Search Results

This volume showcases, but also interrogates, the value of Atlantic World approaches to the histories and cultures of the American South. Challenging the traditional chronological focus of most Atlantic history on the Early Modern period, the volume ranges from colonial times to the modern era, while thematically it embraces a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to topics such as economics, migration, religion, revolution, law, slavery, race relations, emancipation, gender, literature, performance, visual culture, memoir, ethnography, empires, nations, and historiography. Geographically, the chapters focus mainly on the southern region of the North American continent and the lands in and around the Atlantic Ocean-although the physical location of a putative “Atlantic World” and, for that matter, of something we can call an “American South” are among the definitional issues with which the volume wrestles. Ultimately, the value of any grand concept such as Atlantic History, or Atlantic Studies, or the Black Atlantic depends on its capacity to explain past or present social realities. The cumulative effect of the mix of case studies and state-of-the-field essays gathered in this volume is to affirm that there is much to be learned about both the American South and the Atlantic World by considering them together and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. In so doing, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the fields of American, southern, and Atlantic Studies.

This multi-authored volume examines the process of European expansion into the Atlantic by focusing on a region that has come to be known as the American South. During the three centuries after Europeans began to cross the Atlantic with confidence, they interacted with one another, with the native people, and with enslaved Africans across the South. The volume's essays offer examples of colonial encounter for those who are curious about how the broad processes of historical change influenced particular people and places. In recent years there have appeared several important studies that address the Atlantic World generally and/or the specific experiences of Spanish, British, and French imperial projects in the South. A key aspect of each of these colonial schemes was finding ways to engage profitably—from the European perspective—with Native Americans. The consequences of Indian encounters with European invaders has long been a principal feature of ethnohistorical research, but during the last long generation scholars of Native Americans in the South have increasingly viewed their subject in an Atlantic World context. With such scholarship as its foundation, the goal of the present volume is to bring together scholars with research linked to each of the three major European colonial powers to draw increased scholarly attention to the South as a significant arena of imperial ambition.

Beginning in 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) launched one of the earliest and most sustained efforts to Christianize enslaved people in Britain’s colonies. This book examines the history of this program and offers a new assessment of the missionary encounters it produced in colonial America and around the Atlantic world. Based on a belief in the essential unity of humankind, the Society’s missionaries worked to convert slaves and improve their treatment. However, over time the Society became increasingly comfortable with slavery, allied with masters, and willing to embrace slavery as a missionary tool. As this book shows, these developments provided moral and intellectual support to masters and they help explain why only a minority of enslaved people in colonial America adopted Anglicanism. Two key sites show how these dynamics operated in the wider Atlantic world. On its Codrington sugar plantation in Barbados, the Society owned hundreds of people and hoped to simultaneously make profits and save souls. In Africa, it cooperated with slave traders and established a mission at Cape Coast Castle, at the heart of the British slave trade. This book closes with a re-examination of the Society’s place in the history of abolition and emancipation. While some accounts have stressed SPG supporters’ reformism and anti-slave trade statements, here a re-evaluation reveals the Society’s corporate commitment to slavery, how its history was used to defend slaveholding, and how antislavery activists viewed the Society as a significant institutional opponent.

Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals, The Atlantic World and Beyond brings together new scholarship on the cross-cultural experiences of intellectuals of African descent since the 18th century. The intent of this book is not to dismantle Paul Gilroy’s thesis but to embrace it and venture “beyond” the traditional organization and symbolism of the “Black Atlantic.” This collection of essays is not organized geographically or historically by era; instead, contributions are arranged into three sections which highlight the motivations and characteristics that connect a certain set of “agents,” thinkers, and intellectuals: 1) Re-ordering Worldviews: Rebellious Thinkers, Poets, Writers, and Political Architects; 2) Crafting Connections: Strategic and Ideological Alliances; 3) Cultural Mastery in Foreign Spaces: Evolving Visions of Home and Identity. These essays are intentionally organized to expand categories and to suggest patterns at play that have united individuals and communities across the African Diaspora. They highlight the self-determined stories of individuals, who from their intercultural, and often marginalized, positioning, challenged the status quo, created strategic (and at times, unexpected) international alliances, cultivated expertise and cultural competency abroad in places that were unfamiliar to them, as well as, crafted physical and intellectual spaces for their self-expression and dignity to thrive. What, for example, connects the 18th century Igbo author, Olaudah Equiano with 1940s literary figure, Richard Wright; 19th century expatriate anthropologist, Antenor Fermin with 1960s Haitian émigrés to the Congo; Japanese Pan-Asianists and Southern Hemisphere Aboriginal activists with Jamaican-born, Marcus Garvey; or Angela Davis with artists of the British Black Arts Movement Ingrid Pollard and Zarina Bhimji? They are all part of a mapping that reaches across and beyond geographical, historical, and ideological boundaries typically associated with the “Black Atlantic.” They reflect accounts of individuals and communities that are equally united in their will to seek out better realities, often, as the title suggests, “anywhere but here.”

Embracing Protestantism argues that people of African descent in America who embraced Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century did not become African Americans, but rather came to think of themselves in the context of more fluid Atlantic-African identities. America was the land of slavery and white supremacy where they had little chance of obtaining civil rights or economic mobility. Contrastingly, the Atlantic world offered access to the growing abolitionist movement in Britain and Europe, membership in transatlantic evangelical churches that gave people of color unprecedented power in their local congregations, the chance for contact with black Christians in West and Central Africa, and inspiration from the large black churches then developing in the Caribbean with whom they had formed links through correspondence and the movement of black missionaries. Rather than deracinated creoles who attempted to merge with white culture, people of color who became Protestants in this era were Atlantic Africans who used multiple religious traditions to restore cultural and ethnic connections. Reaching out to third parties outside the plantation complex in the new abolitionist and humanitarian societies then springing up in late eighteenth-century Britain and America was an important way black Anglophone Christians had to resist slavery.

Holy Nation reconstructs the transnational religious community forged by the Society of Friends during the Age of Revolution. It utilizes the public and private writings of 76 ministers (40 male and 36 female) who crossed the Atlantic Ocean from 1750–1820 in order to reinforce religious ties across national borders. It argues that these Quakers envisioned themselves as the ancient Hebraic nation of Zion in order to articulate an identity not only separate from but in opposition to the nation-state during this critical period. This positionality, however, represented a triple threat to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century governments. First, Friends' primary political identity was invested not in the nation or the empire but rather in a loose, transatlantic alliance of Society members, undermining the idea of a cohesive citizenry. Second, Quakers were united in their opposition to the practices used by those in power to secure and exert their authority, challenging exclusionary definitions of citizenship. Finally, Friends' activism underscored the distance between the promise of democracy and the practices that violated it, highlighting the oppressive power of the state. In these three ways, the Friends' holy nation challenges the common supposition that religion and nationalism were mutually constitutive during this period, highlighting instead the role of religion in questioning the form and character of the nation-state. Holy Nation thus intervenes in religious and Atlantic World historiography, demonstrating how religious identity subverted the project of nation-building by offering concrete alternative definitions of nation and citizen at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Deadly Virtue argues that the history of the French Calvinist attempt to colonize Florida in the 1560s is key to understanding the roots of American whiteness in sixteenth-century colonialism, science, and Protestantism. The book places the history of Fort Caroline, Florida, into the context of Protestant colonialism and understandings of the body, emotion, and identity held in common by travelers throughout the early Atlantic world. Protestants envisioned finding a rich and powerful Indigenous king, converting him to Christianity, and then establishing a Protestant-Indigenous alliance to build an empire under Indigenous leadership that would compete with European monarchies. However, when the colony was wiped out by the Spanish, these Protestants took this as a condemnation from their god for this plan of collaborating with Indigenous people and developed separatist strategies for future Protestant colonial projects. By introducing the reader to the humoral model of the body, this book shows how race, gender, sexuality, and Christian morality came to intersect in modern understandings of whiteness.