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

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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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2011 06, Volume 8, Number 2 Abolitionist places

Special Issue: Abolitionist Places; Guest Editors: Martha Schoolman and Jared Hickman

Editorial


Saltwater anti-slavery: American abolitionists on the Atlantic Ocean in the Age of Steam


Despite the explosion of interdisciplinary interest in the Atlantic World, the Atlantic Ocean itself is often quickly passed over in studies of transatlantic abolitionism. However, this essay briefly considers what we might learn about abolitionists from a perspective that treats the ocean as a "place" in its own right. American abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth-century made numerous Atlantic crossings, and the crossings themselves - often aboard transatlantic steamships - offered significant and unique opportunities for abolitionist activism and self-fashioning. The architecture of the transatlantic passenger ship created a particular set of opportunities and constraints for political activism, while the experience of being on the ocean afforded abolitionist travelers unique opportunities for personal reflections on their political ideals and their self- transformation. By focusing on "saltwater antislavery" - defined here as the experiences of nineteenth-century American abolitionists at sea - this essay thus draws attention to the general differences that place made both to abolitionist activism and identity. It also suggests the value of treating the ocean and the transoceanic passenger ship as scenes of historical action and experience, not simply as places always en route or adjacent to settings on land.

Out of Chatham: Abolitionism on the Canadian Frontier


In the 1850s, one region in Canada became the site of intense abolitionist activity: Canada West (Southwestern Ontario) and, prominently, the town of Chatham. Chatham can be described as a kind of border town as it was located close to the US-Canadian border; it was one of the terminal points of the Underground Railroad and one of the first Canadian destinations of abolitionists looking for ways to network. Noted abolitionists lived, worked, and passed through Chatham in the mid-nineteenth century. Therefore, in the 1850s, the town turned into what would later be called Canada's "black Mecca." This paper investigates the complicated story of Chatham as a mid-nineteenth century Canadian border town, a story that reverberates with the tension of real-world white racism and African American abolitionist intellectual life. For the fugitives and black residents, Chatham seems to have been a safe place of transit and reflection to ponder available future possibilities, as well as a place of belonging. In Chatham, African American educator and writer Mary Ann Shadd published the abolitionist newspaper The Provincial Freeman; Martin Delany, the "Father of Black Nationalism," who had a medical practice in Chatham, wrote his novel Blake and planned settlements in Africa; the Presbyterian minister William King founded the Elgin settlement for former slaves south of Chatham; John Brown plotted his rebellion at the so-called Chatham convention, also hoping to recruit blacks living in Canada for his attempt to found a black state on US-American soil. In the wake of the transnational turn in American Studies, I draw on "border studies" and "border theory," fields developed with a focus on the Mexican-US-American borderlands. In my context, it serves the analysis of the border situation to the North of the United States and allows me to draw attention to the overall desideratum of studying anti-slavery thought in a transnational context -- beyond borders as well as at the borders -- while also paying close attention to local practices and particularities, such as those discernible in the case of Chatham. In an exemplary fashion, this Canadian town is an abolitionist place, where in the mid-nineteenth century a black diasporic culture develops and interacts with various local and transnational forces.

Arithmetic and Afro-Atlantic Pastoral Protest: The Place of (In)numeracy in Gronniosaw and Equiano


Olaudah Equiano's autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) possesses the peculiar distinction of being both the first Afro-Atlantic autobiography written with a quantitatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan African voice as well as the earliest complex pastoral text by a black Atlantic author. Equiano departs from the simple pastoral pattern set by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw in A NARRATIVE OF THE Most Remarkable Particulars in the LIFE of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, AN AFRICAN PRINCE, As Related by HIMSELF. Integrating arithmetic into the literary pastoral in a way that his less numerate predecessor refuses to or simply cannot do, Equiano voices protest as a fellow citizen of the Atlantic, not merely as a victim of Atlantic trade. The first two sections of the essay review what quantitative skills Equiano obtains in the course of his Atlantic experiences and focus specifically on the Rule of Three, or Golden Rule, a widely known eighteenth-century arithmetical mechanism that Equiano uses to convert or translate commercial data and to measure fairness as he moves from place to place in the Atlantic world. The final three sections juxtapose the beginnings, middles, and ends of the two Afro-Atlantic texts, interpreting the role of numeracy or innumeracy in the authors' opening descriptions of Africa, their extended accounts of Atlantic life, and their projected notions of the future. The essay uses Gronniosaw as a foil to argue that Equiano's deployment of numeracy to assess questions of equity in small-scale, transnational trade makes his narrative a uniquely Atlantic kind of complex pastoral.

