Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2021.2000831
Alison Maas
ABSTRACT This essay argues that depictions of small craft sailing in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) indicate an underlying crisis in the kinship structures of the age of sail as wrought by industrial capitalism’s rising reliance on steamships. Theorizing an older form of “maritime kinship” and its continuation in “oceanic kinship,” this essay re-evaluates the gap between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century seafaring fiction and bridges the two through a continued connection to the sea and maintained sailing heritage. Countering a rhetoric of loss, it presents Treasure Island’s nearness to the sea as highlighting an environmental interconnection that might allow us to reimagine how we relate to oceans and provide key approaches to confronting the current climate crisis.
摘要本文认为，罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森（Robert Louis Stevenson）的《金银岛》（Treasure Island，1883）中对小船航行的描述表明，由于工业资本主义对蒸汽船的日益依赖，航海时代的亲属结构出现了潜在的危机。本文将一种更古老的“海上亲属关系”及其在“海洋亲属关系”中的延续理论化，重新评估了19世纪末和20世纪初航海小说之间的差距，并通过与海洋的持续联系和保持的航海遗产将两者联系起来。与损失的言论相反，它将金银岛与海洋的距离描述为突出了环境的相互联系，这可能使我们能够重新想象我们与海洋的关系，并为应对当前的气候危机提供关键方法。
{"title":"“Near the sea”: Maritime kinship and oceanic kinship in Stevenson’s Treasure Island","authors":"Alison Maas","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2021.2000831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2021.2000831","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay argues that depictions of small craft sailing in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) indicate an underlying crisis in the kinship structures of the age of sail as wrought by industrial capitalism’s rising reliance on steamships. Theorizing an older form of “maritime kinship” and its continuation in “oceanic kinship,” this essay re-evaluates the gap between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century seafaring fiction and bridges the two through a continued connection to the sea and maintained sailing heritage. Countering a rhetoric of loss, it presents Treasure Island’s nearness to the sea as highlighting an environmental interconnection that might allow us to reimagine how we relate to oceans and provide key approaches to confronting the current climate crisis.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":"20 1","pages":"259 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48024683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2022.2079900
Katharina Fackler, Silvia Schultermandl
ABSTRACT This introduction puts forth a working definition of oceanic kinship as kinship with the ocean and kinship shaped by the ocean. It uses the notion of kinship as a critical idiom and conceptual lens through which we can examine the oceanic turn’s potential for rethinking forms of human and nonhuman belonging. Modernity and coloniality were spurred and sustained by oceanic mobility. The oceans, as waterways and material presences, have helped shape modern-day (re-)configurations of kinship. This introduction acknowledges oceanic kinship’s situatedness within conditions of systemic racism, colonial injustice, and global power imbalances in the various contexts of oceanic im/mobility, labor, and ecologies, presently and historically. Our notion of kinship encompasses practices of mutual care which emerge from an understanding of interdependence, collectivity, and affiliation. With its focus on kinship and mutual care, this introduction charts a new critical tradition within ocean studies.
{"title":"Kinship as critical idiom in oceanic studies","authors":"Katharina Fackler, Silvia Schultermandl","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2022.2079900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2079900","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introduction puts forth a working definition of oceanic kinship as kinship with the ocean and kinship shaped by the ocean. It uses the notion of kinship as a critical idiom and conceptual lens through which we can examine the oceanic turn’s potential for rethinking forms of human and nonhuman belonging. Modernity and coloniality were spurred and sustained by oceanic mobility. The oceans, as waterways and material presences, have helped shape modern-day (re-)configurations of kinship. This introduction acknowledges oceanic kinship’s situatedness within conditions of systemic racism, colonial injustice, and global power imbalances in the various contexts of oceanic im/mobility, labor, and ecologies, presently and historically. Our notion of kinship encompasses practices of mutual care which emerge from an understanding of interdependence, collectivity, and affiliation. With its focus on kinship and mutual care, this introduction charts a new critical tradition within ocean studies.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":"20 1","pages":"195 - 225"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43282536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2021.2000833
J. Murray
ABSTRACT Kevin Dawson has recently argued in Undercurrents of Power (2018) that waterscapes and aquatic culture played a crucial role in the African diaspora, and contemporary scholars “must move beyond landlocked paradigms.” This forms a necessarily transnational depiction of Black identity, one that eschews notions of nation and state. This essay follows Dawson’s lead by proposing a material confrontation with water vis-à-vis Langston Hughes. His writings emphasize this oceanic power of kinship by recurrently referencing waterways and transatlantic travel. More than merely tracing the appearance of water symbolism, this essay contends that these frequent literary allusions grant key insights into his burgeoning kinship with the greater African diaspora. Using Hughes’s emphasis on water as both metaphorical and material geographical space as the key example, this essay demonstrates the fertile application of an oceanic approach to the African diaspora.
