Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199217182
- eISBN:
- 9780191712388
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217182.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Chapter One establishes the book's theoretical and methodological context by siting it within recent developments in postcolonial studies, reception studies, and theories of tragedy. Taking as its ...
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Chapter One establishes the book's theoretical and methodological context by siting it within recent developments in postcolonial studies, reception studies, and theories of tragedy. Taking as its methodological parameters the work of Gilroy and Bernal on the Black Atlantic and Black Athena, it introduces the construct of the ‘Black Aegean’ as the zone of cultural transmission among Africa, Ancient Greece, and contemporary Europe. Other issues in postcolonial studies, such as the nature of canonical counter-discourse, and the possible identity of the United States as a postcolonial society, are analysed. The chapter also enters into dialogue with recent writers on classical reception, and develops further the theory of classical reception by positing a version of reception that has learnt from deconstruction and so highlights its self-consciousness and recursivity. The final section of the chapter discusses theories of tragedy, supplementing Steiner with Soyinka.Less
Chapter One establishes the book's theoretical and methodological context by siting it within recent developments in postcolonial studies, reception studies, and theories of tragedy. Taking as its methodological parameters the work of Gilroy and Bernal on the Black Atlantic and Black Athena, it introduces the construct of the ‘Black Aegean’ as the zone of cultural transmission among Africa, Ancient Greece, and contemporary Europe. Other issues in postcolonial studies, such as the nature of canonical counter-discourse, and the possible identity of the United States as a postcolonial society, are analysed. The chapter also enters into dialogue with recent writers on classical reception, and develops further the theory of classical reception by positing a version of reception that has learnt from deconstruction and so highlights its self-consciousness and recursivity. The final section of the chapter discusses theories of tragedy, supplementing Steiner with Soyinka.
Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199217182
- eISBN:
- 9780191712388
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217182.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This book seeks to explain the prominence of Sophocles' Theban plays among those Greek tragedies adapted by dramatists across the African diaspora. It argues that the Theban plays reflect on three ...
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This book seeks to explain the prominence of Sophocles' Theban plays among those Greek tragedies adapted by dramatists across the African diaspora. It argues that the Theban plays reflect on three themes which have become crucial in the postcolonial context: identity, the grounding of civilization on barbarism, and transmission of culture over time and space. To adapt the Theban dramas is thus a massively theoretical as well as an audaciously practical act, because they have been installed as the script that both legislates and explains how they, and indeed all other cultural artefacts, are conveyed. African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American adaptations engage with the cultural politics of the so-called Western canon, and use their self-consciously literary status variously to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and the place of the Greek ‘originals’, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission. The book is informed by and contributes to postcolonial theory and theories of classical reception. In particular, it develops a new analytic concept, the ‘Black Aegean’, with which to theorize the ways in which colonialist and postcolonialist discourses have staged various encounters between ancient Greece and contemporary Africa. This construct mediates through the plays the later debates about the Black Atlantic and Black Athena.Less
This book seeks to explain the prominence of Sophocles' Theban plays among those Greek tragedies adapted by dramatists across the African diaspora. It argues that the Theban plays reflect on three themes which have become crucial in the postcolonial context: identity, the grounding of civilization on barbarism, and transmission of culture over time and space. To adapt the Theban dramas is thus a massively theoretical as well as an audaciously practical act, because they have been installed as the script that both legislates and explains how they, and indeed all other cultural artefacts, are conveyed. African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American adaptations engage with the cultural politics of the so-called Western canon, and use their self-consciously literary status variously to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and the place of the Greek ‘originals’, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission. The book is informed by and contributes to postcolonial theory and theories of classical reception. In particular, it develops a new analytic concept, the ‘Black Aegean’, with which to theorize the ways in which colonialist and postcolonialist discourses have staged various encounters between ancient Greece and contemporary Africa. This construct mediates through the plays the later debates about the Black Atlantic and Black Athena.
Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott, and Anja Werner
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628461558
- eISBN:
- 9781626740839
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461558.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
The authors argue, that a focus on Black intellectualism dissolves binary oppositions—as Paul Gilroy, W.E.B. DuBois, and others have attempted to do in their explorations of “double consciousness” ...
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The authors argue, that a focus on Black intellectualism dissolves binary oppositions—as Paul Gilroy, W.E.B. DuBois, and others have attempted to do in their explorations of “double consciousness” and other (intellectual) ways in which people of African descent have proactively negotiated their heritage, past, and present in the face of external conditions of hardship and change. Studies on Black Intellectualism create a space for understanding self-determined, conscious actions and creative choices, without ignoring historical and systemic obstacles of inequality, discrimination, violence, enslavement, misfortune or other circumstances that may victimize. New literature focusing on the intellectualism of the Black Atlantic and beyond can now go further to make more connections across time and space and to show how these inventive connections and collaborations are an inherent part of the process of facing uncertainty, movement and change By moving beyond traditional and formerly limiting geographical, historical, and conceptual categories of the “Black Atlantic,” we expand and liberate this discourse to make possible the study of how movement to “anywhere but here” helped individuals to arrive at where they needed to be spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally.Less
The authors argue, that a focus on Black intellectualism dissolves binary oppositions—as Paul Gilroy, W.E.B. DuBois, and others have attempted to do in their explorations of “double consciousness” and other (intellectual) ways in which people of African descent have proactively negotiated their heritage, past, and present in the face of external conditions of hardship and change. Studies on Black Intellectualism create a space for understanding self-determined, conscious actions and creative choices, without ignoring historical and systemic obstacles of inequality, discrimination, violence, enslavement, misfortune or other circumstances that may victimize. New literature focusing on the intellectualism of the Black Atlantic and beyond can now go further to make more connections across time and space and to show how these inventive connections and collaborations are an inherent part of the process of facing uncertainty, movement and change By moving beyond traditional and formerly limiting geographical, historical, and conceptual categories of the “Black Atlantic,” we expand and liberate this discourse to make possible the study of how movement to “anywhere but here” helped individuals to arrive at where they needed to be spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally.
Maurice S. Lee
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199797578
- eISBN:
- 9780199932412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199797578.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter discusses how African-American authors participated in the probabilistic revolution. While early black Atlantic writers largely adhered to the providential outlook of Christian ...
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This chapter discusses how African-American authors participated in the probabilistic revolution. While early black Atlantic writers largely adhered to the providential outlook of Christian abolitionism, some later writers—most notably Douglass and the black intellectual James McCune Smith—deployed emerging sciences of chance to fight against slavery and racism. Douglass in his autobiographies and journalism moved away from providential rhetoric toward more empirical, quantitative antislavery arguments, aligning him with statistical sociology (Adolphe Quetelet), liberalism (John Stuart Mill), and pragmatism (the early Du Bois and, more surprisingly, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). This chapter ends with a discussion of how pragmatism as traditionally conceived has failed to grapple sufficiently with the challenge of racism.Less
This chapter discusses how African-American authors participated in the probabilistic revolution. While early black Atlantic writers largely adhered to the providential outlook of Christian abolitionism, some later writers—most notably Douglass and the black intellectual James McCune Smith—deployed emerging sciences of chance to fight against slavery and racism. Douglass in his autobiographies and journalism moved away from providential rhetoric toward more empirical, quantitative antislavery arguments, aligning him with statistical sociology (Adolphe Quetelet), liberalism (John Stuart Mill), and pragmatism (the early Du Bois and, more surprisingly, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). This chapter ends with a discussion of how pragmatism as traditionally conceived has failed to grapple sufficiently with the challenge of racism.
Joseph R. Slaughter and Kerry Bystrom
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823277872
- eISBN:
- 9780823280490
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823277872.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Responding to the way the Southern parts of the Atlantic have historically been obscured in conceptions of the Atlantic world and through the critical oceanic studies concepts of fluidity, solvency, ...
