The Influence of Atlantic Studies on American Literary Scholarship

Given its recent cultural formation dating back to the turn of the 21st century, Atlantic studies as a burgeoning academic field is still very much in its initial stages, more a generic multidisciplinary horizon than a well-defined province of established themes and practices. To be sure, things have rapidly changed in the last ten years. University curricula and academic presses have begun to invest programmatically in this revived but also radically renewed version of an area-studies domain that was once the exclusive preserve of historians. Currently, regular Atlantic studies course offerings, anthologies, and book titles are on offer that range freely across the fields of history, geography, cultural studies, and literature. In addition, an expanding nucleus of exemplary texts continue to point the way to new kinds of cross-disciplinary and multilingual research and new uses of old archival sources, just as topical journal outlets are available as well as no end to conference opportunities devoted specifically to Atlantic world scholarship.

For constructive purposes, it will be helpful to gather up all of these diverse phenomena not so much in terms of an inevitably tangled genealogy as of a paradigm, in the popular sense that Thomas Kuhn explored in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Indeed, most of the features mentioned above—research horizon and practices, exemplars, university curricula and degree programs, publishing houses, journals, and academic conferences—are very much a part of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. This article considers the taking hold of Atlantic studies as a distinct paradigm has undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion shaping the new century’s studies in American literature, literary history, and critical methodologies, although it is also true that this influence worked both from within and from without the ambience of American literature proper. Since endless nuances are attached to the idea of “influence,” which embraces neighboring concepts such as connectivity, relationship, and causality, it will be to our advantage here simply to discuss those features of Atlantic studies that have made it a salient paradigm before proceeding to appreciate the ways in which scholars of American literature have sought to renew their own field via the collective epiphanies hailing from the Atlantic world.

It should be said that Atlantic studies owes much to the historical study of both slavery and the slave trade and the cultural-philosophical study of modernity, what Immanuel Wallerstein in 1974 called the modern world-system (Wallerstein, 1974). While this debt is formative, the significance of Atlantic studies is evidently due to its scopic fusion of the two fields of study as these socioeconomic formations played out across the same oceanic spaces and ports of the Atlantic world. As noted below, this fusion was brought about by the cultivation of hermeneutic interests that broke down traditional disciplinary fences. Inevitably, the study of life under slavery and of the effects of the African diaspora in the postcolonial era required a new sensibility and renewed forms of humanistic acuity from scholars located throughout the Atlantic world.

The noteworthy works that contributed to the formation of the thematic core of Atlantic studies include at least a handful of titles: Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Philip D. Curtin’s edited volume Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (1967) and his monograph The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975), Eugene D. Genovese’s From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1979), Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death (1982), Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985), Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery (1997), David Eltis’s co-authored The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (1999) and his The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000). Needless to say, the scholarship on slavery studies is now too vast to summarize here; nevertheless, it is the abundance of this research as a whole that has led to a more sophisticated discussion of such cultural notions as diaspora, the Middle Passage, creolization, bondage and freedom, rebellion and resistance, the master-slave relation, reform and abolition, and related issues touching upon the status of the modern subject, universal human rights, republicanism, gender, sexuality, and the often unspeakable horrors of the slave system.

It is worth noting that as early as 1967, several years before novelist Arna Bontemps’s inclusion of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography in Great Slave Narratives (1969), the historian Philip Curtin considered autobiographical narratives like Equiano’s to be important historical documents, thereby anticipating the post-Shoah shift in interest in oral history, testimony, and trauma. By the end of the twentieth century, Equiano’s autobiography had become an exemplary Atlantic world text, leading to the discovery of a host of similar testimonies, some of which Henry Louis Gates Jr. and William L. Andrews later collected in their anthology Pioneers of the Black Atlantic (1998).¹ Likewise, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson provided a broad, comparative analysis of slavery not only as a historical institution, but also as a dialectic of internal relations (Patterson, 1982, 17–101). Note that besides drawing his analyses from the field of history, he also relied heavily on the insights of anthropology and sociology.

As for Atlantic historians, a few prominent scholars at the outset of this century—Donna Gabaccia, David Armitage, Bernard Bailyn, Alison Games, Jack Greene, Philip Morgan—began to acknowledge the innovative work of a handful of scholars from cultural and literary fields who were instrumental in the development of Atlantic studies as a cross-disciplinary project, thereby sounding the call for a renewal in the writing of history.² In her oft-cited lead article in the first issue of the journal Atlantic Studies, which began publication in 2004, Donna Gabaccia noted, “Literary and cultural studies of the Atlantic have proved occasionally influential (consider particularly the work of Paul Gilroy) but still deserve more space in the interdisciplinary dialogue” (18). Published in 1993, Gilroy’s  The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness quickly became a central exemplar for Atlantic studies scholars of all stripes. As will be discussed in more detail below, Gilroy’s major insight was to envision the “Black Atlantic” as “a Counterculture of Modernity” (1–40), an aperçu that first became apparent thanks to him. In the words of Gabaccia, “Interest in the ‘black’ Atlantic has also generated the most interdisciplinary work, from the anthropology of Mintz to the seminal writings of Paul Gilroy” (5).³

