Charting the future: Twentieth-anniversary issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

ABSTRACT

The Introduction to the special issue “Charting the Future: Twentieth-anniversary issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents” traces the first two decades of the journal’s publication. A survey of essays serves to exemplify its methodological and theoretical perspectives that embody fundamental questions moving beyond the historical paradigm of Atlantic Studies to explore, for example, images and paintings, cultural theory, the novel and poetry, and the narratives and iconography of popular culture. Its title reflects the recognition that all the world’s oceanic flows and currents feed into and out of the Atlantic world, as do the varied transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship published by the journal.

KEYWORDS:

• Atlantic Studies
• global currents
• transdisciplinary
• interdisciplinary
• charting the future of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents
• twentieth-anniversary celebration

When Atlantic Studies: Global Currents was founded over 20 years ago, the study of the Atlantic world was an emerging field,¹ but it lacked a scholarly journal reflecting the broader, inter- and transdisciplinary scholarship we envisioned. In the editorial launching its second issue, the founding editors wrote that the journal was “under full sail” but still had “come no closer to measuring the sheer largeness of our field – the Atlantic itself and its tributary geocultural worlds.” Nevertheless, their belief in the centrality of the Atlantic to the human experience prompted them to note that in an innovative and shifting field such as Atlantic Studies, it was “the scholarly contributions themselves that ultimately will bring about the sea change” in historical and cultural studies, through fresh scholarship based on “historical archives, images and paintings, cultural theory, the novel and poetry, and the narratives and iconography of popular culture.” These approaches and others like them allow scholars the remarkable mobility to “crisscross the Atlantic from England to the coast of West Africa, from Jamaica to England, from the United States to Scotland, and from the North Atlantic to the old capital of Brazil.”²

The first two issues were designed to exemplify these goals based primarily on material and discussions culled from a colloquium held at the University of Sussex in 2003.³ It became clear that the journal’s historical focus should move, as expressed by historian Verene Shepherd, “from the classical period to the legacy,” expanding our chronological framing of the Atlantic world beyond the early modern period into the contemporary era. In those earliest meetings and editions, the editors and contributors also recognized that it was inevitable our work would take us to areas beyond the Atlantic to other seas, from the Pacific to the Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic Oceans. In envisioning a journal that would break new ground for history and cultural studies, the editors agreed to a guiding concept – “publish the controversy.” Twenty years later, this still holds true – we do not seek a single unifying paradigm or a definitive methodology. Rather, through constant innovation, we seek to expose and explore the ruptures, controversies, gaps, and concerns that emerge in the study of the Atlantic, broadly defined.

Four essays from the journal’s first issues can serve to exemplify its methodological and theoretical perspectives. In her opening essay, “A long Atlantic in a wider World,” Donna Gabaccia, historian of global migration, called for extending the Atlantic history paradigm into contemporary times, and for adopting inherently global micro- and macrohistory beyond the more stratified scholarship on red, black, and white Atlantic that characterized earlier approaches. In “‘I’ll teach you how to flow’: On figuring out Atlantic studies,” theorist and comparative literature scholar William Boelhower explored two exemplary scenes from works by William Shakespeare and Olaudah Equiano in order to explore an Atlantic he characterized as “an entire system of deliverance and delivering and of traffic and trafficking – a system founded on connecting both sides of the ocean by means of all kinds of ships.” A decisive move that signaled the journal’s expanding scope was the publication of Alex Seago’s “The ‘Kraftwerk-Effekt’: Transatlantic circulation, global networks and contemporary pop music,” an exploration of the global circulation of techno music within an emerging landscape of “glocal” popular culture. As an expert in the cultural globalization of visual and auditory cultures, Seago’s call to challenge the longstanding perception of transatlantic cultural productions inevitably emanating from an “Anglo-American ‘centre’” set the stage for the journal’s continued focus on the relevance, importance, and dynamism of global culture based outside European and Anglo centers. In the second issue, artist and film-maker Marcus Wood’s “Celebrating the Middle Passage: Atlantic slavery, Barbie and the birth of the Sable Venus,” examined the complex cultural inheritance of the middle passage by enmeshing the figures of the Barbie doll transported to Brazil and transformed into the African sea-Venus. Essays like these modeled how the global currents of the Atlantic world could promote radical revisions in our academic traditions, opening more inclusive and paradigm-shifting spaces for critical engagement and discussion.

