Atlantic Studies

""De la guerre de Sept ans aux émancipations nationales de l’Amérique ibérique, les sociétés européennes et coloniales de l’espace atlantique connaissent une série de ruptures politiques majeures qui redessinent la carte politique des Amériques comme de l’Europe. L’hémisphère occidental se peuple de nouveaux Etats, républiques ou empires, l’un éphémère – le Mexique –, l’autre durable – le Brésil. Or, si les Révolutions américaine et française, et, depuis peu, haïtienne, ont pris toute leur place dans la séquence prestigieuse des révolutions atlantiques, les indépendances hispano-américaines et brésilienne continuent à apparaître comme des mouvements incomplets ou ratés. Ce jugement sévère ne fait pas justice à la richesse et à la complexité de ces révolutions d’indépendance qui posèrent de façon précoce la question de l’égalité civile et de l’esclavage, au sein de sociétés coloniales où les libres de couleur et les Indiens étaient souvent majoritaires.
Rassemblant des contributions de spécialistes reconnus des trois continents, L’Atlantique révolutionnaire : une perspective ibéro-américaine traduit la richesse et le dynamisme de l’historiographie actuelle sur le moment révolutionnaire ibérique et ibéro-américain. Il place le sous-continent au centre de l’attention sans pour autant négliger la question devenue classique des imbrications et des interactions impériales, aux Antilles, notamment. Inscrit dans la perspective de la nouvelle histoire atlantique, il explore les dimensions sociales, politiques et « raciales » d’un moment décisif pour la modernité politique et la construction de sociétés plurielles confrontées à la dialectique de la liberté et de l’esclavage, de l’égalité et de la discrimination. ""

L'Atlantique noir est devenu un outil de référence pour les études postcoloniales. La notion fait sens lorsqu'il s'agit d'étudier les présences de l'hyperviolence et des luttes d'émancipation dans des oeuvres littéraires et des parcours politiques. Nous reviendrons d'abord sur le lien entre l'Atlantique et la notion d'identité. Ce lieu où se donne à voir, à lire et à entendre une multitude de biens symboliques, tend en effet à favoriser des identités excentrées, moins marquées par un nous enraciné et exclusif. Cet article se penchera ensuite sur la façon dont Cabral, Césaire et Du Bois ont, à partir de cet espace symbolique, pensé les formes de l'émancipation. Envisagée à partir du Sud global, l'émancipation requière un espace analytique dépassant le cadre local. Nous montrerons que l'Atlantique s'impose non comme une ressource parmi d'autres, mais comme une nécessité face à la nature de l'objet étudié.
Abstract
The Black Atlantic has become a key reference in postcolonial studies. This concept is extremely useful to examine the presence of hyperviolence and struggles for emancipation in literary works and political paths. This article addresses the link between the Atlantic and the notion of identity. This metaphoric place, where a wide variety of symbolic goods circulates, tends indeed to favour dynamic processes of identification, less marked by a rooted and exclusive Us. Then, this article examines how Cabral, Césaire and Du Bois have, from that symbolic space, thought the forms of emancipation. When considered from the global South, emancipation requires an analytic space that goes beyond the local setting. This article argues that the Atlantic imposes itself not as a resource among others, but as a necessity given the nature of the object being studied.

En el S. XVI mares y océanos se habían convertido en ajetreadas zonas de paso, confrontación, exploración, etc. por las que pululaban armadas, corsarios, piratas, comerciantes y aventureros tanto de coronas europeas como de reinos norteafricanos y orientales. La corona española centraba su interés en controlar las rutas comerciales, puertos, etc. tanto en las Américas como en el Mediterráneo y Norte de España, para proteger esos mercados tanto de la flota Otomana y los berberiscos en el Mediterráneo como de corsarios y demás enemigos en el Atlántico y pacifico, lo cual determino el sistema naval y defensivo que iba a emplear el imperio.

