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English | |
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History, Literature, Cultural Studies |
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1478-8810 | |
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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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December 2008, Vol. 5, No. 3
Special Issue on New Orleans in the Atlantic World
Editorial
Locating the Isle of Orleans: Atlantic and American Historiographical Perspectives
This essay offers a review of American and Atlantic approaches to the history of New Orleans. It argues that most American historical writing about New Orleans employs a national perspective that views the city as "exceptional." The essay highlights the limits of a USA-centered historiography and suggests that an Atlantic-oriented approach might offer new insights. It considers a variety of works, old and new, that address themes related to the Atlantic World, noting the richness of research about the colonial city and the paucity of work about its nineteenth- and twentieth-century successor. The essay suggests possible directions for future research in the areas of ethnicity, immigration, and cultural transfer, while also identifying some limitations to the Atlantic approach.
Slave Trade Merchants of Spanish New Orleans, 1763-1803: Clarifying the Colonial Slave Trade to Louisiana in Atlantic Perspective
The Spanish era (1763-1803) saw the "re-Africanization" of Louisiana, and yet the colonial slave trade to Louisiana remains relatively undocumented. This essay seeks to clarify the Spanish-era trade by focusing on colonial slave-trade merchants in New Orleans in Atlantic perspective. Using the online Louisiana Slave Database, the paper identifies over two dozen principal slave-trade merchants, outlines the structure of the slaving mercantile community, and revises the scope of slave imports to the colony in the Spanish era.
"Keep alive the powers of Africa": Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Deren, and the Circum-Caribbean Culture of Vodoun
As the site of the first black republic and the center of the African diasporic culture of Vodoun, the island of Haiti undoubtedly plays a central role in the African American imaginary in multifaceted ways. Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Deren attempted, each in turn, to decipher the meaning of Vodoun and Hoodoo for the community of practitioners, for non-practitioners, as well as for themselves in the context of their lives as scholars and artists. Dunham's The Dance's of Haiti (1947) and Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953) can be counted among founding texts on the anthropology and aesthetics of Vodoun. Zora Neale Hurston's work on the anthropology of the Caribbean led her to look closer to home and to explore Vodoun in Haiti and Hoodoo in Louisiana. Her Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), as well as her publications in the Journal of American Anthropology, are among the first explorations in African American diasporic culture of Hoodoo, locating Louisiana's culture in the larger context of the Caribbean. Hurston declared New Orleans "the hoodoo capital of America" and determined that in Louisiana there are "great names in rites that vie with those of Haiti in deeds that keep alive the powers of Africa." This essays explores why African diasporic culture in the larger Caribbean was so powerfully attractive to Dunham and Hurston, both African Americans, and Deren, a Russian immigrant to the United States, as scholars and artists.
Placing Louisiana in the Francophone world: Opportunities and challenges
Louisiana has had a varied relationship with the geographical construct known as the Francophone World. Until the second half of the twentieth century, the state was only rarely associated with this particular geographical framing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, an explicit effort was made to embrace the Francophone World idea. The endeavor met with some success, yet this occurred precisely at a time when the use of French was declining in Louisiana and when concerns were mounting over the commodification of the culture of the Louisiana French. The irony is that these trends needed to be downplayed in order to claim a place for Louisiana in the Francophone World. Exploring the nature and significance of the effort at geographical positioning shows the importance of looking at spatial conceptualizations not just as passive compartments, but as actively constructed frameworks that reflect and promote social, economic, and political agendas.
(Post-)K New Orleans and the Hispanic Atlantic: Geographic method and meaning
An explicitly methodological case study conducted for a multidisciplinary symposium on the Atlantic relationships of pre- and (post-)Katrina Louisiana illustrates some methods that geographers might usefully contribute to an emergent Atlantic Studies. Three general types of method apply to a substantive question related to the hurricane that struck on the morning of August 29th, 2005: Is (post-)Katrina New Orleans emerging as a Hispanic place in contrast to its predominant pre-Katrina associations with the Black and French Atlantics? One type of method involves spatial analysis of data, whether social survey data such as census enumerations, environmental data such as flood depth and persistence, or others. Another relies on fieldwork that combines informal interviews with observation of landscape elements, both those diagnostic of past relational processes and those suggestive of emerging ones. And the third employs analysis of long-term dynamics in the relationships among places, in this particular case New Orleans, the Canary Islands, Honduras, and other places of the Hispanic Atlantic. That mix of methods makes understandable some of the processes driving the emerging Hispanic geography of New Orleans, such as new Hispanic in-migrants creating a place for themselves among the Vietnamese of New Orleans East. The question of whether New Orleans is really emerging as a Hispanic place thus begins to become much more meaningful than the categorical claims to date, which have cited a relatively minor increase in the proportion of a social survey category termed Hispanic while ignoring the much more significant shifting location of New Orleans within the network of relational processes that comprise the Hispanic Atlantic.
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
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
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
October 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2
April 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1