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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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August 2009, Volume 6, Number 2
Special issue: Tracing black America in black British culture
Editorial: Tracing black America in black British culture
The rise of the Black Internationale: Anti-imperialist activism and aesthetics in Britain during the 1930s
This article explores the radical ferment associated with the cadre of anti-imperialist activists through the lens of films made by Paul Robeson during his sojourn in Britain in the 1930s. The collective biography of the activist intellectuals with whom Robeson affiliated himself while in Britain may be said to track the rise of an exemplary Black Internationale, a loosely organized but nonetheless coherent revolutionary project linking anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. Like other expressions of Popular Front culture, the Black Internationale was grounded in an anti-racist ethnic pluralism and an anti-fascist politics of international solidarity. While they exemplify these values, the films in which Robeson participated during this period also demonstrate his movement away from elitist conceptions of cultural uplift that characterize earlier Pan-African doctrines. In addition, Robeson's British films gradually assumed a more explicitly documentary form grounded in ideals of egalitarianism and solidarity. Thus, in both form and content, Robeson's work during this period articulated a radical political aesthetics that resonated with audiences galvanized by the rise of fascism in Europe and the intensification of imperialism around the world. In recovering Robeson's encounters with figures such as C.L.R. James in Britain, I intend additionally to illuminate a seminal but ill-documented moment in the pre-history of British anti-racism. This unique coming together of international figures in a common, anti-colonial cause can also be seen to have left a distinctive trace on the specific black British cultures that come into being in the postwar period. The activism and aesthetics of Paul Robeson and the Black Internationale laid important foundations, establishing powerful anti-imperialist traditions that prevailed after the eclipse of the Popular Front and beyond the apparently brief heyday of British anti-fascism.
“Original London style”: London Posse and the birth of British Hip Hop
Hip Hop culture arrived in Britain in the late 1970s from New York. However, by the middle of the 1980s it had established itself as a hugely popular youth cultural form in Britain in the shape of graffiti, breakdancing and music. Although largely seen as an African American form, a number of artists began to produce music that drew specifically upon established black British styles, within a Hip Hop framework of beats and rhymes, in order to develop a highly unique version of Hip Hop, one that communicated both the differences and similarities within the US and the UK. This dialogue placed black British music and culture as an equal partner in the black Atlantic triangle, as artists and cultural practitioners drew upon the Caribbean and America while specifically being influenced by and reflecting upon their very unique position in Britain. London Posse, as one of the first groups to specifically draw upon the traditions of black British music and Sound System culture, and combine it with Hip Hop culture, sought to utilize Hip Hop as a form for expressing a particular position as young black Londoners with cultural resources of their own. In so doing, they were drawing upon the music's origins as a hybrid and malleable form rather than as an essentially black American one. This period of intense creativity and innovation has rarely been documented, yet is significant in the continuing ability of black British cultures to position themselves at the centre of black Atlantic debates and creativity, as opposed to simply mimicking or drawing upon American and Caribbean influences. My essay explores this period through a close reading of London Posse's music and lyrics and an examination of their position as a Hip Hop act drawing upon a black British tradition with roots in the Caribbean and US, but which spoke from, and for, a British perspective.
British freedoms: Caryl Phillips’s Transatlanticism and the staging of Rough Crossings
This essay is an exploration of the British-raised writer Caryl Phillips's dramatic adaptation of Simon Schama's book Rough Crossings (2005), which was first performed in the UK as part of the 2007 bicentennial commemoration of the end of slavery in the British Empire. It explores how Phillips's rewriting of Schama's history of transatlantic slavery, Abolition, the War of Independence, and the fortunes of the Sierra Leone settlement in the eighteenth century functions as a dramatic critical envisioning of African American politics and leadership in the twentieth century. The essay begins by noting the initial and instructive significance of Africa America for Phillips's diasporic engagements with Britain, and its emergence as a central concern in his circumatlantic envisioning of modern diasporic life. It considers next the confluences between Schama's book and Phillips's adaptation, and explores the significant changes and transformations which distinguish the play of Rough Crossings. Rather than offer an accurate vision of the eighteenth century on stage, Phillips uses the historical occasion of the play to address twentieth-century concerns and happenings related to African American charismatic political leadership. Its two key African American figures, David George and Thomas Peters, are presented as "hagiographical" characters who recall the political trajectories of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X - hallowed and revered personages in African American history who iconically encapsulate two distinct kinds of dissidence in which the proper name of each functions almost as a sacred signature. The essay argues that Phillips's play calls into question the efficacy of each form of dissidence across centuries, and ultimately considers Phillips's concluding identification of an American-born post-racial vision of circumatlantic and humanitarian affiliation with the problematic of well-meaning white British Abolitionist John Clarkson, who is going into exile as the play ends.