In his important attempt to set forth a preliminary frame for the fashioning of Atlantic history, in which he seeks both to clarify its conceptual opportunities and to posit its creative tensions beyond the so-called white Atlantic, the intellectual historian David Armitage called to his side Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, both of which quickly emerged in the late 1990s as influential Atlantic exemplars. Specifically, Armitage cited Roach to describe what the focus of “Circum-Atlantic history” might profitably be: “Accordingly, ‘[t]he concept of a circum-Atlantic world (as opposed to a transatlantic one) insists on the centrality of the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of the culture of modernity’” (Armitage, 2002, 16). Setting this abysmal thematic burden as his major task, Armitage noted that circum-Atlantic history would have to be attuned to “everything around the Atlantic basin” and therefore would have to envision it as “a single … system” (16, author’s italics) based on forms and patterns of circulation and, within them, subzones of exchange and movement that went well beyond the binary politics between nation-states and European metropoles and their colonies. Above all, the author insisted that this concept of Atlantic history—he proposes three: transatlantic, circumatlantic, and cisatlantic—is transnational, not international. To make his point he then calls on a British cultural studies scholar and a theater scholar from Tulane University: “In the words of Paul Gilroy, the Atlantic was a crucible of ‘creolisation, métissage, mestizaje and hybridity’; out of that crucible of identities emerged what Roach has called an ‘interculture … along the Atlantic rim’” (Armitage, 17). As will be discussed more fully below, Armitage’s leap forward hails as an appropriate response to Donna Gabaccia’s earlier plea for more interdisciplinary boldness among historians, since issues of culture and identity are now included as major research themes across the humanities.

Another historian, coming from the field of working-class history, has contributed significantly to the Atlantic studies paradigm by broaching a topic closely related to modern circum-Atlantic identity, mobility, and protest. In his prize-winning book Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, published in 1987, Marcus Rediker sets out to write history from the bottom up by focusing on the nomadic “proletarian” figure of the deep-sea sailor during the period 1700–1750. The seaman, in the author’s words, “toiled among a diverse and globally experienced body of workingmen, whose labors linked the continents and cultures of Europe, Africa, Asia, and North and South America” (11). Building on Wallerstein’s notion of the modern world-system—with its core, periphery, and semiphery zones— Rediker discussed not only trade commodities such as tobacco and sugar, but also the slave trade connecting England, West Africa, and the Caribbean. That said, his ultimate theme was the collective life of sailors as wage-laborers during the rise of British capitalism. As he also recounts, life on the high seas was very much a multiracial and multinational experience, the ship being a synecdoche of Atlantic modernity. This book and the one he later co-authored with Peter Linebaugh, titled The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), led to the identification of a specifically “red” (proletarian) Atlantic constellation. Although both of these books have become exemplars for Atlanticists, primarily because of their focus on forgotten forms of agency and their interdisciplinary élan, Rediker’s next study The Slaves Ship: A Human History, published in 2007, proved equally paradigmatic for Atlantic studies.⁴

Some nineteen years earlier, Paul Gilroy had already drawn attention to the ship in The Black Atlantic when he wrote, “I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point” (Gilroy, 1993: 4). For him, the ship was “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (4). But besides a brief appreciation of the ship in Martin Delany’s mid-nineteenth century novel Blake, Or, the Huts of America, Gilroy made little operative use of his “central organising symbol.” In the notes to The Black Atlantic, we do find references to Rediker’s “brilliant book” Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987: 227, n. 32) and appreciation of an early co-authored essay by Linebaugh and Rediker on “The Many-Headed Hydra” (1990), but he passed up the opportunity to discuss the Middle Passage and other accounts of ships in Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, which he cites for other reasons. And yet, as Werner Sollors points out in his introduction to the 1789 version of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, the autobiography is very much “a memoir by a seaman” (Sollors, 2001: xv). In those same years, Michel Foucault made a trenchant comment on the ship as a heterotope, which quickly became an essential intertext for Atlantic studies scholars, both literary and historical. Given its allusive appeal and brevity, let me cite it here:

Think of the ship: it is a floating part of space, a placeless place, that lives by itself, closed in on itself and at the same time poised in the infinite ocean, and yet, from port to port, tack by tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies, looking for the most precious things hidden in their gardens. Then you will understand why it has been not only and obviously the main means of economic growth …, but at the same time the greatest reserve of imagination for our civilization from the sixteenth century down to the present day. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. (1997: 7)

In Rediker’s The Slave Ship, the Middle Passage, British capitalism and colonialism, the carceral society of the plantation, trans-Atlantic abolitionism, and millions of African deportees all converged to make the slave ship the single most powerful icon of the Atlantic world. Rediker’s anatomy of the slave ship also capably implemented Gilroy’s symbol of the ship, only now as a material as well as a cultural system. Embedded in the black Atlantic as the counterculture of modernity, Rediker’s slave ship provides us with a traumatic vortex of circum-Atlantic memory. In an attempt to explain the spirit behind the writing of The Slave Ship, Rediker chose to quote these words from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: “My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the solitary confinement of despair” (Moore, 2010, 40). By regularly bringing together merchants, sailors, pirates, slaves, ships, empire, and race in the fluid space of the Atlantic world in all of his work, Rediker has done much to identify a set of major figures, themes, and methodological challenges that are now a constitutive part of the Atlantic studies paideia. His ongoing probes into various genealogical sites of circum-Atlantic history make each of Rediker’s books an important tessera of Atlantic studies possibilities. But his way of doing history has not pleased everyone in the academy.