These essays embodied fundamental questions that the founding editors William Boelhower, Stephen Fender, Richard Follett, Maria Lauret, and I had posed in launching a new journal, reflected in its original subtitle, Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives. Because of our diversity of content – history as well as cultural and literature studies in the North and South Atlantic, and connections further afield, we have worked with a team of three to four editors, loosely distributed among varied fields with a non-hierarchical, team-oriented structure. Over the years the editorial teams have shifted, with editors leaving or joining the team: Manuel Barcia, Rocio G. Davis, David Lambert, William O’Reilly, Neil Safier and, currently, Emily Berquist Soule and Nathaniel Millett. These scholars from diverse fields have made the journal richer, and they have left their distinctive signatures on its pages.

From the beginning, the journal was fortunate to have had the support of The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (MESEA), an organization that has consistently challenged nationalist histories and literatures, while focusing on cultural change and exchange. The journal is published on its behalf.⁴ Further, the editorial team’s efforts to initiate a radically innovative journal were supported from the onset by Routledge, UK. Convinced of its potential, Tracy Roberts and Stacey Gubb, understood and supported the journal’s initial innovative conceptualization, presenting our project to Routledge and shepherding the proposal through the numerous difficult stages necessary for publication approval. In particular and over the years, Adam Burbage and Becky Guest gave invaluable support as our portfolio managers.

Atlantic Studies was supported from the outset by an illustrious Editorial Board encompassing a wide range of eminent scholars.⁵ We have been fortunate to count on scholars who pioneered the field of Atlantic Studies, as well as many who have opened up new directions in the area over the last twenty years. They have been very generous with their time and expertise, helping us judge the Early Career Essay Award, pointing out cutting-edge topics to engage in, and publicizing our projects. For this we are grateful. Most recently, several of them have made interesting suggestions for possible future directions for the journal. Mita Banerjee has noted the importance of linking Atlantic Studies to the Blue Humanities and interspecies studies, which would open up new dimensions for studies. Trevor Burnard signaled the significance of considering the relationship between Atlantic studies and imperial history, explaining that the interplay of Atlantic processes and imperial structures made up a good deal of the transformative energy in the making of the modern world from early modern foundations. Moreover, in line with our consideration of the Atlantic as part of a global circulation, Gary Okihiro emphasized the crucial relationship between the Atlantic and the Pacific, as positive or negative spaces set against, or in dialogue with, each other. Clearly, the focus of Atlantic Studies continues to widen, revising histories and geographies.

In recognition of our understanding that all of the world’s oceanic flows and currents feed into and out of the Atlantic world, in 2014 the journal’s editors amended its title to Atlantic Studies: Global Currents. The Atlantic would certainly remain the primary focus, but with expanded inclusion. This reframing has led us to publish on numerous topics and methodologies which incorporate studies on relations of the Atlantic to the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well as the Arctic and Antarctic Seas. The conceptual Atlantic, like its maritime namesake, is inherently expansive, inclusive, and ever-changing. As literary scholar Hester Blum, a leading specialist in oceanic and polar studies, wrote in the introduction to the journal’s first issue of 2013, which focused on oceanic studies: “whether in Atlantic, Black Atlantic, transnational, or hemispheric studies; or in ecocritical, spatial, planetary, or temporal reorientations, the seas have bounded, washed, transported, and whelmed the terms and objects of inquiries.” The world’s seas, Blum proposed, offer a new epistemology for our modern era, one that reinvigorates history and cultural studies with “surfaces, depths, and the extra-terrestrial dimensions of planetary resources and relations.”⁶ In the same issue, geographer Philip E. Steinberg published the journal’s most cited article to date, “Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions.” She asserted that “we need to develop an epistemology that views the ocean as continually being reconstituted by a variety of elements: the non-human and the human, the biological and the geophysical, the historic and the contemporary. Only then, can we think with the ocean in order to enhance our understanding of and visions for the world at large.”⁷ This is what we, as editors, struck out to accomplish, and what will guide us as we move into the future.

