Founded In    2003
Published   quarterly
Language(s)   English
     

Fields of Interest

 

History, Literature, Cultural Studies

     
ISSN   1478-8810
     
Affiliated Organization   MESEA, Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas
     
Publisher   Routledge, Taylor & Francis
     
Editorial Board

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

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

Please make submissionselectronically at . Articles should, in general, be under 10,000 words. Please consult the online “Instructions for authors” and follow the journals style sheet (modified Chicago Humanities style)

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Submissions will be subjected to two double-blind reviews before acceptance.

     

Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

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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 10, Volume 4, Number 2

The October 2007 issue of Atlantic Studies features scholarship by Jeremy Rich, Solimar Otero, Laura Doyle, Carl Plasa, Jeffrey A. Fortin, Will Kaufman, and Alan Rice.

Editorial

When, on 25 March 1807 the London House of Commons passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it brought to a close two-hundred and forty-five years of slave trading in the English, and later British, empire. From the actions of John Hawkins to the Zong massacre of 1781 and after, the slave trade was the cold blood of a cadaverous Atlantic trade, flowing away from Africa and giving life to new Atlantic colonies and an old, but rejuvenating, European economy. On 9 June 1815, all signatories to the international treaty at the Congress of Vienna, which brought the period of post-French Revolution warfare to an end, agreed to the abolition of the slave trade, and in 1825 slave trading became a crime punishable by death under British law.

After the Last Slave Ship, the Sea Remains: Mobility and Atlantic Networks in Gabon, Ca. 1860-1920


Too often the black Atlantic has been conflated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, without consideration for the ways different parts of West and Central Africa became more closely tied together by Atlantic networks after 1860. This essay explores the formation of a multinational group of migrant workers in Gabon. Men from Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast found skilled work in Gabon. Gabonese men and women also moved to other colonies. While men entered high-paying jobs in the same manner as their counterparts from West Africa, young women often became the mistresses of Europeans.

Barrio, Bodega, and Botanica Aesthetics: The Layered Traditions of the Latino Imaginary


This essay explores notions of Nuyorican, or Diasporic Puerto Rican culture found in New York as expressed in literature, poetry, and memoir. The concept of the Latino imaginary is invoked to both explain and critically analyze the variety of transnational, especially Atlantic, inflections that are drawn upon by Puerto Rican authors locating a tropical identity in urban America through their writing. Yoruba religious culture, as reinterpreted by the Caribbean folk religion of Santería, becomes an avenue for exploring how transatlantic concepts of the journey and home help to formulate Nuyorican identity and community-making through literature. A comparative analysis of Diasporic traditions found in writing, religious practice, and cultural concepts between the Yoruba in Nigeria and Puerto Ricans in the U.S. illuminate the ways in which vernacular traditions render the social imagination as a pivotal strategy for gaining social agency in post-colonial contexts.

Reconstructing Race and Freedom in Atlantic Modernity: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative


This essay offers a dialectically intertextual reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative within a reconstructed account of Atlantic race history. As such it provides one kind of answer to Paul Gilroy's call to consider "the Atlantic as one, single complex unit of analysis" in order to build a "transnational and intercultural perspective." The essay pursues a transcultural Atlantic perspective that moves beyond strictly racial paradigms (those that would segregate, say, discussion of Anglo-British from Afro-British cultural legacies); yet it also brings into view how, paradoxically, it is in part their race narratives that link these traditions. That is, the essay argues that both black and white narratives pivot on the scene of a sea-crossing and an accompanying experience of self-loss that is recuperated, ultimately, under the sign of race. Anglo-authored texts from Oroonoko to Billy Budd regularly practice what Toni Morrison calls Africanism, subsuming the African-Atlantic story within their own Atlantic freedom plots, while African-Atlantic texts directly challenge this erasure and rewrite the Atlantic story -- yet also do so as the story of a race's quest for its freedom. The core historical contribution of the essay is to trace this dialectical relation between Anglo-Atlantic and African-Atlantic traditions (as the author refers to them) to the seventeenth-century revolutionary period in which the will to freedom was first defined as a racial trait. This history allows us to appreciate just how shrewdly Olaudah Equiano managed the paradoxes of the racialized Atlantic freedom quest.

