“Julius Scott’s Masterless Caribbean and the Force of Its Common Wind,” (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Common Wind: A Masterful Study of the Masterless Revolutionary Atlantic
The American Historical Review, 2020
The 2018 publication of Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution inspired a renewed focus on the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution. Here, six scholars of the Atlantic World and the Age of Revolutions consider the historiographical implications of The Common Wind and remind us how the Haitian upheaval belongs at the very center of the ripples of modernity that spread across the globe from the revolutionary Atlantic.
William & Mary Quarterly , 2022
In recent years, the dwindling reliance on national and single-imperial frameworks of analysis in favor of an emphasis on connectivity and entanglement has stimulated a surge of fresh transimperial and colonial histories. This shift in focus has been especially pronounced in the study of the early modern Caribbean, where it has also generated an invigorating new trend focusing on broader regional integration. Scholars now regularly embrace multilingual research projects to explore how lived experiences of colonial officials, planters, merchants, and enslaved and free people of color in the Caribbean were shaped by interisland and regional networks as much as by the assertions of sovereignty issued from distant imperial metropoles. By attending to illicit commercial networks, shared responses to natural disasters, and maritime border crossings, historians have produced textured understandings of regional integration and brought into view a Greater Caribbean as a recognizable unit of historical analysis. 1 In In a Sea of Empires, Jeppe Mulich both narrows and expands this focus, for though he concentrates specifically on the Leeward Islands in the northeastern corner of the Caribbean, he also makes the case that integration at the microregional level was a critical component of early nineteenth-century globalization. By examining formal and informal relations among the Dutch, French, Spanish, British, Danish, and Swedish colonies from the end of the American Revolution through the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean, Mulich argues that layered networks forged through cross-imperial practices of contraband trade, slavery, and privateering made the Leeward Islands "a politically polyglot zone of thin sovereignty and local integration" (2). As a result, he suggests, they serve as a historical example of an "inter-imperial microregion" (2), an ideal type that Mulich suggests can be found across the globe but whose role in early globalization remains little explored. As both a sociological model for the analysis of globalization from a regional perspective and a historical case study of the Leeward Islands, In a Sea of Empires is well-written and conceptually stimulating. The theoretical
Anxieties of Influence and Origin in the Black Atlantic
An overview-ish critical essay on the question of influence in black Atlantic theory. I look at the existential and atavistic moments in the anti- and de-colonial work of Césaire and Fanon, and then at the critique of such work from the perspective of the post-colonial in Brathwaite, Walcott, Glissant, Bernabé, et al, and Benítez-Rojo. At stake here is the meaning of vernacular culture both as composite culture and as an expression of resistance that de-centers the colonial in thinking about history, influence, and cultural formation. The essay in part aims at documenting this important rupture in Caribbean theory, but also begins an important critical re-reading of Césaire and Fanon that identifies their anxious relation to the colonial - something that they could not de-center, largely due to their problematic relation to the syncretic and creolizing cultural forms of Caribbean life.
2014
Atlantic Creoles explores the contested, fractured world inhabited by groups of mixedrace creoles as they negotiated the nexus between Florida, Saint-Domingue, and Cuba during the Age of Revolutions. Using six interrelated case studies, Landers argues that rather than being a marginalized set of individuals specific to any one colony this motley collection of escaped slaves, self-freed emancipists, revolutionaries, royalists, and native Americans in fact shared ideas about autonomy and freedom that reached across shifting borders. In vying for their own future, Landers contends, these individuals and groups acted as a powerful force in the history of the region, with long-lasting resonances for the wider Atlantic.
The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the "History" of the Black Atlantic
African Studies Review, 2000
As a new field and analytical category, the African diaspora promises to remap the histories of Africans and their dispersed descendants. In what ways has die promise of diaspora been confounded by a preceding intellectual legacy? By focusing on the nation-state and its genesis in nineteenth-century German Romantic thought and that of its critics, this article questions the unproblematic relationship that now exists between history and the African diaspora. Specifically, the audior suggests that die nation continues to inform die very meaning of diaspora despite the intentions of some scholars to challenge the conventional framework (history: the narrative of the nation). By drawing on a vast body of literature from various disciplines, this heuristic article explores, among other themes, specific reading and writing strategies that inform the work of scholars on die African diaspora. Resume: En tant que nouveau domaine et nouvelle categorie d'analyse, la diaspora africaine promet de re-tracer les histoires des Africains et de leurs descendants disperses. De quelles facons la promesse de la diaspora at -elle ete sapee par un heritage intellectuel anterieur? En nous concentrant sur l'etat-nation et sa genese dans la pensee allemande romantique du dix-neuvieme siecle et celle de ses critiques, cet article remet en question la relation non problematique qui existe aujourd'hui entre l'histoire et la diaspora africaine. Plus specifiquement, l'auteur suggere que la nation continue d'informer la signification meme de la diaspora malgre les intentions de certains chercheurs de remettre en cause les donnees conventionnelles (histoire = recit de la nation). En se basant sur un vaste corps de litterature issu de disciplines diverses, cet article heuristique explore, entre autres themes, des strategies de lecture et d'ecriture specifiques qui informent le travail des chercheurs sur la diaspora africaine.