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Charting the future: Twentieth-anniversary issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents
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The Atlantic became a place of continual interaction for the Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg, a dynasty whose lands have so far received little or no attention in Atlantic historiography. This article demonstrates how the eighteenth century witnessed repeated attempts by Habsburg rulers to broker connections between the central European region and the Atlantic basin. In doing so, the article charts the emergence and meaning of the Atlantic world for one of Europe’s most important powers, revealing the centrality of the Atlantic to wider Austrian Habsburg global entanglement. Acknowledging the Austrian Atlantic enhances Atlantic history through the study of maritime connections with areas typically perceived as landlocked spaces.
The early twentieth century saw an increase in the transatlantic circulation of African American poetry, evidenced in anthologies published in the 1930s and 1940s. This article traces earlier instances of this trend by focusing on the translation of poetry among periodicals during the 1920s. Adopting George Bornstein’s “bibliographic code” as a methodological approach, I trace the transatlantic itineraries of three poems by Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, and James Weldon Johnson. A reading of the interlingual translation against its bibliographic code reveals the ironies and intricacies of texts in circulation, products of translation practices seeking to transcend structures of national particularity, and editorial practices seeking to reify them.
This study tells the story of a West African woman, Teresa Mina, as a window onto a relatively unexplored aspect of nineteenth-century slavery in Cuba: the journeys around the island of Africans and their descendants, long after surviving the Atlantic slave trade. Coerced displacement, herein termed “slave-moving,” was fundamental to the experience of slavery and to the contested process of “place-making” occurring on the island. Slave-moving served the practical needs of the expanding plantation economy, occurring via the same transport systems that enabled faster transfer of commodities, and became a key function of the colonial bureaucracy. It also served disciplinary purposes, deepening slaveholders’ power and unfree people’s subjection. Its effects were strongly gendered, exposing women to heightened, specific forms of subjugation. Throughout, the essay also explores how unfree people managed to travel of their own will, in ways that were nonetheless closely connected to the processes of slave-moving and place-making.
This book explores connections between Atlantic studies and (trans)Pacific studies. Directed at scholars with a background in (trans)Pacific and/or Atlantic studies, or working of the intersection of the two, the volume encourages exchange between the fields and outlines new theoretical approaches and concepts productive for both the Atlantic and the (trans)Pacific. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of the journal Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.
In this paper we are concerned with some issues of inter-colonial dependency, especially in food and with a focus on rice that both directly linked the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds and that highlight some structural issues of colonialism, globalization, and food security more generally. This paper examines rice as a staple commodity, one that both reflected and generated inter-colonial dependencies in both ocean worlds, and how that dependency was ultimately fraught. Because the rice trade did not operate in isolation, we also of necessity include some discussion of important non-food crops such as cotton and jute. In the Caribbean, to greater or lesser extents, the colonial plantation economies relied on imported rice and other foodstuffs, needs supplied by other “knots” in the web, especially in the Carolina low country. Other British colonial possessions, too, were developed as “rice bowls” critical to the sustenance of colonized peoples and the support of commercial crops. One of these newer service colonies was British Burma, the formerly sparsely settled delta of the Irrawaddy River. No matter which ocean we center our focus on, and indeed across the "recentered” empire at large, in the Early Modern period rice was a risky business. By making this point we hope to frame a larger conversation about inter-colonial dependencies and the scales at which it is best realized
Despite the numerous books and articles on the topic of Creole architecture, no previous work has attempted to explore the interrelationships between historical creolization in traditions of material culture and recent theoretical developments in the growing field of Creole culture studies. A brief history of the development of Creole architecture is followed by a sketch of creolization theory. This review explores what we might learn through an analysis of studies of creolization in vernacular architecture. The colonial and nineteenth-century vernacular of New Orleans functions as our test case.
This article studies sixteenth-century English views of Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs and the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the framework of the Atlantic world. It analyses the process by which English scholars and politicians collated, understood, appropriated and used information about Mexico – circulating in the rest of Europe – to produce their own interpretations and productions. This was made with the aim of promoting English exploration and colonial ventures in the New World, supporting English claims to the Americas, fostering anti-Spanish sentiments and Protestant solidarity against Spain and satisfying curiosity and desire for fresh knowledge. Paying especial attention to the investigation of a water-coloured map of the city of Tenochtitlan, produced in London in 1571, this article illustrates how the English departed from a pro-Spanish narrative of the conquest and began to use information about the Aztecs – in the framework of increasing Anglo-Spanish rivalries – to criticize the Spanish and to legitimize the fight against Spain in the Old and New 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.