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Responding to the way the Southern parts of the Atlantic have historically been obscured in conceptions of the Atlantic world and through the critical oceanic studies concepts of fluidity, solvency, and drift, this chapter serves as a critical introduction to the South Atlantic. Beginning with a rereading of the Atlantic Charter, it poses the South Atlantic both as a material geographic region (something along the lines of a South Atlantic Rim) and as a set of largely unfulfilled visions—including those of anti-imperial solidarity and resistance generated through imaginative and political engagement from different parts of the Global South with the Atlantic world. It also reflects on the conditions under which something called the “Global South Atlantic” could come into being and the modes of historical, cultural, and literary comparison by which a multilingual and multinational region might be grasped.Less
Responding to the way the Southern parts of the Atlantic have historically been obscured in conceptions of the Atlantic world and through the critical oceanic studies concepts of fluidity, solvency, and drift, this chapter serves as a critical introduction to the South Atlantic. Beginning with a rereading of the Atlantic Charter, it poses the South Atlantic both as a material geographic region (something along the lines of a South Atlantic Rim) and as a set of largely unfulfilled visions—including those of anti-imperial solidarity and resistance generated through imaginative and political engagement from different parts of the Global South with the Atlantic world. It also reflects on the conditions under which something called the “Global South Atlantic” could come into being and the modes of historical, cultural, and literary comparison by which a multilingual and multinational region might be grasped.
Keith Cartwright
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter reminds us that subjective judgements and personal knowledge of the Atlantic World, whether recorded in memoir, expressed in literature and other creative arts, or channelled into a ...
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This chapter reminds us that subjective judgements and personal knowledge of the Atlantic World, whether recorded in memoir, expressed in literature and other creative arts, or channelled into a particular brand of scholarship, have been important elements in generating understandings of the South’s relationship to places around the Atlantic. In offering a bold, multi-layered, temporally expansive interdisciplinary essay that circumnavigates the Atlantic World several times, Cartwright demonstrates how experiences, real and imagined, of the American South, of the Atlantic World, and of the connections between them, have always varied according to precisely whose perspective is being examined, privileged, or obscured.Less
This chapter reminds us that subjective judgements and personal knowledge of the Atlantic World, whether recorded in memoir, expressed in literature and other creative arts, or channelled into a particular brand of scholarship, have been important elements in generating understandings of the South’s relationship to places around the Atlantic. In offering a bold, multi-layered, temporally expansive interdisciplinary essay that circumnavigates the Atlantic World several times, Cartwright demonstrates how experiences, real and imagined, of the American South, of the Atlantic World, and of the connections between them, have always varied according to precisely whose perspective is being examined, privileged, or obscured.
Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William A. Link (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott, and Anja Werner (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628461558
- eISBN:
- 9781626740839
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461558.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
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 ...
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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.”Less
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.”
Natanya Keisha Duncan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter focuses on the rise and tragic fall of the Ghanaian-born Garveyite Princess Laura Kofey and her political, economic, and cultural activities on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement ...
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This chapter focuses on the rise and tragic fall of the Ghanaian-born Garveyite Princess Laura Kofey and her political, economic, and cultural activities on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in interwar Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. The chapter reveals the special place that the American South and its African American population occupied in Kofey’s plans for greater commercial ties between Africans and African Americans and, ultimately, for repatriation. By noting the regional, gender, class, religious, and racial dimensions of Kofey’s transatlantic experiences, the chapter adds nuance to our appreciation of how the Black Atlantic functioned and how diasporic identities were constructed.Less
This chapter focuses on the rise and tragic fall of the Ghanaian-born Garveyite Princess Laura Kofey and her political, economic, and cultural activities on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in interwar Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. The chapter reveals the special place that the American South and its African American population occupied in Kofey’s plans for greater commercial ties between Africans and African Americans and, ultimately, for repatriation. By noting the regional, gender, class, religious, and racial dimensions of Kofey’s transatlantic experiences, the chapter adds nuance to our appreciation of how the Black Atlantic functioned and how diasporic identities were constructed.
