This book features methodological and theoretical perspectives that embody fundamental questions concerning the historical paradigm of Atlantic Studies and beyond to explore, cultural theory, visual culture, literature, and the narratives and iconography of popular culture (among others).
Embracing a transdisciplinary and forward-looking approach, the volume charts new directions for understanding the Atlantic world through contributions that examine river networks, transatlantic Indigenous travel, the circulation of letters and "exotic" animals, the French Atlantic slave trade, and museum spaces as sites of decolonizing processes. It also proposes expanded geographies—such as viewing the Atlantic from the Arctic—and reconsiders the cultural currents that continue to shape global imaginaries.
This collection marks the twentieth anniversary of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, offering a timely reflection on the journal’s legacy while pointing to the future of the field. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students in Atlantic Studies, history, literary and cultural studies, art history, postcolonial studies, and global and transoceanic studies.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Charting the future: Twentieth-anniversary issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 1. Decolonization, diversity and accountability: The role of museums in democracies of the global north 2. “That ancient and modern wonder”: Giraffes, imperialism, and the making of the American menagerie, 1830–1840 3. Transatlantic itinerants and hustlers: Reading the ‘connected histories’ of India and Atlantic worlds in Bartholomew Burges’s A Series of Indostan Letters (1790) 4. Amphibious landings: Free people of color, food supply, and contested land tenure on the Magdalena River network (1796–1806) 5. Across the Atlantic: Morbidity, geography, and the eighteenth-century French Atlantic slave trade 6. A Spanish colony made of foreigners: Transimperial Trinidad during the age of revolutions 7. Modern American Indians in (and beyond) the Deutsche Reich: (Re)Claiming Indigenous lands, nations, and futures through transatlantic Indigenous travel 8. Wandering books in the global Enlightenment: The life of an eighteenth-century library that crisscrossed the Atlantic 9. Atlantification: Facing the Atlantic from the Arctic – a provocation
About the Author :
Emily Berquist Soule is Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach, California, USA.
Rocio G. Davis is Professor of Literature at the University of Navarra, Spain.
Dorothea Fischer-Hornung is retired Senior Lecturer in the English Department and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Nathaniel Millett is Associate Professor of History at Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