This introduction puts forth a working definition of oceanic kinship as kinship with the ocean and kinship shaped by the ocean. It uses the notion of kinship as a critical idiom and conceptual lens through which we can examine the oceanic turn’s potential for rethinking forms of human and nonhuman belonging. Modernity and coloniality were spurred and sustained by oceanic mobility. The oceans, as waterways and material presences, have helped shape modern-day (re-)configurations of kinship. This introduction acknowledges oceanic kinship’s situatedness within conditions of systemic racism, colonial injustice, and global power imbalances in the various contexts of oceanic im/mobility, labor, and ecologies, presently and historically. Our notion of kinship encompasses practices of mutual care which emerge from an understanding of interdependence, collectivity, and affiliation. With its focus on kinship and mutual care, this introduction charts a new critical tradition within ocean studies.
While a body of earlier work on the Black Atlantic generally imagined the ocean as a backdrop for primarily heteronormative, masculine human agents to move from one continent to another, this westward telos has been complicated by a deeper engagement with Black queer intimacies and non-human kinship relations in the depths of the ocean. A recent novella written by Rivers Solomon with their collaborative interlocuters from the band “clipping.” – Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes – portrays the fluidity of an aqueous merfolk named the wajinru who are born of the dead and nursed and nourished as kin by non-human figures of what Edouard Glissant terms the “womb abyss.” Here I explore The Deep as speculative fiction that speaks directly to questions of oceanic origins and ontologies, transforming the necropolitics of transatlantic slave trading into the possibilities of the “womb abyss” for the lives of its “aquatically mutated,” non-binary descendants.
This is the introduction to the collection of essays dedicated to colonial Caribbean visual cultures between 1750 and 1900. Examining the ways of seeing that emerged under the conditions of slavery and its immediate aftermath, this piece explores some of the methodological and theoretical challenges of working with the visual and material afterlives of empire. What traces of Black lives can yet be mined in the fragments and biases of the colonial archive? How were images and objects produced, circulated and viewed in colonial contexts? What forms of resistance are revealed by a focus on visual cultures? This introduction considers strategies for responding creatively and ethically to the gaps and silences that haunt this archive, and for recovering the resilience, resistance, knowledge and “everyday” of Black lived experience.
This article examines developments in the field of Atlantic History within the past two decades and through the prism of slavery studies and a number of close sub-fields. By paying attention to what Atlantic historians have achieved since the turn of the century, it discusses contributions and critiques in equal measure, highlighting the field’s place in wider global discussions. While probing a number of methodological challenges that are already being tackled by numerous Atlantic historians, this article also explores the potential obstacles that lay ahead and suggest possible ways to negotiate them successfully. Rather than offering yet another painstaking reconstruction of the birth and growth of Atlantic History, this piece focuses squarely on the field’s twenty-first century’s saga: past, present and future.
The phrase “chattel slavery” evokes a narrative of the Atlantic slave trade as people with African heritage were stolen, forced to labour under abhorrent conditions, and were powerless to prevent their children being sold away generation after generation. However, slaves were not the only people held in a chattel status through the course of American history. Both Indentured Servants and Convicts were held as chattel, albeit a temporary form. This essay suggests that historians of both slavery and unfree labour need to untangle the word chattel from the word slave – for a person who is chattel is not always a slave (and a slave is not always chattel). I argue that terminology is crucial, and that analysis of the semantics of the word chattel shows how current word usage does not match with actual word meaning, which has repercussions in the current political climate.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) rarely appear in any analysis of the global diffusion of Argentine tango. Yet, writers, musicians, singers, and dancers from the MENA region have long contributed to and drawn from tango as a cultural phenomenon in complex and multi-layered ways, as this essay demonstrates through a select taxonomy of historical, literary, musical, and dance encounters that culminates with a cross-cultural dialogue between Borges’ analysis of the One Thousand and One Nights and the theology of Sufism in order to theorise the ineffable experience of the dance and the profundity of its music and lyric dimensions. Through a contrapuntal methodology that draws on my dual experience as a tango dancer and DJ, and as a literary and cultural historian of the MENA region, I explore these encounters and entanglements as opening new embodied pathways for South-South solidarity engendered through transnational “translations” of music and dance.
