, religious practice, and cultural concepts between the Yoruba in Nigeria and Puerto Ricans in the U.S. illuminate the ways in which vernacular traditions render the social imagination as a pivotal strategy for gaining social agency in post-colonial contexts.
Reconstructing Race and Freedom in Atlantic Modernity: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative
This essay offers a dialectically intertextual reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative within a reconstructed account of Atlantic race history. As such it provides one kind of answer to Paul Gilroy's call to consider "the Atlantic as one, single complex unit of analysis" in order to build a "transnational and intercultural perspective." The essay pursues a transcultural Atlantic perspective that moves beyond strictly racial paradigms (those that would segregate, say, discussion of Anglo-British from Afro-British cultural legacies); yet it also brings into view how, paradoxically, it is in part their race narratives that link these traditions. That is, the essay argues that both black and white narratives pivot on the scene of a sea-crossing and an accompanying experience of self-loss that is recuperated, ultimately, under the sign of race. Anglo-authored texts from Oroonoko to Billy Budd regularly practice what Toni Morrison calls Africanism, subsuming the African-Atlantic story within their own Atlantic freedom plots, while African-Atlantic texts directly challenge this erasure and rewrite the Atlantic story -- yet also do so as the story of a race's quest for its freedom. The core historical contribution of the essay is to trace this dialectical relation between Anglo-Atlantic and African-Atlantic traditions (as the author refers to them) to the seventeenth-century revolutionary period in which the will to freedom was first defined as a racial trait. This history allows us to appreciate just how shrewdly Olaudah Equiano managed the paradoxes of the racialized Atlantic freedom quest.
"Stained with Spots of Human Blood": Sugar, Abolition and Cannibalism
This article explores representations of sugar in black and white abolitionist discourses of the 1780s and 1790s, taking Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) as its starting-point and frame of reference. As several critics have noted, one important feature of this text is its appropriation and reversal of the image of the racial other as cannibal. Such an image is a commonplace of colonial discourse from Columbus onwards, occurring, for example, on either side of Equiano's work, in the Caribbean historiography of Edward Long and Bryan Edwards. In The Interesting Narrative, however, the image is overturned, as it is the white subject who emerges as potential flesh-eater, threatening to consume both Equiano himself and his fellow slaves. At the same time, the strategies of appropriation and reversal Equiano uses are themselves taken up and reworked in the white abolitionist writings contemporary with his book's publication. While many instances of this can be found in the work of Mary Birkett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and others, this chapter focuses on just two texts, William Fox's well known 'An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum' (1791) and Andrew Burn's similarly titled but far less familiar sequel to Fox in 'A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar' (1792). In both of these texts, the consumption of sugar is represented as a form of anthropophagy, although in Fox's case the cannibalism involved is figurative, while in Burn's it becomes grotesquely literalized.
Paul Cuffe's Black Atlantic World, 1808-1817
This article examines how Paul Cuffe, a man of Native American and African ancestry, developed his views on the colonization of West Africa. Cuffe had long supported the concept of colonization, but later in life he injected his own blend of entrepreneurial zeal, evangelical zest, and moral righteousness into the cause. Cuffe saw an uncivilized population on his first trip to West Africa in 1811, an encounter that perplexed the devout Quaker. Convinced that a solid demographic foundation existed in Sierra Leone - consisting of African-Americans (via Nova Scotia), Jamaican Maroons, and African laborers - Cuffe believed that the Christianization of the people and the development of a free and legitimate triangular trade between West Africa, Great Britain, and the United States held the key to successfully building a free black nation. Finding ideological support for his colonization scheme proved to be less of a problem than securing proper funding for his ventures. Frustrated, Cuffe drew on his own moderate wealth acquired through his shipping business to fund the first of what he hoped to be many voyages bringing free African-Americans to colonize Africa. Shortly before his death in 1817, and with his personal wealth severely depleted, Cuffe emerged as a sage of sorts, advising a variety of political and social leaders interested in sending free blacks to Sierra Leone. The American Colonization Society, abolitionists in Great Britain, and African-American leaders such as Prince Saunders and James Forten all looked to the elder Cuffe for guidance on how to best implement the emerging colonization movement. Deeming himself too old to travel across the Atlantic, Cuffe hoped a younger generation could take charge of his mission to civilize and Christianize Africa.
On The Psychology Of Slavery Reparation: A Kleinian Reading
This essay draws on the theories of Melanie Klein and others in the British object relations school to explore the psychological dynamics of the slavery reparations debate in Africa, Britain, and the United States. Kleinian psychology emphasizes the ability to make reparation as an indicator of psychic maturity and argues for the importance of symbolism and creativity in the reparative gesture. At the same time, it situates the inability to make or accept reparation in the psychically immature stage known as the "paranoid-schizoid position." This essay applies Kleinian theory to the concept of "the transgenerational phantom" developed by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, and interrogates Klein's limitations through the critiques of C. Fred Alford, who argues for a leap from merely symbolic to practical reparation. In exploring the Kleinian concepts of legitimate reparation, mock reparation and manic defence, the essay aims to establish illuminating connections between individual and public psychology in relation to one of the most emotionally and morally charged areas of debate in the Atlantic world.
The Cotton that Connects, the Cloth that Binds: Manchester's civil war, Abe's statue, and Lubaina Himid's transnational polemic
This essay uses the full text of a recent interview conducted with the Zanzibar-born, Lancashire resident Lubaina Himid to explore her memorial vision as articulated in her work and her comments on it. It will discuss the varied historical contexts of the work, particularly its black Atlantic resonances. It expands on the discussion on Revenge (1992) in my Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (2003) by more fully fleshing out Himid's preoccupation with the links between workers and slaves as articulated in her Cotton.com (2003) which used fabric patterns and text to imagine communications between these wage and chattel labourers separated by the Atlantic. It discusses the repercussions of the American Civil War for Manchester workers and Abraham Lincoln's gratitude for the support of these workers in the face of the Cotton Famine caused by the embargo on Southern produced cotton. It shows the importance of the 1919 statue of Lincoln and its inscriptions for articulating this solidarity and the way that Himid uses it as inspiration for her contemporary work on Manchester and the memory of slavery and abolition.
Other Issues
April 2007
Special Issue: The French Atlantic, Volume 4, Number 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
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
October 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2
April 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1