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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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2012 09, Volume 9, Number 3 Slave Trade Memorialization
Editorial: Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the politics of black bodies, embodied memories and memorial landscapes
This introductory essay discusses the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade across three continents. It begins by investigating the historical amnesia about the trade which has only recently and in some geographies been ameliorated, taking as a point of departure observations by Nobel Prize Winners Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison, who were in the vanguard of a movement to memorialise it. The essay moves on to discuss not only traditional memorials, walking trails and artworks, but also ghostly legacies of the trade, including human body parts. Taking the small slave port of Lancaster, England, as a key case study, the essay draws on recent theoretical work on corporeality, spectrality, Holocaust studies, trauma, dark tourism, the Black Atlantic and memory studies to interrogate the meanings of these legacies. The way that black agency contributes to new understandings of the horrors of the slave trade is demonstrated by discussion of William Wells Brown's intervention at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Such
''guerrilla memorialisation'' is shown at work historically and in recent memorialisations of the trade. Moreover, its urgent need in the wake of contemporary issues of forced labour from the African continent is discussed. The final section on memorial landscapes summarises the essays in this volume and discusses the links between the various locales. France, which is trying to come to terms with its history through legislation and the creation of memorials, is discussed as a slave power case study. The new memorial in Nantes is an 25 important municipal response to the legacy of the trade and by its esplanade design is linked back to the city trails in Britain discussed earlier in the essay. Other geographies with slaving pasts such asWales and Mauritius are introduced, as well as the African Burial Ground in New York. The essay ends where it started, on theWest Coast of Africa, with a reflection on heritage tourism and the complex legacies of slavery on the slave castle coast.
Monument talk
This essay discusses the need for monuments in the British cityscape. It talks about whether monuments are for the living and/or the dead, whether they should be primarily reflecting on the past, for present city-dwellers or future-directed. It analyses the claims on the monument from city-fathers to citizens with babystrollers. Finally, it uses the author's own experience in designing a monument to essay what kind of monument to the dead should be made for the living citizens to experience.
The Pantheon’s empty plinth: commemorating slavery in contemporary France
This article takes as its starting point a symbolically empty site in the French commemorative landscape the plinth in the Panthe´on to where Toussaint Louverture's remains may have been transferred had plans to pantheonize him ever been realized. It argues that the implications of this emblematic absence at the heart of official memorial practices in France are at least twofold: not only 10 does this empty site reflect the persistent and systematic silencing of slavery and the enslaved in national commemorations (traditionally focused instead on abolition), but also, somewhat paradoxically, by avoiding any clear orthodoxy in formal processes of remembrance, it has permitted the opening up of possibilities for a range of alternative practices that have encouraged recognition of what E´ douard Glissant dubbed the ''nomadic,'' ''diffracted,'' and plural memories of slavery. Drawing on Marcus Wood's recent study The Horrible Gift of Freedom (2010), the article suggests that national commemorations in France
tend systematically to remember abolition whilst forgetting slavery. Having explored this analysis in the light of sites such as the Panthe´on itself, the focus then shifts to the alternative memorials relating to slavery imagined by the artist Lubaina Himid in her work ''What Are Monuments For? Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map.'' Her reflection on the potential for politicians and citizens to collaborate actively in creating memorials and monuments allows a concluding study of two locations -- Bordeaux and Nantes -- where over the past decade different processes of commemoration have emerged, and where there have been dynamic, controversial, innovative, and, at times, highly constructive efforts to remember slavery and abolition in civic space, not least in the cities' museums. The article concludes with a discussion of the distinctive project of a Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, a site whose ambition endeavours to reject any reduction of slavery to the histories of abolitionism.