The historian David Armitage pointed out in his review of The Many-Headed Hydra that the book’s methodology “has little in common with the traditional political histories of the white Atlantic [the Anglo-American, northern Atlantic connection] and more with the cultural studies of the black Atlantic, especially Paul Gilroy’s account … of the Atlantic as the crucible of a modernity defined by upheaval and dispersal, mass mobility, and cultural hybridity” (Armitage, 2001: 480). A historian of ideas unfamiliar with the mimetically elusive levels of narrative representation plied by Linebaugh and Rediker, Armitage expresses little sympathy for the kind of project under review, for he goes on to say that it is really not social history at all but literary history with a Marxian narrative structure (482). Mostly an investigation of the anglophone Atlantic, Linebaugh and Rediker used a surprising variety of sources, including testimony, poetry, drama, pamphlets, trial data, and political debates. Faced with the inherent difficulties involved in reconstructing the flickering agency of slaves, pirates, sailors, servants, market women, indentured servants, and common laborers, the authors often found themselves using modernist narrative techniques, such as juxtaposition and metalepsis, to narrate the impulsive rebelliousness of their collective subject; in the end, Armitage laments, they offer little more than a bricolage of fragmentary sources and motifs and a mosaic of set pieces. While the reviewer admits that The Many-Headed Hydra makes for a compelling and enjoyable story, he also states that such eclectic archival trawling cannot be taken seriously as a legitimate form of documentary history. In short, for Armitage what is wrong is the approach, its promiscuous jumbling of sources. Acting as watchdog for a more acceptable kind of middle-range academic history, Armitage assigns The Many-Headed Hydra to the then inchoate, muddling world of Atlantic studies: “In the end … they do not provide a reliable model for a new kind of Atlantic history …” (2001: 485).

Armitage’s review helps us to identify the period shift from a traditional narrative form of Atlantic history to the new Atlantic studies paradigm. His critique is important not because of its local quibbling over some of Linebaugh and Rediker’s readings and perceived evasions but because of its discontent over the book’s experimental articulation of an Atlantic-world poetics based on levels of aisthesis (sensory representation) and agency considered beyond the purview of academic history. Since, however, this same poetic boldness also informs Rediker’s subsequent books The Slave Ship and The Amistad Rebellion: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2013), both of which recount quintessential Atlantic world sites, it is worth commenting further on the disciplinary disjunction noted here. Apparently aware that an increasing number of historians of the modern period and of post-Shoah history were investing in new social science and humanistic methodologies, Armitage ended his review with this tip of the hat: “Anyone seeking inspiration for a multicolored, multivalent, and multinational history of the Atlantic world—in much the same period, and treating many of the same themes—would be better advised to read the theater historian Joseph Roach’s brilliant (but, among historians, little known) Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), whose texts are better chosen, readings more credible, and juxtapositions more truly revealing than those making up The Many-Headed Hydra” (2001: 486). Needless to say, by citing both Gilroy and Roach in his review, Armitage was calling on his fellow historians in Atlantic history to embrace the new literary turn informing Linebaugh and Rediker’s book.

Only a year after his review of The Many-Headed Hydra, Armitage published his important essay “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” (2001), which marked a succinct attempt to identify, classify, and connect the various perspective forces that had already begun to rally young historians of colonial North America, the Age of Revolution, and British imperialism. Given the increasing importance of race, identity, and ideas within these topical periods, not a few among the emerging generation of historians showed familiarity with postcolonial scholarship and the writings of Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Hulme, Paul Gilroy, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others outside the discipline of history proper. In his essay Armitage again mentioned The Many-Headed Hydra, but now as an exemplar of the red Atlantic and without attaching any reservations. More important, he identified Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead as the source for one kind of his threefold typology of Atlantic history, namely the “Circum-Atlantic”one (2001: 16), and in the process he also acknowledged what Eliga H. Gould later termed the “literary turn” in Atlantic history (Gould, 2008: 175–180).⁵ In his description of the circum-Atlantic, Armitage identified it as, above all, a circulatory system characterized by motion and fluidity, which, although apparently boundless, has generated a polycentric “rim” (a term he draws from Roach). Looking back over the rapid development of cultural histories of the Atlantic, Gould confirmed Armitage’s advocacy of this diasporic space, over and above the political and economic dimensions of metropolitan cores and colonial peripheries: “[T]he work of literary scholars played an important role in conceptualizing the early modern Atlantic as a sort of ‘imagined community,’ one sufficiently coherent to merit analysis in its own right” (175).

