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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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August 2008, Vol. 5, No. 2
The August 2008 issue of Atlantic Studies, the first of two special issue on New Orleans in the Atlantic World, features scholarship by Jay D. Edwards, Craig E. Colton, Kent Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Adam Rothman, and Marcus Rediker.
Editorial: New Orleans in the Atlantic World, I,
The Atlantic world has been called a structure, a system, and even a unit of analysis, but it would be more accurate to consider it a tensive, exuberant, and often incommensurable space bunched, folded, striated or simply mapped according to the strategic interplay between circulation and sites, nomos (an oceanic order) and peoples, shifting scales and multiple narrative standpoints. Such is the research profile the contributions to this special issue - New Orleans in the Atlantic World - have drawn of the contingent, eruptive, and yet pattern-yielding space of the new, re-ruddered Atlantic Studies. From cover-to-cover in this issue, we are dealing mainly with the world of moving waters, its articulation as a hydroscape, and the corresponding behavioral ecologies it generates on land and sea. Nevertheless, this requires further explaining.
Unheralded contributions across the Atlantic world
Despite the numerous books and articles on the topic of Creole architecture, no previous work has attempted to explore the interrelationships between historical creolization in traditions of material culture and recent theoretical developments in the growing field of Creole culture studies. A brief history of the development of Creole architecture is followed by a sketch of creolization theory. This review explores what we might learn through an analysis of studies of creolization in vernacular architecture. The colonial and nineteenth-century vernacular of New Orleans functions as our test case.
Meaning of water in the American South: Transatlantic encounters
Water is an essential resource in all societies, but presents some challenges in wetland or riverine settings. Europeans and Africans who settled in the lower Mississippi Valley and across what became the American South encountered indigenous ideas about water that sometimes overlapped with transatlantic notions, but sometimes contrasted their own. Focusing on water as an element of the biophysical environment, the paper examines how indigenous, European, and African societies dealt with water as a resource and as a hazard, and how it reflected the flow of ideas among people and societies. Using Andrew Sluyter's colonial triangle, it examines native concepts, appraisals by Europeans and Africans, and the overlay of European legal concepts on the management of water resources.
Greater Louisiana connections and conjunctures: Placing New Orleans in an Atlantic time-geographic perspective
The place of New Orleans in the Greater Atlantic World has shifted significantly if not literally since its formal founding in the early eighteenth century. Long a favored site of human habitation and adaptation to Louisiana's coastal environments and a strategic mediation point between bayou, river, lake, and seaborne commerce and travel, the city's fortunes (and possible eventual fate) have been in part determined by its location - both in terms of relations with its ambient environment, and relative to other places and forces at work in the larger Atlantic World. This paper proposes that "time-geographic" analysis, a methodology pioneered by Swedish human geographer Torsten Hägerstrand to chart individual geo-biographic trajectories, be applied to aggregate formations - in this case one of the Atlantic World's most distinctive cities - New Orleans. In framing New Orleans in time-geographic perspective, Braudel's geohistorical scalar temporalities - "the individual" (annual and its lesser divisions), "the social" (centurial), "the geographical or structural" (millennial) -- lend themselves well to differentiating the moments and modes that mark both the continuities and their disjunctions. Braudel's "conjunctural" category of half-century spans offers the appropriate metric for measuring and marking this flow. The year of the Louisiana Purchase, 1804, can be taken as the key datum point. Taking the pulse of New Orleans' site and situation at fifty-year intervals prior to, and after, 1804 provides a conjunctural geohistory that says much about the city, but also about the relations with its Mississippian hinterland and its Gulf/Caribbean forelands. This dilation of the time-geographic perspective to the urban scale may offer new ways of viewing the geohistorical trajectories of other emblematic Atlantic cities.
White lies: Human property and domestic slavery aboard the slave ship Creole
This paper explores the voyage of the slave ship Creole, which left Virginia in 1841 with a cargo of 135persons bound for New Orleans. Although the importation of slaves from Africa into the United States was banned from 1808, the expansion of slavery into the American Southwest took the form of forced migration within the United States, or at least beneath the United States's flag. About two-thirds of a million slaves were transported in this "domestic" slave trade between 1820 and 1860 (another three hundred thousands were moved by their owners in the same period). But those aboard the Creole were not to be among them: a group of slaves aboard revolted, and took the ship to Nassau in the Bahamas, where slavery had been abolished in 1834. The 1807 Congressional Act, which paralleled the British Act of 1807 ending British involvement in the African trade, forbade the further importation of African slaves after 1 January 1808 and sought to draw a line between the henceforth "domestic" economy of American slavery and the global economy in human beings. By instituting a distinction between "slaveholding" and "slave trading", the act sought to align the limits of its economy with its polity, its slavery with its security, and its "property" with its "humanity". The American flag gave protection to these trade actions, which became the flag of convenience for slave traders worldwide. The Creole and the contradictory imperatives of slaveholding and security aboard the boat; the dramatic attempts by those slaves aboard to attain freedom and transportation to a new home in Africa - although they came from different parts of Virginia, different communities, and different families -- moments of white collusion, inter-racial cooperation, and black mercy aboard vessel; all combine in the telling of this story of slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic.
Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans and the Caribbean
Cosmopolitan and anti-modern, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) arrived in New Orleans in 1877 and spent the next thirteen years of his life in Louisiana and the Caribbean, writing newspaper articles, travel essays, and novellas depicting the rich cultural world he experienced there. Hearn's writing during these years constitutes a "tropical" phase of his peripatetic career, which eventually took him to Japan. Hearn's tropical writings connect New Orleans, Louisiana, and the American South to broader circum-Caribbean, transatlantic, and global fields of historical and literary representation. He fused classic motifs of tropicality and Orientalism to represent the circum-Caribbean milieu as exotic and erotic. In his major works, published at the end of the 1880s, Chita (1889), Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), and Youma (1890), Hearn emphasized cultural and racial diversity, the power of tropical nature to overwhelm human civilization, and the demise of the old Creole order through ecological disaster and slave emancipation.
History from below the water line: Sharks and the Atlantic slave trade
This essay explores the role of sharks in the Atlantic slave trade. It draws on the testimony of ship captains, officers, sailors, and passengers to assess abolitionist claims that sharks followed slave ships across the Atlantic and feasted on human remains thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The essay concludes that the abolitionists were essentially right and that the shark functioned as an integral part of a system of terror utilized by the slave ship captain. The abolitionist image of the marine predator in turn added effective horror to what would become a successful public agitation against the slave trade.
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
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
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
October 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2
April 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1