Just as literature shapes national identities, so too do national and international sociopolitical currents shape the study of literature and culture. This insight holds especially true in transatlantic studies, a field that, by and large, grew out of twentieth-century reevaluations of Americanness itself. From the height of the Cold War and its consolidation of “the West” versus the world, through the globalizing turn of the twenty-first century, to more recent reckonings with essentialism and race, transatlantic studies has foregrounded the question: How can we push against and think beyond the nation?
While the term “transatlantic” has historically referred to the so-called special relationship between the United States and Great Britain, transatlanticists today call for a more capacious circum-Atlantic or pan-Atlantic approach that includes southern hemispheric cultures.
More than a geographic term, however, “transatlantic” is an interpretive method. Taking the Atlantic Ocean as a guiding metaphor, transatlanticism emphasizes the fluid, porous, or plastic nature of contrived national boundaries and identities. It disrupts hierarchical models of power and influence by attention to lateral exchange, interrogating assumptions about time and space.
Both material and imagined, the transatlantic as a concept is inherently interdisciplinary; its conceptual flexibility has affected the past several decades of literary, historical, environmental, and diasporic studies—and beyond. Any teacher or student may (rightly!) find themselves overwhelmed by such a borderless method and field. With that in mind, the below readings, organized chronologically, offer foundational rather than comprehensive touchpoints in the development and application of a transatlantic critical model.
Louis Chude-Sokei, “The Black Atlantic Paradigm: Paul Gilroy and the Fractured Landscape of ‘Race’,” American Quarterly 48, no. 4 (December 1996): 740–45.
Gilroy’s theorizing of the “Black Atlantic” as outlined in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, his groundbreaking and widely influential book from 1993, treats the Atlantic “as one single, complex unit of analysis” for the first time. Gilroy rejects cultural nationalism and rooted identity formation, instead calling attention to the mobile, hybrid double-consciousness of modern Black identity—being European and being Black, for instance, are not and were not mutually exclusive. Famously beginning with the chronotope of the ship, Gilroy shows how, via transatlantic networks of enslavement, colonialism, migration, and circulation, Black identity is at once national and diasporic. Gilroy’s work was a catalyst for the formalizing of transatlantic studies in the late twentieth century and has regularly prompted retrospectives in the decades since.
Paul Giles, “Virtual Americas: The Internationalization of American Studies and the Ideology of Exchange,” American Quarterly 50, no. 3 (September 1998): 523–47.
A precursor to Giles’s landmark 2002 book, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary, this article proposes a future for an “internationalized” American studies, or an American studies within a global context that has overcome its national exceptionalism. In its reorientation to a world stage, American studies must, he writes, embrace ideology as a virtual, aesthetic mode. The imagined, virtual America stands for an aestheticized myth not the actuality of true freedom. This symbolism is mediated via a rapid international exchange of literature, culture, and information. American studies therefore becomes valuable not for any essentializing reason but for its potential to work as a “virtual discipline,” projecting difference and thereby interrupting the self-enclosed borders of other geographies or disciplines.
David Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” The American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 427–45.
Though Atlantic history originated in Cold War-era American isolationism, and though new British history originated in Anglocentric imperialism, together they can provide “novel integrative histories” of Greater Britain, Atlantic America, and Atlantic Europe. Armitage, a prolific British historian, traces the history of “Greater Britain,” or the British empire, back through early modern Three Kingdoms narratives and colonial America. Ultimately, he suggests that “Greater Britain,” like the Atlantic, is a useful historical framework because it unites history of state with history of empire. Both Atlantic history and new British history empty out and expand the nation while acknowledging its imperial influence.
Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” American Literary History 13, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 755–75.
The assumption that a physical, geographic territory can map onto a distinct body of literature implies a false causality, Dimock observes. She calls her readers to situate American literature within a much broader historical and global context. To do so, she proposes thinking with “deep time,” a cumulative, denationalized model of world history that extends beyond episodic narratives to provide large-scale analysis. For example, “deep time” can combat pervasive Eurocentrism by foregrounding the resonances of ancient, Afro-Eurasian hybrid civilizations through modern African American writers. Dimock’s model is useful in reconceptualizing national bodies of literature via transatlantic or global histories.
Elisa Tamarkin, “Black Anglophilia; or, The Sociability of Antislavery,” American Literary History 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 444–78.