If, however, we take a closer look at Roach’s reading practices in Cities of the Dead, the conceptual clarity of what a specifically circum-Atlantic perspective might look like becomes considerably blurred. For Gilroy, this perspective line was transparently thematic: the African diaspora and its accompanying issues of identity and double consciousness, race and national belonging. For Roach, self-consciously positioned in the Gulf of Mexico city of New Orleans, Louisiana, the circum-Atlantic stands for a much broader “oceanic interculture” composed of the contributions of many peoples: “Bambara, Iroquois, Spanish, English, Aztec, Yoruba, and French” (Roach, 1996: 5). In effect, Roach, a theater critic then at Tulance University, studies genealogies of performance and sites of memory in two circum-Atlantic rim cities, New Orleans and London, over a stretch of time running from the eighteenth century (Alexander Pope’s “Windsor-Forest,” Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” Shakespeare’s “Mohawk” Macbeth) to the end of the twentieth (New Orleans Congo Square, slave auctions, Mardi Gras, Storyville, jazz funerals). While the confluence of readings and the range of critical notions that Roach draws upon amount to a tour de force of Atlantic-world literary and anthropological engagement, he locates circum-Atlantic interculture in well-rooted behavioral vortices that become “boundless” only through processes of surrogation and memory.

Roach’s forays into eighteenth-century London stage performances reveal the manifold ways in which, as Felicity A. Nussbaum puts it, “the empire penetrated Britain” (71).⁶ This climate of infiltration hovers over such notable works as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (and Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of it), and Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, all of which have become exemplary circum-Atlantic texts. The very idea of an “oceanic interculture” as a hypothetical unit of analysis has also given way to a critical practice that can readily be called contingent history, in which two quite different works, such as Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative and Defoe’s Crusoe, roughly close in time and plying the same seas provide a critical interface for considerations about race and freedom in a far from homogeneous modern world. By juxtaposing these two works, literary critic Laura Doyle has recently sought to bring into a dialectical relation both Anglo-Atlantic and African-Atlantic traditions.⁷ In short, it is the geocultural unit of the circum-Atlantic that licenses such facings in the name of an open-ended archive of themes irrespective of their relevance to a red, green, black, or white Atlantic tenure or to a north, south, east, or west Atlantic location. Similar juxtapositions have also been (and should be) extended to gender and linguistic divisions in such genres as the slave narrative, the captivity narrative, sentimental and gothic fictions, and travel literature.⁸ In her sweeping study Freedom’s Empire (2008), which builds on the results of her 2007 essay, Doyle identifies what she calls “the liberty plot” (99) in early Anglo-Atlantic novels and autobiographies. In an original move, she locates the origins of this Ur-plot in eighteenth-century English and American historiography (David Hume, Catherine Macaulay, David Ramsay, Mercy Otis Warren), which consistently celebrated the Anglo-Saxon legacy of freedom. Having established this correspondence between early history writing and the rise of the novel, Doyle deftly broaches her central argument: how the themes of liberty and rights became racialized—and then racist—in modern Atlantic-world English fiction and memoir.

It is not implausible that Armitage was still drawing from his reading of The Cities of the Dead when he posited what for him is the most practicable type of Atlantic history, namely “Cis-Atlantic” history. For it is here that one can find the routes–roots configuration innervating all of Roach’s sites of memory. Of this kind of history, Armitage muses, “[I]t may prove to be the most useful as a means of integrating national, regional, or local histories into the broader perspectives afforded by Atlantic history, both as an example of oceanic history and as a fashionable mode of historical inquiry in the English-speaking world” (15). We should note that “Cis-atlantic” history—and cis-Atlantic literary scholarship—is above all the history of a particular place understood as a crossroads for circum-Atlantic and trans-Atlantic trajectories (22), and by place we can also intend a particular institution, object, piece of music, text, or local practice. What a circum-Atlantic perspective adds to the study of a particular place is preeminently a form of attention that recognizes the porousness and fluidity of borders, limits, and statuses. It also questions the mute interests behind narratives of descent and the mythologizing ploys of genealogy. Apart from conceptual distinctions, therefore, it seems impossible in practice to separate the two kinds of Atlanticism discussed above. As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once declared, a point of view is a view from a point (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 74, n. 14). Indeed, if a viewpoint claims to be from everywhere, it is in fact from nowhere.

In short, the circum-Atlantic is not a standpoint but an ecology. While Atlantic circulation vivifies and enriches interest in local place, it is local place that provides forms of agency with a purchase it otherwise would not have. I will return to this point below, when discussing a select number of exemplary cis-Atlantic literary studies. The point I want to make here is that only when taken together do the circum-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic viewpoints generate the perspectivism that makes for a specifically Atlantic approach to literature and culture. In effect, once he introduced all three concepts of his threefold typology—the third he called “Trans-Atlantic history”—Armitage then suggested that when taken together, these concepts “offer the possibility of a three-dimensional history of the Atlantic world” (26). Although he remains tentative here, it is precisely this three-dimensionality that proves most promising for the creation of a fully blown Atlantic studies heuristic. For by fostering a triple form of historicity in terms of a law of shifting epistemic levels, Armitage implicitly recognizes the multiform representational tensions characterizing the Atlantic world. As a result of these shifts and tensions, no one perspective—neither the circum-Atlantic nor the cis-Atlantic nor the trans-Atlantic—can be considered absolute or exclusive. The adherent tensional condition of Atlantic studies perspectivism makes it so that all three representational levels appear radically constructive and competitively interdefined.