In this dissertation, I examine specifically how and why historical narratives of African American theatre begin with minstrelsy and Jim Crow’s dancing body. Working with the process of historical production from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, I trace the related emergence of an imagined and Europeanist dancing body alongside the imagined and Black dancing body. I use imagined, following Susan Leigh Foster, because written sources and historical narratives do not facilitate physical or corporeal access. In Early Modern archives, I reveal how European dance masters and philosophers elevated court dancing and noble decorum into the imagined and ideal human. The imagined Europeanist and noble dancing body became the principal historiographic human figure in legitimated dance histories. Concurrently, I show how European travel writing negated imagined Black dancing bodies as inhuman, savage and bestial bodies, disqualifying them as imagined dancing bodies for inclusion in historical narratives. Thus, when scholars go to archived sources, with choreographed ballet and imagined Europeanist dancing bodies as the legitimated carriers of dance history, Thomas Dartmouth Rice and early minstrel performers emerge as the first qualified and documented dancing bodies moving through sub-Saharan repertoires. By further recuperating seventeenth- century, European-language sources on leaping and mock combat, I question the exclusion of airborne and martial repertoires from historical narratives of Black dance from West Africa to the United States. I argue that the process of silencing airborne leaps and staged combat from West African belonging lays the philosophical and historiographic groundwork for originating and containing sub-Saharan influences within plantation and minstrelsy belonging. By revealing where we are, philosophically speaking, in historical narratives of Black dance, and how we got to this point, I propose an extensive re-mapping of sub-Saharan influence through and across the Sahara and Mediterranean, prior to and alongside the trans-Atlantic trade.

In an evocative article tracing petrochemical connections with Franco’s legacy in Spain, Chris Waite reflects on the troubled past and uncertain future of a petrochemical refinery in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. A contribution to a special issue of Toxic News that brings together research by the ERC project 'Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice & the Global Petrochemical Industry' research team. Each article contributes to making the petrochemical connection, using different methods, sites, and perspectives to shed light on part of the complex industrial system.

Engaging the Atlantic might be useful, even instrumental, in putting together and taking apart the elements of the colonial on both shores of the divide – if it is conceived as providing possibilities for network analysis and comparative colonialities rather than as an expansion of the tradition of imperial Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch history. Equatorial Guinea, a Portuguese and later a Spanish colony, is an Atlantic site of colonial convergence. Its history presents the opportunity to approximate the field of study to other latitudes by examining the branches of Portuguese and Spanish imperial practices in America and Africa and, in passing, questioning traditional definitions of area, regional, period and national studies. In rethinking Iberian and Latin American Studies across the Atlantic, and in opening the field of inquiry, we add a spatial dimension to the colonial haunting, which enables us to alter our traditional perception of body flow, nuancing hegemony and shifting locus. In this colonial equation Africa no longer figures as the passive departure point for a one-way traffic, the quintessential homeland of the diaspora,  forever a place of origin and purity. The case study presented here is in several instances a compelling example of a process in reverse.

Slavery was a habitual phenomenon in the Cádiz of the Modern Age, and its incidence increases from 1650, date in which in the rest of Spain its decline is about to begin. The origin of the slaves was very variable: Berber from North Africa, Ottomans captured in the wars between Turks, Imperial and Venetians in the late seventeenth century, and subsaharians from Portugal or caame directly from African territories, in this case transported by ships Dutch or English. In this paper we intend to make an approximation of the slave routes that converged in the Cádiz of 1650-1750, and the structure of the slave market in that spanish city.

