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)

.

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

     

Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

ALTTEXT

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.

 

» Visit Journal Web Site

2011 03, Volume 8, Number 1

Sloth bones and anteater tongues: Collecting American nature in the Hispanic world (1750-1808)


This article explores the collection and display of natural history specimens in eighteenth-century Spain. Focusing primarily on the zoological collections in the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural, it examines the mechanisms through which naturalists in Madrid procured natural objects from across Spain's vast empire, which included both state-sponsored scientific expeditions and written decrees soliciting material and information from colonial subjects. The article considers why Spanish bureaucrats serving in the Americas responded to repeated demands for specimens to exhibit in the metropolitan museum, and assesses the extent to which their offerings corresponded to the wishes of museum curators back in Europe. It argues that the collection of natural knowledge and physical specimens in Bourbon Spain represented not only a major logistical challenge, but a constant dialogue between Spain and its American colonies, in which metropolitan naturalists and colonial correspondents sought objects, information and recognition.

Translating the vernacular: Indigenous and African knowledge in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic


Encounters between diverse peoples and knowledges were one of the defining features of the early modern Atlantic world. This article examines some of the implications of these encounters by focusing on the place of indigenous and African knowledge in eighteenth-century natural histories of British plantation societies (from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean). It builds on recent scholarship to argue that while colonials acknowledged the authority of their black and indigenous informants as experts about American nature, they represented such expertise as merely the raw materials out of which they fashioned new natural knowledge. Naturalists credited their informants not as individual authors, but as members of groups whose collective experiences and observations gave them unique understanding of New World nature. Colonial naturalists appropriated such expertise while simultaneously asserting that it represented mere know-how, rather than genuine knowledge. Colonials suggested that their own ways of knowing were necessary in order to turn the collective know-how of enslaved and free Africans and Amerindians into stable, universal knowledge suitable for enlightened European audiences. By translating vernacular knowledge into a universal key, colonials suggested that they became authors of new matters of fact about American nature.

Redemptive violence and stuttering across the Atlantic: The Who's ''My Generation'' and Herman Melville's Billy Budd in historical perspective


Heard on the radio or played live, the song ''My Generation'' (1965) by the British rock band The Who could startle or enthrall. It is possible to make sense of the song's curiously stuttering lyrics, loudness and distortion, along with the smashing of instruments that ended the band's live act, as the product of long and short-term historical developments. This article offers a historical interpretation of the stutter and violence of ''My Generation'' by pairing it with a literary counterpart: Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1924). A fumbling for words and a reflex for violence mark Melville's famous story of a young sailor who strikes and kills his nemesis, Claggart. The song and the novella describe young men unable to put emotions into words, a frustration that fuels a violent outburst. Melville inscribed the stutter as a function of deep consternation from a character for whom a physical blow is the only way for ''right'' to prevail. The stutter of ''My Generation'' comes from the modern young punk, brazen in attitude and yet deeply unsure of himself. Billy Budd and ''My Generation'' were products of historical settings that have obvious differences. Yet, the surprising blend of stuttering and violence in the two illustrates parallel historical developments across the North Atlantic during the last two centuries which cast certain acts of violence as ''redemptive.'' These developments combined with political, technological and commercial developments to create transatlantic fans receptive to surprising juxtapositions like Billy Budd and ''My Generation.'' The similarities in the novella and the song are signs of a distinctly modern receptiveness to youthful, stuttering, redemptive violence that has roots in the legacies of the French Revolution, the Burke-Paine dialogue and the idea of the ''angry young man.''