In 2014, the editors initiated the Early-Career Essay Prize, supported by Routledge, in recognition of the key role fresh and groundbreaking work by emerging scholars plays in a field as dynamic as Atlantic Studies. Literature scholar Joanne Chassot was the first recipient. In “‘Voyage through death/to life upon these shores’: The living dead of the Middle Passage” she examined a novel, a film, and a monograph about the Middle Passage. She linked all three works by exploring how the concept of “the living dead” can help today’s observers to begin to explore how captives experienced their forced journeys towards eventual enslavement. Her study has, to date, generated over 10,000 downloads, underlining the importance of this award for rising scholars. In the ensuing ten years since its initiation, the subsequent winning essays have explored concepts as diverse as Aaron Pinnex’s suggestion to use free-floating sargassum as a model for conceptualizing transoceanic literary connections; Kirsty Bennett’s study of the tango circulating between Argentina, North Africa, and the Middle East; Jemima Hodgkinson’s elaboration on the transatlantic circulation among periodicals of interwar African American poetry; and Jennie Jeppesen unpacking the distinctions between the word “slave” and “chattel.”⁸

With their attractive and effective focus on topics that blend diverse fields of interest under the umbrella of a single theme, special issues have become an increasingly important part of our publication agenda. In 2008, the first two were published: “New Orleans in the Atlantic World, I and II,” launching a wide range of subsequent special issues, many of which were then also published as books.⁹ Several examples serve to underline their expansive scope: “Atlantic childhood and youth in global context: reflections on the Global South” (2014), guest edited by Audra Diptee and David Trotman, still bears a political impact today and for the future in the context of The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which legally and internationally binds the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of every child, regardless of their race, religion or abilities. The issue explored the ways in which childhood and youth have been shaped by Atlantic and global dynamics, elucidating some of the methodological and theoretical challenges of writing a history of childhood and youth in the Global South. “Connecting Continents: South Carolina and the Guinea Coast” (2015), guest edited by Kenneth G. Kelly, addressed aspects in processes in the development of plantation slavery and rice agriculture that had consequences for people from a wide range of places (Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas). Scholarship linking the Upper Guinea coast of present-day Sierra Leone and Guinea with the rice growing plantation economies of South Carolina has had a profound impact on the way historical trajectories have been conceived and have gone a long way toward forcing scholars to question the role African agency may have played in many different practices.¹⁰ “Across currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific studies” (2018), guest edited by Nicole Poppenhagen and Jens Temmen, demonstrated how current (geo)political and economic developments, as well as the ongoing transpacific flow of people, ideas, and goods have triggered a surge of interest in the Pacific as a region, an object of academic study, as well as a source of important political, scholarly, and artistic work by Pacific Islanders themselves.¹¹ They bring the Pacific region, as well as Pacific studies as a field, into a critical relation with other areas of study such as Atlantic, oceanic, and archipelagic studies. “Visual Cultures of the Colonial Caribbean” (2021), guest edited by Emily Senior and Sarah Thomas, brought together a collection of essays dedicated to colonial Caribbean visual cultures, examining the ways of seeing that emerged under the conditions of slavery and its immediate aftermath, while exploring some of the methodological and theoretical challenges of working with the visual and material afterlives of empire.

Predictably, globalized perspectives have been central to the journal’s focus, but often with an innovative and sometimes unexpected focus. In “Towards an African Atlantic: Ama Ata Aidoo’s diasporic theater” (2010) Yogita Goyal read the plays of this Ghanaian writer in dialogue with influential theories of transnationalism to argue that her treatment of colonialism, slavery, gender, and diaspora stretches and reshapes Paul Gilroy’s conception of the black Atlantic. Vera M. Kutzinski’s “Alexander von Humboldt’s transatlantic personae” (2010), demonstrated how Humboldt’s writing reflected his holistic vision and his abiding interest in movement, change, and exchange, that is, in dynamic forces behind distributions, interactions, and migrations, not just on a hemispheric but on a global scale, setting him apart from other “proto-Atlanticists.” Casting a wider net and of particular impact in the context of the current global conflicts, Moshe Goultschin’s study “We who stand to differ: Hannah Arendt on maintaining otherness” (2014), focused on Arendt as a figure of global importance and impact, situating her as an intercontinental cultural agent with a unique German phenomenological position, who operated within the heart of the elite of the East Coast liberal thinkers as well as with central Jewish Israeli and non-Israeli figures, with whom she often clashed. In “Risky business: rice and inter-colonial dependencies in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans” (2015) Kathleen D. Morrison and Mark W. Hauser investigated issues of inter-colonial dependency, especially in food, with a focus on rice that both directly linked the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, highlighting structural issues of colonialism, globalization, and food security more generally.

