The Atlantic as Again a Global Hub

Itinerario, XXIII :2

Observed from a distance-in both time and space-European expansion in modern times is an impressive, global process. More and more ships, more and more goods, and more and more people crossed the Atlantic, as well as the Indian Ocean. Europe increasingly ...

International Journal of the Humanities, 2006

In the cultural panorama of late 19th-century Italy, Edmondo De Amicis emerges as one of the writers who were most aware of the gravity of the Italian “social question” and who were most actively concerned with it. However, in the past few decades, some militant critics have attacked De Amicis’ writings – mainly the ones where the author becomes more involved with social issues. The essay focuses on a re-reading of some excerpts from De Amicis’ Cuore (the monthly tales on emigration) in the light of Sull’oceano, the travel book he wrote after a trip to South America, during which the author discovered the dimension of Italian emigration abroad and converted to engaged literature.

Homeros Odyssee, 2018

De Grave, Cailleux, Wilkens, Gideon, Vinci. Continuation of the Atlantic Theory of Homer's Ilias and Odyssey part 4: Atlantic Theory of Homer (Part 1: Odysseus' first voyage; part 2: Odysseus' second voyage; part 3: Atlantic Geography). The most important theories of these authors are discussed.

Culture & History, 2023

This one-semester graduate reading course will provide you with an overview of the historiography of the new field of Atlantic History, through intensive reading by yourself and vigorous discussions in class, as well as through the presentations of book reviews by other students in the course.

Anglican and Episcopal History, 2017

View related articles View Crossmark data would welcome more detail on the giant corporations that dominate the cable industry. Cable & Wireless, Alcatel-Lucent and so forth appear here and there in passing, but not as objects of political economic inquiry in their own right. Starosielski nevertheless successfully advances a progressive politics of infrastructure, clearing the way for informed thinking about building more resilient and equitable communication networks in the Pacific and beyond.

Beginning with two exemplary scenes from Shakespeare and Olaudah Equiano, this essay discusses the rise of the circum-Atlantic world as a fundamental order and a critical space that remains centerless and ultimately unstructured. It relies on the figura of the ocean-going ship and the mappemonde as semiotic operators that are instrumental in creating, measuring, and representing Atlantic space. It then explores Edward Said's dialectic of filiation and affiliation by tracing his career-long interest in the "figural" work of Auerbach and Vico, and suggests that the latter's insights in Scienza nuova make him not only Said's contemporary but also Equiano's.

History of European Ideas, 2008

Participants were collectively invited to give programmatic statements regarding diverse fields of research in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. 1 In the expanded contributions here published, Atlantic history is explicitly or implicitly discussed by seven historians of France, Great Britain, and America of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As an ensemble, they represent a substantial gauge of the direction of contemporary work for what might be qualified as a later generation of Atlantic scholars, inspired by, but most often at some critical distance, between themselves and such pioneers as Bernard Bailyn, Jack Green, and Paul Butel. The coherence of these papers is in the geographical focus on French Atlantic exchanges and comparisons-while Pierre Gervais' contribution brings American merchant networks stretching across borders of empires into sharper focus. The authors collectively seek to rectify an omission in earlier Atlantic history, namely, that the Franco-American Atlantic has been the poorer cousin of many recent discussions. They also point to why this fact is changing. A relatively diminished academic interest in the first French Empire is, no doubt, the price of its relatively sudden collapse. The Empire's ignominious decline in the Napoleonic army's catastrophic retreat from St-Domingue in 1803, followed by the island's independence in 1804, was an abrupt end to the imperial history of France in the Americas. The narrative of defeat has led historians of France abroad to a narrow emphasis on the roots of the failure of the First Empire, or to a general neglect of its greater significance. Also, the vast and complex question of the relationship of the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth-century has, perhaps to excess, concentrated Atlantic questions upon the political and diplomatic history of the two nations. 2

2014

Theoretical paradigms based on Atlantic experiences pose a challenge for attempts to imagine anew histories of commerce and culture in the colonial and Indian Ocean world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Foregrounding place origins of purportedly universal doctrines, this paper attempts provisionally and suggestively to explore this challenge by locating and dislocating in place some conventional frameworks for interpreting patterns of trade and mobility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It relates two connected arguments gesturing to the disruption and suppression of alternative, and potentially subversive, imaginings of worldwide spatial connections and cultural flows in the course of the north Atlantic hoisting itself atop a hierarchy of modernity and historical progress imagined to radiate outwards from it. The first is about the generalization through theory and history of a set of commercial relationships and institutional arrangements historically peculiar to the Atlantic, as being characteristic of the “world economy.” The second argument relates to the misrecognition of spaces of circulation in accounts of migration, and their compression into linear movements where the northern Atlantic world represented the ultimate destinations for the working poor belched out from the rest of the non-Western world.

Terrae Incognitae, 2016