ABSTRACT The introduction presents the key concerns and arguments of Critical Perspectives on Teju Cole. Introducing the essays of this volume, it offers insight into Cole’s genre-crossing oeuvre and its critical study. It also broadens the outlook of this project by pointing to areas for further research.

ABSTRACT Teju Cole’s novel Open City holds up to scrutiny the consequences of the traumatic events of the September 11 terrorist attacks, specifically the Twin Towers in New York City. In a post-9/11 scenario, the limitations of the goals, claims, and outcomes of globalization and cosmopolitanism become manifest, especially when they intersect with the categories of race and religious faith. Ultimately

ABSTRACT In Teju Cole’s novels Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, 2014) and Open City (2011), big city life is explored from the perspective of narrators who are outsiders to the cities they describe. They thus give rather distanced, journalistic reports about their experiences. Both novels convey their meaning via spatio-temporal conceptions that I analyze with the help of urban theories by Michel

ABSTRACT In this article on Teju Cole’s Open City I distinguish and make apparent the various temporal levels on which the novel operates in terms of plot, story, and narrative structure. I illustrate how the novel links the coordinates of temporality and spatiality via the trope of (not only physical) movement and how movement invokes notions of the ostensibly unmarked flâneur, as well as the gendered

ABSTRACT Although Brussels does not figure as prominently in literature in English as do the more iconic cosmopolitan cities of London and New York, when the flâneur-narrator of Open City (2011) keeps up his ambulatory habits in the Belgian capital during a brief holiday from his psychiatry residency at a Manhattan hospital, Teju Cole joins a long line of authors from across the world who have drawn

ABSTRACT My reading of Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief and Open City focuses on strategies of suppression or reticence. Cole’s aesthetic practice involves elision, omission, and revelation through indirection, his vocabulary weaving between terms of forgetting and recovery. One might name this a “poetics of reticence” or what Julius, the narrator of Open City, calls “the ability to trace out

ABSTRACT Teju Cole’s literary and essayistic work opens interdisciplinary and transnational conversations concerning the work of solidarity politics at least four decades in the making. Opening with a look at his first novel, Every Day is for the Thief (2007, 2014), the author probes aspects of his work in relation to other writers, such as the late writer June Jordan and Suheir Hammad who mobilize

ABSTRACT From collaborative experiments on Twitter to creative projects in word and image, Teju Cole’s work is characterised by connectivity and plasticity. Within the tradition of the public intellectual, it comes into focus as a mode of artistic activism, because it creates new publics through the use of social media and affords new insights in its protean erudition. Cole’s distinctive positionality

ABSTRACT Teju Cole’s versatility shows not only in his accomplishments in conventional print media – such as his novella Every Day is for the Thief (2007), his novel Open City (2011), and his collection of essays Known and Strange Things (2016) – but also in his non-textual creative works that engage with contemporary issues through photography, social media, and journalism. In this interview, which

ABSTRACT When Mélie, an enslaved girl, was whipped, raped, and burned, the magistrates of Guadeloupe charged her master, the white François Rivière Sommabert, with murder. A central pillar of Sommabert’s defense strategy was that he was mad, and therefore could not be held responsible for his actions. In contrast, the prosecutors portrayed him as a cannibalistic monster in order to justify allowing

ABSTRACT This study tells the story of a West African woman, Teresa Mina, as a window onto a relatively unexplored aspect of nineteenth-century slavery in Cuba: the journeys around the island of Africans and their descendants, long after surviving the Atlantic slave trade. Coerced displacement, herein termed “slave-moving,” was fundamental to the experience of slavery and to the contested process of

ABSTRACT On the basis of a previously unstudied testimony, this study approaches the life of a slave from a methodological standpoint at the crossroads between Literary Studies and History. On 4 October 1853, a black man stepped into the U.S. consulate in Havana. According to the testimony he gave that day, he had been born free in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1812, at the age of ten or twelve, he

ABSTRACT This study examines the alliances between Cuban and Southern planters before 1861 as a means of counteracting the rise of abolitionism across the Atlantic. The massive expansion of slavery in Cuba and in the US South in the first half of the nineteenth century led Cuban and Southern planters to perceive new geopolitical cartographies that challenged existing cultural, linguistic, and political

ABSTRACT This essay considers the entanglement of race, gender, and imperialism in U.S. discourse on Evangelina Cisneros, a white Cuban woman imprisoned in a Havana jail during her country’s final War for Independence from Spain (1895–1898). I argue that, an event historically tied to the colony’s abolition of slavery, Cuban Independence in writings about Cisneros becomes discursively imbricated with

ABSTRACT When considering cases such as Víctor Lucumí Chappotín's, a slave of the Lucumí nation who owned slaves in Cuba during the 1830s (a period when the illegal slave trade was blooming), scholars have tended to ask certain types of questions: Did the law recognize such forms of ownership? Were slaves allowed to acquire other slaves for their own benefit? In this essay, we aim to go beyond the