One of the benefits of centering our journal around a paradigm as capacious as Atlantic Studies is how this perspective begets innovation, and the journal is pleased to have published many groundbreaking articles on understudied topics. Anthropologist Jay D. Edward’s “Unheralded contributions across the Atlantic world” (2008) and “Upper Louisiana’s French vernacular architecture in the greater Atlantic world” (2011) illuminated the creolization of various cultures in the architecture of the United States, and, using extensive visual and archival materials, highlighted the contributions of Indigenous Africans and Americans. Historian Jonathan Singerton’s “An Austrian Atlantic: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century” (2023) expanded our perception of the Atlantic world by focusing on how the Austrian Habsburgs built meaningful relationships between landlocked central Europe and the Atlantic. The groundbreaking special issue “German entanglements in transatlantic slavery” (2017), guest edited by Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Pia Wiegmink, explored how some of the earliest German economic enterprises embodied and inherently relied on global networks of trade that forcibly uprooted and relocated African people in unprecedented numbers. Its Introduction has tallied the highest number of downloads in the journal’s history.¹² Their new special issue “Slavery and Colonialism in German Cultural Memory: Discourses, Debates, and Practices” is under preparation. In 2024, the journal will publish another special issue: “Scottish Loyalism in the British Atlantic World,” guest edited by Katie Louise McCullough and Graeme Morton, which considers the many facets of Scottish Loyalism, embodying a disparate and multifaced identity embraced by different ethnicities, religions, and political persuasions.

Indigenous studies have been an area of consistent and increasing interest over the years. In 2007, Solimar Otero explored notions of Nuyorican, or Diasporic Puerto Rican, culture found in New York as expressed in literature, poetry, and memoirs in her essay “Bario, Bodega, and Botanica Aesthetics.” Yoruba religious culture, as reinterpreted by the Caribbean folk religion of Santería, become an avenue for exploring how transatlantic concepts of the journey and home help to formulate Nuyorican identity and community-making through literature, rendering vernacular traditions in the social imagination as a pivotal strategy for gaining social agency in post-colonial contexts. In 2009, María Fernanda Valencia-Suárez’s study “Tenochtitlan and the Aztecs in the English Atlantic world, 1500–1603,” examined a water-colored map of the city of Tenochtitlan, produced in London in 1571. She explored how the English departed from a pro-Spanish narrative of the conquest and began to use information to criticize the Spanish and to legitimize the fight against Spain in the Old and New world. Kathleen S. Murphy’s “Translating the vernacular” (2011) argued that encounters between diverse peoples and knowledges were one of the defining features of the early modern Atlantic world by focusing on the place of Indigenous and African knowledge in eighteenth-century natural histories of British plantation societies from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean. Utilizing Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, in “The empire visits the metropolis: the red Atlantic, spatial habitus and the Cherokee” (2015) Ian Chambers argued that space, like language, art, and gender, is a cultural construct and that for each individual nation there existed a spatial habitus. This spatial understanding was one lens through which contact was viewed. A special issue to deepen our exploration of the Indigenous Atlantic is forthcoming in 2024: “Indigenous Americans and the Early Modern and Nineteenth Century Atlantic World,” edited by Nathanial Millett. It emphasizes, as Brett Rushforth states in his forthcoming introductory essay, how using “innovative methods drawn from linguistics, archaeology, and environmental studies, as well as archival research across multiple empires and languages, historians of Native America developed a sophisticated literature that was all too often overlooked by Atlantic historians.”