Wales and the memorialisation of slavery in 2007
This essay explores the way in which the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade was commemorated at heritage sites in Wales. Wales, as a constituent part of the UK newly enfranchised by democratic institutions, and with a long history of political radicalism, had never previously considered its own relationship with the overseas slave-owning economy that sustained its landed estates and that its industries served. In this essay, the author explores how Wales, relying on its heritage tourist industry, has long projected a nostalgic and Romantic selfimage, but that nonetheless a number of heritage organisations took the bicentenary as an opportunity to broaden their interpretation of the past and to engage with a wider audience. The author also discusses how other agencies, thwarted by internal division and lack of commitment, were unable to fully galvanise their staff to the demands of the bicentenary. The author looks at how large government-funded organisations as well as both large and small charities, by commemorating the bicentenary, enabled Wales to rethink its own past by providing a new set of tools with which to do so. This, the author argues, has opened the way for a more inclusive view of heritage and enabled participation by groups that had hitherto had good reason not to engage with museums and visitor sites. The bicentenary was open to both challenge and criticism, but by exploring the ways in which these organisations faced 2007, the author shows both the strengths and weaknesses of heritage agencies in Wales and discusses how such opportunities encouraged a reappraisal of the country's heritage.
From slave to Maroon: the present-centredness of Mauritian slave heritage
Focusing on the heritage sector, this article traces ways of remembering and representing slavery in Mauritius from the first tentative acknowledgment at government level in 1985 to today. Three heritage sites - a monument in Port Louis, the National History Museum in Mahebourg and Le Morne Mountain, a World Heritage site associated with slavery - and their textual and visual narratives serve as exemplary cases of shifting dominant paradigms of representing slavery in the course of the past two decades. Focusing on the national dimension, the article also attempts to contextualize these readings by detecting some of the actors constructing specific images of slavery, as well as their motives and positions of speaking.
Emotive histories: the politics of remembering slavery in contemporary Ghana
New narratives about the role of Africans in the history of the slave trade in Ghana are emerging from unexplored vectors within the black Atlantic, breaking the previous silence about the topic since many of West Africa's elite families have ambiguous histories as both slavers and slaves. Heritage tourism, heavily backed by a state eager to build an industry, has brought Ghanaians into contact with the very different perspectives of comparatively more prosperous diasporan Africans, and has meant that Ghanaians have produced monuments and stories about the past in a new vernacular which differs from extant oral traditions and material culture. The incorporation of these stories into the heritage tourism industry has rendered them into a form of currency. In spite of this flawed function, they also serve emotional needs of diasporan and African communities alike, producing new structures of feeling while simultaneously performing to the demands of contemporary political and economic needs.
This essay traces the contemporary conflicts, both local and transnational, made visible by the contradictions in accounts of the past and seeks to locate markers of the past made visible in material objects, particularly gifts between Africans and Europeans that speak to histories of complicity in the slave trade. Consequently, it also explores the complexities of the history of the post-independence relationship between Ghanaians and diasporans. Nonetheless, this essay insists that a new cultural space has opened up in which Africans themselves are authoring new narratives about their past, and a contemporary transatlantic generation offers a genuine engagement with the past, an escape from the stigma of slavery, and a shared sense of regret and empathy in relation to the difficult legacy of the transatlantic trade.
A home for ourselves in the world: Caryl Phillips on slave forts and manillas as African Atlantic sites of memory
This interview with the black Atlantic writer Caryl Phillips focuses on his non-fiction works and interrogates his ideas on the African diaspora and memorialisation, paying particular attention to such locales as African slave forts and European museums. It also discusses his latest work - a play about the 1940s friendship between Richard Wright and C.L.R. James. The interview discusses the long view of memorialisation on the transatlantic slave trade and interrogates the importance of the bicentenary celebrations of the abolition of the trade in Britain in 2007 to new structures of feeling and curriculum developments that have made the issues raised by the slave trade and its aftermath more central to British historiography. A final section discusses African diaspora communities and their challenge to find a home space amidst the detritus of slavery. Phillips discusses the importance of a slave manilla in his quest for an anchor for memory.
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 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 10, Volume 1, Number 2
2004 04, Volume 1, Number 1