{"title":"Taken by the sea wind: Langston Hughes and the currents of Black identity","authors":"J. Murray","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2021.2000833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2021.2000833","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Kevin Dawson has recently argued in Undercurrents of Power (2018) that waterscapes and aquatic culture played a crucial role in the African diaspora, and contemporary scholars “must move beyond landlocked paradigms.” This forms a necessarily transnational depiction of Black identity, one that eschews notions of nation and state. This essay follows Dawson’s lead by proposing a material confrontation with water vis-à-vis Langston Hughes. His writings emphasize this oceanic power of kinship by recurrently referencing waterways and transatlantic travel. More than merely tracing the appearance of water symbolism, this essay contends that these frequent literary allusions grant key insights into his burgeoning kinship with the greater African diaspora. Using Hughes’s emphasis on water as both metaphorical and material geographical space as the key example, this essay demonstrates the fertile application of an oceanic approach to the African diaspora.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":"20 1","pages":"277 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42061433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2022.2080462
Elizabeth Deloughrey
ABSTRACT While a body of earlier work on the Black Atlantic generally imagined the ocean as a backdrop for primarily heteronormative, masculine human agents to move from one continent to another, this westward telos has been complicated by a deeper engagement with Black queer intimacies and non-human kinship relations in the depths of the ocean. A recent novella written by Rivers Solomon with their collaborative interlocuters from the band “clipping.” – Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes – portrays the fluidity of an aqueous merfolk named the wajinru who are born of the dead and nursed and nourished as kin by non-human figures of what Edouard Glissant terms the “womb abyss.” Here I explore The Deep as speculative fiction that speaks directly to questions of oceanic origins and ontologies, transforming the necropolitics of transatlantic slave trading into the possibilities of the “womb abyss” for the lives of its “aquatically mutated,” non-binary descendants.
{"title":"Kinship in the abyss: submerging with The Deep","authors":"Elizabeth Deloughrey","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2022.2080462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2080462","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While a body of earlier work on the Black Atlantic generally imagined the ocean as a backdrop for primarily heteronormative, masculine human agents to move from one continent to another, this westward telos has been complicated by a deeper engagement with Black queer intimacies and non-human kinship relations in the depths of the ocean. A recent novella written by Rivers Solomon with their collaborative interlocuters from the band “clipping.” – Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes – portrays the fluidity of an aqueous merfolk named the wajinru who are born of the dead and nursed and nourished as kin by non-human figures of what Edouard Glissant terms the “womb abyss.” Here I explore The Deep as speculative fiction that speaks directly to questions of oceanic origins and ontologies, transforming the necropolitics of transatlantic slave trading into the possibilities of the “womb abyss” for the lives of its “aquatically mutated,” non-binary descendants.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":"20 1","pages":"348 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45750257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2021.2008715
H. Blum
ABSTRACT The -ship suffix in “kinship” and the seagoing “ship” are terms that describe forms of relation that bind and collect amid oceanic unboundedness and dispersal. This afterword proposes that shipping in sea parlance and shipping in fan culture (a speculative practice of forging connection between fictional characters beyond the bounds of their original media) share a constitutive commitment to imaginative and material provisioning, transportation, and the creation of surplus value. Shipping allows for generative possibility beyond the foreclosure of formal, terrestrial bounds.
{"title":"Shipping – An afterword","authors":"H. Blum","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2021.2008715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2021.2008715","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The -ship suffix in “kinship” and the seagoing “ship” are terms that describe forms of relation that bind and collect amid oceanic unboundedness and dispersal. This afterword proposes that shipping in sea parlance and shipping in fan culture (a speculative practice of forging connection between fictional characters beyond the bounds of their original media) share a constitutive commitment to imaginative and material provisioning, transportation, and the creation of surplus value. Shipping allows for generative possibility beyond the foreclosure of formal, terrestrial bounds.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":"20 1","pages":"361 - 363"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44262360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-21DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2022.2064186
Chris Bongie
ABSTRACT The Journal du Port-au-Prince was first published in Saint-Domingue on 1 September 1791, days after an insurrection of the gens de couleur libres (free people of color) was launched in the colony’s West Province. This hitherto unexamined newspaper was edited by Félix Pascalis Ouvière, a recently arrived native of Aix-en-Provence who, by the time it ceased publication on 20 November, had earned a reputation as among the most prominent white advocates for free colored rights. After supplying some biographical context for Ouvière’s Journal, this article provides a detailed account of how his (constitutional royalist) “politics of moderation” shaped the paper’s changing attitudes toward the gens de couleur, and then proceeds to highlight the distinctive role that literary forms of expression play in the Journal, concluding with methodological reflections on the double reading, historical and literary-critical, that Ouvière’s innovative contribution to the colonial public sphere solicits.
