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Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of area studies. Within departments of Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American Studies, and Iberian Studies, the Transatlantic approach critically engages the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies in the Americas and Africa. Like its objects of study, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries instead of assuming the nation-state as a sort of epistemic building-block. But it attempts to do so without dehistoricizing the texts and other cultural products it brings under analysis. The thirty-five essays comprised in this volume are geared toward an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty colleagues who teach transatlantically oriented courses. They encompass nearly every decade in the last two centuries: from the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in the spring of 1808 and the subsequent movements of Latin American independence, through the transatlantic avant-garde, to current migration movements between Latin America, Africa, and the former Iberian metropoles. While each essay addresses a specific topic, our contributors also open up new questions for discussion and research, point to further readings, and suggest specific primary sources that can be used in the classroom.

Chapter 1 elaborates the three categories of this book's title, beginning with the unique case of assimilative influence at work in the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson. This will be followed by an examination of how the burgeoning field of transatlantic studies has opened new circulatory spaces to investigate Transatlantic Transcendentalism, and finally, an account of how Coleridge's commitment to mediating the categories of nature, spirit, and humanity characterized an overarching Romantic concern that transcended national boundaries. Thus this book is not just an “influence study” of one writer upon another, but rather the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson serves as a lens to magnify the ways in which ideas transferred across thinkers, oceans, and time periods, on one hand forging enduring legacies while also warping, reinterpreting, and renewing those ideas in new climates.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on transatlantic literature and women's narratives of travel and adventure. It suggests that fictional travel narratives, like their factual counterparts, provide accounts of difference by exploring the politics of location while simultaneously examining localities. What all of the travel narratives explored in this book have in common is a sense that gender is a condition which impinges upon – even determines – the travel experience. The texts of the narratives all contribute to the evolving definitions of transatlantic literature, with important implications for the continued development of Transatlantic Studies as a theorised space.

This essay argues that specialists in Transatlantic Film Studies need to contextualize their research agendas within the growing intensification of globalizing forces, above all, transnational capitalism. Within this historical context, the customary intellectual praise for aesthetic and cultural hybridity, alterity, self-dislocation and cosmopolitan deterritorialization is, at least, partially misguided. Due to the financial specificities of the film industry and its pervasive social preeminence, Transatlantic Film Studies have been a favorable academic venue to negatively evaluate the constrains, narrowness and reductive essentialism of the nation-state, as well of national communities and traditions. One should not overstate this argumentative gesture for three reasons. First, transatlantic artistic collaborations are never symmetrical and tend to be mediated by strong socio-economic and geopolitical inequalities. Second, the filmic interconnection between Spain and Latin American does not take place vis-a-vis, but under the commercial rules set by the US audiovisual mega-industry. Finally, it is a (partial) mistake to eulogize cultural miscegenation, migrancy and rhizomatic self-proliferation when many emancipatory, anti-imperialist movements have traditionally found and still find traction in autochthonous practices and habits. This is why the idea of a national cinema and specially of a national-popular cinema still deserves a careful, more dialectical attention.

The emergence of Iberian Studies as a challenge to the paradigm of Hispanism has not only forced a revision of the cultural and linguistic relations within the Iberian Peninsula, but also raised some questions about the significance of the transatlantic dimension in our field. There is no question that, both institutionally and intellectually, most programs of Spanish and Portuguese are grounded on a much touted “community of language,” and that for as long as Peninsular Hispanism, Transatlantic Studies, and Latin Americanism remain bound to the ideology of monolingualism, the close association among literatures of both sides of the Hispanic Atlantic seems secured. But this linguistic grounding is precisely what Iberian Studies needs to deconstruct in order to implement its own epistemological agenda. Iberian Studies, which articulates the need to go beyond Spanish (and Portuguese) to properly understand the internal complexity of Iberian culture(s), may indeed widen the oceanic gap between the two blocks into which our discipline has been traditionally divided. However, the intellectual projects of Iberianism, Transatlanticism, and Latin Americanism —to the extent that they depend on the disruption of Hispanism for a successful production of new knowledge— may benefit from a common institutional location and sustained critical dialogue.

