In a work of critical reflection and innovation, William Boelhower examines the cultural shift represented by the new paradigm of Atlantic studies, a discipline forged from older models of Atlantic history, with their grounding in imperial traditions, and newer critical fronts that draw on insights from postcolonial and cultural studies occurring throughout the humanities. Atlantic Studies: Prospects and Challenges presents a critical survey of the field that also proposes new horizons for inquiry and critique. The first section, “Prospects and Genealogy,” analyzes the interdisciplinary methodologies that emerged to approach the Atlantic world in a larger, circumatlantic context, studying the exchanges of peoples and cultures instead of rigidly defined national and international boundaries. “Case Studies across the Humanities,” the second section, offers new cross-disciplinary readings of three well-known literary texts—Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave”—as exemplars of how an Atlantic studies perspective acknowledges spatial and cultural dimensions that disrupt the traditional scales of national literatures. By foregrounding the challenges of interpreting nomadic and disenfranchised characters like Caliban, Hester Prynne, and Madison Washington, Boelhower models critical practices that embrace a multicentered, composite world marked by sudden shifts in perspective and scale. The final section, “The Cartographic Challenge,” considers the new expertise that went into the mapping of the Atlantic Ocean and the rise of the Atlantic world as it emerged in the early modern period, focusing on three world maps produced by Europeans in the early sixteenth century, conceivably the most influential visual representations of the dawning Mundus Novus described by the likes of Columbus and Vespucci. Revealing how such maps inform discursive genres like travel literature, the utopia, and the shipwreck narrative, Boelhower argues for the importance of analyzing cartographic practices and strategies to understand how they shaped the visual and textual representations of the Atlantic world. Written by one of the founders of the discipline, Atlantic Studies: Prospects and Challenges provides both an insightful overview of the field and an engaging reflection on the challenges it faces going forward.

“How African-American artists and intellectuals sought greater liberty in Paris while also questioning the extent of the freedoms they so publicly praised.” —American Literary History Paris has always fascinated and welcomed writers. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, writers of American, Caribbean, and African descent were no exception. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic considers the travels made to Paris—whether literally or imaginatively—by black writers. These collected essays explore the transatlantic circulation of ideas, texts, and objects to which such travels to Paris contributed. Editors Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne expand upon an acclaimed special issue of the journal Modern Fiction Studies with four new essays and a revised introduction. Beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois’s trip to Paris in 1900and ending with the contemporary state of diasporic letters in the French capital, this collection embraces theoretical close readings, materialist intellectual studies of networks, comparative essays, and writings at the intersection of literary and visual studies. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic is unique both in its focus on literary fiction as a formal and sociological category and in the range of examples it brings to bear on the question of Paris as an imaginary capital of diasporic consciousness. “Demonstrate[s] how Black writers shaped history and contributed to conflicting notions of modernity hosted in Paris . . . The wide range of writers and scholars from American and Francophone studies makes this collection very original and an exciting adventure in concepts, movements, and ideologies that could be acceptable to non-specialists as well.” —American Studies

An account of the location of black intellectuals in the modern world following the end of racial slavery. The lives and writings of key African Americans such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas and Richard Wright are examined in the light of their experiences in Europe and Africa.

Havana in the 1550s was a small coastal village with a very limited population that was vulnerable to attack. By 1610, however, under Spanish rule it had become one of the best-fortified port cities in the world and an Atlantic center of shipping, commerce, and shipbuilding. Using all available local Cuban sources, Alejandro de la Fuente provides the first examination of the transformation of Havana into a vibrant Atlantic port city and the fastest-growing urban center in the Americas in the late sixteenth century. He shows how local ambitions took advantage of the imperial design and situates Havana within the slavery and economic systems of the colonial Atlantic.

