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

2013 12, Volume 10, Number 4

Editorial


Thinking Atlantically: a conversation with Philip D. Morgan


Although he may never have set out to become an expert in the field of Atlantic history, Philip D. Morgan, Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is today one of the leading specialists on the history of the Atlantic world. His most recent edited collections - Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009; co-edited with Jack P. Greene) and The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2011; co-edited with Nicholas Canny) - are incisive contributions toward bringing cohesion and definition to a historical subdiscipline whose contours have been in dispute ever since Jacques Godechot and Robert Roswell Palmer staked a claim to the field more than nearly 60 years ago, if not long before. A prize for his article on Caribbean slavery and livestock in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1995 was a meek harbinger for the veritable cascade of prizes and honors he won after publishing his magnum opus several years later: Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), a thorough and painstakingly researched study of plantation life that compared the Chesapeake region with its Carolinian counterpart, was awarded the coveted Bancroft Prize, Frederick Douglass Prize, and two other prizes from the American Historical Association, amongst other national and international recognition. Since then he has co-edited numerous volumes with the field's leading scholars and has continued to deal with central questions related to the Atlantic, including labor, slavery and the economics of plantation life, resistance and power, migration, and geography. His current project on the contours of the Caribbean and its historical formation as a distinct oceanic space will continue to probe many of the themes Morgan has grappled with since these earlier works, expanding no doubt on others. Over a series of conversations between Vancouver and Baltimore, Paris and New Orleans, Phil Morgan and I discussed his early interest in Atlantic history, his ideas about future directions for the field, and the rationale behind his most recent publications, certain to affect the course of the discipline in the short, medium, and long terms.

The constitution of empire: place and bodily health in the eighteenth-century Atlantic


For eighteenth-century British Atlantic colonists, bodily health depended in large part on the surrounding environment. Aware that the West Indies and the Georgia and Carolina lowcountry had climates very different from Britain's, voyagers who traveled to the tropical and semitropical climates of the Americas believed that their bodies would need to adapt to the new environment. While much of the existing scholarship emphasizes the unhealthy nature of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, this article examines the importance of health as crucial to the formation of the British Atlantic world. Rather than seeing these hot climates as uniformly unhealthy for British bodies, planters and other colonists held a much more nuanced view of the land, taking into account both microclimates and individual differences among people's bodies and constitutions. Settlers and government officials considered the local environment and evaluated particular places for their effects on people's health as they determined the locations and layouts of towns, cities, and residences. Charleston, Carolina's capital city, moved a few miles from its original location in accordance with the Lords Proprietors' demands that settlers find a healthier spot, and the location of Jamaica's seat of government was the subject of heated debate during the 1750s. Health proved to be a crucial variable in the establishment of towns, and it also determined where individual people chose to settle - some found their bodies did not suit the Caribbean climate, while others determined their health was better in the heat than it had ever been in England. It was far from unusual for people to travel around the empire for health reasons, and considerations of health helped to direct the movement and settlement of people around

Cosmopolitan colonists: gentlemen's pursuit of cosmopolitanism and hierarchy in British American taverns


This article investigates the tavern interactions of colonial elites to gain a deeper understanding of the multiple meanings of cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century. It reveals that the pursuit of cosmopolitanism helped colonial gentlemen entrench their own notions of social exclusion and national superiority to become "citizens of the world." Such an identity was indeed based upon genteel conceptions of exclusivity and nationalism as much as - if not more than - the goal of a wider humanism. Gentlemen's experiences in taverns - perhaps the most widespread, accessible, and globally-connected public spaces in the colonies - highlight the complications and opportunities of cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth-century British American colonies as well as providing an informative lens through which to understand larger processes of Enlightenment, globalization, social conflict, and gentility. Aspiring cosmopolites could barricade themselves in private tavern rooms (well-stocked with books, maps, prints, and consumer goods) to engage in sophisticated clubs, debate cosmopolitan matters with men from across the globe, sip exotic beverages such as coffee, tea, chocolate, and wine, and above all distinguish themselves as separate, superior members of the world community. Ultimately, this article reveals that colonial gentlemen utilized taverns to adjust cosmopolitanism to fit their goals of gentility and exclusivity.

"See the jails open and the thieves arise": Joseph Mountain's revolutionary Atlantic and consolidating early national Connecticut


The primary source for this essay is Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain, a Negro, Who was executed at New-Haven, on the 20th Day of October, 1790, For a Rape (1790), transcribed anonymously by a young New Haven attorney, David Daggett. It is set within the broad context of the late eighteenth-century revolutionary Atlantic and opens the inter-racial possibilities London and the Atlantic then afforded. After he departed his birth home in Philadelphia in 1775, the stern racial and social boundaries Joseph Mountain learned in Philadelphia collapsed as he entered a new world of proletarian interracial opportunities on the sea and especially in London where he embraced the tentative expansion of black freedom heralded by the Somerset decision of 1772. The essay explores in part the textual tension between Daggett's and Mountain's representation of the meaning of these Atlantic experiences and the nature of the impact they wielded upon him once he fatefully journeyed to Connecticut in 1790. Daggett argues that his supposedly corrupt English experiences with interracial license and endemic class warfare led him ineluctably to commit rape in New Haven. The essay examines this event and Mountain's conviction, concluding with near certainty that the rape never occurred. However, Daggett and his influential colleagues in the state's post-revolutionary elite were certain that it had. Nevertheless, sharp contention arose within this elite with partisans in Hartford castigating Daggett and his coterie in New Haven for a grossly self-interested use of Sketches and Mountain's execution to advance their own political ends. They indicted Sketches as a prime example of the new sensational crime literature that catered to democratic prurience and empowered its aspirations. Coming on the heels of Shays and innovations in Rhode Island, fears of democratic insurgency pervaded the state's elite. Yet the ongoing consolidation of their post-revolutionary rule was marked by internal contests over not only how to manage that insurgency, but even who constituted it. This essay highlights that elite anxiety and Mountain's relationship to it as Connecticut's elite sought to stabilize its still very young post-revolutionary rule.

"The most perfect picture of Cuban slavery": transatlantic bricolage in Manzano's and Madden's Poems by a Slave


This article reexamines Richard Robert Madden's English language translation of Juan Francisco Manzano's slave testimony and its publication as part of Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba (1840) in order to assess how our critical investment in the slave narrative as a generic form has restricted the scope of our readings. By looking at the publication history and confused, ambivalent reception of the antislavery tract in Great Britain, I argue that Poems by a Slave actively resists the nascent generic form of the early slave narrative - a single-author memoir buttressed by white-authored paratexts. Ultimately, I refigure the publication as a bricolated slave narrative, assembled piecemeal out of available writings and circulating as a multi-author portrait of Cuban slavery. This print cultural reading of the volume shifts discourse away from the ways in which Manzano's "voice" has been manipulated and appropriated, foregrounding instead how the intratextuality of Poems by a Slave highlights moments of discord among the collected texts, and opens new avenues for analyzing power relations among contributing authors in the slave narrative.

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 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
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