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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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2010 09, Volume 7, Number 3
Editorial
In the borders of being: Mexico, space, and time in Sergei Eisenstein and Octavio Paz
This article sets out to show how the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein and the Mexican writer Octavio Paz developed an understanding of Mexican spatiality in relation to their own concerns about the relations between space and time. Both of them were figures of the avant-garde concerned with the problems of form and artistic representation, but in the case of Paz this involved the possibility of becoming the producer of a modern form that emerged from location. In his case, unlike that of Eisenstein, Mexico is a place that complicates the conception of modern artistic production. The issue of agency and the emergence of subjecthood are crucial for Paz in a way that the author does not find in Eisenstein. It is precisely in the analysis of their commonalities and differences that the author understands the relevance of Mexico to avant-garde ideas and their transatlantic connections.
Towards an African Atlantic: Ama Ata Aidoo's diasporic theater
This essay reads the plays of Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo in dialogue with influential theories of transnationalism to argue that her treatment of colonialism, slavery, gender, and diaspora stretches and reshapes Paul Gilroy's conception of the black Atlantic. Neither Afrocentric nor essentialist, Aidoo is not usually thought of as part of the black diaspora, despite her constant engagement with notions of pan-Africanism, black nationalism, and slavery. By reading two of her plays which specifically engage with the question of black diasporic encounters to explore the links between African Americans and Africans, the author shows how Aidoo's textured representation of tradition and modernity, history and memory, and the local and the global helps define a model of the black Atlantic that can accommodate Africa as a vital participant in transnational exchanges. In showing
that traditions are not static, but changing and adapting all the time, Aidoo suggests that the usable past is not a fact to be assumed, but rather a dilemma to be pondered and debated. While The Dilemma of a Ghost 1965) reveals the assumptions inherent in the cultural politics of the Black Arts era, including the questions of pan-Africanism, black masculinity, gender, and nation, Anowa (1970) takes up the more difficult task of re-imagining the relationship across the Atlantic by way of a searching exploration of the tensions internal to a so-called traditional African society in light of the controversial subject of African participation in slavery. By providing a densely textured meditation on the meaning of slavery, the workings of gender in a traditional society, and the relationship between communal and individual agency, Aidoo offers a long view of history to invite us to probe the meaning of past and present and to open up temporal possibilities outside of both nationalist and neocolonialist ones.
The world and the ''jar'': Jackie Kay and the feminist futures of the black diaspora
This article focuses on black Scottish poet and novelist Jackie Kay's 1997 memoir/ biography, Bessie Smith, a formally innovative profile of the blues singer mixed with a memoir of the author's relationship to Smith's image and recordings. As an amalgam of one of the most recognizable frameworks for black subjectivity -- the blues -- and the discordant location of 1960s Scotland, this text lays the groundwork for reading diaspora through gender and sexual difference. Kay's process of reincorporating Smith into Black British experience redefines diaspora studies through feminist concepts of geography and temporality. In moving unevenly across the usual paths of the black Atlantic, the text positions difference rather than continuity as the future of the field.
''Not Just an American Problem'': Malcolm X in Britain
Malcolm X was received as a merchant of racial hatred by a British mainstream press already anxious in its framing of post-war British identity since the arrival of the troopship SS Empire Windrush initiated a wave of black immigration to Britain in 1948. Nevertheless, Malcolm, inspired during his 1964 trips to Africa and the Middle East by anti-imperialist movements such as the Organization of African Unity, arrived in Britain eager to explore and publicize the social and political barriers faced by black people living in Britain and to foster transatlantic political relationships under the banner of his Organization of Afro-American Unity. The historical spectre of empire would prove crucial to his characterization of Britain. It is only appropriate that Malcolm chose Oxford (in December 1964) and London (in February 1965), those traditional intellectual and commercial centres of empire, to underline his evolving diasporic politics with the practical politics of African decolonization. His theoretical grasp of what he termed in a late speech ''the science of imagery'' enabled him both to analyze the role of
representation in ideological (and, indeed, psychological) control as well as to exploit his own image in the interests of black empowerment. What became evident too late was that Malcolm offered his own life in overturning the orthodoxy of such stereotyping.
In the historical confluence of American and British radicalism, Malcolm X's visits (and their ongoing resonance) are among the most significant. In addition to detailing Malcolm's attitudes towards and experiences in Britain, this essay is concerned with the circulation in Britain of the iconography of Malcolm X. Indeed, as much as racial analysis, Malcolm's genius was for the contrivance of images of himself. Malcolm's legendary transformations, marked also by renaming, were abundantly illustrated.
The well-ordered commonwealth: Humanism, utopian perfectionism, and the English colonization of the Americas
This article utilizes the earliest English attempts to colonize the Americas as a lens through which to examine the assumptions held by elite Englishmen regarding the role of Indians and non-elites in their colonies. It ocuses on the plans for, and experience of, colonizing Roanoke in the 1580s as a way to contextualize the later colonization effort at Jamestown. In these earlier failed attempts at colonization, patrician Englishmen began to espouse their grand plans for incorporating Native Americans into the social structure of England during this period. Specifically, they sought to erect in Virginia a well-ordered commonwealth in accordance with a utopian attitude best expressed by Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century and further refined by English thinkers, writers, and colonial advocates such as Richard Hakluyt, William Shakespeare, and Sir Thomas Smith. According to their own documents, they firmly believed that Indians, once ''civilized,'' would take their place alongside the majority of Englishmen and members of the plebeian class. The proprietors and officials of the Virginia Company bought into these ideas as well, and they brought them with them to Jamestown. Therefore, the origins of these early notions concerning the Native American place in the colonial English social structure provide valuable clues to the eventual relationships that developed on the Virginia mainland during the seventeenth century.
America's first coastal community: A cis- and circumatlantic reading of John Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia
Beginning with the recognition that early British settlements were, by necessity, coastal and therefore inextricably linked to the maritime world, this article reconciles the often problematic ethnocentric and hyperbolic aspects of John Smith's accounts of the Jamestown settlement by reading them as being influenced by maritime culture and the storytelling tradition developed by sailors in the forecastle. Applying cisatlantic and ircumatlantic methodologies to Smith's representation of the coastal world of Jamestown elucidates the liminality of a settlement caught physically between land and sea and metaphorically between terrestrial and maritime culture. This transitory space is inherently contradictory, providing Jamestown with its greatest asset and greatest drawback; a complication that permeates the way John Smith understands and later writes about the settlement. Ultimately, Smith describes Jamestown as a maritime world onshore, combining aspects of British terrestrial and maritime social and literary culture to explain everything from Jamestown's physical location, to the settlers' mindset, to the horrific conditions they encountered in order to present the information to the British public in a way that would deal with the realities while minimizing public outcry. Such an understanding places The Generall Historie of Virginia as an early Atlanticist text, granting modern readers a useful avenue for approaching this often problematic work.
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 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