Plunging into the Atlantic: The oceanic order of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick


This essay analyzes how Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851) divorces itself from a land-based world view by embracing the exploratory potential of the ocean. Melville uses the ocean as a perspective from which to examine the world. The text's embrace of this oceanic perspective foregrounds the distinction between two empirical concepts that organize an environment's space: mundus (world) and nomos (order). Using Carl Schmitt's discussion of these concepts, along with his theorization of them as central to understanding ''the nomos of the earth,'' the author argues that Melville's text examines the nature of oceanic space on a narrative level via Ishmael's many digressions and shifting perceptions. The analysis integrates Schmitt's theories with Immanuel Wallerstein's macroanalytical optic of world-systems analysis, which offers a comparable conceptualization of global space. As a novel written from the point of view of life on the ocean, Moby-Dick can move fluidly to analyze topics and entire philosophies central to the nineteenth-century world. The first three sections (''Etymology,'' ''Extracts,'' and ''Loomings'') emphasize that the novel contains no single fixed point of departure, but instead several entangled beginnings that readers must negotiate. While discussing the rest of the novel, the author draws particular attention to Ishmael's comment concerning why he wants to go whaling: ''I want to see the world.'' Captain Peleg misinterprets this statement because he remains tied to a land-based world view, whereas Ishmael has embraced the expansive potential of an oceanic perspective. In the end, the nomos of Melville's text outlines an oceanic order that contains an endless flow of information.

''What did any of it have to do with race?'': Raced chronotopes in Cristina Garcia's Monkey Hunting


The question quoted in the title of this article expresses the bafflement of Chen Pan -- the main character in Cristina Garcia's novel Monkey Hunting (2003), who migrates from China to Cuba in 1857 in search of riches -- as he witnesses the systematic killing of Afro-Cuban rebels during the 1912 Race War. Contrary to Chen Pan's naive outlook on race relations during the formation of the Cuban nation, Garcia's novel, as the author of this article argues, offers detailed accounts of unequal access to civil rights and citizenship due to emerging patterns of racialization that overshadow the relationships among the novel's individual characters and their relationship to the various geopolitical locations they occupy. The author also seeks to explore in this article Garcia's treatment of transnational relations in global societies. It is proposed that Monkey Hunting illustrates the interconnectedness of American, Asian, African and European epistemologies, and their relevance to debates about civil rights and citizenship in a global context. This is the case for Chen Pan's migration to Cuba as a contract laborer; his love relationship with Lucrecia, an Afro-Cuban slave whom he buys and then frees; their son Lorenzo, who moves to China to study herbal medicine and, while there, has three children with his second wife in China; their grandson Pipo, a short-order cook at the American naval base in Guantanamo; and, finally, his great-grandson Domingo, who enlists in the US Army and fights in the Vietnam War. Exceeding the boundaries of teleological narratives by emphasizing the tension between diasporic identity and state citizenship, the individual migration stories in Garcia's novel raise issues about identity and belonging in a global, but nonetheless raced, world.

Desecrated bodies/phantom limbs: Post-traumatic reconstructions of corporeality in Haiti/Rwanda


In this article, the author wants to make a bold claim, and it is simply this: that in the aftermath of the great earthquake of 12 January 2010, which obliterated much of urban Haiti, it is possible to trace the systemic nature of Franco-American violence ranging from dismemberments in periods of colonization (with reference specifically to Belgium and Rwanda) and neocolonial juntas (specifically in the connection between the USA and Haiti), to the massive numbers of amputations performed in the days and weeks following this cataclysm. The author argues for the need to link post-colonial infrastructural violence with the decimation produced by ''natural'' cataclysms (here with reference, for example, to the structural harms produced by the United States Agency for International Development or United Nations-sponsored sweatshop schemes) and how corporeal injuries suffered by virtue of natural disasters represent a harm not only to the bodies of citizens but to the national body politic. Ultimately, this essay incorporates a consideration of historical and contemporary visualizations of discrete Rwandan/Haitian bodies that have been made to stand in for unnatural/''natural'' cataclysms (genocide/earthquake victims) and seeks to present the Haitian/Rwandan response of dignified, remembering representations of Haitian/Rwandan bodies and lives.

Book Review: Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History


Book Review: From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain


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
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
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