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Editors: Manuel Barcia - University of Leeds, UK Rocío G. Davis - University of Navarra, Spain Dorothea Fischer-Hornung - Heidelberg University, Germany David Lambert - - University of Warwick, UK
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Please make submissionselectronically at . Submissions will be subjected to two double-blind reviews before acceptance. |
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Atlantic Studies: Global Currents
 Atlantic Studies: Global Currents is a multidisciplinary quarterly that publishes cutting-edge research, studying the Atlantic world as a conceptual, historical, and cultural space. It explores transnational, transhistorical, and transdisciplinary intersections, but also addresses global flows and perspectives beyond the Atlantic as a closed or self-contained space. In the larger context of global flows, the journal considers the Atlantic as part of wider networks, a space of exchange, and an expanding paradigm beyond the limits of its own geography, moving beyond national, regional, and continental divides by examining entangled histories and cultures. Published on behalf of MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas), the journal challenges critical orthodoxies that have drawn sharp lines between the experiences and representations of the Atlantic world and its wider global context, in particular in relation to the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
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2007 04, Volume 4, Number 1 The French Atlantic
The April 2007 issue of Atlantic Studies features scholarship by Emma Reisz, Andrew Ginger, Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, Carole Sweeney, Seanna Sumalee Oakley, Richard Watts, Jeremy F. Lane, and Steve Garner.
Editorial: The French Atlantic
Welcome to the first special issue of Atlantic Studies, on the French Atlantic, focussing attention on French participations in trans- and circum-Atlantic exchanges. In so doing, it forces a debate on what that "French Atlantic" might be, and on what are the connotations of the phrase: is it to be understood centripetally and chauvinistically, analogous to the "English Channel," or to the classical Mediterranean as a "Roman lake"? Alternatively, is it an appropriation of Paul Gilroy's term, immediately raising questions about the suitability of the comparison between forced African Diasporas and French conquests and migrations? In fact, any intervention of this sort is always already implicated in contemporary French anxieties about globalisation, the reach and spread of the English language and of Anglo-American audio-visual cultures, an insecure national republican narrative, and postcolonial realities, which came spectacularly to the fore in the banlieue riots of November 2005.
Curiosity and Rubber in The French Atlantic
This article argues that the networks and culture of French Atlantic science played a decisive role in introducing rubber from the Americas to the scholars and engineers of Europe. Though known to the earliest European travellers in Central and South America, rubber aroused no interest among scholars until Charles-Marie de la Condamine encountered it in 1736. Nevertheless, French scientific connections to South America were characterized by their fragility and their limited reach. French scientists were dependent on Hispanic, Creole and indigenous informants for scientific information and for practical assistance to conduct their research. The greatest strength of French science in South America was the prestige it enjoyed in Europe, as local experts saw opportunities to advance their reputations through assisting French investigators. Equally importantly, the high reputation of French science ensured that implausible or unconventional discoveries, such as the unusually elastic properties of rubber, would be greeted with enthusiasm rather than scepticism. French Atlantic science also brought with it a distinctively French version of the prevailing culture of curiosity. Though widely regarded as a vice in the sixteenth century, by 1700 curiosity was widely seen in a more favourable light. Scientific institutions such as the Académie Royale des Sciences created a structure of academic exchange, which protected and encouraged the pursuit of curiosity. Meanwhile the development of an increasingly standardized language of science provided a linguistic framework through which to communicate and contextualize the diverse fruits of curious inquiry. This culture and language of curiosity ensured that bizarre but apparently purposeless foreign discoveries, such as rubber, could be excised from their non-European context and domesticated into European daily life.
Cultural Modernity and Atlantic Perspectives: Estanislao del Campo's Fausto (1866) and its French Contemporaries
This article presents an Atlantic perspective on the origins of cultural modernism in the mid-nineteenth century, through a consideration of the Argentine Estanislao del Campo's poem Fausto and its links and parallels with French culture. The article considers in particular the role of "fresh seeing," "absorption," and reflexive self-awareness of the medium on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic perspective calls significantly into question the model of distinct, plural, polycentric modernisms, but equally is at odds with the assertion of transnational commonalities across modernisms. In consequence, the internationalization or transnationalization of cultural modernity in the Atlantic space shatters the generic intellectual patterns that underlie the very theorization of international modernism itself.