Several contributions can serve to exemplify the journal’s innovative scholarship focusing on gender. In “‘Miss Fan can tun her han!’ Female traders in eighteenth-century British-American Atlantic port cities” (2009), Sheryllynne Haggerty examines the trading opportunities available to women in three Atlantic port cities: Philadelphia, Charleston, and Kingston. These port cities presented women with particular opportunities and problems; however, they made significant contributions to the economies of each port. Dixa Ramírez’s “Great Men’s magic: charting hyper-masculinity and supernatural discourses of power in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2013), an early study of this influential and best-selling novel, addressed the connection between masculinity and a distinctly circum-Atlantic discourse of magic. She also pointed out how an African Diaspora literary tradition deeply marked Díaz’s novel as a text borne out of an Atlantic and Caribbeanist imaginary. Donna Gabaccia returned to publish in Atlantic Studies in 2014, again addressing the question of periodization but with a specifically gendered perspective. In “Spatializing gender and migration: the periodization of Atlantic Studies,” she traced the gender composition of long-distance migrations from the early modern slave trade to the twentieth century. She finds convergence in gendered patterns of migration beginning in the early twentieth century and argues that feminization of international migrations was complete by 1960, with convergence toward gender balance. Recently, Camillia Cowling’s study “Teresa Mina’s journeys: ‘Slave-moving,’ mobility, and gender in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba” exemplified the strongly gendered effects of the practice of “slave moving,” which exposed women to heightened and specific forms of oppression by relocating them away from established networks as a form of punishment. In “Kinship in the abyss: submerging with The Deep” (2023), a contribution to the recent special issue “Kinship as critical idiom in oceanic studies,” guest edited by Katharina Fackler and Silvia Schultermandl, Elizabeth DeLoughrey explores Rivers Solomon’s The Deep as speculative fiction that speaks directly to questions of oceanic origins and ontologies of non-binary descendants in the Atlantic.¹³ She challenges earlier work on the Black Atlantic that generally imagined the ocean as a backdrop for primarily heteronormative, masculine human agents to move from one continent to another. In her analysis, she complicates this analytical framework by exploring Black queer intimacies and non-human kinship relations in the depths of the ocean.

In March 2023, in celebration of the journal’s upcoming 20th anniversary, the editors convened a symposium, “Charting the Future,” in collaboration with Saint Louis University, Saint Louis University in Madrid, and the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri. The call for papers solicited research that chart future directions for circumatlantic studies that engage the global in new and innovative ways. Envisioned as a meeting of established and rising scholars, the symposium provided a space for dialogue pointing to future areas of research. The editors were overwhelmed with the quality and quantity of the proposals received from international scholars. A number of the papers presented and discussed over two days at the symposium appear here in our special twentieth-anniversary issue, “Charting the Future: Twentieth-anniversary issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.” Celebrating the journal’s fruitful development over the last two decades, this issue seeks to engage with the future in a more inclusive, comparative, and inter- and transdisciplinary Atlantic seen as both a barrier and conduit within its global currents.

In the context of the global migration flows which now shape the identity of the world’s major metropolises, William Boelhower’s “Decolonization, diversity and accountability: The role of museums in democracies of the Global North,” explores how museums on both sides of the Atlantic have sought to reinvent their role and purpose. Many foremost museums were created to celebrate the achievements of empire and the West’s civilizational superiority. Decolonization and migration make rethinking these public spaces and their broader civic role essential in order make museums spaces of accountability and inclusion. Further, the reconsideration of their role as guardians of often-looted cultural heritages becomes essential. His essay explores the radical shift that has occurred in conceptualizing the museum, making them into sites for intercultural encounter and social action by helping to foster an open society in multicultural democracies of the Global North.

By drawing on the records of merchants, naturalists, diplomats, and showmen throughout the 1830s, in “'That ancient and modern wonder': Giraffes, imperialism, and the making of the American menagerie, 1830–1840,” Alexander David Clayton traces the history and implications of American menagerie proprietors’ systematic campaign to capture, transport, and display the world’s tallest animal as a commodity. He traces three American attempts to transport the giraffe through British India, the Cape of Good Hope, and North Africa. His study highlights the central role of imperial networks, Indigenous knowledge, and the slave trade in early zoological collecting. These efforts reveal the heightened levels of risk, failure, and exploitation behind the display of living animals, exposing imperial desires that continue to shape the giraffe’s endangerment today, pulling the giraffe to extinction, hybridization, and imperfect protection.

Rajender Kaur’s “Transatlantic itinerants and hustlers: Reading the ‘connected histories’ of India and Atlantic worlds in Bartholomew Burges’s A Series of Indostan Letters (1790)” deploys Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s generative notion of entangled histories in historiographic poetics, thereby connecting world and microhistory in her reading of this travelogue. Written by a British East India Company official, double agent, serial entrepreneur, and aspiring trade commissioner to India, who traveled from Britain to India, then to Boston and New York, the text unveils the complexity of transatlantic circuits, webs of empire, and the imperial public sphere. Burges’ reflections shed light on a tumultuous period in late eighteenth century India and postrevolutionary America. His early transatlantic text, addressed to patrons in both Britain and America, illuminates the “connected histories” of India and the United States facilitated by the transatlantic maritime circuits. Her work extends our understanding of the early circulation of goods and ideas within and well beyond the Atlantic.