ABSTRACT This essay examines the histories of two enslaved Africans living in Cuba and sent to prison in the mid-nineteenth century, to consider the ways in which prison represented a path to freedom within and beyond slave societies. Formerly enslaved people in Cuba and Puerto Rico, released from bondage upon entering the carceral system, were often resold into slavery upon completion of their prison

ABSTRACT While Julius, the narrator of Open City (2011), foregrounds walks, intellectual digression, and stories of minor characters, personal traumatic memories paired with traces and remnants of chattel slavery and the slave trade haunt him. My analysis of Teju Cole’s novel focuses on flight as a physical and mental movement that Julius performs, trying to flee from an association with his Nigerian

ABSTRACT Exploring the genesis, transformation and afterlives of The Black Jacobins, this article follows the revision trail of James’s evolving interest in Toussaint Louverture. How does James “show” as drama versus “tell” as history? Building on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s idea of “silencing the past,” this article argues that James engages in an equally active and transitive reverse process of unsilencing

ABSTRACT This article analyses the relationship between the postcolonial condition and monarchical legitimation in North Haiti during the reign of King Henry I (1811–1820). For Henry and the North Haitian elites, the choice of monarchy represented an attempt at postcolonial socio-political consolidation inasmuch as a strategy towards the recognition of independence by European powers which themselves

ABSTRACT The late-seventeenth century saw a peak in accounts of supposed encounters with “Finnmen” in Orkney. These accounts have shaped the folklore of the Northern Isles. Scholars linked to the Royal Society suggested the accounts represented encounters with Inuit. Subsequent explanations included autonomous travel by Inuit groups and abduction and abandonment. These accounts should be understood

ABSTRACT This article examines African diasporic healing, poisoning and ritual practice as captured in criminal and ecclesiastical trials and accusations, demonstrating how Black healers constructed their knowledge in the Caribbean and Pacific regions of New Granada. Through a connective and comparative approach, it argues that mobility played a central role in the constant creation and recirculation

ABSTRACT Using a transatlantic approach that employs Black perspectives, this study examines how enslaved people in Virginia considered and participated in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675–1676. I utilize British correspondence, petitions, and official reports that document the actions of enslaved rebels, and compare and contrast the actions of enslaved rebels in Bacon’s Army to conventional slave revolts

ABSTRACT This article explores stage and celluloid representations of the dancing baiana archetype by black women performers, focusing on the period 1920 to 1945. The Portuguese term baiana translates as “woman from the state of Bahia,” and refers to Afro-descendent women street vendors in Salvador de Bahia, the state capital. This archetype was embodied by: Etta Moten and her troupe of baianas in

ABSTRACT Energised by his concern with the place of poetry in and as philosophy, Césaire’s work is engaged in thinking knowledge, a praxis which becomes fundamental to his critique of the ideology of imperialism. The concern with poetry as magical thinking and the question of what it contributes to philosophy, and more particularly, to epistemology, takes on pressing importance in the light of colonialism

ABSTRACT By examining how news from Haiti was picked up by Italian periodicals, reference and educational works in the early nineteenth century, I suggest that the Italian peninsula provides a new perspective for gauging the impact of Haitian self-presentation based on the appropriation and subversion of Eurocentric notions of civilization. An intellectual triangulation involving Simondi, Vastey, and

ABSTRACT This article reimagines the transatlantic climate of abolition by a focus on a specific incident. Wilson Armistead, a Yorkshire Quaker merchant, abolitionist, and prolific author, hosted the African American fugitives Ellen and William Craft in his house in Leeds in 1851, when they were on a lecture tour of the UK. In a typically quiet (yet bold) abolitionist act of what I call guerrilla inscription

ABSTRACT The phrase “chattel slavery” evokes a narrative of the Atlantic slave trade as people with African heritage were stolen, forced to labour under abhorrent conditions, and were powerless to prevent their children being sold away generation after generation. However, slaves were not the only people held in a chattel status through the course of American history. Both Indentured Servants and Convicts

ABSTRACT In early November 1845, sailors from H.M.S. Alert boarded an unnamed vessel off Cape Lopez, Gabon, Africa. Inside its hold they found fifty-eight shackled Africans. Placing a prize crew on the slaver, Commander Charles Bosanquet requested that Lieutenant Noel K. Wasey sail the captured ship to Freetown, Sierra Leone, for adjudication. Facing difficult winds and currents, Wasey shifted course

ABSTRACT The focus of the essay is the emergence in the eighteenth century of discourses of abolition in the context of bonded labour and the trade in slaves from India. It relates this to the development in forms of unfree labour from slavery to indenture, and to the travels of abolitionism from the Indian Ocean world into that of the Atlantic. The study examines multinational dimensions of this early