“Sargassum in the Black Atlantic: Entanglement and the abyss in Bearden, Walcott, and Philip” explores the figure of seaweed, particularly free-floating sargassum, as a model for conceptualizing transoceanic connections in the Black Atlantic. I present sargassum as a replacement for the concept of the rhizome, which fails to adequately function within an aquatic context since as a terrestrial metaphor the rhizome cannot capture the ocean’s fluidity and circulation. Replacing a terrestrial figure with an oceanic one allows for a richer understanding of connection and loss, since the migratory sargassum is able to conceptually entangle disparate cultures, while also attending to the histories, and gaps in histories, contained within the oceanic abyss. It is within this context that the article considers a variety of works, including Romare Bearden’s collage “The Sea Nymph” from the series Black Odyssey, Derek Walcott’s poem “The Bounty,” and M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong!.
This essay sets out to theorize the “new” Arctic Ocean as a pivot from which our standard map of the world is currently being reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contact zone in its own right. I examine both functions of the Arctic via a reading of the dispute over the Northwest Passage (which emphasizes the Arctic as a space of transit) and the contemporary assessment of new models of sovereignty in the Arctic region (which concentrates on the circumpolar Arctic as an oceanic world). However, both of these debates frequently exclude indigenous positions on the Arctic. By reading Canadian Inuit theories on the Arctic alongside the more prominent debates, I argue for a decolonizing reading of the Arctic inspired by Inuit articulations of the “Inuit Sea.” In such a reading, Inuit conceptions provide crucial interventions into theorizing the Arctic. They also, in turn, contribute to discussions on indigeneity, sovereignty, and archipelagic theory in Atlantic and Pacific studies.
This essay aims at bringing together research on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavors with current trends in scholarship in Atlantic history and slavery studies. While scholars of German history have begun to challenge what Jürgen Zimmerer has called the “colonial amnesia of Germans,” the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery have rarely been included in discussions about national commemorative cultural debates because Germany, it is claimed, has never directly and profitably participated in the economies of slavery. For the longest time, Germany has entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Denmark, and indeed, it seems plausible that for its own history, Germany is able to claim non-participation. Yet, the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery were part of the earliest economic enterprises that embodied and inherently relied on global networks of trade that uprooted and relocated people in unprecedented numbers. Building on the pioneering work of scholars like Klaus Weber, Eve Rosenhaft, Felix Brahms, and Mischa Honeck, this essay re-charts the various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, as well as showing resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. The essay thereby seeks to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other; yet, we claim that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in German cultural memory and identity to a larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.
Beginning with two exemplary scenes from Shakespeare and Olaudah Equiano, this essay discusses the rise of the circum-Atlantic world as a fundamental order and a critical space that remains centerless and ultimately unstructured. It relies on the figura of the ocean-going ship and the mappemonde as semiotic operators that are instrumental in creating, measuring, and representing Atlantic space. It then explores Edward Said's dialectic of filiation and affiliation by tracing his career-long interest in the “figural” work of Auerbach and Vico, and suggests that the latter's insights in Scienza nuova make him not only Said's contemporary but also Equiano's.
Plantation slavery and rice agriculture in the Carolina Lowcountry drew upon captive Africans from a wide area of the African continent, but particular note has been made of the contributions of enslaved Africans originating in the Upper Guinea coast region who had sophisticated knowledge of indigenous rice agriculture. The “Black Rice Hypotheses” argues that their knowledge was crucial to the successful plantation regimes. Papers collected in this issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents explore the consequences of that interaction during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries for the societies of the Carolina Lowcountry, as well as for the societies of coastal Guinea and Sierra Leone.
This article explores the manner in which spatial knowledge affected colonial encounters. Utilizing Bourdieu's concept of habitus, I argue that space, like language, art, and gender, is a cultural construct and that for each individual nation there existed a spatial habitus. This spatial understanding was one lens through which contact was viewed. Using the concept of contrasting spatial habitus, the article seeks to explain the actions, by both European and Cherokee individuals, during the visit to Cherokee space by Sir Alexander Cuming in 1730 and the subsequent return visit of Cuming and seven Cherokee to London. It unpacks the events during Cuming's Atlantic travels showing that both incidents were interpreted differently by each nation through their own spatial habitus. Thereby showing that travelers whether they be British moving to America or Cherokee moving to England carried with them their spatial understandings as clearly as they carried their baggage.