Tamarkin’s work flips on its head the assumption that American cultural nationalism was defined by separation from European traditions. Through attention to nineteenth-century antislavery politics and abolitionists’ Anglophilic practices, Tamarkin shows how an idealized England offered an alternative vision of home for African Americans. As African Americans adopted Anglophilia, especially in their attitudes toward intellectualism and sociability, they appropriated for themselves values that were seemingly exclusive to white Americans. Anglophilia offered “a fantasy of self-fashioning” focused on Americanness rather than race, allowing African Americans to participate in larger questions of American identity formation.
Marta Werner, “Reviewed Work: American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834–1853 by Meredith McGill,” Textual Cultures 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2006): 172–74.
As Werner writes, Meredith McGill’s book “offers a complex vision of American writers’ vexed relationship to the marketplace.” McGill’s analysis paved the way for studies of transatlantic print culture. Addressing a Jacksonian era of radically decentralized American print, McGill shows how the system of reprinting was not mere piracy but synonymous with republican ideology and American literary nationalism. Whereas in Britain authors had perpetual rights to their work, in the US, legal cases such as Wheaton v. Peters (1834) determined that authors ceded propriety rights in the name of public interest; literature and print were public resources. Through her analysis of figures including Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens, McGill illuminates the ways in which reprinting destabilized the myth of the national author, facilitated transatlantic literary relationships, and changed authors’ relationships to the literary marketplace.
Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 741–57.
An Atlantic and early American historian, Games acknowledges the difficulty of the transatlantic paradigm, especially as historical expertise tends to emerge from regional, place-based focus. At least three strands of Atlantic historiography have proved fruitful thus far in thinking beyond isolated, modern nation-states: studies of the transatlantic slave trade, comparative histories of colonial societies in the Americas, and transatlantic histories of British and American imperialism. Nevertheless, there are many impediments to a truly circum-Atlantic approach—most notably, the challenge of perspective. Games suggests a handful of solutions, especially calling for a new attention to the circulation of people and products. Such approaches can liberate history from a single national or imperial framework and see the Atlantic in the context of global transformations.
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Amanda Claybaugh, “Toward a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 439–60.
A portion of her larger, foundational study, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (2007), Claybaugh’s article brings together the material and the imagined networks connecting nineteenth-century Britain and the US with attention to political reform movements. For her case study, Claybaugh reads Dickens’s (in)famous tours of the US and his subsequent travel book, American Notes, in relation to the shifting ideology of his later novels. Her analysis combines interdisciplinary approaches in literature and cultural history to analyze how political reform was not simply taking place within the bounds of the nation but rather in an imagined and materially connected Anglo-American world.
Daniel Hack, “Close Reading at a Distance: The African Americanization of Bleak House,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 729–53.
A precursor to another founding text in transatlantic print culture (Reaping Something New, 2016), Hack’s article centers the work of African American writers who cited, reworked, and repurposed Victorian literature. These writers wielded British texts that were far removed from their own lived experiences for strategic political purposes as well as artistic expression. Taking Dickens’s Bleak House—a novel infamously blind to imperial racial dynamics—as his primary example, Hack finds its afterlives in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper reprinting and Hannah Craft’s fictional narrative of enslavement. His study combines textual analysis and historicism in a method he calls “close reading at a distance.” Such a method is needed in order to understand African Americans’ deliberate retooling of British literature, drawing attention to the systemic social forces at play as well as the minute mechanisms of textual appropriation.
Ursula K. Heise, “Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies,” American Literary History 20, no. 1/2 (Spring–Summer 2008): 381–404.
The transatlantic or transnational model is vital to environmental criticism: ecological problems cannot be confined within national borders. However, because ecocriticism emerged in American studies prior to the field’s transnational turn, during a time that emphasized the localized subject as resistance to an oppressive nation-state, ecocritical thought has struggled to adapt. Heise reads texts like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990) and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation (2003) to show how environmental literature’s gestures toward the global end up simply using biological diversity and cultural diversity as interchangeable metaphors. Heise cautions against the temptation to derive sociocultural ethics and political stances from ecological science. Instead, she calls ecocritical thinkers to engage more fully with cultural, economic, political, and technological globalization processes.
Kate Flint, “Response: Transatlantic Studies and The Transatlantic Indian,” Victorian Studies 52, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 269–79.
