Editorial

Our last issue (11.1) of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents was largely based on a symposium held in Hong Kong. The resultant special issue was intended to signal a new direction for the journal as it enters its second decade: moving beyond the Atlantic as an isolated and isolating unit of analysis. While the Editors still welcome contributions on the “Atlantic World” as it is more conventionally defined, we hope to encourage scholarship and writing that embraces the exciting possibilities of thinking from, in comparison with and beyond the Atlantic. For this reason, it is appropriate that our latest issue begins with an interview with Eric Hayot, distinguished professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University and a new member of the journal's expanded Editorial Board. Hayot was interviewed by Dorothea Fischer-Hornburg, one of the journal's editors, when the two met in Heidelberg in February 2014. The interview, which can be seen as something of a companion piece to the interview with Zhang Longxi that we published in the previous issue (11.1), ranges from teaching to cross-cultural encounters, Kant to the concept of the ecliptic. Broader themes include epistemology, in/scrutability and ways of knowing, especially with reference to China and Europe, the East and the West. Hayot also speaks about his current work, a book provisionally entitled What Kind of Information is Literature?

Three papers on the French Atlantic and the aftermath – short and long term – of the Haitian Revolution follow, an event that is still relatively neglected within scholarship on the Atlantic world. Alexandra Tolin Schultz considers the work of Claude Milscent, a white planter from Saint Domingue who, alone among his peers, supported equal rights for free people of colour and viewed the ending of slavery in positive terms. Focusing on Milscent's revolutionary newspapers, Le Creuset (1791) and Le Créole Patriot (1792–1794), Schultz documents his radicalisation as he came to embrace the Jacobin cause and sought to persuade other colons to accept his views. While Milscent may have been, as Schultz acknowledges, an extraordinary and, in many ways, unique individual, he deserves far greater attention, not least for what he reveals about unsuspected affiliations and ideological currents in the Revolutionary Atlantic.

France's failure to re-establish control over Saint Domingue and the subsequent sale of Louisiana to the USA greatly reduced its colonial presence in the Atlantic world. With peace after 1815 and the 1817/1818 ban on the transatlantic slave trade, France was left facing questions about the future of its Atlantic empire. Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss recounts in detail debates between 1819 and 1823 involving colonial administrators, colonists, merchants and soldiers about plans for French Guiana, a colony largely deemed to have been a failure. Of key concern was how new groups could be brought there, including indentured Africans from Senegal and white settlers from Europe or France's former Atlantic World holdings, who would be integrated back into the “grand colonial family.” These debates occurred during the governorship of Pierre Clément Laussat, whose own ideas were informed by his previous imperial career, which had included service in New Orleans and Martinique. In telling this story, Schloss reveals an array of different and sometimes competing visions for the post-Napoleonic French Atlantic, as well as connections – residual, existing and projected – between the French presence in the Caribbean Basin, including former holdings in Louisiana and Saint Domingue, and West Africa (Senegal).

The focus returns to Haiti for the final of this trio of papers, which is concerned with the literary aftermath of the Haitian Revolution in the twentieth century. Nicholas Michael Kramer calls for the re-examination of the literary relationship between Alejo Carpentier and Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis. It is well known that Carpentier's first visit to Haiti in 1943 inspired El Reino de este Mundo [The Kingdom of this World] (1949), a novel about Saint Domingue's independence from France that exemplified his theory of marvellous realism. Most critics have claimed that Alexis' approach to Haitian culture and identity was heavily influenced by Carpentier. Kramer takes issue with this view, however, seeing Alexis as adopting a more critical stance towards the Cuban writer's theory. By comparing their novels and essays, he argues that Alexis sought to articulate a form of marvellous realism in which social commentary was more to the fore and that evinced greater faith in the possibilities for social transformation through political action.

Tracing the trans- and circum-Atlantic lives of individuals who careered around has been established as an effective way of writing Atlantic histories, not least by enabling scholars to track the trans-local traffic and transformation of ideas. Following papers on a planter-journalist (Milscent) and a colonial governor (Laussat) – not to mention Carpentier's own peregrinations – two papers follow on other individuals with Atlantic careers. Richard Lowitt's article considers Tilly Merrick of Massachusetts, who sought to establish himself as a merchant trader in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. Merrick is a figure of a type that has been relatively overlooked in Atlantic history, neither part of the trans-oceanic mercantile elite whose members were “citizens of the world” nor one of the maritime subalterns who made up the “many-headed hydra.”¹ Instead, he was a middling figure. Merrick's detailed private correspondence gives insight into his commercial operations and efforts to utilise contacts in Boston, London, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, as well as the challenges he faced in an Atlantic world beset by privateers, unpleasant climates and political uncertainty. Through Merrick's eyes, we gain a glimpse of Atlantic cities such as Charleston in the final years and aftermath of the American Revolution. Focusing on this individual and his mercantile travails, Lowitt knits together the personal and the political, the local and the trans-Atlantic.

While small traders such as Merrick may have been relatively overlooked, the activities of merchants have nonetheless been a central feature of Atlantic history. Júnia Ferreira Furtado's article examines different types of figures. At roughly the same time that Merrick was trading across the Atlantic, two Brazilian-born Catholic priests, Cipriano Pires Sardinha and Vicente Ferreira Pires, were sent by the Portuguese Prince Regent to serve as ambassadors to Dahomey. Charged with converting the West African kingdom to Catholicism, they were also tasked with recording their observations of the wider region, including its natural resources, economy, politics and customs. A report, Viagem de África em o Reino de Dahomé [African Journey into the Kingdom of Dahomey], was presented to the Prince Regent in 1800. Its representation of West Africa drew unfavourable comparisons with colonial Brazil, something Furtado links to efforts by Brazil's elite to secure its place within a broader project of modernisation across the Portuguese empire. By examining what is the only Luso-Brazilian description of the Dahomey region from the late eighteenth century produced by on-the-spot travellers, Furtado's article contributes to wider work on the circulation of geographical and scientific knowledge that is becoming an ever more significant feature of Atlantic history.

This issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents ends with an article on Hannah Arendt, which takes us into the mid-twentieth century. Moshe Goultschin examines the consequences of Arendt's emigration to the USA during the Second World War for her thought and its wider ramifications for the shaping of American political discourse. More specifically, Goultschin is concerned with Arendt's immigrant identity and the value she attached to the perspective of the immigrant (and refugee) in her philosophical project. Goultschin traces Arendt's concern with the “preservation of otherness,” seen as foundational to her thought, from the influence of Walter Benjamin's notion of “friendliness” (Freundlichkeit) – as elaborated by Benjamin in relation to Bertolt Brecht's poem “The Legend of the Origin of the Book TaoTe Ching on Lao-Tse's Way into Exile” – to Arendt's “Reflections on Little-Rock,” which was published after the 1958 events following the desegregation of schools in Little Rock.

Starting with an interview on the relationships between Asia, Europe and North America and ending with the trans-Atlantic influence of a poem about a Chinese philosopher in exile – with the French Atlantic, trans-oceanic commerce and the Luso-Brazilian representation of West Africa in between – we hope this latest issue will further encourage thinking that goes across and beyond the Atlantic world.

The Editors

Notes

1. Hancock, London Merchants; Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra.