Transatlantic Literature

SANTIAGO JUAN-NAVARRO studies Arturo Perez Reverte’s best-selling novel La Reina del Sur (2002) as a paradigmatic example of the globalized trends in the promotion and distribution of narco-literature. From northwestern Mexico to southern Spain and Morocco, the novel’s is a Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Continental story of a female drug trafficker who inserts herself into larger structures of power to eventually dominate over most of her male criminal competitors. Juan-Navarro’s reading focuses on Perez Reverte’s depiction of frontiers at multiple levels (geographical, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, literary, and sexual) within the context of two of the most pervasive examples of globalization: drug/human trafficking and migratory movements. At first sight, the novel seems to transgress these frontiers and to denounce the most abject aspects of globalization, but, as Juan-Navarro argues, La Reina del Sur is simply a hollow tale that fails to denounce (and, in fact, embrace) neoliberal modes of circulation of capital and humans. The novel’s adaptation in one of the most successful, albeit technically deficient, narco TV series, in which moral critique is blatantly absent, only attest to the limitations of narco-novels to adopt a critical stance in the debate on criminality and globalization.

Relates the representation of race in the first English translation of Antoine Galland's Les mille et une Nuits--the anonymous Grub Street The Arabian Nights Entertainments (1708?-1717) and in Richard Burton's pseudo-anthropological Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments (1885-8) to changing models of authorial credibility related to the slow and uneven shift from the presumption of status as the basis of social order to class.

This article examines the processes by which Robert Burns’s poetry was reprinted and pirated in the United States of America. Unbound by law to pay royalties or seek editorial permission, networks of nineteenth-century publishers were able to widely repackage and distribute the work of European writers for their own profit. Given the popularity of Burns's poetry and songs among emigrant Scots in America, it is unsurprising that his work was swiftly reprinted by close-knit networks of Scottish and Irish printers in New York and Philadelphia. In tracing some of these networks, this paper draws further attention to the thriving transatlantic reprint trade that existed during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This article examines the key themes and cultural meanings of 'classic' capoeira lyrics, e.g. prior to the 1960s. First published in: David Treece, Nancy Naro, Roger Sansi (eds.) The Portuguese Black Atlantic, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 199-217. (ISBN-13:978-0-230-60047-8; ISBN-10:0-23--60047-6)

Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s – including Marcel Carné, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.

Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on extensive lecture tours across the United Kingdom. Remond eventually moved to Florence, Italy, where she earned a degree at one of Europe’s most prestigious medical schools. Her language skills enabled her to join elite salons in Florence and Rome, where she entertained high society with musical soirees even while maintaining connections to European emancipation movements.

Remond’s extensive travels and diverse acquaintances demonstrate that the nineteenth-century grand tour of Europe was not exclusively the privilege of white intellectuals but included African American travelers, among them women. This biography, based on international archival research, tells the fascinating story of how Remond forged a radical path, establishing relationships with fellow activists, artists, and intellectuals across Europe.

John Dos Passos conveyed multiple intersections of art and culture and the spirit of the 1920s in his prose. His novel Manhattan Transfer is characterized by intermediality: a combination of theater, film, and visual art. With this novel, Dos Passos became a chronicler of American life. A passionate critique of modern society runs through Manhattan Transfer. The city is presented in this novel as a site of cultural intersections and transition and this focus is matched by the fragmentary qualities of the text. From his war novel Three Soldiers through his city novel Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos places his readers in the swirl of the human currents of his time and argues for the human spirit against the forces of a mechanistic world that would crush them.

Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence, my essay documents how the transatlantic crossing of E. M. Forster's literary corpus, from a Europe devastated by war to America, challenges one of Perry Anderson's key claims about the postwar "contraflow" between the United States and England: that the sea change "modified Anglo more than American culture" (English Questions 204). Rather, the New York intellectual and literary critic, Lionel Trilling, succeeded in resituating Forster's fiction cogently in terms of exigencies recognizable to a mass American readership in wartime and after, thereby securing Forster's afterlife in the American academy. Additionally, Trilling's success imparted scale to the transatlantic turn, by making Forster's newly transformed body of work amenable to ideological re-export, back again across the Atlantic, to England. As such, the pairing offered a historically significant corrective, during the decade following Pearl Harbor, to more reactionary critical formations within literary Modernism, at a time when both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had returned to nationalist bases when endorsing literature as a vehicle for culture. I conclude by affirming that the Forster-Trilling transatlantic combination served uniquely sociohistorical, interpretively occasional, and yet critically significant scalars beyond the nationalizing function of English literature and its criticism at that time.