In keeping with the journal’s agenda to engage with Latin American and African history as well as cultural studies, Valeria Sofia Mantilla’s “Amphibious landings: Free People of Color, food supply, and contested land tenure on the Magdalena River network (1796 – 1806),” provides a ground-breaking study of the amphibious cultures of the people of Chiriguaná, Colombia. She challenges us to rethink how we conceptualize the division between land and waterways. Through a careful unpacking of the voluminous records of a late colonial land dispute, we learn of the culture of bogas or rivermen, free people of color who lived on the margins of Spanish society but made their lives and their livings both on land and on water. Mantilla shows how their vision of the landscape they inhabited – one based on their lived realities, in which they moved easily between two different lifeways – contrasted with the official Spanish vision of spatial realities that could be declared and possessed through maps and documents.

Elise Mitchell’s “Across the Atlantic: Morbidity, geography, and the eighteenth-century French Atlantic slave trade” traces the journey of 500 enslaved Africans who boarded the Roi Guinguin in Badagry in 1765 and who entered historical record through an outbreak of smallpox. Attending closely to African history, beyond the sphere of French commercial and cultural influence, she pursues a bodily, sensory, and geographic history of the slave trade, revealing the material dimensions of enslavement and imperialism. Despite the fact that their voices are lost to us because they do not appear in the historical records, Mitchell enables the articulation of Black people’s material bodies, bodily experiences, and physical contexts as incarnations of the struggles over sovereignty, spirituality, and sociality. Using archival material, she exposes how the connected histories of empire, health management, and the slave trade materialized on, in, and around enslaved people’s bodies.

The story of late colonial and transimperial Trinidad in Latin American and Atlantic History is elaborated in Cristina Soriano’s “A spanish colony made of foreigners:Transimperial Trinidad during the age of revolutions.” The island of Trinidad was part of the Spanish empire in America until 1797, and as Soriano demonstrates, Madrid viewed it as an ideal place for imperial administrators to experiment with reform agendas. Nevertheless, both Trinidad and Venezuela were for many years considered peripheral to the study of the Spanish empire in America and have been largely overlooked in the scholarship. Her study centers Trinidad by exploring how it was a place of dynamic connections between Spanish officials, Spanish colonists in Venezuela, and the French and Irish Catholic migrants who traveled throughout the Caribbean at the time. In so doing, she reconfigures Trinidad as an Atlantic space, highlighting how the reform agendas implemented on Trinidad were key experiments in empire building, often centered around race-based exploitation of labor.

Building upon recent scholarship in Indigenous modernism/modernity and transnational Indigenous studies, Michael P. Taylor’s “Modern American Indians in (and beyond) the Deutsche Reich: (Re)Claiming Indigenous lands, nations, and futures through transatlantic Indigenous travel” explores the journeys of Indigenous travelers beyond the colonial powers of England, France, and Spain, into German-speaking Europe. His study reveals extensive Indigenous mobility and Indigenous modernism as a diverse range of adaptive aesthetics grounded in the continuation and expansion of land-based Indigenous nationhood. Focusing on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings by and about transatlantic Indigenous travelers such as Gaagigegaabaw, Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk), and Deskaheh (Levi General), Taylor explains how, rather than rendering German “Indianthusiasm” as innocent and unproblematic, these transatlantic Indigenous travelers strategically used their journeys as a platform to not only entertain but to educate Europeans on Indigenous realities. They refused to become victims to the internal and external forces of settler modernity that sought to enforce either/or identities.

In the context of “Thing Theory,” Bárbara Zepeda Cortés’s “Wandering books in the global Enlightenment: The life of an eighteenth-century library that crisscrossed the Atlantic” explores José de Gálvez’s (1720–1787) private library, consisting of 580 books, which he took from Spain to New Spain in 1765. From the connected perspectives of book history, the history of reading, and political history, she examines the library and the books this royal inspector of the Mexican viceroyalty carried with him from both a material and intellectual perspective. Galvez’s books served as his enlightened tools of empire as the curated transatlantic library conferred meaning to his office and shaped its contours. Zepeda Cortés focuses on the interplay between the owner, his ideas, biography, and book collection, thereby expanding our interpretation of the nature of the Enlightenment in the Spanish world, proposing a new narrative about its global dimensions and the material strategies that supported it.