Michael A. Bucknor
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781628464757
- eISBN:
- 9781628464801
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628464757.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter turns to Canada – long an important migration destination from the Caribbean–as an overlooked site of postwar literary production. Employing the example of the Barbadian-born Austin ...
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This chapter turns to Canada – long an important migration destination from the Caribbean–as an overlooked site of postwar literary production. Employing the example of the Barbadian-born Austin Clarke, an author firmly canonized and even celebrated in Canada, it explores the generative links Clarke’s own career exemplifies between the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, and Britain–a multifaceted transnationalism in conversation with his Windrush peers but equally influenced by the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and racial politics in Canada. Employing theories of the Black Atlantic and diaspora, the chapter holds Clarke up as an exemplar of literary and political processes that resist containment within an anti-colonial national frame by gesturing outwards, toward a differentially rooted (and routed), insistently global politics of blackness.Less
This chapter turns to Canada – long an important migration destination from the Caribbean–as an overlooked site of postwar literary production. Employing the example of the Barbadian-born Austin Clarke, an author firmly canonized and even celebrated in Canada, it explores the generative links Clarke’s own career exemplifies between the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, and Britain–a multifaceted transnationalism in conversation with his Windrush peers but equally influenced by the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and racial politics in Canada. Employing theories of the Black Atlantic and diaspora, the chapter holds Clarke up as an exemplar of literary and political processes that resist containment within an anti-colonial national frame by gesturing outwards, toward a differentially rooted (and routed), insistently global politics of blackness.
Robert Stam and Ella Shohat
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814798379
- eISBN:
- 9780814723920
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814798379.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter discusses the geopolitical positionings of United States, Brazil, and France in relation to race/colonial issues. The United States and France are known as First World or Global North ...
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This chapter discusses the geopolitical positionings of United States, Brazil, and France in relation to race/colonial issues. The United States and France are known as First World or Global North countries while. Brazil is considered an emerging “second tier” power from the Global South. With these diverse positionings, the three nations share similar historical substratum—their colonizing relation to the indigenous peoples as part of the Red Atlantic; their common shaping by the triangular slave trade as part of the Black Atlantic; and their shared pattern of racial hegemony in the “White Atlantic.” As such, the three represent distinct formations within intercolonial oceanic configurations, as they partake of a multiculturality that was “forged in the cauldron of the colonial process.”Less
This chapter discusses the geopolitical positionings of United States, Brazil, and France in relation to race/colonial issues. The United States and France are known as First World or Global North countries while. Brazil is considered an emerging “second tier” power from the Global South. With these diverse positionings, the three nations share similar historical substratum—their colonizing relation to the indigenous peoples as part of the Red Atlantic; their common shaping by the triangular slave trade as part of the Black Atlantic; and their shared pattern of racial hegemony in the “White Atlantic.” As such, the three represent distinct formations within intercolonial oceanic configurations, as they partake of a multiculturality that was “forged in the cauldron of the colonial process.”
Jennifer K. Snyder
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter focuses on the story of Loyalist James Moncrief and his slaves as they fled the South into the Caribbean in the wake of British defeat in the American Revolution. Highlighting the ...
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This chapter focuses on the story of Loyalist James Moncrief and his slaves as they fled the South into the Caribbean in the wake of British defeat in the American Revolution. Highlighting the personal dilemmas faced by southern Loyalists and their slaves in the midst of a transatlantic power struggle, it shows how migration and settlement, in many ways the key tropes of Atlantic-particularly Black Atlantic-Studies, were experienced differently in different locales by different peoples in the Atlantic World, while still managing to affirm the value of viewing the region holistically as a distinctive zone of contact.Less
This chapter focuses on the story of Loyalist James Moncrief and his slaves as they fled the South into the Caribbean in the wake of British defeat in the American Revolution. Highlighting the personal dilemmas faced by southern Loyalists and their slaves in the midst of a transatlantic power struggle, it shows how migration and settlement, in many ways the key tropes of Atlantic-particularly Black Atlantic-Studies, were experienced differently in different locales by different peoples in the Atlantic World, while still managing to affirm the value of viewing the region holistically as a distinctive zone of contact.
