Tag Archives

10 Articles

New Book: Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation by Richard E. Brantley

dickinson.brantley.cover

From The publisher, “Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation explores the function of hope in Dickinson’s poems and looks to place her in a broad cultural context. Brantley teases out the implications of a succinct central perception by treating that perception as a pebble tossed into the pool of late-19th-century transatlantic culture. His departure from familiar stylistics and his challenging yet entertaining mode of analysis make for delightful reading.” – Paul Crumbley, Professor of English and Director of the Undergraduate American Studies Program, Utah State University, USA

New Book: Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867 by Catherine Jones

literature.music.coverFrom Amazon.com: “This new study looks at the relationship of rhetoric and music in the era’s intellectual discourses, texts and performance cultures principally in Europe and North America. Catherine Jones begins by examining the attitudes to music and its performance by leading figures of the American Enlightenment and Revolution, notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She also looks at the attempts of Francis Hopkinson, William Billings and others to harness the Orphean power of music so that it should become a progressive force in the creation of a new society. She argues that the association of rhetoric and music that reaches back to classical Antiquity acquired new relevance and underwent new theorisation and practical application in the American Enlightenment in light of revolutionary Atlantic conditions. Jones goes on to consider changes in the relationship of rhetoric and music in the nationalising milieu of the nineteenth century; the connections of literature, music and music theory to changing models of subjectivity; and Romantic appropriations of Enlightenment visions of the public ethical function of music.”

 

New Book: The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings by Jerome C. Branche

Poetics.politics.coverFrom Amazon.com:“This book studies the creative discourse of the modern African diaspora by analyzing poems, novels, essays, hip-hop and dub poetry in the Caribbean, England, Spain, and Colombia, and capturing diasporan movement through mutually intersecting axes of dislocation and relocation, and efforts at political group affirmation and settlement, or “location.” Branche’s study connects London’s multimillion-dollar riots of 2011, and its antecedents associated with the West Indian settler community, to the discontent and harrowing conditions facing black immigrants to contemporary Spain as gateway to Fortress Europe. It links the brutal massacres that target Colombia’s dispossessed and displaced poor – and mainly black – “throwaway” citizens, victims of the drug trade and neoliberal expansionism, to older Caribbean stories that tell of the original spurts of capitalist greed, and the colonial cauldron it created, at the center of which lay the slave trade. In revisiting the question of what really has awaited Afro-descendants at the end of the Middle Passage, this volume brings transatlantic slavery, the making of weak postcolonial states that bleed people, and the needle’s eye of racial identification together through a close reading of rappers, black radicals, dub poetry, and novelists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Branche at once demonstrates the existence of an archive of Afro-modern diasporan, discursive production, and just as importantly, points toward a historically-rooted theoretical framework that would contain its liberatory trajectory.”

New Book: A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery by Kenneth Morgan

transatlantic.slavery.coverFrom Amazon.com: “From 1501, when the first slaves arrived in Hispaniola, until the nineteenth century, some twelve million people were abducted from west Africa and shipped across thousands of miles of ocean – the infamous Middle Passage – to work in the colonies of the New World. Perhaps two million Africans died at sea. Why was slavery so widely condoned, during most of this period, by leading lawyers, religious leaders, politicians and philosophers? How was it that the educated classes of the western world were prepared for so long to accept and promote an institution that would later ages be condemned as barbaric? Exploring these and other questions – and the slave experience on the sugar, rice, coffee and cotton plantations – Kenneth Morgan discusses the rise of a distinctively Creole culture; slave revolts, including the successful revolution in Haiti (1791-1804); and the rise of abolitionism, when the ideas of Montesquieu, Wilberforce, Quakers and others led to the slave trade’s systemic demise. At a time when the menace of human trafficking is of increasing concern worldwide, this timely book reflects on the deeper motivations of slavery as both ideology and merchant institution.”

New Book: The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Modern World by Charlotte Cosner

Golden.Leaf.cover

From Amazon.com: “Through the rise and fall of empires, ideologies, and economies, tobacco grown on the tiny island of Cuba has remained an enduring symbol of pleasure and extravagance. Cultivated as one of the first reliable commodities for those inhabitants who remained after conquistadors moved on in search of a mythical wellspring of gold, tobacco quickly became crucial to the support of the swelling Spanish Empire in the 17th seventeenth and 18th eighteenth centuries. Eventually, however, tobacco became one of the final stabilizing forces in the empire, and it ultimately proved more resilient than the best laid plans of kings and queens. Tobacco, and those whose livelihoods depended on it, shrugged off the Empire’s collapse and pressed on into the twentieth century as an economic force any state or political power must reckon with.”

Conference: Transatlantic Studies Association 2014

The 13th Annual Transatlantic Studies Conference will be held at the University of Ghent, Belgium 7 – 10 July 2014.