{"title":"Zoïle’s pilgrimage: Abbé Ouvière’s Journal du Port-au-Prince (1791) and the struggle for free colored rights in revolutionary Saint-Domingue","authors":"Chris Bongie","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2022.2064186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2064186","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Journal du Port-au-Prince was first published in Saint-Domingue on 1 September 1791, days after an insurrection of the gens de couleur libres (free people of color) was launched in the colony’s West Province. This hitherto unexamined newspaper was edited by Félix Pascalis Ouvière, a recently arrived native of Aix-en-Provence who, by the time it ceased publication on 20 November, had earned a reputation as among the most prominent white advocates for free colored rights. After supplying some biographical context for Ouvière’s Journal, this article provides a detailed account of how his (constitutional royalist) “politics of moderation” shaped the paper’s changing attitudes toward the gens de couleur, and then proceeds to highlight the distinctive role that literary forms of expression play in the Journal, concluding with methodological reflections on the double reading, historical and literary-critical, that Ouvière’s innovative contribution to the colonial public sphere solicits.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41569481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2020.1870399
P. von Gleich
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 past and the past of the Atlantic world. His compulsive walks and cosmopolitan musings offer only temporary, improvised refuge. The text remains caught in the gendered history and anti-black legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as well as the ways in which Julius is implicated not only as a witness and victim but also as a perpetrator. Gendered anti-black violence, I argue, forms the obscured ground on which Julius’s narration is built, while the novel’s narrative techniques of oversharing and evasion ultimately negotiate its narratibility.
《开放之城》(Open City, 2011)的叙述者朱利叶斯(Julius)，在前景漫步、智力离题和次要人物的故事中，个人创伤记忆与动产奴隶制和奴隶贸易的痕迹和残余相结合，一直困扰着他。我对特朱·科尔小说的分析主要集中在飞行上，这是朱利叶斯的一种身心运动，他试图逃离与他的尼日利亚过去和大西洋世界的过去的联系。他强迫性的散步和世界性的沉思只能提供暂时的、临时的庇护。文本仍然纠缠于跨大西洋奴隶贸易和动产奴隶制的性别历史和反黑人遗产，以及朱利叶斯不仅作为证人和受害者而且作为肇事者的牵连方式。我认为，性别反黑人暴力构成了朱利叶斯叙事的模糊基础，而小说的过度分享和逃避的叙事技巧最终使其叙事性得以实现。
{"title":"The “fugitive notes” of Teju Cole’s Open City","authors":"P. von Gleich","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2020.1870399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2020.1870399","url":null,"abstract":"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 past and the past of the Atlantic world. His compulsive walks and cosmopolitan musings offer only temporary, improvised refuge. The text remains caught in the gendered history and anti-black legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as well as the ways in which Julius is implicated not only as a witness and victim but also as a perpetrator. Gendered anti-black violence, I argue, forms the obscured ground on which Julius’s narration is built, while the novel’s narrative techniques of oversharing and evasion ultimately negotiate its narratibility.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":"19 1","pages":"334 - 351"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14788810.2020.1870399","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44655121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-13DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2022.2046970
Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso
ABSTRACT Drawing on the “new mobilities paradigm” and contemporary migration studies, this article offers an approximation to the experiences of mobility of María Juana Knepper y Trippel and her five daughters. Their staggered geographical trajectories from Flanders to the Pyrenees, Andalusia, the Spanish circum-Caribbean and back to the Iberian Peninsula are reconstructed through a longitudinal approach, revealing patterns that a focus on one woman or on movement between just two places would miss. Their physical movement is situated in the context of representations of relocation in the royal service as a burden and a sacrifice, before turning to an analysis of the networks and strategies constructed and obstructed by their mobility. Their movement was always intertwined with that of their male relations. Nonetheless, they played key roles in furthering their family’s political and economic interests, creating bonds that linked together distant parts of the Atlantic world, and articulating the Spanish empire.
