ABSTRACT Black people’s contributions to print ventures have been constant and manifold across the Atlantic world during the past centuries. If enslavement and forced labor dictated their involvement in many instances, Black people from early on also adopted the roles of authors, contributors, subscribers, and, notably, editors of different print materials. This collection of essays pays respect to

ABSTRACT For a variety of reasons, emerging research areas can excite and often motivate people to explore and even contribute. But too often even for experienced scholars, academic prowess, good intentions, and curiosity are inadequate, even dangerous. Careful analysis of one's own strengths and weaknesses along with fastidious research and contextualization are essential if one's efforts are to produce

ABSTRACT This essay examines the print strategies of Britain’s first Black editor, S. J. Celestine Edwards (1857?–1894), during his tenure at the antiracist journal, Fraternity. I show how Edwards capitalized on “scissors-and-paste” methods to articulate connections between minoritizing processes in British colonies and the US, thus formulating a theory of Anglo-Saxonism as a power relation reproduced

ABSTRACT This study argues that Mary Ann Shadd Cary theorized and practiced Black feminist nationalism as she edited the newspaper that she founded, the Provincial Freeman, and wrote a variety of pieces throughout her career. The decades-long union between her editorship and writing allowed her to craft a Black feminist nationalism that infused her writings, speeches, and activism during and after

ABSTRACT This essay examines the editorial positions of Thélismon Bouchereau and Frederick Douglass on abolition and Black uplift to explore a transnational, bilingual discussion of Black freedom in the Atlantic world. It surveys reporting in Haitian and U.S. newspapers, including La République and Douglass’ Monthly to argue that Black editorship of newspapers in Haiti and the United States provided

ABSTRACT Formerly enslaved African American Josiah Henson is well-known for his association with the character of Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Published in 1852, the literary phenomenon sold millions of copies throughout the nineteenth century, and also made a hero of Henson, who marketed his connection with the novel to great acclaim. However, Henson’s visit to Britain

ABSTRACT Frederico Baptista de Souza was born to a slave mother during the period of the Free Womb Law in Brazil (1871). After slavery’s abolition, Souza campaigned in favor of full citizenship for formerly enslaved people. Black newspapers in São Paulo originated from the clubs of people who were prohibited from enjoying the clubs attended by whites regardless of their class. I examine the Black press’

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the literary reprints found in New York’s Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829), the first newspaper owned and operated exclusively by African Americans. It demonstrates that the Journal’s editors strategically used seemingly apolitical, nonracial, and often European reprints as subtle vehicles for engagement with the racial politics of the 1820s United States. In doing so, the

ABSTRACT The following conversation with leading scholars in the fields of Black Atlantic literatures and cultures, life writing, and literary studies offers a number of considerations on the state of Black (Atlantic) print culture studies, its potential to revise our understanding of African American literature, its intersections with other disciplines and contemporary fiction, and its lasting radical

ABSTRACT The essay discusses the autobiographies of two Black writers, James Weldon Johnson and Evelio Grillo, both of whom grew up in Florida. While Johnson experienced his hometown Jacksonville in the 1870s and 1880s as a contact zone where Black American, Black Cuban, and other ethnic groups interacted on a daily basis, Grillo spent his childhood in the 1920s in a highly segregated part of Tampa

ABSTRACT This article explores how the involvement of US citizens in projects of political revolution across the Caribbean threatened the geostrategic and economic interests of the United States in the region. In 1822, a revolutionary expedition led by a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, Henri Louis Villaume de Ducoudray-Holstein, departed from the Atlantic seaboard to overthrow Spanish rule in Puerto

ABSTRACT This article examines developments in the field of Atlantic History within the past two decades and through the prism of slavery studies and a number of close sub-fields. By paying attention to what Atlantic historians have achieved since the turn of the century, it discusses contributions and critiques in equal measure, highlighting the field’s place in wider global discussions. While probing

ABSTRACT In 2007 several permanent museum galleries were created in England that discuss the subject of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. This article critiques one recurring image within many of these sites: the diagrams of the slave trade triangle. Drawing on analyses of the slave trade by historians, from Eric Williams to recent contributions, as well as understanding of the behaviour of

ABSTRACT The following is an edited excerpt of an interview that took place between playwright Femi Euba and Nobel Prize Laureate Wole Soyinka, moderated by theatre scholar Biodun Jeyifo. The conversation occurred at the conference, “Praise at the Crossroads: Cultural Intersection in Literary and Artistic Worlds,” celebrating the artistic and scholarly works of Femi Euba, held at Louisiana State University

ABSTRACT This essay examines the use of guaiacum and sassafras in the manuscript recipe collections of Grace Mildmay, Lady Mildmay (1552–1620). Although Milday is now a fairly well known seventeenth-century domestic medical practitioner, her recipes have not received significant scholarly attention. To trace the history of these two ingredients, which had great cachet in the early modern Atlantic world

ABSTRACT The strategy of neutrality has long been referenced in terms of the Duchy of Courland’s dealings with its belligerent neighbours during the seventeenth century. This position was formed in response to Courland’s lack of agency and desire for greater independence amidst eastern Baltic power struggles. However, Courland’s activities were not limited to this locality, expanding under Duke Jakob

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