This collection of essays shows that Transatlantic Studies allows for a wealth of topics and approaches—even as key methodological questions remain unresolved and the very legitimacy of Transatlantic Studies as such is still under dispute. This volume has sought to advance the discussion by putting the disputes surrounding the field front and center. The field need not reach consensus in order to thrive. Yet in order to be productive, every debate needs to start from an agreement about underlying principles. These would include the basic idea that it is valuable to study and teach the cultural archive in an academic context, or that a deep understanding of that archive can only be achieved through engagement with the languages in which that archive was written. These values have come under question, however, as an increasing number of colleges and universities have eliminated programs, courses, and faculty lines dedicated to serious work in the humanities. And if we cannot afford to disregard our institutional context, we also cannot ignore the changing tone of political discourse, as different forms of nativism and populist nationalism rear their heads across the world.

This article argues that Transatlantic studies looks to articulate a reading that follows the native cultural method of re-appropriation and serialization of new information. Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso Inca de la Vega are models of processing information to control violence. Arguedas y Jaramove forward open spaces for new critical readings. Thus, Transatlantic readings are open, horizontal, and inclusive.

The introduction outlines the scope and methodology of this book, with particular reference to Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785); William Billings's The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770); and Benjamin Franklin's ‘The Ephemera’ (1778). It situates the book in relation to recent work in the fields of transatlantic literary studies, Atlantic history, musicology, and literature and music.

The introduction describes the limitations of the Anglocentric focus of transatlantic literary studies, and argues that including the literatures of the British archipelago (Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) in this field of study provides a richer and more accurate picture of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Most significantly, this picture shows that transatlantic migration impacted British literature and British nation formation as much as it did American literature and American nation formation. The introduction explains the aims of archipelagic criticism, surveys recent work on the transatlantic literature of migration, and outlines the scope and organization of the book.

After introducing the purpose, importance, and approach of this book, the argument is made that nineteenth-century Reformed theology in America can be more accurately understood when interpreted in a European theological context. The influence of German theology was especially important for some strands of Reformed theology (e.g., scholars working at Mercersburg and Princeton seminaries). Thus, the introduction discusses the scholarship of that period in terms of American-European relations, and identifies two historical approaches—one that positions American religious thought in a national intellectual context, and one oriented toward a transatlantic intellectual perspective.

My introduction, “Striking Roots,” takes up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Our Old Home (1863), where Hawthorne muses over his own process of re-nativization during his four years as U.S. Consul to Liverpool (1853-57). Hawthorne’s memoir followed his effort, after the end of his consular term, to write a romance around what Our Old Home describes as a broadly-held fantasy nurtured by many Americans who seek to invigorate lost English ties. Such manoeuvres as Hawthorne’s, I suggest, articulate the questions that motivate the chapters to follow: What can it mean for citizens of a nation less than eighty years old to transfigure regional and American affiliations as attachments to heredities located in England? More pressingly, how do such “ancient” American lines triangulate with a more ancient mother country out of whose genealogies these latter lines branch, and hence wherein—we might suppose—all such Anglo-American lineages must otherwise resolve themselves?

This chapter traces the process through which northern and southern writers and public intellectuals conceived the struggle between the states as a conflict between two antagonistic racial groups steeped in the blood and ancestry of disparate biological origins. According to a logic emerging over the course of the 1850s and reaching a pitch during the opening years of the Civil War, Caucasian inhabitants of the southern and northern states were descended from the Norman Conquerors of 1066 and their vanquished Saxon subjects. Refracted through this racially polarizing lens, the struggle over slavery became the latest salvo in an “irrepressible conflict” whose roots lay in a centuries-old conflict. Placing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856) in this context, I show that Emerson engaged such characterizations of English races even as he leveraged from them his vision of an ameliorative racial polity as the hallmark of England and of the United States.

This chapter examines another antebellum appropriation of ancient English history in the figure of the “Black Saxon.” Abolitionist intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and Lydia Maria Child developed a complex analogy through which African-American slaves became the contemporary rendition of the aggrieved Saxon serf, a figure who came to resonate within abolitionist discourses of 1840s and 50s. Henry Herbert’s historical novel Wager of Battle (1855) re-oriented the conventions of the slave narrative around such tropes in depicting liberty-loving Saxon serfs who liberate themselves from serfdom either through compensated manumission or flight. Such typologies, I argue, became interwoven with abolitionist legal and political critique of the fugitive slave law of 1850, dovetailing particularly with complaints—articulated in abolitionist discourse and in the U.S. Congress—of the law’s denial of habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury, what Wendell Phillips would call “the antient Saxon privilege” annulled by southern legislation.