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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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2005 10, Volume 2, Number 2
The October 2005 issue of Atlantic Studies features scholarship by Douglas R. Egerton, Philip Levy, Victor Enthoven, David V. Trotman, Jeremy Smith, and Andreas Hess.
Editorial
Caribbean dreams, Haitian nightmares: Race and class in the competing visions of Denmark Vesey and Simón Bolívar
Trained, as most of us are, to focus on a small corner of the globe during an equally small moment in time, historians too often miss the larger interconnections that help explain regional racial identity and specific types of class formations in the Atlantic world. Denmark Vesey, for example, is too often depicted merely as an "enslaved rebel leader" (despite being free for two decades prior to his execution) rather than a black abolitionist, or a man of the black Atlantic. In the same way, Simón Bolívar is forced into equally simplistic categories. He is a general and a politician, but rarely a resident of Paris at the time of Bonaparte's coronation, or a visitor to Vesey's South Carolina, or a refugee in Haiti. But in their later years, and especially in the early 1820s, they both thought much about events in Haiti, and their competing views of the black nation say much about the shifting boundaries of race and class in the western Atlantic. Conventional wisdom holds that for much of the late colonial era and early national periods in both North and South America, the connection between race and class can scarcely be overemphasized. But scholars now acknowledge that racial definitions are always being defined and redefined, just as class status is never static. Nothing better illustrates this understanding than the way these two individuals viewed the possibilities, as well as the dangers, inherent in Haiti's destruction of old correlations and new perceptions of class structures. If elite whites regarded Haiti as a terrifying example of a world turned upside down, Vesey evidently regarded the black nation as the sort of country where bright, aggressive, ambitious men like himself could prosper and advance in rank. Historians, with a few notable exceptions, have been dismissive and patronizing of post-1804 Haiti, with its governor-generals, emperors, and presidents for life. But as a former resident of Danish St. Thomas, French Saint Domingue, and patriarchal South Carolina (and, most likely, as the child of West Africans), Vesey had never actually seen a truly egalitarian society. If the antislavery ever harbored the sort of communalistic ideals that scholars wish to impose upon black abolitionists, there is now no evidence for it. Vesey appeared to care little about the fact that post-Louverture Haiti was both politically undemocratic and class based. With Christophe's eradication of the blancs and the gens de couleur, race was no longer a component in its class structure, except to the extent that the old order's racial structure was turned upside down. For an exceedingly entrepreneurial businessman like Vesey, Boyer's country was not just liberty or a convenient safe haven; it was the very picture of class mobility.
Man-eating and menace on Richard Hore’s expedition to America
This article is a rereading of Richard Hakluyt's chronicling of Richard Hore's 1536 New World expedition which brought a group of sailors and almost thirty-five well-heeled "tourists" to the Labrador coast where near-starvation allegedly drove them to man-eating. The study situates the story of the crew's privations within larger themes of class and culture in the then emerging Atlantic world. Rather than being a simple case of desperate men driven to even more desperate measures, this analysis emphasizes man-eating, or more precisely talking about man-eating, as a vehicle for a class-based dispute among this unique crew. This use of man-eating menacing mirrors other early modern European examples and shows how the Atlantic discourse on savage "cannibalism" could turn inward in the right situations. Inspired by William Arens's work on man-eating, this article turns a skeptical lens on the events of 1536 to suggest that the documentation for the expedition's man-eating moment (a seeming classic case of survival cannibalism) is actually quite vague and murky. In fact, the fragmentary narrative contains only references to cannibalism and no actual witnessed act, no site-specific confession, and none of the rhetoric of ritual which surround other Atlantic mariners' man-eating. In short, we cannot be sure that the so-called "Cannibal Cruise" even had any real man-eaters in its company -- only that the conditions were right for man-eating, and that stories and fears of cannibal crew members ran rampant during the crew's Labrador ordeal. What we see are Englishmen of very different class backgrounds talking about man-eating, and focusing this heavily freighted discussion, not on Native peoples as was so common, but instead on one another.
Dutch crossings: Migration between the Netherlands and the New World, 1600—1800
This essay presents an overview of two hundred years of demographic consequences of Dutch presence in the Western Hemisphere. It starts with an overview of the Dutch Atlantic World and its settlements. The second section deals with the European Atlantic migration from the Dutch Republic in comparison with the human needs of the Dutch East India Company. In more detail, it addresses the Jewish Diaspora and the migration of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch to the New World.
Transforming Caribbean and Canadian identity: Contesting claims for Toronto’s Caribana
This papers discusses the attempts by peoples of Caribbean origin resident in Toronto, Canada to use a version of the transplanted Trinidad Carnival as a mechanism for creating an ethnic identity in a multi-cultural metropolitan society. The contesting claims to the "ownership' of this cultural product forms the backdrop against which a younger generation of Canadian born children of Caribbean immigrants also work out their own relationship to Canadian society.
Civilizational sociology and perspectives on the Atlantic
This paper calls for an opening of dialogue on the historical character of the Atlantic world between two fields. To date, historical sociologists researching the significance of inter-civilizational encounters have not paid a great deal of attention to the case of the Americas. While historical and comparative sociology has assimilated the lessons of post-colonial critique, the startling histories of transatlantic colonialism have not had the impact on studies of civilizations carried out in this field that they should have. When it comes to the second field, Atlantic Studies, the paper argues that sociologists working in the first field have something to offer in their re-theorization of the character of long term inter-civilizational contacts. A fresh approach to the study of civilizations is sketched out here that reconstructs theoretical conclusions drawn in historical sociology in a way that will be of interest to specialists in Atlantic Studies. The first part of the paper examines the historical sociology of civilizations and sets out a new framework that revolves around a re-conception of radical difference and Otherness. In the second section, I explore how dimensions of the historical experience of transatlantic colonialism -- such as mapping, place-naming and early ethnological curiosity -- constituted the Americas as a vital zone of the growing sense of civilizational superiority amongst Europeans between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In this section, the article argues that civilizational sociology would profit from a systematic examination of this crucial historical zone. The conclusion puts out a call for further detailed inter-disciplinary research that combines the best insights of both the fields of Atlantic Studies and civilizational sociology.
"The social" and "the political": A comparision of the writings of Judith N. Shklar and Hannah Arendt on America
In the context of the rise, ubiquity and overwhelming presence of "the social" and sociological explanations, Hannah Arendt's critique must be welcomed. However, it is also the author's contention that Hannah Arendt overstepped the mark and substituted one extreme ("the social" or "the societal") for another ("the political"). This becomes especially clear in her writings on America, most prominently in her book On Revolution (1963). The author argues that we can find an adequate counterweight to the extreme Arendtian position in the writings of Judith N. Shklar, especially in those critical essays that are concerned and deal with American intellectual history.
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 04, Volume 2, Number 1
2004 10, Volume 1, Number 2
2004 04, Volume 1, Number 1