“On the spot”: travelling artists and abolitionism, 1770-1830


In the Age of Abolition, travelling artists played an important role as eyewitnesses of slave societies across the New World. While oil paintings appeared in the esteemed halls of the Royal Academy, watercolours and drawings were reproduced in a plethora of travel books and abolitionist literature. This paper argues for greater recognition of the unique role of the itinerant artist in the development of abolitionism, focussing in particular on the work of two European artists, Agostino Brunias (1730-1796), and Augustus Earle (1793-1838). Artists such as Earle viewed the New World as a boundless source of fresh material that could potentially propel them to fame and fortune. Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858), on the other hand, was conscious of contributing to a global scientific mission, a Humboldtian imperative that by the 1820s propelled him and others to travel beyond the traditional itinerary of the Grand Tour. Some artists were implicated in the very fabric of slavery itself, particularly those in the British West Indies such as William Clark (working 1820s) and Richard Bridgens (1785-1846); others, particularly those in Brazil, expressed strong abolitionist sentiments. Fuelled by evangelical zeal to record all aspects of the New World, these artists recognised the importance of representing the harsh realities of slave life. Unlike those in the metropole who depicted slavery (most often in caustic satirical drawings), many travelling artists believed strongly in the evidential value of their images, a value attributed to their global mobility. The paper examines the varied and complex means by which visual culture played a significant and often overlooked role in the political struggles that beset the period.

Abolitionist Archipelago: Pre- and Post-Emancipation Islands of Slavery and Emancipation


Framing island-space as one of the black freedom struggle's pivotal formal topographies, this article maps an abolitionist archipelago, or a chain of freedom-oriented islands repeating through space, time, and writing. As the first section outlines, the island of Hispaniola, upon which Haiti established itself by means of black revolution, emerged as a generative insular site within the abolitionist project. Nineteenth-century contestations surrounding abolitionism constructed Haiti as a social laboratory, with proliferating versions of Haiti's island-based experiment in black nationality advanced as arguments for and against the cause of black freedom on the American continent. Largely constituted by competing representations of Haiti's insular experiment, this portion of the abolitionist archipelago had important ramifications even after North American slavery came to an end. As the article's second section outlines, these ramifications become especially apparent in writer Richard Wright's repeated reliance on island-space to theorize black hope for liberation from slavery's enduring legacies. Linking itself to abolitionism's nineteenth-century island chain, Wright's archipelago emerges in his reflective and expressive writings ranging from 12 Million Black Voices (1941) to The Color Curtain (1956) to "Five Episodes," the latter of which is the published portion of Wright's still unpublished novel "Island of Hallucinations." Wright emerges as a master deployer and deconstructor of the insular form's abolitionist legacies. In mapping Wright's islands and nineteenth-century abolitionism's islands as subsets of (to borrow a term from Antonio Benítez-Rojo) a larger meta-archipelago, this article introduces an increased geoformal attentiveness to what generally has been the geoculturally-oriented project of tracing the dreams of freedom that have animated diasporic struggles against slavery and its legacies.

Tracing Slavery and Abolition's Routes and Viewing Inside the Invisible: The Monumental Landscape and the African Atlantic


This essay analyses Lubaina Himid's satirical performance piece What are Monuments For ... Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map (2009) and juxtaposes it with other memorial pieces. She uses collaged additions to manipulate a glossy guide book to the world cities of London and Paris to imagine what might have been if the contributions of African diasporan peoples to the capitals had been fully taken on board in the memorial landscape over the last three centuries. Her commentary in the same self-satisfied style of the touristic voyeur populates London and Paris's history in radical new ways. Through image and text, she subverts the imperial national narrative and makes the landscape speak its hidden and diverse history. The city's amnesia and her act of remembrance are counterpoints that create new multiple possibilities in the often monological cityscape. This essay will argue that Himid is working against the apolitical notion that a city gives up its meaning without any work on the part of its citizens. The essay shows how her work is related to that of Yinka Shonibare whose dramatic Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (2010) is the latest work to be introduced on the Trafalgar Square fourth plinth. Like Himid's work, Shonibare introduces ideas of the absence of black historical memorialisation in London. The paper will discuss Himid's work in the light of recent London, Paris and Amsterdam memorials for victims of the slave trade by Michael Visocchi and Lemn Sissay, Fabrice Hyber and Erwin de Vries. These works exemplify how national memorials can be stymied by conservatism and how municipal memorials can be undermined by apathy when there is an absence of community involvement. The paper will use the author's theory of "guerrilla memorialisation" developed from theoretical paradigms around memory and memorials by Pierre Nora, Édouard Glissant, James Young, Stuart Hall and Paul Ricoeur to show that the right kind of political response to amnesia can make art that is effective and dynamic, enabling nation states, cities and localities to create memorial landscapes that are affecting, truly radical and worthy of a transatlantic abolitionist legacy.

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 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
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