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

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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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, Volume 11, Number 4, Atlantic childhood and youth

This issue considers the ways in which childhood and youth have been shaped by Atlantic and global dynamics. It explores some of the methodological and theoretical challenges of writing a history of childhood and youth in the Global South.

Atlantic childhood and youth in global context: reflections on the Global South


This article is an introduction to the special issue dedicated to exploring the ways in which childhood and youth have been shaped by Atlantic and global dynamics. It explores some of the methodological and theoretical challenges of writing a history of childhood and youth in the Global South. The authors suggest that current theories which address the experiences of young people do not adequately consider the 10 historical specificities of childhood and youth in colonial contexts. In particular, they maintain that there are at least four distinctive factors that shaped young people's experiences. These include the racialization of childhood and youth, attempts to reshape the boundaries of childhood and youth to reflect the priorities of colonial states, the existence of colonial narratives which articulated childhood and youth in 15 terms of deviance and pathology, and the presence of non-Western notions about young people which acted in opposition to colonial impositions despite the severity of the power imbalance. Furthermore, the article argues that while there may be a need to develop a theory that works for children in the Global South, historians should by no means abandon empiricism or develop an over reliance on generalizations that do not 20 adequately consider historical context. Finally, the authors suggest that historians need to rely on nontraditional sources and develop new narratives for articulating the experiences of young people.

Atlantic World mining, child labor, and the transnational constructionof childhood in Imperial Britain in the mid-nineteenth century


This article argues that information about child laborers in mining industries outside of Britain greatly informed ideas about British childhood in the mid-nineteenth century, the period of much legislation and activation against child labor in mining in the UK. The Atlantic World, and particularly Brazil, was a major crucible for cultural formation in global mining industries and therefore ideas about "British childhood," especially with reference to mining, inhered racialized notions of white privilege In addition, the article shows how the contexts of mid-century gold rushes and East India Company activity in the Punjab also factored into notions of British childhood. "Childhood" was one category through which British imperial culture developed and worked to assert imperial authority at home and abroad within a global and ever-more-globalizing context. The article is based on English travel-writing on Brazil, surveys of the British press, and the records of the East India Company.

"A most horrifying maturity in crime": age, gender and juvenile delinquency in colonial Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising


This article examines the difficulties encountered by British colonial officials when attempting to determine the legal age of juvenile offenders in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1963). It identifies a main contradiction in the management of juvenile delinquents. In a trans-imperial project of reform, colonial governments across the British Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds created or expanded legislation with specific age limits. The practice of actually establishing the legal age of children and young people in local communities that relied on divergent criteria of classifying generations, however, was highly contested and subject to inconsistencies. This article highlights the complications of transporting metropolitan legal discourses to colonial settings. Using several case studies rooted in the Kenyan context, this article demonstrates that the categories of child, youth and juvenile were highly unstable and contentious categories. This was not a problem unique to Kenya, as colonial officials confronted the issue in other parts of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds. However, this article explores how the context of the Uprising heightened tensions surrounding intersections of gender, age and criminality.

Global child-saving, transatlantic maternalism, and the pathologization of Caribbean childhood, 1930s-1940s


In a rapid shift between the 1920s and 1940s, British imperial policy went from paying almost no attention to child-rearing among colonized populations to hailing family order among the colonized as essential to economic progress and social stability. The shift resulted from the intersection of processes occurring on three different scales: global scientific and ideological developments, transimperial gendered professionalization, and local social and political struggles. This paper illuminates those multi-scalar dynamics by examining a specific subfield of empire, the British Caribbean. As riots and general strikes in Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, and other colonies shook the imperial order in the late 1930s, metropolitan observers discovered the "native" family as the crucial incubator of proper working-class citizens. This article uses British Caribbean newspapers and unpublished Colonial Office correspondence generated by the 1938-39 West India Royal Commission (Moyne Commission) to make visible the global and transatlantic dialogs that brought the "problem" of the Caribbean family to the forefront of policy debate. Although imperial rule would not last, the pathologization of Caribbean parenting would prove painfully persistent.

The 1938-1939 Moyne Commission in Barbados: investigating the status of children


While the process of reform which took place in the British West Indies following widespread riots in the 1930s was clearly set in motion by the anti-colonial class struggle against authoritarian plantocratic regimes, it was ultimately mediated, muted, and mandated by the investigations and recommendations of the Royal Commission of Enquiry dispatched by the Colonial Office in the wake of the rebellion. In this paper, I focus on the intense inquiry into the status of children and young persons (with respect to family, health, education, employment, the penal system, and public welfare) conducted by the commissioners, specifically on the island of Barbados. I examine the commission's two week-long hearings as a site of negotiation, often contentious, among both Colonial Office-appointed and local reformers, local plantocratic elites, and (as a decidedly minority voice) local anti-colonial nationalist forces. The recordings of the commissioners' meetings with various groups, indicating both the direction of their questions and the answers they received (along with their own comments and repartees), offer an insight into the process by which reform was ultimately shaped and managed in Barbados and elsewhere, connecting the British West Indies to a more global liberal-imperial reform and restructuring project. The commissioners, acting as authoritative transatlantic vectors of liberal Imperialism, took aim at both the oligarchy and the dysfunctional culture of the laboring classes. The focus on Barbados yields particularly rich insights because of its British West India profile of a "double-edged exceptionalism" - with a system that was at once the most punitive and the most extensive provider of schooling with regard to children. I use the context of the Moyne Commission inquiry to examine both the historical record of the treatment of children and youth by the Barbadian state and the "managed" negotiation of reform under the stewardship of authorities of British liberal imperialism.

Using child labor to save souls: the Basel Mission in colonial Ghana, 1855–1900


The notion that Europeans had a duty to civilize 'slaves, sinners and savages' was used as a justification for nineteenth century colonialism and evangelization. Wherever European missionaries travelled, they carried the message that slavery and slave-trading were morally abhorrent. Despite deep anti-slavery sentiments in Britain, the abolition of slavery in colonial Ghana did not end the forced labour of children in the colony. The process and consequences of abolition in the Caribbean and in India shaped the steps that were taken when slavery was outlawed in colonial Ghana. Following the Emancipation Ordinance, the use of children as slaves was particularly common. The Basel Mission, in particular, often relied on the labour of unpaid children. These children were largely students at the mission schools who split their time between general education, Bible study and unpaid labour. The conflict between the missionaries' philosophical opposition to slavery and their need to support the continued growth of the Mission through trade, led to a complicated relationship between the missionaries and African children. Despite its opposition to slavery, the Basel Mission was often directly involved in mediating the exploitation of child labour through established African institutions such as slavery, pawnship and debt bondage.

Intrerview: The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child twenty-five years later: Sara Austin reflects on the journey.


Sarah Austin is the Director of the President's Office with World Vision Canada. She serves as the key adviser to the President. In her current role, she oversees strategy, planning and governance work of the World Vision board. In addition, she has more than 15 years of experience working in the non-profit sector and has focused on the most vulnerable children of the world. She is heavily involved in advocacy for the protection of children. Austin has led the global campaign for the Third Optional Protocol for the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) which was implemented in 2014. She also sits on the board of the Children's Aid Society for York Region in the Greater Toronto Area [Canada].

Other Issues

June 2015, Volume 12, Number 2
March 2015, Volume 12, Number 1
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 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