While historical studies of the Atlantic slave trade have amply demonstrated the magnitude of slave mortality during the Middle Passage, only recently have they started to examine how the captives might have endured and coped with this traumatic experience. Although it constitutes a major topos in African diasporic culture, the Middle Passage has only occasionally been represented directly and in details in novels and in films. This article examines three recent narratives of the Middle Passage, Fred D'Aguiar's novel Feeding the Ghosts (1998), Guy Deslauriers's film Passage du milieu (2000), and Stephanie Smallwood’s historical study Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007). Beyond their individual poetic, aesthetic, and scholarly qualities, what is most striking about these three texts is that they all use the figure of the living dead in order to explore the captives’ experience of the transatlantic journey. If the ghastly quality of the living dead powerfully captures the life-threatening material and physical conditions the captives endured on the voyage, its dual, liminal character also allows D'Aguiar, Deslauriers, and Smallwood to represent the metaphysical, psychological, social, and cultural journey they were forced to undertake. Through their use of the trope of the living dead, these three texts show that if death is indeed a central aspect of the experience of the Middle Passage, it impacts the captives in ways that go well beyond the issue of mortality.
This article explores the ways in which childhood and youth have been shaped by Atlantic and global dynamics. It explores some of the methodological and theoretical challenges of writing a history of childhood and youth in the Global South. The authors suggest that current theories which address the experiences of young people do not adequately consider the historical specificities of childhood and youth in colonial contexts. In particular, they maintain that there are at least four distinctive factors that shaped young people's experiences. These include the racialization of childhood and youth, attempts to reshape the boundaries of childhood and youth to reflect the priorities of colonial states, the existence of colonial narratives which articulated childhood and youth in terms of deviance and pathology, and the presence of non-Western notions about young people which acted in opposition to colonial impositions despite the severity of the power imbalance. Furthermore, the article argues that while there may be a need to develop a theory that works for children in the Global South, historians should by no means abandon empiricism or develop an over reliance on generalizations that do not adequately consider historical context. Finally, the authors suggest that historians need to rely on nontraditional sources and develop new narratives for articulating the experiences of young people.
Even as ocean-region-based studies gain popularity, they all too often fail to engage the aqueous center that lies at the heart of every maritime community. Studies that seek to highlight political–economic connections across ocean basins tend to ignore the sea altogether, while those that highlight it as a site for challenging modernist notions of identity and subjectivity tend to treat the ocean solely as a metaphor. In contrast, this article argues that in order for ocean-region-based studies to reach their potential, the ocean must be engaged as a material space characterized by movement and continual reformation across all of its dimensions. Drawing on a range of theories, from conceptualizations of more-than-human assemblages to the oceanographic modeling techniques of Lagrangian fluid dynamics, this article proposes a perspective that highlights the liquidity of the ocean, so that the sea is seen not just as a space that facilitates movement between a region's nodes but as one that, through its essential, dynamic mobility and continual reformation, gives us a new perspective from which to encounter a world increasingly characterized by connections and flows.
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.
When writing about Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), several scholars focus on its treatment of masculinity, immigration, and comic book nerddom, as well as its engagement with a Caribbeanist literary tradition. However, none have addressed the clear connection between masculinity and a distinctly circum-Atlantic discourse of magic. References to a curse engendered in the arrival of captive slaves to Hispaniola, supernatural animal-like figures that appear in the sugarcane fields, Afro-Dominican spiritual and medicinal practices, and an African Diaspora literary tradition deeply mark Díaz's novel as a text borne out of an Atlantic and Caribbeanist imaginary. In this article, I propose that Oscar Wao adopts the language of a circum-Atlantic supernatural to critique the traumatic history associated with hyper-masculinity and which haunts both island and diaspora Dominicans. Specifically, the novel uncovers a Caribbeanist hyper-masculine ethos emblematized by ruthless Dominican potentates Rafael L. Trujillo (1891–1961) and Joaquín Balaguer (1906–2002). A disenfranchised citizenry often discursively transforms exorbitant power into predatory otherworldly entities and forces. This malevolent energy tends to manifest itself in communities that are particularly vulnerable to the kind of socio-economic inequality and political exclusion that Trujillo and Balaguer exemplified. Using close reading analysis; critical gender theory; Dominican, Caribbean, and African Diaspora critical tradition and historiography; and a consideration of the Columbus Lighthouse Memorial in Santo Domingo as a totem of this masculinist ethos, I show that Oscar Wao both records and subverts this male-centric discourse from an interventionist and nostalgic diaspora perspective.