Exploring the intersections of digital humanities and African diaspora studies How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production. The Digital Black Atlantic spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and teachers of the African diaspora negotiate digital methods to explore a broad range of cultural forms including social media, open access libraries, digital music production, and video games. The volume further highlights contributions of African diaspora studies to digital humanities, such as politics and representation, power and authorship, the ephemerality of memory, and the vestiges of colonialist ideologies. Grounded in contemporary theory and praxis, The Digital Black Atlantic puts the digital humanities into conversation with African diaspora studies in crucial ways that advance both. Contributors: Alexandrina Agloro, Arizona State U; Abdul Alkalimat; Suzan Alteri, U of Florida; Paul Barrett, U of Guelph; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Agata Błoch, Institute of History of Polish Academy of Sciences; Michał Bojanowski, Kozminski U; Sonya Donaldson, New Jersey City U; Anne Donlon; Laurent Dubois, Duke U; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M U; Schuyler Esprit, U of the West Indies; Demival Vasques Filho, U of Auckland, New Zealand; David Kirkland Garner; Alex Gil, Columbia U; Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College, Columbia U; D. Fox Harrell, MIT; Hélène Huet, U of Florida; Mary Caton Lingold, Virginia Commonwealth U; Angel David Nieves, San Diego State U; Danielle Olson, MIT; Tunde Opeibi (Ope-Davies), U of Lagos, Nigeria; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Anne Rice, Lehman College, CUNY; Sercan Şengün, Northeastern U; Janneken Smucker, West Chester U; Laurie N.Taylor, U of Florida; Toniesha L. Taylor, Texas Southern U.

In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, the eighteen essays in this volume provide a fresh and much-needed perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. This collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood that included Africans, Native Americans, and other Europeans. With contributions from both prominent and rising scholars, this volume offers far-ranging and compelling studies of peoples, texts, places, and conditions that influenced the making of New World societies. As Jamestown marks its four-hundredth anniversary, this collection provides provocative material for teaching and launching new research. Contributors: Philip P. Boucher, University of Alabama, Huntsville Peter Cook, Nipissing University J. H. Elliott, University of Oxford Andrew Fitzmaurice, University of Sydney Joseph Hall, Bates College Linda Heywood, Boston University James Horn, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation E. Ann McDougall, University of Alberta Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University David Northrup, Boston College Marcy Norton, The George Washington University James D. Rice, State University of New York, Plattsburgh Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania David Harris Sacks, Reed College Benjamin Schmidt, University of Washington Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University David S. Shields, University of South Carolina Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, McGill University James H. Sweet, University of Wisconsin, Madison John Thornton, Boston University

Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927

England's seventeenth-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration. The quickening pace of this essential migration is captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. Alison Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability, and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration. The colonial travelers were bound for the major regions of English settlement -- New England, the Chesapeake, the West Indies, and Bermuda -- and included ministers, governors, soldiers, planters, merchants, and members of some major colonial dynasties -- Winthrops, Saltonstalls, and Eliots. Many of these passengers were indentured servants. Games shows that however much they tried, the travelers from London were unable to recreate England in their overseas outposts. They dwelled in chaotic, precarious, and hybrid societies where New World exigencies overpowered the force of custom. Patterns of repeat and return migration cemented these inchoate colonial outposts into a larger Atlantic community. Together, the migrants' stories offer a new social history of the seventeenth century. For the origins and integration of the English Atlantic world, Games illustrates the primary importance of the first half of the seventeenth century.

This book argues that Angola and Brazil were connected, not separated, by the Atlantic Ocean. Roquinaldo Ferreira focuses on the cultural, religious and social impacts of the slave trade on Angola. Reconstructing biographies of Africans and merchants, he demonstrates how cross-cultural trade, identity formation, religious ties and resistance to slaving were central to the formation of the Atlantic world. By adding to our knowledge of the slaving process, the book powerfully illustrates how Atlantic slaving transformed key African institutions, such as local regimes of forced labor that predated and coexisted with Atlantic slaving and made them fundamental features of the Atlantic world's social fabric.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.