As an example of this tension, let me cite the case of Frederick Douglass, who until quite recently was read wholly within the restrictive confines of U.S. culture, even though the eighteen months he spent touring Ireland, Scotland, and England as an abolitionist speaker (1845–1847) proved to be an intellectual turning point for him. As Paul Giles points out in his groundbreaking, Atlantic-keyed essay “Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick Douglass and British culture,” the radical revisions Douglass made to the 1855 version of his autobiography were largely due to the positive tensions brought on by his new transnational outlook.⁹ After his highly successful experience in Great Britain, Douglass reconsidered the Emersonian pattern informing his 1845 narrative by adopting a more reflective, ironic style, which Paul Giles attributes to his “comparative consciousness” (787). In effect, My Bondage and My Freedom is beset with an ideological tug-of-war between a newly adopted form of constitutional patriotism and a transnational standpoint bolstered by British abolitionism and reformism.

Written in 1852, under much the same historical and ideological conditions as the revised autobiography, Douglass’s narrative “The Heroic Slave” equally embraces the interconnected spaces of Armitage’s three-dimensional perspectivism: the cis-Atlantic, the circum-Atlantic, and the trans-Atlantic.¹⁰ Impressed by the 1848 revolutions in Europe and evidently buoyed by the pervasive Zeitgeist of an ever-advancing circum-Atlantic freedom, Douglass decided to retell the extraordinary, but forgotten, historical event of the Creole mutiny. With the effects of the new Fugitive Slave Law (1850) stirring up an outrage in northern and western sections of an increasingly divided nation, his timing could not have been better. As the newspapers told it, the slave Madison Washington and eighteen other black revolutionaries took command of the slave ship carrying them from Richmond, Virginia, to the auction block in New Orleans, and they had the ship brought to the British-controlled island of Nassau, where the governor eventually set the 135 slaves free. Taking only a few liberties with the historical facts, Douglass had the narrator-historical chronicler report the words Madison Washington spoke to the first mate, who acts as the only live witness to the revolt. In his quarter-deck declaration to the latter, Washington links the freedom of the Atlantic Ocean with his own spirit and justifies the revolt by citing the fathers of the American Revolution and the spirit of ’76. Here again, Douglass deploys a nationalist-cum-transatlantic perspective to persuade his readers in 1852 that violence had now become a legitimate option for the millions of slaves in the U.S. South and their abolitionist supporters in the North. While the story’s push came from the ever-looming spirit of revolutionary Haiti, the pull came from an Atlantic-propelled spirit of liberty already installed in the British-governed Bahamas. The new Atlantic world paradigm helped systematically to reframe previously national readings of texts such as Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and “The Heroic Slave.”

Armitage’s “Trans-Atlantic” history is the one requiring least annotation. In fact, it represents the rather well-trodden path of comparative history, especially imperial and colonial, carried a step forward in the late 1960s by scholars such as Jack P. Greene, Bernard Bailyn, and J. H. Elliott.¹¹ Greene and Bailyn were instrumental in launching graduate courses in Atlantic history at John Hopkins University and Harvard, respectively. In the mid-1990s, Bailyn spurred interest in Atlantic history among young scholars when he launched the Harvard International Atlantic History Seminar (1996–2007), which produced more than four hundred papers over the years.¹² Building on his own substantial scholarship and the results of the Harvard seminar, Bailyn wrote what he meant to be a timely description of the field, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (2005). But with respect to the more inclusive horizon promoted by the journal Atlantic Studies, his vision appeared parochial and did not address issues related to interdisciplinarity, multilingualism, and the sheer variety of Atlantic geocultures. With Bailyn in mind, the historian Alison Games noted, “The comparative absence of Africa in conceptualizations of the Atlantic is a consequence both of the dominance of Atlantic history by historians of the North Atlantic and of enduring Eurocentrism” (Games, 2006: 754).¹³

If trans-Atlantic history can be said to trace a road across the Atlantic, then a full-blown Atlantic studies turns that same vector into a three-dimensional crossroads connecting four continents. More alive than historians to the cultural, racial, and linguistic complexities besetting the colonial and early national period of North America, the Caribbean, and the United States, literary scholars at the beginning of the new century increasingly sought to turn the study of “American” literature inside out. The paradigm shift they helped to enforce was based on a very simple Atlantic studies perception: “American” literature could not be set apart. It belonged to a binding network sustained by the busy traffic that connected people, commodities, and ideas on both sides of the Atlantic, along a north-south hemispheric axis, and regionally among the Caribbean islands. Nor could European explorers and colonists have survived and flourished without creating cultural, trade, and military networks with the various indigenous peoples of the Americas.¹⁴ In short, the old chestnut of American exceptionalism and the diminished rewards of national introspection now seemed outmoded in an increasingly interconnected world.