ABSTRACT Taking the theme of “abolition” as its point of departure, this collection of essays builds on the significant growth in scholarship on unfree labour in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds during the past two decades. The essays revisit some of the persistent problems posed by the traditional comparative literature on slavery and indentured labour and identify new and exciting areas for future

ABSTRACT Through an examination of arguments used in an 1866 freedom suit initiated in Benguela, this article highlights the existence of a shared legal culture in the Lusophone Atlantic. Through in-depth analysis of this case, I show how common institutions of the ius commune acquired specific meanings in the pro-slavery jurisdictions of Benguela and Brazil. I specifically focus on how legal categories

ABSTRACT This essay explores the careers of two British consuls on different sides of the globe, David Turnbull in Cuba and Lyons McLeod in Mozambique, both engaged in a long-running battle against the illegal slave trade. Consuls were often on the frontlines of efforts to police the trade, but they faced serious opposition from slave traders and government officials who often received bribes and kickbacks

ABSTRACT In the midst of a major economic restructuring known as Second Slavery, which included important debates between abolitionist and proslavery interests, Cuba experienced the emergence of new forms of mobility and networks. After being forcibly moved across the Atlantic, enslaved Africans were moved within Cuba, and sometimes sold to owners in other Caribbean islands or the U.S. South. A significant

ABSTRACT This article provides a comparative and transatlantic analysis of the forcible recruitment of Africans for the British West India Regiments. From the 1790s to the 1860s, West India Regiment officers plundered slave vessels for young African men whom they could conscript for military service. This process began with the purchase of thousands of enslaved Africans upon arrival in the British

ABSTRACT In 1825, France recognized its former colony Haiti's independence, ending an over twenty-year struggle for the black republic to obtain legal recognition as a sovereign state but saddling it with a financial indemnity that crippled its economy. This article argues that France's formal recognition of the republic gave Haiti an important advantage to defend its sovereignty as a legitimate nation

ABSTRACT Brazil was the most important destination for enslaved Africans forced into the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. While Rio de Janeiro became the country's leading slave port, the regions north of Rio were no small players in the business. This article uses the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to analyze the evolution of the traffic to Amazonia and Northeast Brazil

ABSTRACT Merchant and planter James Murray’s experience as Scottish immigrant and North Carolina colonist argues for a reconsideration of Atlantic World experiences. James Murray’s vantage point shows that the Atlantic World was not monolithic and that transatlantic connections could not be taken for granted. Murray, and countless others who shared his experience of being separated by the Atlantic

ABSTRACT The unification of Italy is one the events of the nineteenth century which resonated within the international public sphere of the time. The religious dimension of these events contributed decisively to their internationalization. In this context, this essay will analyze the impact of the Roman Question in Latin America. I will examine how the Latin American faithful were informed of what

ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cotonou, Benin, the essay explores historical and contemporary dynamics pertaining to the different ways in which salsa is creatively appropriated in Benin. The analysis of the specificities of Beninese salsa dialogues with the ever-growing body of literature interrogating the ability of the Black Atlantic heuristic to grasp South-South transatlantic

ABSTRACT The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) rarely appear in any analysis of the global diffusion of Argentine tango. Yet, writers, musicians, singers, and dancers from the MENA region have long contributed to and drawn from tango as a cultural phenomenon in complex and multi-layered ways, as this essay demonstrates through a select taxonomy of historical, literary, musical, and dance encounters

ABSTRACT This essay examines quadrille dancing in the Caribbean and the Mascarene archipelagos to theorize creolization as cultural process. Through close reading of French, Creole, and English sources, fieldwork, and attentiveness to the pleasures of social dance, I analyze the creolized quadrille as a balancing act between choreogenesis, or the emergence of new segments within the quadrille’s multi-part

The partner dance kizomba became fashionable in the eighties in Portuguese-speaking Africa and its European diasporas. Its commodification in Portugal in the late nineties turned it into a global c...

ABSTRACT The primary goal of this study is to shed new light on the meteoric rise (and fall) of maxixe dancing, from Rio de Janeiro’s practices and performances in the late 1800s to its international explosion in Parisian venues in the 1910s, and subsequent codification in USA dance manuals published in 1914. Building on my previous scholarship, I examine how different kinds of bodies have articulated

ABSTRACT By examining film and print media, along with influences of the Great Depression and WWII on public culture, this essay explores the evolution and appropriation of the Lindy Hop as it transformed from a black, working-class dance in the early twentieth century to a white, middle-class dance by the swing revival in the 1990s. During the revival, young people were drawn to the Lindy Hop because