In the 1990s, the geographical conceit of the Atlantic as a watery site of cross-cultural exchange and struggles gained wide enough currency to alter teaching and research on Africa, Europe, and the Americas, at least for the years between 1500 and 1800. This paper examines the possibilities for analyzing a longer history of the Atlantic--one that conceivably reaches into our own times. Key to creating a periodization for this longer Atlantic is the changing place of the Atlantic in the wider world. Interpretations of the Atlantic as a separate or central "world" in the years before 1800 are collapsing in the face of global perspectives. The paper summarizes a considerable literature on the Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century that complements in surprising ways the work on red, black and white Atlantic in earlier centuries. This literature also reveals little-known and multi-disciplinary roots of the emerging field of Atlantic Studies. Although the usefulness of Atlantic analyses become more problematic for historians of the "American century," analyses of red, black and white Atlantic continue to have some salience for the era of NATO and American global hegemony.
Encounters between diverse peoples and knowledges were one of the defining features of the early modern Atlantic world. This article examines some of the implications of these encounters by focusing on the place of indigenous and African knowledge in eighteenth-century natural histories of British plantation societies (from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean). It builds on recent scholarship to argue that while colonials acknowledged the authority of their black and indigenous informants as experts about American nature, they represented such expertise as merely the raw materials out of which they fashioned new natural knowledge. Naturalists credited their informants not as individual authors, but as members of groups whose collective experiences and observations gave them unique understanding of New World nature. Colonial naturalists appropriated such expertise while simultaneously asserting that it represented mere know-how, rather than genuine knowledge. Colonials suggested that their own ways of knowing were necessary in order to turn the collective know-how of enslaved and free Africans and Amerindians into stable, universal knowledge suitable for enlightened European audiences. By translating vernacular knowledge into a universal key, colonials suggested that they became authors of new matters of fact about American nature.
This essay examines the story of Hannah Arendt's emigration to America in the midst of World War II and its implications on Arendt's thought and development as a central figure in the American political arena. At times her ideas were controversial, leading her to clash with the American liberal elite of her time and also with central Jewish Israeli and non-Israeli figures, sometimes over Zionism. After her arrival in New York on May 1941, Arendt sought to situate herself as a Continental cultural agent with a unique German phenomenological position, operating within the heart of the elite of the East Coast liberal thinkers during the second half of the twentieth century. Arendt considered herself to be an important participant in the process of reshaping American political discourse and even in the remolding of American citizenship and social conscience, certainly more as a philosopher in the strictly academic sense. Arendt's vita activa and vita contemplativa are stretched between two poles: Bertolt Brecht's poem “The Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao-Tse's Way into Exile,” as well as Walter Benjamin's commentary on the poem (1939), and the 1958 events surrounding the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in light of Hannah Arendt's “Reflections on Little-Rock,” published more than a year later in Dissent, the loud criticism it provoked, and the seminal discourse it stimulated.
She washi off an scrubi off, she Dragi dunga gate, She stock it our wid half her lunch An start fe speculate! Miss Fan described in the quote above epitomises the tenacity and versatility of women in the early-modern Atlantic world. Lack of access to capital meant that women often had to be extremely entrepreneurial in their approaches to commerce. Half her lunch represents that small capital, but with hard work, women could manage to speculate successfully. This article investigates the trading opportunities available to women in three Atlantic port cities: Philadelphia, Charleston and Kingston. Port cities presented women with particular opportunities and problems with regards to work and income opportunities because their economies were based far more on commerce than other activities. There is no doubt that despite the hindrances placed in their way, these women made significant contributions to the economies of each port. Taking a comparative perspective highlights not only the similar problems faced by female traders throughout early-modern British America, but also the way in which factors such as the wider economy, race, the law and gender constructs shaped their abilities to contribute to the economy. The ability of these women to work within these constructs and to stretch their boundaries, whether white or black, free or slave, and whether by choice or necessity, is amazing.
