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History, Literature, Cultural Studies |
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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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2011 12, Volume 8, Number 4
Editorial
Afro-Brazilian popular culture in Paris in 1922: Transatlantic dialogues and the racialized performance of Brazilian national identity
This article interrogates the presence of Afro-Brazilian popular culture in Paris in 1922 in the context of bi-directional transatlantic currents between performance spaces in the French capital and in the city of Rio de Janeiro during this era. It focuses on a group of predominantly Afro-Brazilian musicians, the Oito Batutas, who performed in Paris between February and August 1922. This article highlights how transatlantic dialogues informed the performance of Brazilian ''race'' in Paris and Brazil in the 1920s. Via an examination of the impact that the Parisian sojourn and the cultural interactions it led to had on the Oito Batutas, both in terms of their musical repertoire and their visual style, it situates their selfrepresentation in Paris within dominant discourses of the era surrounding black US musicians and the African continent. Taking as its point of departure Hermano Vianna's acknowledgement of the varied agents associated with samba's consecration as ''national'' music, the wider ambition of this article is to bring to light the central role played in this process by transatlantic currents. It argues that it was only thanks to dialogues with ''black'' Paris that Afro-Brazilian cultural forms, like the samba, were accepted by the Brazilian elite as quintessential elements of a homogenizing ''national'' culture in the 1930s. This article thus seeks to broaden our understanding of how an ''Atlantic'' perspective, and more specifically a focus on the Paris-Rio axis, can explain and nuance the shifts in racial self-definition that took place in Brazil in the 1920s, paving the way for samba's canonization as ''national'' rhythm during the regime of President AQ1 Getu´ lio Vargas (between 1930 and 1945).
Upper Louisiana’s French vernacular architecture in the greater Atlantic world
In this essay I re-examine the role of eighteenth-century upper-Mississippi Valley French communities in the wider circumatlantic world. Rather than relying primarily upon historical documentation, I focus upon patterns of historic vernacular architecture in the early Illinois Country settlements. How does the study of historic architecture enhance and expand our understanding of cultural processes and the significant ties between remote communities? I argue that by applying the comparative method to the details of house layout and construction, new perspectives on the significance of cultural ties between even widely separated historic communities may be obtained: a new timeline for the development of architectural traditions and a more nuanced conceptualization of the creolization process becomes possible.
A peculiar silence: The Scottish Enlightenment, political economy, and the early American debates over slavery
This paper explores the economic critique of slave labor that emerged from the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment and the general failure of these ideas to influence American debates over slavery in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. While the Scottish school of political economy was quite influential in revolutionary America, neither antislavery advocates nor economic writers chose to follow the Scots in analyzing the deeper economic ramifications of the ''peculiar'' institution. Indeed, Americans who discussed slavery generally framed the issue in terms of morality, religion, legal principles, or humanitarian sensibilities. They rarely focused on slavery as a system of labor, or its effects on commercial growth. This tendency represented a peculiar feature of the late eighteenth-century debates over slavery in America. In other parts of the British Empire and Atlantic world, the discourse of political economy became one of the primary lenses through which contemporaries viewed the institution. And as
AQ1 historians of antebellum America have long noted, the supposed economic limitations of slavery were just as important as evangelical fervor or liberal principles in driving public anxiety over the future of the institution. This paper seeks to explore the historical roots of this ''free labor'' ideology in the Scottish discourse of political economy; how this critique of bondage was connected to a larger pattern of philosophical and commercial suppositions; and how this constellation of ideas took on different meanings when Americans grafted their own priorities onto the economic agenda of the Scots. Ultimately, the piece aims to reveal some of the tensions and dissonances which historically shaped the transmission of ideas throughout the transatlantic republic of letters, revealing how certain issues could disappear from the conversation when ideas moved from one distinct context to another.
Transatlantic poetics of haunting
This essay discusses issues relevant to current redefinitions of the Black Atlantic through a comparative reading of the novels At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and Le Livre d'Emma (2001) written, respectively, by the Trinidad-born Canadian Dionne Brand and the Haitian-born Marie-Ce´lie Agnant, both of whom emigrated to Canada in 1970. Agnant's novel is primarily concerned with exposing the legacy of pain, abjection, and silence that has been passed on to black women of the African diaspora, a legacy that persists in the present and is finally overturned when the suicide of the Haitian protagonist enables her to escape her ''captivity'' in a mental clinic in Que´bec. As for Brand's novel, its narrative inquest locates a similar act of sacrificial rebellion in the past (the putting to death of a slave woman who, in an act of revenge against the white plantation owners, poisoned her companions) and deploys this act strategically to open up the way to a drifting transatlantic progeny scattered across the Old and New Worlds. By focussing on these two exemplary Black Atlantic texts I explore their different approaches to issues such as the haunting effect of colonial history in the lives of the contemporary descendants of the African slaves, the curse (or the gift) of genealogical memory and forgetting, and the dislocating/relocating routes of the Black diaspora.
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 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