Founded In    2003
Published   quarterly
Language(s)   English
     

Fields of Interest

 

History, Literature, Cultural Studies

     
ISSN   1478-8810
     
Affiliated Organization   MESEA, Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas
     
Publisher   Routledge, Taylor & Francis
     
Editorial Board

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

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

Please make submissionselectronically at . Articles should, in general, be under 10,000 words. Please consult the online “Instructions for authors” and follow the journals style sheet (modified Chicago Humanities style)

.

Submissions will be subjected to two double-blind reviews before acceptance.

     

Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

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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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2013 03, Volume 10, Number 1 The French Atlantic Studies

Beyond center and periphery: new currents in French and Francophone Atlantic Studies -- Editorial


This introductory essay explores recent shifts in perspective in the study of the French and Francophone Atlantic World. It takes as a touchstone changes in the place of Louisiana and the French colonial period in American history and consciousness. The essay traces the evolution of both Anglophone and Francophone Atlantic historiography, elucidating the shift in meanings attributed to the relationship between France and its Atlantic colonies. It then explores the recent emergence of alternative interpretations grounded in a vision of a de-centered Atlantic theater where local actors, locations, vectors and networks of power, knowledge and resources interact with each other and with the metropolitan center.

Le Sueur in the Sioux country: rethinking France's Indian alliances in the Pays d'en Haut


This essay explores the career of Pierre Charles Le Sueur, an explorer, fur trader, soldier, and diplomat in the nominal service of the French Crown at the turn of the eighteenth century among the Indian peoples of the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi Valley, the Pays d'en Haut. It uses Le Sueur's story to suggest a new explanation for the instability of France's Indian alliances in the Pays d'en Haut that brings current ethnohistorical accounts - which have largely emphasized the diversity of, and conflicts of interest between, Indian villages in the region - into conversation with revisionist works on Louis XIV's France which have similarly deconstructed monolithic portrayals of the "absolutist" state with which these peoples engaged. Le Sueur's story - his transition from a contraband trader, or coureur de bois, in the Pays d'en Haut to a prominent agent of French empire - reveals the layers of bitter political infighting within New France and Louisiana over control of the lucrative fur trade; the gambles and deception that often shaped the dealings of colonial agents with officials at Versailles; and, most importantly, the destabilizing effects that their schemes could have upon the Pays d'en Haut as trade routes conveying powerful means of war into the continental interior consequently shifted, offsetting tenuous balances of power between the very Indian peoples the Crown hoped to galvanize as allies. Exploring Le Sueur's risk-laden and ultimately ill-fated attempts to integrate the powerful Sioux peoples of the Upper Mississippi into existing networks of trade and diplomacy that had long been centered upon their enemies in the Great Lakes region reveals these alliance systems as the often tumultuous entanglement of two equally complex systems: the village politics of the Pays d'en Haut and patron-client networks linking these spaces with the court of Versailles.

How to succeed in exploration without really discovering anything: four French travelers in colonial Louisiana, 1714-63


Histories of colonial America in the last 20 years have emphasized European empires and the borderlands where empires confronted one another and the native peoples of the continent. The French colonies of New France and Louisiana did not truly control a vast territory however, only a chain of posts along major rivers. French Louisiana also never developed a profitable staple commodity such as sugar in the West Indies or pelts in New France. This article examines how four French Louisiana explorers - Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe, Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont, and Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz - nonetheless sustained metropolitan interest in the colony by delivering to Paris maps, exploration accounts, and Indian alliances that promised access to vast wealth in Spanish New Mexico or a route to the Pacific Ocean. The four men sensed that information was a commodity which could exceed the value of staple products or, perhaps more accurately, that one individual could amass greater capital in the form of information than in the form of physical commodities, by feeding the desires of and sustaining the myths held by metropolitan officials and investors. De la Harpe and Bourgmont succeeded in winning titles of nobility from the Crown in exchange for their maps and narratives, and retired comfortably in France. Dumont and Le Page were less successful. They offered their knowledge in exchange for investments in further exploration, but found no takers. By the 1750s, a more pastoral fantasy of agricultural fertility was replacing the mercantilist fantasy of gold and silver such as had been found in New Spain.