This essay explores notions of Nuyorican, or Diasporic Puerto Rican, culture found in New York as expressed in literature, poetry, and memoir. The concept of the Latino imaginary is invoked to both explain and critically analyze the variety of transnational, especially Atlantic, inflections that are drawn upon by Puerto Rican authors locating a tropical identity in urban America through their writing. Yoruba religious culture, as reinterpreted by the Caribbean folk religion of Santería, becomes an avenue for exploring how transatlantic concepts of the journey and home help to formulate Nuyorican identity and community making through literature. A comparative analysis of Diasporic traditions found in writing, religious practice, and cultural concepts between the Yoruba in Nigeria and Puerto Ricans in the US illuminate the ways in which vernacular traditions render the social imagination as a pivotal strategy for gaining social agency in post-colonial contexts.
Focusing upon contemporary developments in electronic dance music, this paper challenges the conventional view of transatlantic cultural domination emanating from an Anglo-American “centre”. It argues that contemporary global popular culture, facilitated by advances in communications technologies and increasingly complex global flows of people, images and capital, is increasingly decentralized and has a tendency to be based upon networks of mutually interdependent local “scenes”. The emerging landscape of global popular culture requires a theoretical reassessment of transatlantic cultural relations, which includes an appreciation of the complexities of “glocal” taste formation and of the decentralized global networks of cultural production and consumption.
This paper concerns the fictionalisation of the phenomenon of the "middle passage" within Atlantic cultures. Scholarly construction of the middle passage has tended to be grounded in the analysis of abuse, guilt and suffering. The ground rules for this set of cultural emphases were laid down in England in the late eighteenth century, and then seeped through the Americas. Yet much may be gained by moving away from this inheritance, by looking at the rhetoric that, in different ways, celebrates the processes of the middle passage. The majority of celebratory rhetoric was written by slavery apologists for a pro-slavery readership. Isaac Teale's strange poem "The Voyage of the Sable Venus," written in 1765 and published in 1793, together with an accompanying engraving by the celebrated artist Thomas Stothard, is used as a test case to think through some ironies and paradoxes thrown up by art which injects sexualised humour into the contemplation of the middle passage. The tendency to ironise, and even joke about, the processes of sexuality and suffering embodied within the experience of the middle passage, is then taken out from eighteenth-century England and into contemporary Brazil. The discussion moves on to meditate upon the meanings of the sea-Goddess Iemanjá within the cult religions of Salvador Bahia. The piece ends by speculating on what it means when the icon of American subject womanhood, the Barbie doll, is taken over to Brazil and transformed into the African sea-Venus, and protector of slaves, Iemanjá.
This essay reads the plays of Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo in dialogue with influential theories of transnationalism to argue that her treatment of colonialism, slavery, gender, and diaspora stretches and reshapes Paul Gilroy's conception of the black Atlantic. Neither Afrocentric nor essentialist, Aidoo is not usually thought of as part of the black diaspora, despite her constant engagement with notions of pan-Africanism, black nationalism, and slavery. By reading two of her plays which specifically engage with the question of black diasporic encounters to explore the links between African Americans and Africans, the author shows how Aidoo's textured representation of tradition and modernity, history and memory, and the local and the global helps define a model of the black Atlantic that can accommodate Africa as a vital participant in transnational exchanges. In showing that traditions are not static, but changing and adapting all the time, Aidoo suggests that the usable past is not a fact to be assumed, but rather a dilemma to be pondered and debated. While The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) reveals the assumptions inherent in the cultural politics of the Black Arts era, including the questions of pan-Africanism, black masculinity, gender, and nation, Anowa (1970) takes up the more difficult task of re-imagining the relationship across the Atlantic by way of a searching exploration of the tensions internal to a so-called traditional African society in light of the controversial subject of African participation in slavery. By providing a densely textured meditation on the meaning of slavery, the workings of gender in a traditional society, and the relationship between communal and individual agency, Aidoo offers a long view of history to invite us to probe the meaning of past and present and to open up temporal possibilities outside of both nationalist and neocolonialist ones.