The paradigm shift I am talking about can be captured in a synthetic overview of a handful of scholarly texts that have become recognized exemplars of the new Atlantic studies vision of U.S. literature, a vision that has now become a dominant force in reshaping curricula and introducing new literary histories. Above all, the three-dimensional horizon of Atlantic perspectivism has led to a new interest in the role that geography and cartography have played, particularly in the shaping of colonial and early national literatures. Indicative of this geocultural sensibility is Paul Giles’s The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011), which is an extended meditation on the geographer D. W. Meinig’s efforts to place the United States within a spatial context he called Atlantic America (Meinig, 1986: xvi). As Meinig notes, geography and history are complementary and independent: “This relationship is implied by such common terms as space and time, area and era, places and events—pairs that are fundamentally inseparable” (xv). Giles discusses mental maps and their relation to actual maps and invests his concise analyses of literary texts with an ecological sensibility. A heightened awareness of Atlantic America leads Giles radically to revise the old genealogy of American literary history based on a process of “retrodiction,” whereby colonial and Augustan American literatures were read from the decades-strong exceptionalist perspective incarnated in F. O. Matthiessen’s book American Renaissance of 1941 (2009 2–3, 74, 77–78).

Giles sets out to reevaluate such writers as Richard Alsop, Timothy Dwight, Ebenezer Cook, and William Byrd II by considering them in the light of a highbrow-lowbrow republicanism based on burlesque, travesty, and an ironic sense of cultural geography. We are now a far cry from the mythologizing tendencies of the American landscape that once argued for a national culture based on an original, ahistorical relation with nature. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, too, receives Giles’s attention, in part due to the poet’s interest in the work of George Catlin and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Indeed, in one chapter calling attention to the many traces of Mississippi Valley mound culture in early national literature, he corrects the notion that the indigenous peoples had no past. In line with his Atlanticist framework, Giles also discusses the geographical visions of the antebellum, southern slaveholding class, which ambitiously dreamed of incorporating Cuba, parts of Central America, and the lands taken from Mexico in an all-embracing cotton empire—a mental geography that Matthew Pratt Guterl called the “American Mediterranean.”¹⁵ In his earlier book Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (2001), Giles often brilliantly pairs writers such as Richardson and Franklin, Jefferson and Sterne, Hawthorne and Trollope, and Poe and Equiano with the express purpose of getting us to rethink literary history and creative allegiances. No scholar of the trans-Atlantic literary exchange has Giles’s grasp of the literatures in question. At one point, for example, he points out that Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, which was extremely popular in Britain in the early years of the eighteenth century, helped to creolize the novels of Samuel Richardson (2001: 78).¹⁶

While a growing number of scholars have now begun to investigate the north-south axis of cultural exchange in the Americas, Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004) was especially influential, and for obvious reasons.¹⁷ Brickhouse introduces her project by discussing the 1826 Congress of Panama, which, under the leadership of Simón Bolívar, sought “to form a hemispheric political coalition against imperial threat from Europe” and wrest the colonial territories of Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish control (2). In Article 27 of the Congress’s Treaty of Perpetual Union, it also prohibited the slave trade. With this opening salvo Brickhouse points to “the first flourishing of a hemispheric consciousness” and what she calls a “paradigm shift” toward “an inter-American cooperative system” (2–3). In acknowledging her vast critical debts, she names the work of Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, and Paul Giles, but also that of Lois Parkinson Zamora, Vera Kutzinski, Walter Mignolo, and Michael Dash, to name the most prominent. Focusing on Spanish, French, and English linguistic cultures and steeped in Latin American and Caribbean history, Brickhouse calls for recognition of a “transamerican renaissance” (30) in place of the narrow American Renaissance that Paul Giles also targeted above. The time period of her own historically dynamic renaissance is roughly the same as that of F. O. Matthiessen, but now the physical and cultural geography demands a much broader horizon and set of linguistic skills.

Brickhouse’s insistence on a three-dimensional hemispheric, cis-Atlantic, and circum-Atlantic perspectivism also leads to an equally rich interdisciplinary use of history, geography, and literature. Her cultural and geographical visitations carry her to Cuba, Haiti, Boston, Mexico, New Orleans, Paris, and elsewhere as she discusses various literary coteries and journals such as Revue des colonies (1830s–1840s) and the North American Review (especially its early interest in Latin America and Haiti). Also an advocate of contingent history, Brickhouse convenes in one interpretative site works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Pierre Faubert’s play Ogé, ou, Le préjugé de couleur (1856), Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico and Hawthorne’s “Rappacini’s Daughter,” the anonymous historical novel Jicoténal (Philadephia, 1982), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (2009), and W. H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843).¹⁸ If these tensive encounters prove startlingly fresh and surprising, their rationale is well grounded in the paradigm shift Brickhouse evokes in her prologue. Sibylle Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, which was also published in 2004, shares not a few of the same texts and geographies discussed by Brickhouse, only now the author more exclusively focuses on the theme of slavery as the counter-memory of modernity. Again, Fischer’s sites of memory include Haiti and Cuba, but her critical aim is to correct Gilroy’s overemphasis on culture in theorizing the black Atlantic.

