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

ALTTEXT

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.

 

» Visit Journal Web Site

2014 03, Volume 11, Number 1

Editorial


Response to Donna Gabaccia, "Spatializing gender and migration: the periodization of Atlantic Studies, 1500 to the present"


Spatializing gender and migration: the periodization of Atlantic Studies, 1500 to the present


Despite recent efforts to describe the changing relationship of the Atlantic to the wider world, scholars do not agree on the periodization of global integration and the end of the Atlantic's status as a unique macro-region. They do, however, agree that mass migratory flows are a constitutive element of global integration; some social sciences argue further that recent global integration has produced the feminization of migratory movements across all world regions. This paper traces the gender composition of long distance migrations from the early modern slave trades to the twentieth century. It finds convergence in gendered patterns of migration beginning already in the early twentieth century and argues that feminization of international migrations was complete by 1960. Global convergence toward gender balance in the twentieth century - commonly called feminization - was neither the product of predictable gender relations of power nor was it indicative of the feminization of the global - formerly understood as masculine realm of conflict - as a new domestic, cooperative space of female emancipation. While the figure of the female migrant does increasingly represent contemporary global migrations discursively, the iconic female is viewed as a victim of trafficking and exploitation.

“Word people”: a conversation with David Dabydeen


David Dabydeen is a novelist, poet, art historian, literary critic and, since 2010, he has been Guyana's Ambassador to the People's Republic of China. His literary career has spanned more than thirty years, in which time he has written seven novels, three poetry collections, two non-fictional works and edited many more. Dabydeen was born in Berbice, Guyana, in 1955 and attended schools in New Amsterdam and Georgetown before, in 1969, joining his father and elder sister in England. He read English at Cambridge University and was awarded his doctorate from University College London. Dabydeen spent three years as a post-doctoral Fellow at Oxford University, before taking up an academic position at the University of Warwick. His work has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes; his poetry collection Slave Song (1984) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. On three occasions has he been awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature (for the novels The Intended (1991), A Harlot's Progress (1999) and Our Lady of Demerara (2004)), and A Harlot's Progress was also short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In 2004 he was awarded the Raja Rao Award for outstanding contribution to the Literature of the South Asian Diaspora; in 2007, the Hind Rattan Award by the Non-Resident Indian Society of India for outstanding contributions to the literary and intellectual life of the Indian diaspora, and he received the Anthony Sabga Prize for Literature in 2008.

Atlantic paradigms and aberrant histories Atlantic paradigms and aberrant histories


Theoretical paradigms based on Atlantic experiences pose a challenge for attempts to imagine anew histories of commerce and culture in the colonial and Indian Ocean world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Foregrounding place origins of purportedly universal doctrines, this paper attempts provisionally and suggestively to explore this challenge by locating and dislocating in place some conventional frameworks for interpreting patterns of trade and mobility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It relates two connected arguments gesturing to the disruption and suppression of alternative, and potentially subversive, imaginings of worldwide spatial connections and cultural flows in the course of the north Atlantic hoisting itself atop a hierarchy of modernity and historical progress imagined to radiate outwards from it. The first is about the generalization through theory and history of a set of commercial relationships and institutional arrangements historically peculiar to the Atlantic, as being characteristic of the "world economy." The second argument relates to the misrecognition of spaces of circulation in accounts of migration, and their compression into linear movements where the northern Atlantic world represented the ultimate destinations for the working poor belched out from the rest of the non-Western world.

