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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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October 2006 , Vol. 3, No. 2
The October 2006 issue of Atlantic Studies features scholarship by Douglas M. Bradburn, John C. Coombs, Mauel Barcia, Cassandra Pybus, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Joanna Pawlik, Sarah Florence Wood.
Editorial
Smoke and Mirrors: Reinterpreting the society and economy of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake
The most recent research demonstrates that the idea of a thirty-year depression in the Chesapeake economy at the end of the seventeenth century, which has been the dominant view since the groundbreaking work of the “Chesapeake school” thirty years ago, is no longer tenable. The peculiar way this “depression thesis” emerged has inhibited creative and ongoing research on the society and economy of early Virginia and Maryland. This essay argues that the time has come to explore new questions with new perspectives, including an awareness of the Atlantic dimensions as well as the internal diversity of the early modern Chesapeake. To help encourage further research the authors point to suggestive but under-researched aspects of the region’s economy in the so-called era of depression, including the variation of regional tobacco cultures, new evidence of a vibrant commerce with the Caribbean, exchange with other mainland colonies, trade with the Indians, growth of internal markets, shipbuilding, and western land development. An awareness that the old narratives no longer work and that many topics are ripe for creative analysis shows that better solutions to old interpretive problems within the history and historiography of the colonial Chesapeake are possible, including the consolidation of gentry power, opportunity for poor whites, and the rise of slavery.
Fighting with the Enemy’s Weapons: The usage of the colonial legal framework by nineteenth-century Cuban slaves
This article focuses on the use of the colonial legal framework by Cuban slaves. It examines briefly the particulars of the slave laws across the Americas, before focusing on nineteenth century Cuba. Cases drawn from Cuban plantation archives illustrate and analyse the way plantation slaves learned to use the law for their own benefit, and show what limitations they found while attempting to exercise their legal rights. Slaves often encountered a variety of legal obstacles. Their chances of taking advantage of the law were frequently determined by whether they were African or Creole, by whether they lived in the countryside, and by other factors. Although these laws were devised to control them rather than to offer them valid channels to claim their rights, slaves never stopped trying to test the Spanish colonial legal system to its limits, and on some occasions, they succeeded in improving their condition.
Washington’s Revolution: Harry that is, not George
As Harry Washington faced a British military tribunal in 1800, he not may have appreciated the irony that his escape from enslavement to the leader of the rebellion in colonial America led inexorably to his trial for rebellion in Sierra Leone. Where General Washington was subsequently reified as father of the United States, Harry Washington lost everything in his attempt to forge an independent community in West Africa. The contrast between these two Washingtons could not be greater, yet they share a commitment to the transforming ideals of liberty and self-determination, albeit one which played out very differently for George Washington than for the African man he purchased in 1863.
From Fugitive Slave to Fugitive Abolistionist: The Oratory of Frederick Douglass and the Emerging Heroic Slave Tradition
This article focuses upon Frederick Douglass’s speeches on the Creole slave ship mutiny which he gave in North America and Britain in the 1840s and 1850s to examine the complexities of his transatlantic abolitionist discourse. Douglass’s commitment not only to freedom from slavery but also freedom from mainstream abolition remained undiminished throughout his life as he argued against the “spirit” as much as the “fact” of slavery. Douglass’s speeches, autobiographies, diaries, and letters reveal a complex literary figure as well as a forceful and impassioned agitator. There can be little doubt that Douglass engaged throughout his works in literary subterfuge, polemical play, and subversive experimentation to express the full extent of his radicalism and challenge the boundaries of permissible antislavery discourse. His speeches on Madison Washington, the heroic liberator aboard the Creole slave ship revolt, afforded Douglass the highly prized opportunity to extend his subject matter beyond personal autobiography and challenge abolitionist demands for an authentic recital of the facts of his own life. He was able to exalt a black heroic tradition of violence and self-sacrifice as he articulated his own creative independence in retelling the story to suit his transatlantic audiences.
“Various Kinds of Madness:” The French Nietzscheans inside America
Drawing comparisons to the introduction of deconstruction to America and its perceived discontinuity with North American intellectual traditions, this paper discusses the arrival of a different strain of poststructuralism in America – the French Nietzscheanism of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard. It isolates the presence and function of American oppositional discourses, such as the countercultural or anti-psychiatric, within French Nietzscheanism and asserts there exists a more intimate link between these French and American oppositional discourses than is customarily assumed. French Nietzscheanism entered America via the Schizo-culture conference, organised by Sylvère Lotringer in Columbia, 1975. The examination of this neglected, though intriguing event produces a valuable snapshot of the transition that oppositional discourses on both sides of the Atlantic underwent as the sixties gave way to the seventies.
"Narrow Passages": Captive sailors and national narrative in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot
This paper offers a new reading of James Fenimore Cooper's Revolutionary sea-romance, The Pilot, published in 1824 and regarded by many as "the first sea novel ever written." Challenging the long-held critical assumption that The Pilot reflects the maritime nationalism of the antebellum United States, this paper argues instead that The Pilot presents readers with a bungled naval expedition led by a dubious national hero in an aborted national narrative, where a spiralling captivity saga displaces the clichés of the Revolutionary romance genre and deconstructs Revolutionary conceptualizations of American identity.
Book Reviews
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
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