Citing the work of such historians and sociologists as David Brion Davis, Eugene Genovese, Orlando Patterson, Robin Blackburn, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Fischer, a professor of literature and romance studies, discusses “the conflictive and discontinuous nature of modernity in the Age of Revolution,” a phenomenon she refers to as “a disavowed modernity” (Fischer, 2004: 37). Devoted, like Brickhouse, to the Atlantic studies forma mentis, Fischer explains the aims of her book as follows: “It is an attempt to think about literature, culture, and politics transnationally, as forms of expression that mirrored the hemispheric scope of the slave trade; to think what might have been lost when culture and emancipatory politics were finally forced into the mold of the nation-state” (2–3). Again, Fischer’s interests introduce a new cast of cis-Atlantic poets, novelists, revolutionaries, and intellectuals: Plácido, José Antonio Aponte, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Tanco y Bosmeniel, Domingo Del Monte, Toussaint Louverture, Sonthonax, Henri Christophe, and Cirilo Villaverde. Inevitably, her discussion also relates antislavery culture to the events of the French Revolution, the Amis des Noirs, and the way in which European events and ideas took hold locally, in the sugar islands of Haiti and Cuba. We are also reminded that women’s rights movements first gained strength as women became actively and internationally involved in abolitionist societies in England and North America during the period 1830–1860. Fischer notes that it would be interesting to study “the links between the struggle against slavery and sexual subordination” (16–17) inasmuch as women in the suffrage movement were quick to adopt the emancipatory language of antislavery to their cause. According to Fischer, the fact that such links have not been studied is due, in part, to the disciplinary fragmentation and disciplinary hierarchies of academic scholarship. But a few years later, the essay collections Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (2007) and Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (2012) dealt with those very links.¹⁹

A cursory word should be said on the reemergence of hemispheric studies, which a growing number of literary scholars have cultivated as a workable alternative to the restrictive focus on independent national cultures. On the U.S. front, for example, Caroline Levander recently reviewed three books on “The Times of Transnational Studies” (2014: 559–568) in which all the authors seem to agree that the American Century has come to an end. While such score-keeping has become quite popular, Levander and Robert S. Levine, in particular, have done much to promote an alternative Hemispheric American Studies, the title of their 2008 essay collection, which incorporates earlier contributions from a special issue of American Literary History published in the fall of 2006. In these two venues the editors feature essays by leading scholars of hemispheric studies such as Ralph Bauer, Anna Brickhouse, Rodrigo Lazo, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Kirsten Silva Guresz, and Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, and both occasions are accompanied by introductions and commentary or afterword that point out pitfalls and new directions. In their “Introduction: Hemispheric American Literary History” (2006), Levander and Levine also provide a concise genealogy of hemispheric literary studies and an essential bibliography. In the special journal issue, we find Claire Fox’s important discussion of Herbert Bolton’s call in 1932 for a shift of interest to hemispheric American history and Edmundo O’Gorman’s objections based on cultural and geographical particularity. Basically, O’Gorman accused Bolton, a University of California at Berkeley history professor, of naïve U.S. expansionism, a warning that is still relevant today.²⁰ For some reason, Fox’s essay was not included in the 2008 volume. This is unfortunate for a project that seeks to promote interdisciplinary and multilingual scholarship. For that matter, no mention is made of Bernard Bailyn’s account of hemispheric history in his book Atlantic History (2005).

As Levander and Levine note in their volume of essays (2008), several of the contributors have chosen to discuss places and texts that are already in themselves hemispheric, even if regularly considered otherwise in a national framework. Indeed, one of the major thrusts of hemispheric studies is to historicize geography and pay close attention to border-crossing and national borders, which function as hot spots for cultural translation or obstruction. In the end, what this collection offers is a series of specific case studies which the editors would like to consider as elements for picturing a “polycentric American hemisphere” (7). But this vision, taken as a paradigm (6), seems rather visionary as such. The authors often discuss issues of colonialism, empire, and race, all of which require a circum-Atlantic outreach, but there is no expression of interest in the broader outlook of Atlantic studies and its exacting three-dimensional perspectivism. In his impressive book Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (2000), George B. Handley goes beyond the parameters of nationality by pairing various novels in Spanish and English around the hemispheric theme of racial genealogy in plantation cultures. He fixes on the central topic of family history as a metaphor for national identity in former slave societies of the Americas. This focus allows him to pair Cirilo Villaverde and George Washington Cable; Martín Morúa Delgado, Charles Chesnutt, and Frances E. W. Harper; Alejandro Carpentier and William Faulkner; and Jean Rhys, Rosario Ferré, and Toni Morrison. In pursuing his theme, Handley builds on the work of Latin American and Caribbean scholars such as Doris Sommers, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Deborah Cohen, José David Saldívar, and Édouard Glissant, and is familiar with the recent history of Atlantic-world slavery. Although he cites the work of Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach, he does not open up his project to Atlantic-world effects. Handley’s book is part of the University of Virginia Press’s New World Studies series, which is edited by J. Michael Dash and is largely dedicated to hemispheric themes in multilingual contexts.