Publicado en BUSTOS RODRIGUEZ, Manuel (coord..), La expansión comercial del siglo XVIII: Europa, España y América, Cádiz, Editorial UCA, 2019, pp. 103-131, ISBN 978-84-9828-733-2. Introducción. El 12 de mayo de 1717 Felipe V firmaba el Real Decreto por el cual se disponía el traslado de la sede de la Casa de Contratación de Sevilla a Cádiz. Este hecho ha quedado como uno de los grandes hitos en el relato histórico de la ciudad, el cual, unido a otra fecha no menos simbólica, a saber, la proclamación de la primera constitución española (en realidad la segunda, ya que la primera fue la de Bayona, pero ésa no suele contar al ser medio impuesta por Napoleón), el 19 de marzo de 1812, ha configurado un corto siglo XVIII que se suele identificar con un período de grandeza, esplendor y cosmopolitismo, de obligada referencia cada vez que los poderes públicos, en un recurrente proceso de autoflagelación, se lamentan de la prolongada decadencia gaditana y pretenden buscar soluciones alternativas. Sin embargo, sería erróneo pensar que 1717 fue el inicio de una transformación de envergadura en la ciudad. Desde luego, no en lo económico, aunque sí es cierto que desde el punto de vista cultural y científico la Casa de Contratación vendría acompañada de una serie de instituciones (Observatorio, Escuela de Guardiamarinas, Real Colegio de Cirugía) que transformaron a Cádiz en uno de los núcleos fundamentales del imperio español. Pero, por lo demás, el traslado de la Casa de Contratación no fue más que la culminación de un proceso iniciado al menos cien años antes y a lo largo del cual la urbe gaditana se fue convirtiendo en uno de los centros principales de lo que se ha dado en llamar el Atlantic System. En realidad, todo nace a lo largo del siglo XVII (prescindimos del siglo XVI, muy mal conocido, ya que, como se ha repetido en tantas ocasiones, el asalto inglés de 1596 supuso la destrucción de buena parte de la documentación archivística de la urbe, y eso tradicionalmente ha supuesto un agujero negro en la historia de la ciudad que hasta el momento nadie ha rellenado satisfactoriamente) 1 , una centuria lo largo de la cual se van configurando muchos de los rasgos específicos de la ciudad, y que encontraremos plenamente desarrollados durante el siglo XVIIII, siendo éste el primer aspecto que vamos a abordar, para pasar acto seguido al análisis de los fundamentos económicos y del desarrollo cultural e 1 Un buen ejemplo de lo que se puede hacer con los escasos materiales disponibles en Francisco Javier Fornell Fernández, Linajes y familias medievales en el ámbito de la bahía de Cádiz. Siglos XIII a XVI (Cádiz 2016, Tesis doctoral inédita).

While political activists have long decried the cultural and economic marginalization of Appalachia in the twenty-first century, there has been no analogous effort to rectify the exclusion of Appalachia from the historiographical consideration of processes of colonial expansion and trans-Atlantic conflict in the early modern Atlantic world. This lacuna in the telling of American history leads to an impoverished understanding of Appalachia’s centrality in the European push inland from the North American coast beginning in the early sixteenth century. This article highlights the centrality of the European obsession with Appalachian mineral resources from 1528 to 1682, while reframing Appalachian history within the broader fields of Latin American, early American, and Atlantic history.

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.

Ocorre neste momento em Portugal um movimento de reorientação estratégica para o mar, induzido em grande medida pela possibilidade de extensão da delimitação da plataforma continental marítima, no sentido da exploração científica e económica dos seus recursos provados e estimados. Mas a dimensão do “mar português” é avassaladora, correspondendo na prática a um território à escala do continente europeu. O complexo de desafios e respostas marcam portanto o presente de Portugal em função do seu passado atlantista e também do futuro que está a ser projectado.
Esse complexo de desafios e respostas apresenta dois grupos nucleares: por um lado a ciência, economia e ambiente; por outro lado, a segurança e governação. No primeiro verifica-se uma interacção tripartida, uma influência recíproca múltipla e alargada, muito condicionada pelo facto de que a economia portuguesa, em ritmo de progressão em crise recorrente, não tem vindo a ser capaz de gerar receitas suficientes para o investimento na exploração dos recursos do mar; por exemplo, os recursos alocados às universidades para a investigação científica especializada no mar não tem gerado um efeito de halo no sentido da mobilização pessoal e institucional tendencialmente intensa e extensiva nessa direcção, o que significa que o investimento estrangeiro necessário poderá vir a submergir um retorno desejável maioritariamente nacional e soberano. No segundo grupo, se a economia condiciona igualmente as capacidades em termos de meios necessários à fiscalização, já a governação depende exclusivamente das opções de coordenação política do sector, o qual apresenta vulnerabilidades recorrentes que fragilizam viciosamente em círculo o desenvolvimento do potencial do mar português.

