Friday, January 8, 2010: 9:50 AM
Edward B (Hyatt)
Stephanie E. Smallwood
“The Slave Ship and the Political Geography of the ‘Atlantic World’”
Judging from its ubiquitous naming as referent, the Atlantic ocean has become a central focus of scholarship in several fields of historical research and writing in the past two decades or so. The “Atlantic world” has become the default, taken-for-granted frame for work on the early modern history of Europe and its overseas expansion, the colonial Americas, precolonial Africa and the African diaspora produced by the transatlantic slave trade. To the extent that this Atlantic turn reflects awareness of the interconnectedness of historical processes, this is a positive development. But it is also the case, I argue, that historians have not sufficiently asked what it means to conceptualize the Atlantic as a “world.” Our easy, uncritical naming of the Atlantic as the center of a world advances an unquestioned geographic argument: that the Atlantic arena functioned as a neatly bounded, symmetrically-ordered totality—a constituted unity. By our movement so easily toward a geographic argument without ever engaging any sustained analysis that takes space and spatial relations seriously as modes of analysis, a colonizer’s model of the world, to borrow geographer James Blaut’s provocative formulation, has won by fiat. Focusing on the slave ship as a site of African agency in the Atlantic arena, this paper asks how taking the Atlantic seriously as a contested spatial domain allows us to better understand the alternative political geographies Africans pursued in the Atlantic arena.
“The Slave Ship and the Political Geography of the ‘Atlantic World’”
Judging from its ubiquitous naming as referent, the Atlantic ocean has become a central focus of scholarship in several fields of historical research and writing in the past two decades or so. The “Atlantic world” has become the default, taken-for-granted frame for work on the early modern history of Europe and its overseas expansion, the colonial Americas, precolonial Africa and the African diaspora produced by the transatlantic slave trade. To the extent that this Atlantic turn reflects awareness of the interconnectedness of historical processes, this is a positive development. But it is also the case, I argue, that historians have not sufficiently asked what it means to conceptualize the Atlantic as a “world.” Our easy, uncritical naming of the Atlantic as the center of a world advances an unquestioned geographic argument: that the Atlantic arena functioned as a neatly bounded, symmetrically-ordered totality—a constituted unity. By our movement so easily toward a geographic argument without ever engaging any sustained analysis that takes space and spatial relations seriously as modes of analysis, a colonizer’s model of the world, to borrow geographer James Blaut’s provocative formulation, has won by fiat. Focusing on the slave ship as a site of African agency in the Atlantic arena, this paper asks how taking the Atlantic seriously as a contested spatial domain allows us to better understand the alternative political geographies Africans pursued in the Atlantic arena.