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History, Literature, Cultural Studies |
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Routledge, Taylor & Francis | |
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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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2011 09, Volume 8, Number 3
Editorial
''What Town's this Boy?'': English civic politics, Virginia's urban debate, and Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter
This essay explores Aphra Behn's play The Widow Ranter as evidence for a transatlantic discussion about urban political culture in the later seventeenth century. The play, written in 1688, is a heavily fictionalised dramatisation of a rebellion that had gripped the English colony of Virginia 12 years earlier. The rebel leader, Nathaniel Bacon, had burned down the colony's only city, Jamestown, and Behn's retelling of the story pays particular attention to this urban inferno. The historical Bacon's arson can be understood as a product of a longstanding dispute between ordinary Virginia settlers and the colony's governor over the particular ways in which town development was being pursued. But this colonial dispute was rooted in the contested nature of urban life in contemporary England, where the charter rights and freedoms of towns and cities were being challenged by royal efforts to consolidate control over the realm. This English conflict led to the circulation around the Atlantic world of contradictory definitions of the ideal political and social constitution for a town. This essay argues that Behn, a staunch royalist, recognised these strands at work in the events in Virginia. She dramatised the rebellion as a conflict between Bacon, the legitimate cavalier patriarch of Jamestown, and corrupt urban authorities. In this way, Behn used the government, social sphere, and eventual conflagration of Jamestown to comment on the status of the urban debate in England. The Widow Ranter, therefore, is not simply an English vision of the exotic colonial world but part of a circum-Atlantic debate over urban political culture in an era of expanding state and imperial control.
When Parisian liberals spoke for Haiti: French anti-slavery discourses on Haiti under the Restoration, 1814-30
This article examines French anti-slavery discourses on Haiti during the Restoration. Integrating anti-slavery struggle into the political contestation between ultra-royalists and liberals during the Restoration, this project investigates how the political imperative of oppositional liberals influenced their antislavery politics and induced them to vindicate Haiti. This article focuses on three questions about the role of Haiti in anti-slavery discourses. First, in what terms did the French abolitionists try to measure and advertise the results of this first abolition of slavery? Second, what does their championing of the perfectibility of Africans tell us about their ideas of race and color? And third, how did the birth of Haiti challenge the old colonial order and generate new ideas about the future of the French Empire? This article argues that those anti-slavery discourses vindicating Haiti were deeply ambivalent. Critiques of slavery, color prejudice, and colonialism were entangled with the assumptions of colonial discourses. They were also dominated by notions of the progress of history in which France occupied a privileged place by virtue of its superior civilization and Revolution.
Rites of passage: The coffin ship as a site of immigrants' identity formation in Irish and Irish American fiction, 1855-85
The statue of Annie Moore and her brothers in Cobh, Ireland, is one of the many lieux de me´moire which seek to crystallise the recollections of the Irish exodus to North America between 1845 and 1900. Scholars have examined the monuments erected to commemorate the massive exodus of 1.8 million Irish to Canada and the United States. Hitherto, however, very little attention has been paid to a transatlantic corpus of fiction, mainly written by the so-called ''Famine generation,'' which recollects the conditions of Irish immigrants to the New World. These novels and stories, by Irish writers at home who witnessed the outflux of population as well as authors who had migrated themselves to escape starvation and poverty, not only describe their migrant characters' conditions of departure from the homeland and settlement in North American communities. An equally central role is reserved for the transition from home to diaspora, on-board the so-called ''coffin ships.'' While the texts remember the fearful realities of poor hygiene and high mortality rates on-board, the voyage also has a symbolic function, featuring as a rite of passage for the characters and their sense of ethnic identity. This article discusses several examples of the iconic image of the coffin ship in Irish and Irish American fiction on immigration, written between 1855 and 1885. In these texts, the storms that the immigrant characters have to endure during their passage at sea prefigure the trials the characters will face in the urban New World. Moreover, the coffin ships represent microcosmic Irish ''imagined communities'' that function as utopian heterotopia where the cultural clashes experienced in the homeland and the pending assimilation in the New World have to be negotiated.
Of Sartre, race, and rabies: ''Anti-Americanism'' and the transatlantic politics of intellectual engagement
Jean-Paul Sartre has been called ''the most prominent anti-American'' in France, and his critiques of US society and foreign policy have been attributed to his ingrained anti-Americanism. This article questions the utility of this concept in understanding Sartre's political engagements, for he does not fit into standard definitions of anti-Americanism that emphasize special hostility and general resentment toward the United States. Instead, Sartre's writings about the United States reveal an enthusiastic embrace of contemporary American culture, while his sharpest critiques focused on two issues that were lifelong concerns of his, regardless of national context: racial discrimination and the arbitrary exercise of power. Despite his period of fellow traveling that made him sympathetic to the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, Sartre's political biography shows that he was much more interested in the deficiencies of French society and foreign policy than he was in America's failings. The article concludes that Sartre can be better understood as a member of a multiracial, transatlantic community of engaged intellectuals who struggled, and sometimes failed, to find an activist Marxism that was compatible with individual integrity.
Review Essay: Beyond the Emerald Isle: Studying the Irish Atlantic
The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (2009), edited b
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 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