Leigh Anne Duck
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter on the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Levi Jenkins Coppin describes how ideas of race and racial, as well as regional, identity were generated and circulated around the Atlantic ...
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This chapter on the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Levi Jenkins Coppin describes how ideas of race and racial, as well as regional, identity were generated and circulated around the Atlantic World at the turn of the twentieth century. It uses the writings and photographs of Coppin, a southerner who became the first AME Bishop of Cape Town in South Africa, to demonstrate how conceptions of the Atlantic World and its constituent parts, including the American South, and its peoples were at some level created by acts of imagination as well as symbolic constructs enacted through textual and visual representations and misrepresentations, as well as through commercial, demographic, military, and legal encounters and exchanges. It also uses Coppin’s attempts to work through notions of diasporic black identities to complicate how we think about the Black Atlantic and its manifestations in Africa and the United States.US SouthLess
This chapter on the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Levi Jenkins Coppin describes how ideas of race and racial, as well as regional, identity were generated and circulated around the Atlantic World at the turn of the twentieth century. It uses the writings and photographs of Coppin, a southerner who became the first AME Bishop of Cape Town in South Africa, to demonstrate how conceptions of the Atlantic World and its constituent parts, including the American South, and its peoples were at some level created by acts of imagination as well as symbolic constructs enacted through textual and visual representations and misrepresentations, as well as through commercial, demographic, military, and legal encounters and exchanges. It also uses Coppin’s attempts to work through notions of diasporic black identities to complicate how we think about the Black Atlantic and its manifestations in Africa and the United States.US South
Andrew Apter
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226506388
- eISBN:
- 9780226506555
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226506555.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
This book challenges the seasoned trend of disavowing Africa in the Black Atlantic, showing how Yoruba cultural frameworks from West Africa remade black kingdoms and communities in the Americas. ...
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This book challenges the seasoned trend of disavowing Africa in the Black Atlantic, showing how Yoruba cultural frameworks from West Africa remade black kingdoms and communities in the Americas. Highlighting revisionary strategies and regenerative schemes that are grounded in the dialectics of ritual renewal, it revisits classic topoi in Afro-American studies such as Herskovits’s syncretic paradigm, the petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, the historical conditions of orisha cult clustering, re-mappings of gender in plantation societies, and the rise of Lucumí and Nagô houses in Cuba and Brazil, in each case offering new interpretations based on cognate dynamics in Yorubaland. The book thereby argues for a critically reformulated culture concept, in this case distinctively “Yoruba,” which designates something real, somewhat knowable, eminently historical, and even indispensable for locating Africa in the Black Atlantic.Less
This book challenges the seasoned trend of disavowing Africa in the Black Atlantic, showing how Yoruba cultural frameworks from West Africa remade black kingdoms and communities in the Americas. Highlighting revisionary strategies and regenerative schemes that are grounded in the dialectics of ritual renewal, it revisits classic topoi in Afro-American studies such as Herskovits’s syncretic paradigm, the petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, the historical conditions of orisha cult clustering, re-mappings of gender in plantation societies, and the rise of Lucumí and Nagô houses in Cuba and Brazil, in each case offering new interpretations based on cognate dynamics in Yorubaland. The book thereby argues for a critically reformulated culture concept, in this case distinctively “Yoruba,” which designates something real, somewhat knowable, eminently historical, and even indispensable for locating Africa in the Black Atlantic.
Elizabeth Pérez
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479861613
- eISBN:
- 9781479803217
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479861613.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
The introduction begins by addressing the omission of food preparation and casual conversation from analyses of Black Atlantic religions. The author contends that the transnational expansion of these ...