In Jonathan Swift's view, the defense of Ireland's constitutional rights and an effective critique of British imperialism required the creation of a national print media.  He sought to mobilize Irish writers, booksellers, and printers in the creation of a patriotic public sphere that would both facilitate political objectives and encourage the development of a domestic publishing industry.  An account of Swift's engagement with the problems of Ireland, accordingly, is also a history of the emergence of the Irish book as a vehicle by which an Irish nation was formed and a means by which Irish identity came to exert political, commercial, and cultural influence.  Anglo-Irish literature, which Swift helped to found, was the central transformative category of the Irish book in this period.  It contributed to the establishment of Dublin as the "second city" in English-language publishing, after London. 

Table of Contents

Introduction:  Ireland, the Fiscal-Military State, and the Colonial Print Media

Chapter 1:

“God knows how we wretches came by that fashionable thing
a national debt”: The Dublin Book Trade and the Irish Financial Revolution

Chapter 2:

Banking on Print: The Bank of Ireland, the South Sea Bubble, and the Bailout

Chapter 3:

Arachne’s Bowels: Scatology, Enlightenment,
and Swift’s Relations with the London Book Trade

Chapter 4:

“Money, the Great Divider of the World, has, by a strange Revolution,
been the great Uniter of a Most divided People”:
From Minting to Printing in The Drapier’s Letters

Chapter 5:

Devouring Posterity: A Modest Proposal, Empire,
and Ireland’s “Debt of the Nation”

Chapter 6:

“A Mart of Literature”:
The 1730s and the Rise of a Literary Public Sphere in Ireland

Epilogue:
A Brand Identity Crisis in a National Literature?

Bibliography

(in English and Italian below; in italiano e inglese di sotto)

PDF: http://www.isaaccurtis.com/files/3313/8203/0950/Curtis_2013_Gens_sans_matres.pdf

Homepage: http://www.isaaccurtis.com/

Français :

Cet article tente de présenter l’histoire des Antilles coloniales du point de vue des gens sans maîtres. La narration qui suit est provisoire mais a l’avantage de montrer les mérites d’une telle démarche pour l’étude que les “acteurs informels” ont joué dans l’histoire plus généralement. En même temps, il présente un compte rendu de la transition au capitalisme dans le contexte antillais. Étudier le capitalisme par rapport aux circonstances qui ont précédé son avènement plutôt que du point de vue de ses conséquences permet d’analyser cette transition avec un œil neuf. Tout d’abord, cela permet de considérer les «extraordinaires possibilités manquées», d’après Césaire, en raison du développement du capitalisme et du colonialisme. Deuxièmement, cet article établit un lien avec d’autres études qui étudient d’autres enclosures qui pourraient profiter d’une perspective historique sur ces développements. Troisièmement, en traitant la conscription des gens sans maîtres comme intimement liée au projet colonialiste, ce travail soulève des questions quant à la mesure, évidemment variable, de la liberté dont ils jouirent. Finalement, en considérant que le commerce est en effet un rapport de production, cet article souligne que le commerce fait partie de la production matérielle et de la formation de la classe ouvrière, et fut, par conséquent, un processus violent et qui relevait fondamentalement de l’exploitation.

Mots-clés: masterless people, Caraïbes, capitalisme, colonialisme, commerce.

English :

This article presents the history of the colonial Caribbean from the perspective of masterless people. Though the narrative presents a preliminary account rather than a conclusive analysis, it shows some of the potential strengths of the so-called “informal actors” paradigm on display in this issue. At the same time, it presents a summary of the transition to capitalism in the Caribbean context. By approaching this transition from the perspective of the past that preceded it rather than the present that is its legacy, this transition emerges in a new light. First of all, this approach allows us to consider the «extraordinary opportunities lost», in the words of Aimé Césaire, as a result of the development of capitalism and colonialism. Secondly, it builds on studies of “enclosures” in other places and times. Thirdly, it considers the conscription of masterless people to the colonial project and the implications for their liberty. Finally, in analyzing what I call “the production of exchange”, this article intends to redirect the transition debate away from an either-or analysis of production and exchange. Instead, I argue that exchange was part of an inherently violent and exploitative material production process that shaped and was shaped by the emerging working class.

Keywords: masterless people, Caribbean, capitalism, colonialism, trade.

