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2003 | |
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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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April 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1
The April 2004 issue of Atlantic Studies features scholarship by Donna Gabaccia, William Boelhower, Verene A. Shepherd, William O’Reilly, Alex Seago, Jean-Philippe Mathy.
A long Atlantic in a wider world
In the 1990s, the geographical conceit of the Atlantic as a watery site of cross-cultural exchange and struggles gained wide enough currency to alter teaching and research on Africa, Europe, and the Americas, at least for the years between 1500 and 1800. This paper examines the possibilities for analyzing a longer history of the Atlantic -- one that conceivably reaches into our own times. Key to creating a periodization for this longer Atlantic is the changing place of the Atlantic in the wider world. Interpretations of the Atlantic as a separate or central "world" in the years before 1800 are collapsing in the face of global perspectives. The paper summarizes a considerable literature on the Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century that complements in surprising ways the work on red, black and white Atlantic in earlier centuries. This literature also reveals little-known and multi-disciplinary roots of the emerging field of Atlantic Studies. although the usefulness of Atlantic anylses become more problematic for historians of the "American Century," analyses of red, black and white Atlantic continue to have some salience for the era of NATO and American global hegemony.
Editorial
A long Atlantic in a wider world
In the 1990s, the geopolitical conceit of the Atlantic as a watery site of cross-cultural exchange and struggles, gained wide enough currency to alter teaching and research of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, at least for the years between 1500 and 1800. This paper examines the possibilities of analysing a longer history of the Atlantic – one that conceivably reaches into our own times. Key to creating a periodization for this longer Atlantic is the changing place of the Atlantic in the wider world. Interpretations of the Atlantic as a separate or central “world” in the years before 1800 are collapsing in the face of global perspectives. The paper summarizes a considerable literature on the Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century that complements in surprising ways the work on red, black and white Atlantic in earlier centuries. This literature also reveals little-known and multi-disciplinary roots of the emerging field of Atlantic Studies. Although the usefulness of Atlantic analyses become more problematic for historians of the “American century,” analyses of red, black and white Atlantic continue to have some salience for the era of NATO and American global hegemony.
“I’ll teach you how to flow”: On figuring out Atlantic Studies
Beginning with two exemplary scenes from Shakespeare and Olaudah Equiano, this essay discusses the rise of the circum-Atlantic world as a fundamental order and a critical space that remains centerless and ultimately unstructured. It relies on the figura of the ocean-going ship and the mappemonde as semiotic operators that are instrumental in creating, measuring, and representing Atlantic space. It then explores Edward Said’s dialectic of filiation and affiliation by tracing his career-long interest in the “figural” work of Auerbach and Vico, and suggests that the latter’s insights in Scienza nuova make him not only Said’s contemporary but also Equiano’s.
Unity and Disunity, Creolization and Marronage in the Atlantic World: Conceptualizing Atlantic Studies
Since the emergence of Atlantic Studies, scholars have engaged in a rigorous theorizing of the field. The ideological perspectives have not been unified. Debates have ebbed and flowed, for example, around the issue of identity, as essential question posed: was there a discrete Atlantic identity that was distinguishable from a burgeoning imperialistic mentality? This essay comments on the concept of a “unified Atlantic World,” showing that great instability and difference characterized this world. The essay observes the suggestion of fractured or fragmented identities and unstable relationships in the Atlantic World during the colonial era, specifically during the period of African enslavement. The enslaved struggled for freedom and respect; the non-sugar entrepreneurs strove for upward social mobility in a sugar planter’s world, the Creole resented being cast into “local” social status and the coloured struggled for civil rights. At the same time, there was no unified white or free-coloured group pursuing a homogeneous economic ideology. While some whites supported the plantation economic model, others pursues a divergent economic path that was out of step with what we have come to view as the “global” needs of empire. It establishes the possibility of an economy that was uniquely Caribbean and of regional interconnectedness that was not envisioned by those who established empires and tried to control trade in the Atlantic World. Local/internal and regional trade networks developed and domestic economies emerged. The regional trade that developed led to the interaction of (trans-imperial) cultures and set in train new patterns of migration and mixing. The making of an integrated market culture in the Atlantic has particularly overshadowed the study of intra-Caribbean trading links before and after the conquest. While the dominant trade routes during slavery led from the Caribbean to Europe and North America, intra-Caribbean links, which pre-date conquest, though not as developed, were not complete casualties of colonization and the monopolistic tendencies of empire. In other words, regional interconnectedness was not lost in the “making of the Atlantic World.” From a theoretical standpoint, and as it centres a divergent economic path that could be termed “Creole,” the discussion is located within the discourses of creolization – defined as a historical process resulting from “maroon activity” outside of the plantation system that “engendered new modes of thinking, of acting, of feeling, of imagining.”
Genealogies of Atlantic History
This paper reviews the origins, course, context and content of Atlantic history as it is debated and taught today. Beginning with as analysis of the context in which the earliest ideas of the Atlantic Community and of a shared Atlantic history emerged, specially in the writings of Walter Lippmann from 1917, the paper offers a series of complementary genealogies of Atlantic history, proposing that a closer scrutiny of those shared aspects of common cultural engagement and exchange grew out of a confluence of interests shared principally by North Atlantic countries in the aftermath of World War II. In 1955, Godechot and Palmer’s presentation on “The Problem of the Atlantic” to the International Committee of Historical Sciences in Rome marked a crucial step in this process; so too did the promotion of Atlantic history by pre-eminent historian Bernard Bailyn some forty years later. The growth and popularity of the “Atlantic World” is reviewed as a possible response to globalization at the end of the twentieth century. Also reviewed are the historiographical debates surrounding Atlantic history; how American history incorporates, or is incorporated into, Atlantic history, and the opportunities that Atlantic history offers to the broader discipline.
The “Kraftwerk-Effekt”: Transatlantic circulation, global networks and contemporary pop music
Focusing upon contemporary developments in electronic dance music, this paper challenges the conventional view of transatlantic cultural domination emanating from an Anglo-American “centre”. It argues that contemporary global popular culture, facilitated by advances in communications technologies and increasingly complex global flows of people, images and capital, is increasingly decentralized and has a tendency to be based upon networks of mutually independent local “scenes”. The emerging landscape of global popular culture requires a theoretical reassessment of transatlantic cultural relations, which includes an appreciation of the complexities of “glocal” taste formation and of the decentralized global networks of cultural production and consumption.
The Atlantic as Metaphor
Taking as its point of departure Paul Gilroy’s proposal to look at the Atlantic as “as system of cultural exchanges,” this paper argues for the need to look at the Atlantic both as a barrier and as a conduit. As Tocqueville noted two centuries ago, some elements of European culture, not all of them, made their way across the ocean. Religion, which figures so prominently in contemporary debates about transatlantic relations, is a case in point. While pre-Enlightenment conceptions of the religious formed the core of the American national ethos, secularist notions so dominant in “post-Christian” Europe today are much less prevalent in the New World, accounting for the growing gap between European and American public opinions on issues such as abortion, the death penalty, religious dress in public schools or the separation of Church and State.
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
October 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
April 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1
October 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2