"The Darkest is before the break of day": Rhetorical Uses of Haiti in the Works of Early African-American Writers
This article seeks to contribute to recent approaches within Early American Studies, which position the early USA within a hemispheric transnational framework, and which depart from exceptionalist perspectives that view the identity formation of the United States as predominantly a negotiation of intra-national differences and traditions. Proceeding from Malini Schueller and Edward Watts's concept of the "messy beginnings" of American identity, it explores the repercussions of the Haitian Revolution on the identity discourses within the young nation. The article argues that while the Caribbean's image as a site of slavery, social and racial unrest, and miscegenation made it a "sensitive spot" in white republican discourses after the American Revolution, early emancipatory African-American discourses disrupted the racial stereotyping of black people as barbarous and powerless by using the West Indian slave revolt to construct alternative and empowering versions of black identity. The essay investigates the strategies by which African-American authors such as Prince Hall and John Russwurm employ the Caribbean experience of black revolt to imagine an alternative collective history distinct from that of white America.
The Unmaking of the World: Haiti, History, and Writing in the Work of Edouard Glissant and Edwige Danticat
This article reads Edouard Glissant's notion of a Caribbean nonhistory through the lens of the Haitian slave revolution of 1791 and its subsequent disappearance from, or distortion in, various intellectual discourses. It argues that the historical and political dislocations produced by the slave trade and subsequent histories of violence and rupture have resulted in a Haitian history centred on a central notion of absence and disappearance. This has produced a crisis in the ability to render traumatic experience into narrative, as history is only able to be experienced as a latent symptomatic injury. Reading Edwige Danticat's novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and its representation of the transgenerational transmission of sexual trauma from mother to daughter, the article suggests that the novel adopts Glissant's idea of a "tormented chronology" in order to narrate the history of violence for Haitian women. The reading of Glissant and Danticat uses both the insights of trauma theory and the work of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain in which she observes that intense pain or trauma has the effect of unmaking the world of the sufferer and destroys the relationship between language and body. Danticat's novel considers this broken relationship through women's experiences at the "edges of history" and in doing so addresses Glissant's problematic of the "dislocation of the continuum."
Le Masque Blessé/The Afflicted Mask: Romantic Selves, Vodounist Selves in Frankétienne's Fleurs d'insomnie
This paper aims to bring the Francophone Atlantic into dialogue with philosophy, critical theory, and studies of the lyric instead of continuing to cloister it within diasporic, black, ethnic, or cultural studies. In addition, the aim is to move the literature of the Francophone Atlantic beyond merely thematic discussion. The book-length poem Fleurs d'insomnie (Flowers of Insomnia) by Haitian poet Frankétienne employs the first-person vatic speaker in ways that point to ethical relations between Haitian vodoun, Afro-Creole lyric, and European Romanticism. The vates in Fleurs d'insomnie is a structural necessity and a syntactic convention. Contrary to what is often said of the lyric "I" in deconstructionist critique, the vates is not a figure of essential or transcendental identity. Instead, Frankétienne's appropriation of Romantic lyric discourse within Haitian vodoun syntax challenges us to reconsider how the lyric "I" is productive as a poetic device and as an ethical medium.
Contested Sources: Water as commodity/sign in French Caribbean literature
Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, this essay argues that fresh water is a site of contested representational regimes in French Caribbean literature. The meaning of water in the Caribbean is the result of the encounter between ideas brought together by a wide range of actors, with French and African understandings of water the two most significant. French notions of water's meaning and value circulate throughout the French Atlantic, but take hold most vigorously in those places - such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and even to a certain degree Haiti - where these notions were buttressed by the legal and cultural practices and institutions of colonialism. While briefly addressing what those French notions of water are and how they have been imposed on cultures with radically different notions of water's meaning, the bulk of the essay is taken up with the contemporary refashioning of those notions in French Caribbean literature, the area of the French Atlantic that has been subject to arguably the greatest variety and intensity of cultural flows.