Italiano :

Questo articolo presenta la storia del periodo coloniale nei Caraibi adottando il punto di vista dei masterless people («persone senza padrone»). Sebbene il testo rappresenti un’indagine preliminare piuttosto che un’analisi conclusiva, mette in evidenza alcuni dei potenziali punti di forza del paradigma dei cosiddetti “attori informali”, oggetto di questo numero. Allo stesso tempo, propone uno studio sintetico della transizione al capitalismo nel contesto caraibico. Analizzando questa evoluzione con una prospettiva che si concentri sul passato piuttosto che sul presente che di esso è eredità, tale transizione apparirà sotto una nuova luce: primo, perché questo approccio ci permette di prendere in considerazione le «straordinarie opportunità perdute» (citando le parole di Aimé Césaire) come il risultato dello sviluppo di capitalismo e colonialismo; secondo, perché l’articolo si basa su studi dedicati alle enclosures, in altri spazi e tempi; terzo, perché lo studio considera l’arruolamento di persone senza padrone nel “progetto coloniale” e le implicazioni che questo ebbe per la loro libertà. Infine, analizzando quella che ho definito la production of exchange, questo articolo intende deviare il dibattito sulla transizione dall’attuale analisi dicotomica produzione/scambio: infatti, ritengo che lo scambio fosse parte di un processo di produzione intrinsecamente violento e sfruttatore, che formò e fu plasmato dall’emergente classe operaia.

Parole chiave: masterless people, Caraibi, capitalismo, colonialismo, commercio.

The Chinese Atlantic is an interruption into the current configuration of Atlantic studies, offering a reorientation of the narratives that describe globalization as it intersects with discourses of imperialism, capitalism, and race. Sean Metzger uses the term "Chinese Atlantic" not to recover or supplement knowledge about the role of China in globalization, but as a method of investigating the processes that create such categories of meaning: What are the fantasies at play in the global cultural imaginary about China and Chineseness? How are these fantasies produced, presented and perceived? And how can we perceive the "shifting status of the human" (p.251), a process we ourselves are immersed in, through our local experiences of global processes? The Chinese Atlantic overflows the boundaries of Atlantic, black Atlantic, Chinese diaspora and Asian American studies, complicating the geographic and conceptual parameters of these fields. Metzger follows artistic production to explore less frequented narratives of the Atlantic theater, mapping networks of cultural exchange around the globe. His method of inquiry begins with a question of how one senses the forces of globalization when we are already submerged in its "global flows" (p.11). In this sense, The Chinese Atlantic engages a similar methodology to Lisa Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents-Metzger seeks to defamiliarize established methods of apprehending Chineseness in particular, and globalization in general, in order to make available "alternative forms of knowing, thinking and being" (Lowe 2015: 137). Buoyed by in-depth examinations of artworks-including film, video, immersive installation, public art, performance and mixed media-that take the form of detailed descriptions of his intimate relationships with cultural objects, Metzger invites us to "imagine ways of seeing the world and its interconnections that push against dominant paradigms" (p.3) and open up possibilities of sensing the processes of globalization otherwise, despite our immersion in its forces.

NOW IN PAPERBACK!
This is just to market my dissertation a little. Sorry, I will be uploading "real" work soon.
In a nutshell, the dissertation aims to amend a particular problem with how early modern Spain has been viewed in the German field of Romance Philology: namely as an isolated peninsula with little or no connection to the great trends of what will come to be considered as European modernity. Starting with an analysis of how this odd perception of an early modern global player rooted itself firmly in our academy, the dissertation unfolds a different epistemology of Spanish history and aesthetics. Thus, I read Golden Age literature as an important contribution to a literary history of globalization.

This article examines how Jewish immigrants of the so-called New Immigration (1880–1924) used the space of autobiography to symbolically “discover” and “possess” the New World and discusses this kind of narrative identity fashioning against the national debate over immigration restriction. Works such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), Marcus E. Ravage’s An American in the Making (1917), Elizabeth Hasanovitz’s One of Them (1918), and Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow (1918) take up the El Dorado myth when describing America as a “land of gold” and thus appropriate a popular discourse pattern of Spanish explorers and conquistadores. They also appropriate discourses of wonder and taking possession that are prevalent in traditional European New World writing. Wonder – a direct reaction to the first encounter with unknown places, people, and objects – is omnipresent in these texts and conveyed by various linguistic and narrative strategies. Trading exotic Yiddish names for Americanized versions or entering American educational institutions constitute acts of taking possession, and are, in fact, modern variants of Spanish practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jewish-American immigrant authors negotiated their narrative identities as model American citizens by adopting popular discourse patterns of Spanish discoverers and conquistadores, and by changing them according to their own political purposes, interests, and needs. Such narrative identities framed the immigrants’ transatlantic journey in ways that linked them with America’s mythical past and thus enabled the entire group to feel at home in the United States, to inscribe themselves into the nation’s origin stories, and to (re)negotiate the meaning of Americanness.