Here Flint responds to a review forum on her book The Transatlantic Indian (2009) and reflects on the work’s argumentation, interdisciplinary methodology, and contribution to transatlantic studies. Flint takes the Atlantic as a literal and symbolic site of messy exchanges through which Indigenous identity was mediated during the period 1776–1930. She analyzes the ways in which racial, tribal, and national identities were at stake in Britons’ encounters with both imagined (romanticized, stereotyped) and live historical Native Americans. As Native Americans traveled to Britain, and as the figure of the Native American was circulated and remediated via transatlantic print, performance, and visual culture, Native Americans became active participants in—not merely subjects of—transatlantic modernity.
Daylanne K. English, “Review: Diaspora and the Politics of Genre,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 124–28.
Yogita Goyal’s widely influential Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) calls readers to rethink the traditional assumption that realism is the mode of African national literature and romance is the mode of diaspora literature. Genres such as romance and realism are political, Goyal argues, and work together in constructing the diasporic Black Atlantic. Through reading the work of authors like Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Chinua Achebe, among others, Goyal shows how the tension between realism and romance enables African American writers to reconceptualize Africa as integral to Black modernity rather than as a distant or forgotten homeland. Her work models how postcolonial and literary theory can operate within the temporally and geographically fluid Atlantic paradigm.
Winfried Fluck, “A New Beginning? Transnationalisms,” New Literary History 42, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 365–84.
In this polemic, Fluck warns that while American studies scholars have eagerly embraced the new transnational turn, they must ask if it truly exceeds the pull of the nation-state. The transnational and the national are interdependent, so the transnational will always still imply theories about “America.” For example, what Fluck calls an aesthetic transnationalism aims to recover and celebrate America as a site of global flow and rich cultural cross-fertilization. But then American culture is once again treated as exceptional because of its diversity. Fluck proposes that the antidote to American exceptionalism is a political transnationalism. Under this model, the individual can form a transnational identity by connecting to diasporic groups beyond the nation-state (like the Black Atlantic or Pacific Rim). The transnational provides the political promise of unsettling stable identity and thereby returns agency to the national subject.
Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (April 2016): 377–402.
The transnational turn was aided by the simultaneous advent of digital tools and databases such as JSTOR, Google, Ancestry.com, and others that dissolved the place-based boundaries researchers had previously faced. With “side-glancing,” historians could suddenly jump across borders in nanoseconds and quickly scale between large patterns and microhistories. However, Putnam warns that these tools’ shortcuts enable ignorance as they do knowledge, systematically casting shadows over rural, illiterate, or stationary populations. Digitized access has also made the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone world disproportionately visible. What’s more, digital searching dangerously yields to the priorities of the researcher. Putnam calls historians to critically reflect on their use of digital tools as they would any archival method and combine technological convenience with a commitment to local, regional, and national research as well as larger-scoped approaches.
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Joel Pace, “Afterthoughts: Romanticism, the Black Atlantic, and Self-Mapping,” Studies in Romanticism 56, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 113–23.
Pace begins by reflecting on how the present-day political climate—marked by police brutality, the US presidential election, and Brexit—calls Romanticists to reframe the map of their field. Romanticism has long divided the period’s Black and white cultures, but appropriating African American literature into existing Romanticist rubrics would reproduce colonial frameworks. So, Pace suggests developing new models like a Black Atlantic Romanticism and adding to Gilroy’s ship, the map. Pace takes Phillis Wheatley as his case study, a poet who, while typically excluded from the Romantic canon, subversively uses the formal coordinates of the slave trade to chart a course toward freedom, anticipating Romantic themes of self-discovery. Through the map, like the ship, Pace argues, time, space, and place are linked to cultural, personal, poetical, and political memory.
Linda K. Hughes, Sarah Ruffing Robbins, Andrew Taylor, Heidi Hakimi-Hood, and Adam Nemmers, “Transatlanticism,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 917–24.
This brief keyword essay summarizes the current value of the transatlantic in nineteenth-century British and American studies. Hughes and Robbins also worked together on a 2015 collection, Teaching Transatlanticism; they were joined by Taylor, Hakimi-Hood, and Nemmers to form the editorial group for the print and digital anthology, Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920. They illustrate that while globalization enforces a cultural homogeneity, the transatlantic model embraces difference, flow, exchanges, and networks. The Atlantic’s boundaries are fluid, but so too, transatlanticists emphasize, are the borders of the nations it connects and the disciplines which have long contained them.
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