Featuring keynote speakers Duncan Bell (Cambridge University): “The Intellectual Grip: Strengths and Weaknesses of Anglo-American Conceptions of the Transatlantic Relationship”; Gregory Castle (Arizona State University): “The Literary Diaspora and Configurations of the Transatlantic”; Jamie Shea (NATO): “Emerging security challenges: a NATO perspective” and Author Roundtable: Sarah Churchwell (University of East Anglia), author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby

Click here for the CFP

 

New Book: Goodman and Lenzen, eds, Joint and Double Degree Programs: An Emerging Model for Transatlantic Exchange,

From the Transatlantic Degree Programs Project:

A new book released by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Institute of International Education (IIE) features practical recommendations for developing and delivering collaborative degree programs between U.S. and European universities. The publication, Joint and Double Degree Programs: An Emerging Model for Transatlantic Exchange, features articles and insights from higher education administrators and practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic.

As professional collaboration with colleagues and customers in other countries increases across sectors, colleges and universities around the world are looking to joint and double degree programs as a way to offer their students meaningful international experiences. The diverse language and cultural fluencies they obtain will help prepare them for successful careers, whether in business, government or academia.

The book seeks to provide practical recommendations on key challenges, such as communications, sustainability, curriculum design, and student recruitment. Articles are divided into six thematic sections that assess the development of collaborative degree programs from beginning to end. While the first two sections focus on the theories underpinning transatlantic degree programs and how to secure institutional support and buy-in, the third and fourth sections present perspectives on the beginning stages of a joint or double degree program and the issue of program sustainability. The last two sections focus on profiles of specific transatlantic degree programs and lessons learned from joint and double degree programs in the European context.

Read more at: http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/en/v/tdp/index.html

Conference: The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, July 17-19, 2014, Institute of English Studies, London

by tc_admin 0 Comments

From the website CFP

The 16th annual conference of the Space Between society will explore the notion of ‘crossing’ − whether of oceans, borders, classes, genders, disciplines or genres − as it relates to literature, art, history, music, theatre, media, and spatial or material culture in any country between 1914 and 1945. From 1930s writers and intellectuals crossing the class divide to the surrealist crossing of a sewing machine with an umbrella, from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, from crossing the dance floor to spying and wartime betrayal, tropes and examples of crossing proliferate across the culture of the period. We invite proposals for papers considering any aspect of crossing whether literal or metaphorical, spatial or social, successful or unsuccessful. Topics might include:

  • crossing time and space
  • transatlantic crossings of American (North and Latin) and European cultures
  • crossing between east and west
  • crossing the Mediterranean
  • crossing travel and colonialism
  • crossing the breach between peace and war
  • crossing between friendship and enmity
  • crossing picket lines
  • broadcast media crossing the airwaves
  • border crossings
  • double crossings, voluntary and involuntary
  • identity crossing
  • cross dressing
  • cross purposes
  • cross-cultural activity

Keynote speaker: TBC

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short biographical statement to Nick Hubble at Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk by 2 December 2013.

Conference Organising Committee:

Erica Brown, Sheffield Hallam University
Richard Hornsey, University of Nottingham
Nick Hubble, Brunel University
Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University
Michael McCluskey, University College London
Ann Rea, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

New Book: Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

 

shumway.cover

From Amazon:

The history of Ghana attracts popular interest out of proportion to its small size and marginal importance to the global economy. Ghana is the land of Kwame Nkrumah and the Pan-Africanist movement of the 19 60s; it has been a temporary home to famous African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois and Maya Angelou; and its Asante Kingdom and signature kente cloth-global symbols of African culture and pride-are well known. Ghana also attracts a continuous flow of international tourists because of two historical sites that are among the most notorious monuments of the transatlantic slave trade: Cape Coast and Elmina Castles. These looming structures are a vivid reminder of the horrific trade that gave birth to the black population of the Americas. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade/ explores the fascinating history of the transatlantic slave trade on Ghana’s coast between 1700 and 1807. Here author Rebecca Shumway brings to life the survival experiences of southern Ghanaians as they became both victims of continuous violence and successful brokers of enslaved human beings. The era of the slave trade gave birth to a new culture in this part of West Africa, just as it was giving birth to new cultures across the Americas. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade pushes Asante scholarship to the forefront of African diaspora and Atlantic World studies by showing the integral role of Fante middlemen and transatlantic trade in the development of the Asante economy prior to 1807. Rebecca Shumway is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Conference: Transatlantic Connections Conference Jan 15-18 2014

by tc_admin 0 Comments

From their Website. Click here for more information!

Drew University, in association with the Institute of Study Abroad Ireland, is pleased to announce a conference titled TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS. The conference explores relationships between Ireland and the USA, and papers will cover the following areas

Transatlantic connections in history, in particular, transatlantic cooperation in the Abolition of slavery, American and Irish independence, Civil Rights in both countries and the Irish Peace Process

Transatlantic themes in Literature: Critical & Creative work from scholars and writers.

Food Culture:  Comparisons of the cuisines of Ireland and the United States.  American Irish vs. Irish foodstuffs. History, heritage, and conviviality. The future of food and drink in Ireland.

Film Studies: Irish Cinema in the world

Surf Culture: Surfing & tourism in Ireland, visual culture, arts, music & surf culture, gender studies & surfing, Surfing & education.

The Drew TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS Conference will take place in Bundoran, Co. Donegal, Ireland.

The Conference will also feature plenary lectures on historical and cultural topics pertaining to Ireland, America, and their relationship since the eighteenth century