The sweet part and the sad part: Black Power and the memory of Africa in African American and black British literature
This paper examines the approach toward narratives of Black Power by African American and black British writers in the post-Civil Rights era. The relationship to Black Power politics is explored here in the particular context of how African American and black British writers are perceived to relate to a "memory of Africa"; how "Africanness" fits into these diverse configurations of contemporary black identity. African American writers often find that Black Power, with its heavy reliance upon iconography, has failed to acknowledge the fluid relationship which exists in African American communities and artforms with a traditional African American past, and with a "memory of Africa" within that tradition. The performance of Black Power is a practice which is shown to distance the present from the past, whereas traditional African American artforms are understood to figure performance as a site where the past may "possess" the present. Black British authors are not concerned with situating the memory of Africa as part of a continuous tradition in the way that African American writers are. Both American tropes of blackness, and the memory of Africa itself, are dramatised in black British fiction as inherited tropes which must be adapted in order to bear any relevance to contemporary experience. The very different kinds of emphasis that writers from these two cultural scenarios place upon notions of performance and tradition, in relation to blackness, lead us to discover that narratives in the vein of the "Black Atlantic" must be approached with some caution if they are understood to provide a global locus of identification while also respecting specific conditions of local cultures.
Tricky’s Maxinquaye: Rhizomes, rap and the resuscitation of the Blues
Generic markers today continue to organise Black Atlantic music into various received categories and traditions. However much postcolonialist thinkers rhapsodise about the syncretism of black dance music in general, the connoisseurs of particular scenes continue to take a protective attitude towards the object of their affection, and grow guarded about innovation or the prospect of making contact with other generic fields. Yet this process of segmentation, encouraged by a music industry for which genres and customer profiles go hand in hand, can only simplify our response to such radical works as Tricky's Maxinquaye. For although Tricky himself placed Maxinquaye firmly in the Rap lineage, such bald positioning effectively saluted some of his album's sources at the expense of others, presenting it as a limited work that comfortably inhabits an existing genre rather than challenging the very idea of categorisation. Only by consulting less circumscribed visions of cultural tradition, such as Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus and the journalist Dorian Lynskey's map of pop genealogy Rock Underground, can we arrive at a more fluid position from which to assimilate the full range of genres on which Maxinquaye draws as well as the tension in which it holds them. In particular, Dorian Lynskey's decision to disassociate Maxinquaye from Hip Hop encourages the suspicion that Tricky overstated his identification with US rap, and that it masked a more potent love that he felt for a foregoing Blues tradition more willing to grasp the song as an opportunity to lament social pain. Via close lyrical readings, then, this article concludes that Maxinquaye aspires to the genre of Hip Hop yet cannot achieve this ambition because it cannot fight off the feelings of alienation that lure it back into the arms of this earlier songwriting tradition.
Callin’ out around the world: Isaac Julien’s new ethnicities
This essay addresses the role of African American culture in the work of filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien. Focusing on the films Looking for Langston: A Meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance (1989) and Baadasssss Cinema: A Bold Look at 70s Blaxploitation Films (2002) and the installation Baltimore (2003), I look at the ways that Julien's excavation of African American texts and traditions underwrites his eclectic auto/biographical -- auto-ethnographic, auto-genealogical -- project. First, I discuss the representations of Langston Hughes and the recovery of the interracial queer eroticism of the Harlem Renaissance in Looking for Langston. Next, I examine the treatment in Baadasssss Cinema and Baltimore of 1970s blaxploitation cinema as a genre that resists the sanctioned versions of African American history and culture canonized in the Civil Rights movement, on the one hand, and Baltimore's Great Blacks in Wax Museum, on the other. Throughout, I suggest, Julien finds in the lives and work of African American writers and artists a prefiguration of his own enterprise. Yet, rejecting confinement in restrictive notions of race, nationality, and sexuality, Julien represents not only African Americans such as Hughes, but also Robert Mapplethorpe, Quentin Tarantino, and the Italian Renaissance painter Fra Carnevale, among others, as symbolic parents and surrogate selves. Refashioning the work of his precursors, I argue, Julien elucidates -- and queers -- what Stuart Hall identifies as "new ethnicities" and fashions himself as a cosmopolitan, diasporic, postimperial British subject.
The Black Atlantic: Exploring Gilroy’s legacy
This is a review essay of published responses to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993). The essay begins by summarising Gilroy's main arguments and considering the significance of his term 'double consciousness,' both as a theme and as a theoretical approach. It goes on to examine reviews, articles, books and journal special issues, spanning from 1994 to 2008, which either engage directly with Gilroy's text or make use of his term 'black Atlantic' as a basis for further research. Early reviews of The Black Atlantic balance its shortcomings against its groundbreaking potential, envisaging that the book will generate discussions for years to come across a range of disciplines. Analysis of more recent literary criticism and cultural theory which draws on Gilroy's ideas, taking them in a variety of often conflicting directions, demonstrates the accuracy of this prediction. The essay looks first at critics' commentaries on the scope of Gilroy's project, whether they aim to extend it so that it encompasses a broader range of social and cultural contexts, or to narrow its focus in a way which illuminates its relevance for a particular country or region. Readings of The Black Atlantic asserting the need to incorporate the Pacific and the Indian diaspora into Gilroy's black Atlantic vision, or to transform his 'counterculture of modernity' into a more general notion of anti-colonial resistance, are compared to readings which seek to ground Gilroy's theoretical framework within the social realities of Africa, the Caribbean, or Canada. The essay then explores the work of critics and theorists who have identified problems with Gilroy's style, viewing his black Atlantic model as dangerously abstracted from the material world, and discussing the limitations of his postnational stance. I argue that the apparent inconsistencies within Gilroy's theoretical framework have led to productive debates and significant shifts in methodology within literary and cultural studies.
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
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
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
October 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2
April 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1