ABSTRACT This introduction to a curated volume of original essays on African-heritage partner dances presents their shared kinetic features as performative social practices arising from creolising processes in the Atlantic world. The expressive dimension of these creolised dances, particularly their dependence on the connection between two dancers, enables them to function as the embodied memory of

ABSTRACT “The Jamaican airs” is a paper introducing an unpublished primary source from the C. E. Long Papers at the British Library in London. Although much of the source’s content was originally printed in 1797, in a periodical called The Columbian Magazine, about half has never been published. This half features the most extensive pieces of musical notation from the early-modern era of songs that

ABSTRACT This article explores the risks and dangers of redemptive readings of JMW Turner’s (in)famous 1840 painting, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon Coming on) that assume that we cannot be complicit in anything other than abolition and deliberately forget and disavow the underlying structures and continuing dispossessions of slave racial capitalism. The paper reads

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the interactions, connections and parallels in literary texts addressing Haiti by Anglophone Caribbean writers C.L.R. James and Derek Walcott, and Francophone writers Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. Primary materials considered include: C.L.R. James’ 1934 playscript, Toussaint Louverture, which had been lost for many years until recently; two plays by Derek Walcott

ABSTRACT Recent work in political ecology and more-than-human geography has highlighted the foundational role that nonhumans play in actively shaping politics. More than simply resources over which humans wage political battles, this work contends that nonhumans must be considered political actors in their own right. Building on this research, this paper examines a political-economic crisis in the

ABSTRACT Historians of slavery in the Americas have focussed on major revolts such as Haiti in 1791 to explain emancipation, and ignored smaller clashes. A close study of one such clash in Jamaica in 1819 between slave runaways in the Hellshire Hills and the colonial state offers a new perspective. Planters used the cooperation of free and enslaved people of colour to carry out a “descent” that destroyed

ABSTRACT Near the end of the Quasi-War in 1800, Jean-Pierre Boyer, future president of Haiti, was brought to New London, Connecticut with other partisans from the pro-French forces in St. Domingue. Boyer along with others were held in nearby Norwich until April 1801. A Freemason, Boyer was welcomed by Masons in Norwich while plundered by other Masons on the cruiser and in New London. In 1800, internal

ABSTRACT This introduction to the volume on “The Fraternal Atlantic” places the eighteenth-century emergence of freemasonry within the context of the dynamic Atlantic world. It highlights three characteristics that persisted into the twentieth century: the importance of freemasonry to sociability across borders; the tensions within freemasonry between cosmopolitan fraternalism and the turbulent political

ABSTRACT British Freemasons accommodated the revolutionary politics of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world until the 1790s, when the British waged war against revolutionary France and suppressed internal radicalism and associations they defined as seditious. British Grand Lodges reoriented to overt displays of loyalty, such as adopting royal patrons, and consolidating their authority over Freemasonry

ABSTRACT In the wake of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), tens of thousands of people – white colonists, free people of color, and slaves – left the French colony of Saint-Domingue for neighboring Caribbean colonies and North America. Scattered and diverse as they were, these refugees maintained diasporic bonds, constituting a community with distinct social, cultural, linguistic, and religious traits

ABSTRACT Late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue produced both a thriving Masonic movement and the most successful slave uprising in modern world history. Scholars have suggested but never proven that these two movements were linked. One biographer hypothesizes that white planters who knew the future Toussaint Louverture from colonial Masonic circles helped him organize the slave uprising of August

ABSTRACT After the 1848 revolutions in Europe, waves of European émigrés, many of them Germans, settled in the United States. These Forty-Eighters faced challenging choices in their relationship to American society, oscillating around assimilation, adaptation, alienation and open antagonism. The arrival of thousands of refugees from revolutions repositioned US politics within a transatlantic world

ABSTRACT This work seeks to analyse the links between elite families on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic through the processes of social negotiations that took place within the Spanish navy in the second half of the eighteenth and the opening decade of the nineteenth century. Increasingly close links led elite families to undergo and to experience similar transformations, such as new ways of representing

ABSTRACT Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993) both negotiate community and individuality in the Black diaspora, utilizing multi-generic techniques. The lack of significant scholarly attention to relationships between the two texts I take as representative of the limiting imagined borders of “national” literature and turn to genre theory to read depictions of Black

ABSTRACT What has passed for historical “knowledge” about precolonial Africa and the diaspora has for centuries been “dubbed” through the lens of foreign observers. The main research findings have been shaped by the concerns of external financial backers, be they the Portuguese crown and Missionary orders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the colonial governments of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT This essay takes up W. E. B. Du Bois’s theorization of internationalism, focusing on his representation of India as racial kin and anti-colonial herald, especially his suggestion of an analogy between race and caste, by reading him alongside Nobel Prize-winning poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore. I juxtapose Du Bois and Tagore to recover a submerged history of a sustained dialogue between