Response to G. Balachandran, “Atlantic paradigms and aberrant histories”


The vital materiality of aluminum: light modernity and the global Atlantic


This article considers the significance of new ontological approaches to vibrant materialities and to mobilities research for re-thinking the globality of the Atlantic world. It does so through a study of bauxite mining and aluminum smelting as an agent of globalization and a mobile materialization of uneven global modernities. Aluminum can be thought of not just as an inert metal that is acted upon, but as a complex agent enrolled into transnational circuits, structuring and structured by the connections between them. The first section begins by sketching the idea of the global Atlantic; the second section focuses on methods of "following things" as a productive way of doing global history; and the third gives a brief account of the mobilities and materialities of aluminum based in part on the author's book Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity. In following the material assemblages and energetic transformations of bauxite/aluminum, this account seeks to bring to light the long-distance trans-oceanic relations that connect Atlantic political economies into global political ecologies

Response to Mimi Sheller, "The vital materiality of aluminum: light modernity and the global Atlantic"


Response to Paul Cammack’s response


Of space/time and the pineapple


This article considers space and time as relational constructs and quantum states that correspond with assignments of spatial and temporal distinctions and values. The career of the pineapple, in its transgressions of land and water, the temperate and tropical latitudes, the Atlantic and Pacific, America and the rest of the world, illustrates imperialism and the social construction of space/time.

Response to Gary Okihiro, “Of space/time and the pineapple”


Oceans, cities, islands: sites and routes of Afro-diasporic rhythm cultures


Since at least New York's Jazz Age, people the world over have filled urban social spaces (dance halls, dance clubs, the dance floor) to enjoy themselves through partner dances that evolved from the fusion of African-derived percussive rhythms and body movements on the one hand, and European melodies, instruments, and courtly dance styles on the other. These dances originated through the colonization of Africa, the forced displacement of African peoples, their enslavement on plantations throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Despite their traumatic origins, they have become synonymous with the kinetic, somatic, pleasurable dimensions of urban modernity. What can this paradox reveal about people who enjoy dancing to these rhythms, including those with no connection to "Africa"? What is the relationship between the transoceanic routes that first brought these rhythms from Africa to the Americas, and the transnational webs that have ensured their global popularity? Can we excavate a history that connects the ship, the jet engine, and the beats of the drum? Can rhythm help bridge the histories of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, especially given that similar rhythm cultures evolved in the Indian Ocean space through its own long histories of migrating and displaced peoples? By focusing on the sites and routes involved in the propagation of Afro-diasporic rhythm cultures from the plantation to the dance floor, this essay will argue that the unpredictable alliances forged thereby between bodies, rhythms, and places update both the Black Atlantic paradigm dominant in thinking about music and dance, and return pleasure and the body to studies of globalization.

Response to Ananya Kabir, "Oceans, cities, islands: site and routes of Afro-diasporic rhythm cultures"


Oceanic mirrors: Atlantic literature and the global chaosmos


This essay explores what would happen to the literary study of the Atlantic world if oceanic nature rather than land- or ship-based cultures were placed at its center. Drawing primarily on three novels from the American and oceanic traditions - Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies - read in dialogue with recent works of Atlantic theory, this essay contends that in literature, the ocean's primary function is to undermine and even to erase cultural assumptions, not to draw boundaries between individual and national identities or racial and religious affiliations. These authors insist that the ocean has a life and an intent of its own, and that it may be threatening as well as liberating for human beings who engage with it. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Johnson, Melville, and Ghosh step into that space of uncertainty to ask, "What is the ocean doing?" When we examine a map of Atlantic currents, the ocean's naturally occurring blank spots shock us with their emptiness, which for Melville warns of watery oblivion but for Johnson and Ghosh allows for productive detachment from grounded particulars. Johnson imagines that the "nothing" of the ocean generates a Buddhist condition of "no-self," opening up patterns of black Atlantic narrative to influences from the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Consequently, a wrenching experience of the Middle Passage becomes a promising Middle Path. Following similar cultural currents, Ghosh envisions the Indian Ocean basin as a dynamic, refracted mirror of the Atlantic world, breaking apart racial categories while also reflecting familiar patterns of slavery, creolization, and landlessness. Reframed in an oceanic light, Atlantic literature shares a transhistorical and transnational commitment to testing the limits of human understanding in the face of what Johnson calls the oceanic "chaosmos" that pulls apart and recombines worlds again and again.

On national traditions and world literature: a conversation with Zhang Longxi


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
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 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