Jose de Urrutia y Montoya, Teatro historico juridico y politico de Cuba, 1789, La Habana.  Pedro y Rafael Rodriguez Mohedano, Prologo, Historia literaria de Espana, 1766, Madrid.  Eusebio Amort, Censura sobre el arte de pensar de Arnaldo, 1759, Madrid.  Science, rhetoric,  and modernity in the 18th-century Spanish Atlantic.  Cartesianism, Baconianism.  Philosophy of history.  Rhetoric v. New Rhetoric.  Cartesianism.  Critique.  Logic.  Analytical method v. synthetic method.  Subjectivity

In the first half of the nineteenth century, British North America was trying to find its way within the Empire and in North America. The American democratic and republican experiment offered the Canadian colonies an alternative that seemed both appealing and threatening. The Nova Scotian politician, historian, and satirist T. C. Haliburton articulated the fears of his time in a series of humorous sketches targeting a general audience and designed to spur a collective debate on the advantages and disadvantages of democracy. This article explores Haliburton’s political satire in parallel with the classic interpretation of democracy in America offered by Alexis de Tocqueville. Both authors wrote about American democracy at about the same time and related to the American model from without, being aware of the profound effect the new form of government could have on their own communities.

Page 1. Rationalizing disease: James Kilpatrick's Atlantic struggles with smallpox inoculation Claire Gherini* This essay uses the career of the inoculating physician James Kilpatrick as an example of how itinerant medical entrepreneurs ...

Transatlantic Studies, which are transdisciplinary by nature, cannot ignore the way in which translation and translational practices play a crucial role in debates about mobility in the transatlantic world. Whether in the rich intersections and overlaps of transnational affiliations and Atlantic cultural histories or in the recent attention to issues of reciprocities between marginal Atlantic territories,  much more remains to be said on the role of translation in processes of identity formation across the Atlantic.

This article discusses several early modern Spanish and Portuguese texts that describe Afro-Iberians' festive and confraternal practices in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. While scholars have contended that the early modern Iberian states and church used conversion and confraternities, or lay Catholic brotherhoods, to integrate Afrodescendants to Iberian society, by linking Afro-Iberians' festive practices to their confraternities, the article contends that these texts underscore how Afrodescendants adapted their African cosmologies and festive customs in the diaspora, rather than totally assimilate to Iberian culture. The article also triangulates Afrodescendants' festive practices in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, suggesting that Afrodescendants thought of the diaspora as an imagined community. Black Woman: If you want me to have a fiesta, I'll sing a song from our land. Preta: Queri tu que faça uns festa, eu canta argum moda de nossa terra. 1

ABSTRACT
Celtic literature and Celtic history can be considered as 'terra incognita' in Brazil. Nevertheless, many aspects of a Celtic nature can be identified in Brazilian culture. Bretons, Galicians and Portuguese
shared a common space in Europe’s extreme western point, being the Oestrymnios people to the ancient Greeks. The Bretons, whether they had come to Brazil to trade or as missionaries, were known only as French, and the Galicians as Spanish. But their Celtic lore has come with them and if we look towards Portuguese lore it will not be difficult to recognise elements that have common roots
in Celtic oral literature and Celtic medieval written literature. The oral culture from the Sertão, especially in the region of the São Francisco river could certainly give us much important material not yet collected. This is an enterprise that still has to be undertaken, before this people’s voices finally
become silent.

KEYWORDS:
BRETON ORAL LITERATURE, SERTANEJA CULTURE, BRAZIL COLONISATION HISTORY, CULTURAL IDENTITIES,
CELTIC FOLKLORE