{"title":"Female staggered mobility across the Spanish Atlantic: The Bertodano-Kneppers in the early eighteenth century","authors":"Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2022.2046970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2046970","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Drawing on the “new mobilities paradigm” and contemporary migration studies, this article offers an approximation to the experiences of mobility of María Juana Knepper y Trippel and her five daughters. Their staggered geographical trajectories from Flanders to the Pyrenees, Andalusia, the Spanish circum-Caribbean and back to the Iberian Peninsula are reconstructed through a longitudinal approach, revealing patterns that a focus on one woman or on movement between just two places would miss. Their physical movement is situated in the context of representations of relocation in the royal service as a burden and a sacrifice, before turning to an analysis of the networks and strategies constructed and obstructed by their mobility. Their movement was always intertwined with that of their male relations. Nonetheless, they played key roles in furthering their family’s political and economic interests, creating bonds that linked together distant parts of the Atlantic world, and articulating the Spanish empire.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47834369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-07DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2022.2034569
M. Bennett
ABSTRACT In the 1680s the English East India Company (EIC) sought to develop a plantation economy in its South Atlantic colony of St. Helena, using the Caribbean island of Barbados as a colonial model. The EIC’s attempt to develop Barbadian-style plantations on St. Helena demonstrates the global reach of the Caribbean sugar colonies and their importance as an exemplar for English imperial projects in the early modern period. Colonial theorists working outside the remit of the EIC even sought to expand the Caribbean plantation system beyond the Cape of Good Hope in this period, highlighting how English overseas expansion was an interconnected phenomenon which defies rigid categorization along regional lines. Yet the failure of the EIC’s top-down plan for St. Helena also underscores how both historical contingencies and local factors were central to the success of colonial plantation, and that misunderstanding these conditions could undermine the best-laid plans and models.
{"title":"Caribbean plantation economies as colonial models: The case of the English East India Company and St. Helena in the late seventeenth century","authors":"M. Bennett","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2022.2034569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2034569","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the 1680s the English East India Company (EIC) sought to develop a plantation economy in its South Atlantic colony of St. Helena, using the Caribbean island of Barbados as a colonial model. The EIC’s attempt to develop Barbadian-style plantations on St. Helena demonstrates the global reach of the Caribbean sugar colonies and their importance as an exemplar for English imperial projects in the early modern period. Colonial theorists working outside the remit of the EIC even sought to expand the Caribbean plantation system beyond the Cape of Good Hope in this period, highlighting how English overseas expansion was an interconnected phenomenon which defies rigid categorization along regional lines. Yet the failure of the EIC’s top-down plan for St. Helena also underscores how both historical contingencies and local factors were central to the success of colonial plantation, and that misunderstanding these conditions could undermine the best-laid plans and models.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46397664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-23DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2022.2040344
K. Sembe
ABSTRACT Marronage is often treated in academic discussions as a compelling example of resistance, a type of agency that has a definitive insurgent impulse. This approach makes the study of maroons vulnerable to ideological taint because it can downplay the full complexity with which slave rebels and free people of color achieved social mobility and engaged with colonial power structures. By exploring late sixteenth century negotiations between a maroon leader named Alonso de Illescas and Spanish viceregal authorities in Esmeraldas province, Ecuador, I demonstrate how maroon agency in early colonial Latin America can disrupt theories about resistance or accommodation. I explore various types of mediation at work in negotiating power in the colonial Atlantic, uncover some of the risks associated with reading maroon agency through North Atlantic universals (namely the notion of sovereignty), and offer the term “subsovereign agency” to bridge the chasm between theory and colonial politics of marronage.
{"title":"On the brink of sovereignty: Maroon Chief Alonso de Illescas and vernacular agency in the colonial Atlantic","authors":"K. Sembe","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2022.2040344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2040344","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Marronage is often treated in academic discussions as a compelling example of resistance, a type of agency that has a definitive insurgent impulse. This approach makes the study of maroons vulnerable to ideological taint because it can downplay the full complexity with which slave rebels and free people of color achieved social mobility and engaged with colonial power structures. By exploring late sixteenth century negotiations between a maroon leader named Alonso de Illescas and Spanish viceregal authorities in Esmeraldas province, Ecuador, I demonstrate how maroon agency in early colonial Latin America can disrupt theories about resistance or accommodation. I explore various types of mediation at work in negotiating power in the colonial Atlantic, uncover some of the risks associated with reading maroon agency through North Atlantic universals (namely the notion of sovereignty), and offer the term “subsovereign agency” to bridge the chasm between theory and colonial politics of marronage.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48507775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：