This special issue ends with Hester Blum’s “Provocation.” A decade ago, Blum saw oceanic studies shoving off from land- and nation-based perspectives to find new critical locations from which to investigate questions of affiliation, citizenship, economic exchange, mobility, rights, and sovereignty. She posed the question what would happen if we took the oceans’ nonhuman scale and depth as a first critical position and principle?¹⁴ Here, Blum confronts “Atlantification” in the inflow of Atlantic waters into the Arctic in our moment of global climate crisis, leading to the melting of circumpolar seas through the warmer and saltier Atlantic’s water, which profoundly disrupts the marine ecosystem in ocean waters. Looking to the future and as a finale to this anniversary issue, she challenges Atlantic Studies to respond to the charge of intellectual Atlantification by affording an ongoing, systemic study of the intermingling and deliquescence of boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the past and the future, the Atlantic and the world.

For all of us, revisiting the past serves as a way to rethink and reimagine the future. As Atlantic Studies enters its third decade of publishing innovative and always exciting work by established and emerging scholars, we send our gratitude to everyone who has collaborated with the journal over the years. We also thank our families, friends, and colleagues, many of whom have shared this adventure from the start. We also offer our deep appreciation to the very generous reviewers who have supported our editorial process over the years. We all know that behind an excellent journal lies a dedicated group of academics who help us support our colleagues with constructive suggestions and encouraging comments. In the end, being part of such a global endeavor opens one’s mind and hearts as well. Atlantic Studies: Global Currents has been, and will continue to be, a site of conversation, of honest debate, and a representation of the spirit that seeks to learn more about the dynamic world we inhabit, and to share that knowledge with a generous community of international thinkers and learners.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to my current co-editors Emily Berquist Soule, Rocio G. Davis, and Nathaniel Millett, who put in more than their two cents worth while composing this exploration of the first 20 years of publishing Atlantic Studies: Global Currents. Thanks also to all my former co-editors, who helped develop the journal over the past two decades, forging it into its present impressive form. Kudos to our portfolio managers at Routledge, UK and our technical support, which is literally spread globally across all oceans, A special thanks to our current portfolio manager, Becky Guest, and to our production editor Mary Ann Dimaculangan, for their efficient and patient support. The innumerable reviewers and the journal’s Editorial Board deserve an unending thank you for their generous, often unseen and unrecognized, support. Last, but certainly not least, thanks to all our family members, friends, and colleagues who over many years have supported our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dorothea Fischer-Hornung

Dorothea Fischer-Hornung is founding co-editor of the journal Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

Notes

1 Bernard Bailyn’s influential Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours was published by Harvard University Press in 2005, a year after Atlantic Studies’ first issue. See also “Atlantic soundings: A conversation with Bernard Bailyn” (2009) published by Niel Safier in Atlantic Studies.

2 “Editorial,” 3.

3 The founding colloquium was held at and sponsored by the University of Sussex in 2003; the attending participants who facilitated the conceptualization of the journals aims and scope were Donna Gabaccia, Verene Shepherd, William O’Reilly, Jean-Philippe Mathy, William Boelhower, Marcus Wood, Rick Halpern, Maria Lauret, and myself.

4 https://mesea.org/.

5 For a list of the journal’s Editorial Board, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=editorialBoard&journalCode=rjas20.

6 Blum, “Introduction: Oceanic Studies,” 151.

7 Steinberg, “Of Other Seas,” 157. See also: Waller, “Connecting Atlantic and Pacific.” For a detailed overview of the developments in the field of Atlantic History, see Barcia, “Into the Future.”

8 Pinnex, “Sargassum in the Black Atlantic”; Bennett, “One Thousand and One Nights of Tango”; Hodgkinson, “The Mediated Text”; Jeppesen, “In the Shadows between Slave and Free.” For a complete list with links to the recipients of the Early Career Essay Prize see: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjas20/collections/best-paper-prize-atlantic-studies.

9 For a list with links to special issues, see https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjas20/special-issues.

10 In “High on the Hog” Netflix has devoted one episode to the connection between South Carolina Rice and the Guinea Coast of West Africa. See Netflix, “How African American Cuisine Transformed America: The Rice Kingdom”; “High on the Hog,” Season 1, episode 2. Accessed 19 December 2023. https://www.netflix.com/watch/81162441?trackId=255824129.

11 This special issue published “Crosscurrents (three poems)” by Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guam: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14788810.2017.1363578.

12 Raphael-Henandez and Wiegmink, “German Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery.” Metrics: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/metrics/10.1080/14788810.2017.1366009?scroll=top.

13 DeLoughrey, “Kinship in the Abyss.”

14 Blum, “Introduction.”