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2003 | |
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quarterly | |
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English | |
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History, Literature, Cultural Studies |
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1478-8810 | |
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MESEA, Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas | |
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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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2004 10, Volume 1, Number 2
The October 2004 issue of Atlantic Studies features scholarship by Marcus Wood, Emma Christopher, Andrew Taylor, Trevor Burnard, Jonathan Highfield, Adrienne Scullion.
Celebrating the Middle Passage: Atlantic slavery, Barbie and the birth of the Sable Venus
This paper concerns the fictionalisation of the phenomenon of the 'middle passage' within Atlantic cultures. Scholarly construction of the middle passage has tended to be grounded in the analysis of abuse, guilt and suffering. The ground rules for this set of cultural emphases were laid down in England in the late eighteenth century, and then seeped through the Americas. Yet much may be gained by moving away from this inheritance, by looking at the rhetoric that, in different ways, celebrates the processes of the middle passage. The majority of celebratory rhetoric was written by slavery apologists for a pro-slavery readership. Isaac Teale's strange poem 'The Voyage of the Sable Venus,' written in 1765 and published in 1793, together with an accompanying engraving by the celebrated artist Thomas Stothard, is used as a test case to think through some ironies and paradoxes thrown up by art which injects sexualised humour into the contemplation of the middle passage. The tendency to ironise, and even joke about, the processes of sexuality and suffering embodied within the experience of the middle passage, is then taken out from eighteenth-century England and into contemporary Brazil. The discussion moves on to meditate upon the meanings of the sea-Goddess Iemanjá within the cult religions of Salvador Bahia. The piece ends by speculating on what it means when the icon of American subject womanhood, the Barbie doll, is taken over to Brazil and transformed into the African sea-Venus, and protector of slaves, Iemanjá.
Editorial
Celebrating the Middle Passage: Atlantic slavery, Barbie and the birth of the Sable Venus
This paper concerns the fictionalisation of the phenomenon of the "middle passage" within Atlantic cultures. Scholarly construction of the middle passage has tended to be grounded in the analysis of abuse, guilt and suffering. The ground rules for this set of cultural emphases were laid down in England in the late eighteenth century, and then seeped through the Americas. Yet much may be gained by moving away from this inheritance, by looking at the rhetoric that, in different ways, celebrates the processes of the middle passage. The majority of celebratory rhetoric was written by slavery apologists for a pro-slavery readership. Isaac Teale's strange poem "The Voyage of the Sable Venus," written in 1765 and published in 1793, together with an accompanying engraving by the celebrated artist Thomas Stothard, is used as a test case to think through some ironies and paradoxes thrown up by art which injects sexualised humour into the contemplation of the middle passage. The tendency to ironise, and even joke about, the processes of sexuality and suffering embodied within the experience of the middle passage, is then taken out from eighteenth-century England and into contemporary Brazil. The discussion moves on to meditate upon the meanings of the sea-Goddess Iemanjá within the cult religions of Salvador Bahia. The piece ends by speculating on what it means when the icon of American subject womanhood, the Barbie doll, is taken over to Brazil and transformed into the African sea-Venus, and protector of slaves, Iemanjá.
Another Head of the Hydra? Slave trade sailors and militancy on the African coast
This paper looks at the activities of the sailors on board British and North American slave ships on the coast of West Africa. It argues that the West African coast was a central part of the Atlantic arena, where seamen deserted from their ships, resisted the authority of their captain, and occasionally took more extreme action of taking their ships and turning pirate. They did this not in isolation from local African workers, but rather in connection with them
"Mixture is a secret of the English island": Transatlantic Emerson and the location of the intellectual
This essay examines Emerson's position as a public intellectual engaging with concepts of national identity in the transatlantic framework of his travel narrative English Traits (1856). Rather than reading Emerson simply (and reductively) as the seductive avatar of an American cultural nationalism, I propose instead a pattern of assertion and retreat that the comparative perspective of English Traits allows. I examine the ways in which the idea of the "intellectual" has been defined in the work of William James and Edward Said, specifically the relationship between the life of the mind and institutional forces, and suggest that Said's model of "contrapuntal" reading can be applied usefully to Emerson's aesthetic and ideological practices. The essay addresses the tension between intellectual transcendence and intellectual location in terms of Emerson's own engagement with social institutions (such as the lyceum network) and his uneasy relationship within ideological ones associated with American exceptionalism. Both the formal structuring of English Traits and its cultural analysis reveal an Emerson unable to decide between the relative merits of England and the United States, and the book closes with an implied rejection of national categories altogether.
Passangers Only: The extent and significance of absenteeism in eighteenth century Jamaica
Contemporaries and modern historians see absenteeism as a defining feature of British colonisation in the West Indies. Moreover, they have imbued absenteeism with a host of negative meanings, suggesting that it was the principal reason why West Indian colonies did not develop into settler societies as in British North America. Looking at Jamaica, this article examines the extent of absenteeism in the mid-eighteenth century and concludes that it was not as considerable as it has been presented in the literature. In addition, it assesses the long-term significance of the phenomenon and questions whether absenteeism was especially socially and politically deleterious.
The Dreaming Quipucamayoq: Myth and landscape in Wilson Harris’ The Dark Jester
In Wilson Harris' novel The Dark Jester conquistador history in the Americas and Andean and Buddhist myths are linked in a type of quipu, a pre-colonial Incan narrative constructed from knotted strings. Exploring these ideas, Harris' narrator uncovers an architectural passage into alternate histories through the motif of the Lost City. The dark jest of the title is a carnivalesque transformative moment at the point of death, and the narrator, looking through both Atahualpa's and Tupac Amaru's eyes as they are executed, sees the genealogy of Indian resistance which continues in the struggles in Chiapas and the Andes. Harris' novel suggests an alternate history of the cultural exchange between Europe and the Americas, built not upon nationalist myths or determinist global colonialism, but resting rather on the receptive ideas of Incan and Buddhist religion, and argues that the affects of that interaction are still in process and are far more complicated than neocolonial narratives suggest.
Byrne and the Bogie Man: Experiencing American popular culture in Scotland
This essay argues that American popular culture, economically so dominant and socially so prevalent, remains open to re-use and reversal when exposed to the unique and active discourses of the 'target' culture. With reference to a range of texts and representations - including comic books, television and stage drama - this essay considers how modern Scottish culture has used images and motifs of American popular culture, transforming them wholly, and rendering them uniquely and identifiably 'Scottish.' The essay focuses on the example of Scottish playwright and fine artist John Byrne, with key exemplification being draw from his drama cycle The Slab Boys Trilogy - The Slab Boys (1978), Cuttin' a Rug (1979) and Still Life (1982) - and two television series, Tutti Frutti (BBC, 1987) and Your Cheatin' Heart (BBC, 1990). The essay discusses the impact and utilisation of American popular culture in Scottish popular culture in general - and on Byrne's work in particular - in relation to two important sets of representation: the western; and, the gangster film and narratives of the hard-boiled detective. These are initially discussed in relation to two Scottish cartoon series: Bud Neill's 1950's cartoon strip Lobey Doser, and the 1980's cartoon serial The Bogie Man. Referring to these two comic strips, as a segue to analysing the work of a dramatist and painter, underlines both the general mutability of popular culture and the specific impact of American popular culture in both the visual and linguistic culture of Scotland. From these examples, the essay concludes that popular culture will negotiate with the various cultural and artistic systems in its worldview. Therefore, within Scottish culture, such processes of hybridisation transform the raw material of, for example, the Hollywood movie into a distinctive and locally specific expression of popular culture
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
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 04, Volume 1, Number 1