Rythme de Travail, Rythme de Jazz: Jazz, Primitivism, and Machinisme in Inter-war France
Existing studies of the reception of jazz in France have tended to posit a neat distinction between those commentators, who saw the music as the degraded product of an Americanized machine age on the one hand, and those who sought in its unconventional rhythms and melodies a source of primitive, Black African authenticity, on the other hand. This article questions such accounts by showing how notions of primitivism and modernity were closely articulated in the discourse of critics and fans of the new music alike. As a musical form apparently rooted in West African tradition, jazz was attributed a capacity for returning its audience to a more "primitive" state, a state figured as at once seductively authentic and dangerously debasing. In this, jazz mimicked the effects of mechanized industrial labour, which, through the imposition of a set of repetitive, mindless physical tasks, similarly risked reducing the French worker to a more "primitive" state, that of an unthinking beast of burden. If this state threatened to debase the worker, it simultaneously held out the possibility of recovering a sense of primitive harmony through the adaptation of the worker's bodily rhythms to the rhythms of mechanized labor in the new Taylorist and Fordist factories. Whether in the writings of the conservative commentator Georges Duhamel, or in the work of the surrealist ethnographer André Schaeffner, jazz was seen to be analogous to mechanized labour in the simultaneous threat of violent disruption and the chance of restored harmony it promised to the human body. As such, jazz in inter-war France could become a powerful figure for the wholesale transformation of bodies and affects contingent on France's continuing passage from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial economy.
Atlantic Crossing: Whiteness as a Transatlantic Experience
The Atlantic is a space through which racialized identities are dynamically produced and are re-produced by particular practices, in particular places, at particular times. The Atlantic space, this paper argues, has transmogrified collective identities so that not only do some people change into "Blacks" when they travel across it, other people change into "Whites." This article presents a historical and material-based argument around the relational rather than absolute nature of blackness and whiteness. Three brief studies of unstable white identities -- the Irish in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, the Portuguese in nineteenth-century British Guiana, and the Catholic Irish in nineteenth-century America - are used to make the case that the economic context is a determining factor in the way identities are generated. The focus is on why people's identities begin to include whiteness, and the mechanisms through which this is achieved. In each case, it is argued that this is a process involving a stage at which the group in question is not white. Yet this "not-white" status is not the equivalent of blackness that a Manichean perspective might suggest. Rather whiteness is relational, processual and specific to time and place.
Other Issues
June 2015, Volume 12, Number 2
March 2015, Volume 12, Number 1
, Volume 11, Number 4, Atlantic childhood and youth
2014 09, Volume 11, Number 3 Irish Global Migration
2014 06, Volume 11, Number 2
2014 03, Volume 11, Number 1
2013 12, Volume 10, Number 4
2013 09, Volume 10, Number 3
2013 06, Volume 10, Number 2
2013 03, Volume 10, Number 1 The French Atlantic Studies
2012 12, Volume 9, Number 4
2012 09, Volume 9, Number 3 Slave Trade Memorialization
2012 06, Volume 9, Number 2
2012 03, Volume 9, Number 1 The Planter Class
2011 12, Volume 8, Number 4
2011 09, Volume 8, Number 3
2011 06, Volume 8, Number 2 Abolitionist places
2011 03, Volume 8, Number 1
2010 12, Volume 7, Number 4 Atlantic Science -- New Approaches
2010 09, Volume 7, Number 3
2010 06, Volume 7, Number 2
2010 03, Volume 7, Number 1
2009 12, Volume 6, Number 3
2009 08, Volume 6, Number 2
2009 04, Volume 6, Number 1
2008 12, Volume 5, Number 3 New Orleans in the Atlantic World II
2008 08, Volume 5, Number 2 New Orleans in the Atlantic World
2008 04, Volume 5, Number 1
2007 10, Volume 4, Number 2
2006 10, Volume 3, Number 2
2006 04, Volume 3, Number 1
2005 10, Volume 2, Number 2
2005 04, Volume 2, Number 1
2004 10, Volume 1, Number 2
2004 04, Volume 1, Number 1