As the scholarship reviewed here unanimously demonstrates, U.S. literary scholarship, like the new Atlantic studies paradigm, is now increasingly multilinguistic and cross- and interdisciplinary. To be sure, the critical configurations of our Atlantic exemplars are also the direct result of a whole new ecology of cultural themes. Sean X. Goudie’s Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006) will serve as a representative cis-Atlantic text for a number of closing observations. To stage the issue of Creole nationalism and the young nation’s ambiguous (“paracolonial”) relation to the West Indies, Goudie discusses at length the political and cultural projects of two representative Creole nationalists, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton (who was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis). In the early years of U.S. nation-building, an ideological battle developed between those who envisioned a commercial nation based on hemispheric and trans-Atlantic trade and those who favored an agrarian nation whose future lay in westward continental expansion. Both parties were eager to define the cultural process of ethnogenesis and both had to come to terms with the hopelessly entangled relations between the sugar-rich, slave-run West Indies and the new nation’s claims to be an empire for liberty. It is in this heated-up context that Goudie, an English scholar, speaks of the “New Republic’s creole complex” (66) and the popular perception that white Creoles from the West Indies were degenerate. To elaborate these issues, he discusses Edward Long’s A History of Jamaica (2010) and Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (1801), and he also provides a number of illuminating hemispheric readings of well-known authors and texts—in particular, Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Philip Freneau’s “West Indies” poems, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, and Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. In addition, he introduces us to several rediscovered works that are specifically relevant to the themes of Creole identity, Creole degeneracy, and, more broadly, the Creole complex: J. Robinson’s once popular play The Yorker’s Stratagem; or, Banana’s Wedding (1792) and Leonora Sansay’s epistolary novel Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (2007).

What brings these texts into conversation with each other is precisely Goudie’s theme, which, along with the African diaspora, stages another major interdisciplinary site of the new scholarship. The history, ethnography, and theory of creolization has become a critical flashpoint for linguists, anthropologists, historians, and cultural studies and literary scholars.²¹ As exemplary circum-Atlantic sites, places like New Orleans continue to be conspicuously ideophanic and, quite literally, eu-phoric (producing an excess of self-reflexive commentary), as Rien Fertel’s Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (2014) and Catharine Savage Brosman’s Louisiana Creole Literature (2013) promptly confirm. Of course, the theme of creolization extends well beyond the cis-Atlantic-hemispheric context of the West Indies and the new U.S. republic. It was the historian Ira Berlin who first pointed to the circum-Atlantic breath of the creolization process.²² Commercial, kinship, and cultural networks between the West Indies and the new republic of North America were undoubtedly part of a larger circum-Atlantic world, where Creole ambivalences already characterized the fluid processes of all kinds of exchange mixed together in single encounters. Names, strategies of recognition and survival, roles and professions, fortunes and reputations, all could become liquefied in the interstitial zones between metropole and colony, center and periphery, and beyond the international divisions of state apparatuses.

The exemplars discussed here, a baker’s dozen, recount some of the formative moments of the new Atlanticist surround of U.S. literary scholarship, all of them salient and representative. It should be said that within the context of this interdisciplinary perspectivism interest has grown in other significant themes accompanying the paradigm shift outlined here: trans-Atlantic print and reprint cultures, translation histories, commodity studies, oceanic studies, abolition and reform interests, science and natural history studies, travel, and the rich vein of single-author studies—including Atlantic figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Alexander von Humboldt, Margaret Fuller, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Simón Bolívar, José Martí, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louis Kossuth, Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Craft, Sarah Forten, Sarah Parker Remond, Julia Griffiths, and Harriet Martineau. Many of these special-focus areas are at the initial stages of elaboration and promise to enrich the current Atlantic paradigm for decades to come. Interestingly, after growing into a major quarterly journal during its first ten years, Atlantic Studies decided to add a new feature to its title: “global currents.” The “global currents” addition, above all, marks an attempt to embrace Pacific Rim studies, which has recently become a complementary area-studies domain. As for global (or world) history, it has become one more dimension complicating the horizon of the now seemingly retrogressive study of national literatures proper. In the last few years we have had a global history of the “empire of cotton” and an equally vast study of the “transformation of the world” during the nineteenth century.²³ Besieged by their own disciplinary crisis, also comparative literature scholars have sought to reinvent their programs by embracing the study of world literatures, although the problems this scopic challenge has raised have yet to be clarified. The tensions of a three-dimensional, multilingual perspectival alertness characterizing the best scholarship of the new Atlantic studies and U.S. literary criticism seem to be sufficiently comprehensive and ecologically responsive to the ever-changing needs of humanist criticism.