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The introduction begins by addressing the omission of food preparation and casual conversation from analyses of Black Atlantic religions. The author contends that the transnational expansion of these traditions compels scholars to look beyond valorized genres of ritual action to see the importance of cooking for gods and ancestors and talking about them. In fact, these very acts develop the faculties, sentiments, and expertise indispensable for these religions’ social viability and demographic spread. Placing Lucumí (popularly called Santería) within the historical context of the transatlantic slave trade as the worship of Yorùbá spirits called orishas, the introduction turns to the Chicago-based religious community called Ilé Laroye, led for almost thirty years by African American Lucumí diviner and praise singer, Spiritist medium, and Palo Monte initiate Ashabi Mosley. It identifies the kitchen of Ilé Laroye as the micro-site of the book’s “sensuous ethnography” and explains the research methods employed in the service of its comparative methodological approach. After considering the ethics of the ethnographic enterprise, the affect-laden circumstances of data collection, and the book’s reliance on field notes and vignettes, the author reflects on her positionality with regard to race/ethnicity, gender, and class. A chapter overview and note on transcription follow.Less
The introduction begins by addressing the omission of food preparation and casual conversation from analyses of Black Atlantic religions. The author contends that the transnational expansion of these traditions compels scholars to look beyond valorized genres of ritual action to see the importance of cooking for gods and ancestors and talking about them. In fact, these very acts develop the faculties, sentiments, and expertise indispensable for these religions’ social viability and demographic spread. Placing Lucumí (popularly called Santería) within the historical context of the transatlantic slave trade as the worship of Yorùbá spirits called orishas, the introduction turns to the Chicago-based religious community called Ilé Laroye, led for almost thirty years by African American Lucumí diviner and praise singer, Spiritist medium, and Palo Monte initiate Ashabi Mosley. It identifies the kitchen of Ilé Laroye as the micro-site of the book’s “sensuous ethnography” and explains the research methods employed in the service of its comparative methodological approach. After considering the ethics of the ethnographic enterprise, the affect-laden circumstances of data collection, and the book’s reliance on field notes and vignettes, the author reflects on her positionality with regard to race/ethnicity, gender, and class. A chapter overview and note on transcription follow.
Brittany Powell Kennedy
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628461978
- eISBN:
- 9781626744943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461978.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter builds upon what Paul Gilroy identifies as an inherent “double-consciousness” within modernity and exposes the performativity inherent in that experience, particularly within the racial ...
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This chapter builds upon what Paul Gilroy identifies as an inherent “double-consciousness” within modernity and exposes the performativity inherent in that experience, particularly within the racial and biological “purity” that was so violently affirmed in Francoist Spain and the Jim Crow South. Framing this chapter with African-American writer Richard Wright’s experience in what he describes as Franco’s “pagan” Spain, I examine how Spain and the South provide specific examples where racial indeterminacy compels the subject to embrace performativity as a means of shirking the expectations of “race” and “biology” thrust upon them by those perceived as “pure.”Less
This chapter builds upon what Paul Gilroy identifies as an inherent “double-consciousness” within modernity and exposes the performativity inherent in that experience, particularly within the racial and biological “purity” that was so violently affirmed in Francoist Spain and the Jim Crow South. Framing this chapter with African-American writer Richard Wright’s experience in what he describes as Franco’s “pagan” Spain, I examine how Spain and the South provide specific examples where racial indeterminacy compels the subject to embrace performativity as a means of shirking the expectations of “race” and “biology” thrust upon them by those perceived as “pure.”
Marlene L. Daut
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381847
- eISBN:
- 9781781382394
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381847.003.0013
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
In order to show what we readers miss when their readings of nineteenth-century literary texts are circumscribed by an a priori idea about what is contained therein based on the author’s skin color ...