"Stained with Spots of Human Blood": Sugar, Abolition and Cannibalism


This article explores representations of sugar in black and white abolitionist discourses of the 1780s and 1790s, taking Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) as its starting-point and frame of reference. As several critics have noted, one important feature of this text is its appropriation and reversal of the image of the racial other as cannibal. Such an image is a commonplace of colonial discourse from Columbus onwards, occurring, for example, on either side of Equiano's work, in the Caribbean historiography of Edward Long and Bryan Edwards. In The Interesting Narrative, however, the image is overturned, as it is the white subject who emerges as potential flesh-eater, threatening to consume both Equiano himself and his fellow slaves. At the same time, the strategies of appropriation and reversal Equiano uses are themselves taken up and reworked in the white abolitionist writings contemporary with his book's publication. While many instances of this can be found in the work of Mary Birkett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and others, this chapter focuses on just two texts, William Fox's well known 'An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum' (1791) and Andrew Burn's similarly titled but far less familiar sequel to Fox in 'A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar' (1792). In both of these texts, the consumption of sugar is represented as a form of anthropophagy, although in Fox's case the cannibalism involved is figurative, while in Burn's it becomes grotesquely literalized.

Paul Cuffe's Black Atlantic World, 1808-1817


This article examines how Paul Cuffe, a man of Native American and African ancestry, developed his views on the colonization of West Africa. Cuffe had long supported the concept of colonization, but later in life he injected his own blend of entrepreneurial zeal, evangelical zest, and moral righteousness into the cause. Cuffe saw an uncivilized population on his first trip to West Africa in 1811, an encounter that perplexed the devout Quaker. Convinced that a solid demographic foundation existed in Sierra Leone - consisting of African-Americans (via Nova Scotia), Jamaican Maroons, and African laborers - Cuffe believed that the Christianization of the people and the development of a free and legitimate triangular trade between West Africa, Great Britain, and the United States held the key to successfully building a free black nation. Finding ideological support for his colonization scheme proved to be less of a problem than securing proper funding for his ventures. Frustrated, Cuffe drew on his own moderate wealth acquired through his shipping business to fund the first of what he hoped to be many voyages bringing free African-Americans to colonize Africa. Shortly before his death in 1817, and with his personal wealth severely depleted, Cuffe emerged as a sage of sorts, advising a variety of political and social leaders interested in sending free blacks to Sierra Leone. The American Colonization Society, abolitionists in Great Britain, and African-American leaders such as Prince Saunders and James Forten all looked to the elder Cuffe for guidance on how to best implement the emerging colonization movement. Deeming himself too old to travel across the Atlantic, Cuffe hoped a younger generation could take charge of his mission to civilize and Christianize Africa.

On The Psychology Of Slavery Reparation: A Kleinian Reading


This essay draws on the theories of Melanie Klein and others in the British object relations school to explore the psychological dynamics of the slavery reparations debate in Africa, Britain, and the United States. Kleinian psychology emphasizes the ability to make reparation as an indicator of psychic maturity and argues for the importance of symbolism and creativity in the reparative gesture. At the same time, it situates the inability to make or accept reparation in the psychically immature stage known as the "paranoid-schizoid position." This essay applies Kleinian theory to the concept of "the transgenerational phantom" developed by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, and interrogates Klein's limitations through the critiques of C. Fred Alford, who argues for a leap from merely symbolic to practical reparation. In exploring the Kleinian concepts of legitimate reparation, mock reparation and manic defence, the essay aims to establish illuminating connections between individual and public psychology in relation to one of the most emotionally and morally charged areas of debate in the Atlantic world.

The Cotton that Connects, the Cloth that Binds: Manchester's civil war, Abe's statue, and Lubaina Himid's transnational polemic


This essay uses the full text of a recent interview conducted with the Zanzibar-born, Lancashire resident Lubaina Himid to explore her memorial vision as articulated in her work and her comments on it. It will discuss the varied historical contexts of the work, particularly its black Atlantic resonances. It expands on the discussion on Revenge (1992) in my Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (2003) by more fully fleshing out Himid's preoccupation with the links between workers and slaves as articulated in her Cotton.com (2003) which used fabric patterns and text to imagine communications between these wage and chattel labourers separated by the Atlantic. It discusses the repercussions of the American Civil War for Manchester workers and Abraham Lincoln's gratitude for the support of these workers in the face of the Cotton Famine caused by the embargo on Southern produced cotton. It shows the importance of the 1919 statue of Lincoln and its inscriptions for articulating this solidarity and the way that Himid uses it as inspiration for her contemporary work on Manchester and the memory of slavery and abolition.

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 04, Volume 4, Number 1 The French Atlantic
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