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2003 | |
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quarterly | |
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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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2012 06, Volume 9, Number 2
Editorial
As the Sun Set on Europe: Marvelous Realism and a New Place for America
This article considers how Marvelous Realism, a predecessor of Magical Realism formulated by the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, contributes to an understanding of the United States as part of America. Past efforts to maintain a separation of the United States from the rest of America have distorted cultural studies and impeded useful political projects. Although sound political concerns, along with disciplinary boundaries, exist for moving cautiously while revising current views of the United States as an entity necessarily opposed to Latin America, scholars need not always uphold invasive or hegemonic forces as they discover links between these seemingly disparate American places. Developing ideas found in the writings of José Martí and other American philosophers, Carpentier found powerful connections between Latin America and the rest of America -- whatever one calls it -- even as he engaged in excoriations of Washington's misuse of power and the undue influence of Hollywood. In addition to defining Marvelous Realism, Carpentier's Prologue to El reino de este mundo shows how it applies to literature, painting, and music in ways that have the power to transform our understanding of how fusions of the three populated continents on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean brought about a profusion of American cultures. Reading Carpentier's 1948 explanation of Magical Realism in the context of his earlier articles serialized in Carteles in 1941 demonstrates the utility as well as the logic of -- sometimes -- bringing America together.
The ruins of Havana: representations of memory, religion, and gender
The city of Havana and the island of Cuba are two important sites in the cultural cartography of the Atlantic world whose significance has been felt from at least the sixteenth century on. This piece investigates how the trope of the ruins of Havana in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century literature create notions of space and time that both rupture and create a transnational idea of Cuba. The layering of memory, identity, and history onto the image of the ruins of Havana allow for several cartographies of meaning to be located in these specific sites of decay. This kind of locating operates in a Havana imaginary that embeds the ruins within a contiguous transatlantic project that necessarily includes Afro-Atlantic ways of understanding the world, magic and religion. In this essay, I look at how representations of the ruins of Havana and Afro-Cuban religion work together in especially literature by Cuban and Cuban diaspora authors to signify a process of re-working history, place, and the nature of time that destabilize linear narratives of the past and reaffirm the metaphysical potential of place. In other words, both the trope of the ruins of Havana and the representation of Afro-Cuban spaces here illustrate the transformative power of imagining Havana. This imagining takes on many different forms over time and in overlapping transatlantic projects that are contextualized here in a postcolonial historical framework that also takes into account Cuba's Caribbean, Latino/a, Afro-Atlantic, Asian, and Mediterranean influences. Also central to this investigation of the ruins of Havana is a critique of the role that gender plays in creating a paradigm for understanding the city and Afro-Cuban religious cultures in ways that are under examined.
OlaudahEquianoor Gustavus Vassa—What’s in a name?
Whether the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa the African (London, 1789) should be referred to as Equiano or Vassa in part relates to where he was born and how he related to his place of birth. The choice of name also relates to how scholars want to perceive of the author, on the one hand, and how the man himself presented himself at the time, on the other. It is argued here that the author of The Interesting Narrative used his birth name, Olaudah Equiano, as proof of his African background, not as a name by which he wanted to be known, Gustavus Vassa. Hence, the dilemma is why scholars refer to him by his African name, when he chose not to do so. It is suggested that use of the birth name has more to do with the politics of representation and political correctness of later generations of scholarship, not with the intention of the man. The imposition of the birth name as the signifier long after he died, however, has allowed the postulation of a series of dichotomies, such as place of birth being in Africa and/or Carolina, and whether or not the man was self-made, meaning creating his identity and benefiting from that creation, as opposed to being a committed activist motivated by principles and sacrifice. The veneer of interpretation melts away if it is recognized that Vassa consciously operated in a different mode of expression and implementation than subsequent literary scholars and historians have allowed. The dichotomy between evangelical man and crass entrepreneur evaporates. The reason for the debate over his birth has more to do with the present clash between literary scholarship and historical interpretation than over possible misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the past.
The Newtonian slave body: Racial enlightenment in the Atlantic World
Whether the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa the African (London, 1789) should be referred to as Equiano or Vassa in part relates to where he was born and how he related to his place of birth. The choice of name also relates to how scholars want to perceive of the author, on the one hand, and how the man himself presented himself at the time, on the other. It is argued here that the author of The Interesting Narrative used his birth name, Olaudah Equiano, as proof of his African background, not as a name by which he wanted to be known, Gustavus Vassa. Hence, the dilemma is why scholars refer to him by his African name, when he chose not to do so. It is suggested that use of the birth name has more to do with the politics of representation and political correctness of later generations of scholarship, not with the intention of the man. The imposition of the birth name as the signifier long after he died, however, has allowed the postulation of a series of dichotomies, such as place of birth being in Africa and/or Carolina, and whether or not the man was self-made, meaning creating his identity and benefiting from that creation, as opposed to being a committed activist motivated by principles and sacrifice. The veneer of interpretation melts away if it is recognized that Vassa consciously operated in a different mode of expression and implementation than subsequent literary scholars and historians have allowed. The dichotomy between evangelical man and crass entrepreneur evaporates. The reason for the debate over his birth has more to do with the present clash between literary scholarship and historical interpretation than over possible misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the past.
Slave rebellion and the conundrum of cosmopolitanism: Plácido and La Escalera in a neglected Cuban antislavery novel by Orihuela
In 1852, Andrés Avelino de Orihuela, a white Canary Island immigrant to Cuba in exile in Paris, translated Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin twice. After publishing La cabaña del tío Tom, he then "translated" Stowe in a different way: he wrote a Cuban antislavery novel. In El Sol de Jesús del Monte, Eduardo, a white lawyer, embodies the conundrum of race within cosmopolitanism: he professes to be an egalitarian citizen of the world, yet betrays his mulatto lover Matilde for a white woman. The novel places Matilde's personal tragedy in the context of the colonial government's destruction of the community of free people of color during La Escalera (1843-1844), a series of antislavery and anticolonial conspiracies. In this sentimental melodrama that elicits sympathy for victims of racism, Eduardo's rejection of Matilde signifies a failed unification of whites and Afro-Cubans in a national romance à la Doris Sommer. When Matilde's family flees to Veracruz and builds a new life - Matilde marries a Mexican mestizo - mulattoes do not appear subordinate to whites, as in Uncle Tom's Cabin, but instead embody the mixed-race future of Latin America.
The novel's focus on the racial contradictions of Eduardo's self-styled cosmopolitanism constitutes Orihuela's critical, "vernacular cosmopolitanism" (Homi Bhabha). I argue that Orihuela's critique of Cuban exiles' collusion with the colonial government's vilification of Plácido and repression of free people of color exposes a new permutation of a longstanding racial contradiction in Latin American republicanism. Indeed, Simón Bolívar assassinated two prominent mulatto leaders in the 1820s for allegedly promoting race over nation. Bolívar had opposed slavery, yet limited democracy to ward off a repeat of the Haitian Revolution in Gran Colombia (Aline Helg). At a time when antislavery novels reinforced racist discourses, El Sol de Jesús del Monte unflinchingly points to white racism as the main challenge facing the would-be egalitarian republics of Latin America.
The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A novel of Cuban customs
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 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