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In order to show what we readers miss when their readings of nineteenth-century literary texts are circumscribed by an a priori idea about what is contained therein based on the author’s skin color or “race,” the author examines Pierre Faubert’s Ogé, ou le préjugé de couleur (1841/1856). This play is offered as a prime example of how the trope of the “colored historian” has led to an obfuscation of Faubert’s much more important contribution to what is now called critical race theory, on the one hand, and, on the other, his position as one of the first writers in what the author calls a tradition of Black Atlantic Humanism that emanated from nineteenth-century Haitian authors.Less
In order to show what we readers miss when their readings of nineteenth-century literary texts are circumscribed by an a priori idea about what is contained therein based on the author’s skin color or “race,” the author examines Pierre Faubert’s Ogé, ou le préjugé de couleur (1841/1856). This play is offered as a prime example of how the trope of the “colored historian” has led to an obfuscation of Faubert’s much more important contribution to what is now called critical race theory, on the one hand, and, on the other, his position as one of the first writers in what the author calls a tradition of Black Atlantic Humanism that emanated from nineteenth-century Haitian authors.
Kathryn M. Lachman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781781380345
- eISBN:
- 9781781387184
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380345.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter considers the fiction of Senegalese author Fatou Diome in relation to the categories of Afropean literature and the Global South Atlantic. As critics have noted, Diome's novels address ...
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This chapter considers the fiction of Senegalese author Fatou Diome in relation to the categories of Afropean literature and the Global South Atlantic. As critics have noted, Diome's novels address the asymmetries of mobility that define today's global economy, while also attempting to envision alternative networks. Like many other contemporary authors, Diome critiques French immigration policies, but she also points to Senegal's failure to provide equal access to education, to support the needs of rural women, and to curb the operations of corporate fishing companies in Senegalese waters. These forces all contribute to forcing young African men into illegal immigration, sustaining poverty and debt, and prolonging Senegal's dependency on France. At the same time, however, Diome's work articulates a transnational Atlantic poetics that transcends national boundaries by incorporating references to North-American and Brazilian modernism and reclaiming the ocean as a source of creative exchange. This chapter examines two of Diome's novels, Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003) and Celles qui attendent (2011), to evaluate the writer's efforts to break free of the binary relationship between Senegal and France which defines Afropeanism more generally, in order to forge networks across the wider Global South Atlantic.Less
This chapter considers the fiction of Senegalese author Fatou Diome in relation to the categories of Afropean literature and the Global South Atlantic. As critics have noted, Diome's novels address the asymmetries of mobility that define today's global economy, while also attempting to envision alternative networks. Like many other contemporary authors, Diome critiques French immigration policies, but she also points to Senegal's failure to provide equal access to education, to support the needs of rural women, and to curb the operations of corporate fishing companies in Senegalese waters. These forces all contribute to forcing young African men into illegal immigration, sustaining poverty and debt, and prolonging Senegal's dependency on France. At the same time, however, Diome's work articulates a transnational Atlantic poetics that transcends national boundaries by incorporating references to North-American and Brazilian modernism and reclaiming the ocean as a source of creative exchange. This chapter examines two of Diome's novels, Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003) and Celles qui attendent (2011), to evaluate the writer's efforts to break free of the binary relationship between Senegal and France which defines Afropeanism more generally, in order to forge networks across the wider Global South Atlantic.
John Lowney
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041334
- eISBN:
- 9780252099939
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041334.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and ...
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There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.Less
There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.
Kathleen M. Gough
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both ...
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Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both Black and Green Atlantics. By exploring their work and subsequent public reputations, it reveals how powerful notions of Irish and black, especially southern black, identity have been generated, disseminated, and redeployed around the Atlantic World, often with recourse to similar invocations of agrarianism, religiosity, and resistance (cultural and political) to oppression. The chapter also offers a pointed critique of the tendency to ignore or marginalize women in much Atlantic Studies.Less
Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both Black and Green Atlantics. By exploring their work and subsequent public reputations, it reveals how powerful notions of Irish and black, especially southern black, identity have been generated, disseminated, and redeployed around the Atlantic World, often with recourse to similar invocations of agrarianism, religiosity, and resistance (cultural and political) to oppression. The chapter also offers a pointed critique of the tendency to ignore or marginalize women in much Atlantic Studies.