Race and scripture in the eighteenth-century French Caribbean


This article focuses on a 1730s debate about the causes and significance of human diversity, particularly that of Africans, between three French Caribbean clerics: Augustus Malfert, Jean-Baptiste Labat, and Jean Baptiste Margat de Tilly. Their ideas attest to the continuing importance of the biblical account in structuring thinking about human diversity; at the same time, they demonstrate how explanations thereof were shifting from largely religious to secular bases before the publication of such influential works as the Comte de Buffon's "Variétés dans l'espèce humaine" (1749). On the one hand, Malfert profoundly "racialized" scripture by advancing unexpected biblical ancestors for Africans, Asians, and Amerindians, and making skin color a sign not only of heinous sin, but of heritable and fixed distinctions. On the other, Margat looked to nature, not the Bible, for the source of physical differences between peoples; arguing that they resulted from a complex interplay of environmental factors, he also asserted their mutability. All three men were well placed to interject what they had learned from their Caribbean experiences into metropolitan disputes by contributing to popular and well-regarded publications, thus participating in the early Enlightenment and engaging individuals on both sides of the francophone Atlantic world.

"A motley collection of all nations": the Napoleonic soldiers of Champ d'Asile as citizens of the world


In 1818, following Napoleon's fall and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, a band of French veterans exiled in the United States established Champ d'Asile ["Field of Asylum"], a short-lived colony on the edge of Spanish Texas. Led by General Charle Lallemand, the settlers intrigued observers around the Atlantic and inspired a romantic, indeed utopian, mythology celebrating them as soldat-laboureurs ["farming soldiers"]. The adventure proved to be a social experiment through which the Napoleonic veterans embraced collectivist, egalitarian, and anti-capitalist ideas and practices as they redefined their own political identity. Marooned on the Texas frontier, they lived and labored alongside Native Americans and African Americans, on whom their survival depended. This essay argues that the international origins and experience of these Napoleonic veterans, and their association with Jean Laffite's ragtag band of freebooters, made them "a motley collection of all nations" - practical cosmopolitans, or citizens of the world, who challenged the limits of national allegiance. Their engagement with liberty and equality, race and slavery, and citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the south-western borderlands of North America generated an explosion of documents in French, Spanish, and English, which illuminate the French Atlantic in the Age of Revolution.

Jazz women, gender politics, and the francophone Atlantic


This article explores the francophone bourgeoisie's class-based connection with advocates of race uplift in the United States, revealing the transnational similarities between middle-class French and American hopes and fears about racial representation through black "culture," whether literary, artistic, or musical. It shows that, given this transnational context, jazz not only presented a real promise to black communities in representing their culture as innovative and civilized, but also posed a threat because of associations between jazz, primitivism, and sexually suggestive performances. Finally, it engages with the commentaries produced by black francophone women about black American performers in Paris and about black popular music. It argues that, in these commentaries, black French intellectual women began to explore how to move beyond the stereotypical images of black women generated by the jazz craze. This was a position marked by race uplift, but not necessarily a compromise position for black agency or a purely assimilationist stance. The article concludes that in the process of formulating a response to jazz, a set of literate French men and women of color began to define their own music - notably the Caribbean biguine style - against jazz and to promote it as a source of pride and racial identification. In doing so, they demonstrated an early instance of Negritude values intermingled with race-uplift concerns.

Between empire and nation: francophone West African students and decolonization


This article explores the movement of African university students from French West Africa to France during the last years of French colonial rule (1946-60). The author argues that the act of traveling between these spaces at a time when the new French Union supposedly produced greater equality within the imperial system allowed students to point out their continued inequalities, despite their so-called elite status. Indeed, the Atlantic voyages themselves were often a key place of protest, where young people symbolically connected their material circumstances (often forced to travel in third or fourth class) to the greater disparities within the colonial system. At the same time, French authorities viewed this movement as both necessary and dangerous - allowing the next generation of African leaders to study in France, but also enabling them to connect with a growing anti-colonial diaspora centered in Paris. The administration interpreted student political organization as a problem stemming from the psychological difficulties these young people faced in their adjustment to life in France. Such analyses resulted in policies designed to ease the transition on a local scale, but rarely acknowledged the deeper, systemic roots of political protest. Students, in contrast, increasingly saw themselves as part of a wider movement, particularly as events in Indo-China and Algeria revealed the power of anti-colonial nationalism. Joining, and often critiquing, their own nationalist movements, these young people used their transitory status to help bring down the structure that could not completely contain them.

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
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 10, Volume 2, Number 2
2005 04, Volume 2, Number 1
2004 10, Volume 1, Number 2
2004 04, Volume 1, Number 1