The notion of gender was debated in France long before the 2013 law on marriage equality. In 2004, a mayor in the south of France celebrated the first gay marriage. One year later, a court denied two trans women the right to marry because they did not behave as husband and wife. The introduction locates public debates on gender in France, and shows that they have heavily weighed on the 2013 law, which maintains discriminations against LGBT people with regard to parenthood, trans rights, and nationality. From this standpoint, France has experienced no clear "before-and-after" watershed. French conservatives indeed see themselves as majority victims of a system devised to benefit minorities. They credit the idea that LGBT rights are the product of a "theory" to legitimize their own doctrine. References to the United States become all the more potent since they accredit the idea of a foreign plot.

El trabajo de Catalina Quesada [lleva a cabo] un perspicaz análisis de la narrativa de Juan Cárdenas, un autor de gran proyección en el momento actual que se desmarca, en gran medida, de las tendencias predominantes de la literatura latinoamericana. Si la “toma de posición” de un autor depende tanto de sus declaraciones en entrevistas, del lugar en el que escribe y de las editoriales en las que publica, como nos indica Quesada, nos encontramos ante un intelectual que se ubica entre los “raros” de América Latina, que ha publicado la mayoría de sus textos en una editorial independiente  española  y  que  reconoce  sentirse  distanciado  de  la  mayor parte de las estéticas desarrolladas por sus coetáneos. Aunque sus  obras  “se  resisten  a  la  remisión  contundente”,  mantienen  un vínculo temático y un lenguaje cercano a su nación. Estas se alejan de la legibilidad, dialogan con la tradición evitando exotismos maniqueos, enmascaran los problemas de la sociedad contemporánea y aquellos generados por el capitalismo en escenarios distópicos y presentan preocupaciones locales desviadas de los lugares comunes como, por ejemplo, la Colombia afrodescendiente.

Ángel Esteban y Virginia Capote

In 1962, the Heritage Series of Black Poetry, founded and edited by Paul Breman, published Robert Hayden's A Ballad of Remembrance. By 1975, the Series had published 27 volumes by some of the 20th century's most important and influential poets. As elaborated in Lauri Ramey's extensive scholarly introduction, this innovative volume has dual purposes: To provide primary sources that recover the history and legacy of this groundbreaking venture, and to serve as a research companion for scholars working on the Series and on twentieth century African American and African diasporic poetry. Never-before-published materials include Paul Breman's memoir, retrospectives and poems by poets published in the Series, scholarly essays, bibliographical and biographical information, and a photo-documentary of W.E.B. Du Bois's 1958 visit to the Netherlands.

This essay focuses on a specific aspect of electric telegraphy in America-what I call 'telegraphic acoustics', which includes: 1) the sound of telegraph wires vibrating overhead and 2) 'sound-reading', the practice of transcribing Morse code by ear instead of transcribing it from a printout. Telegraphic acoustics started as a distinctively American technical evolution that emphasized sound and listening over sight and literacy. Because of this emphasis and because of increasingly universal poetic education, American telegraphers understood their technology in poetic terms. In turn, American poets, including John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., also thought about poetry in terms of telegraphic acoustics. The essay focuses on Emily Dickinson as an in-depth case study because of her unusual familiarity with telegraphic acoustics in Amherst; her visual impairment, which heightened her awareness of sound; and her insights into the nature and future of networks and information flow. It concludes by examining the intersection of her poetry and telephony, which was perceived as an extension of telegraphy. I argue that thinking of these media acoustically, instead of in terms of literacy, reveals a rich separate discourse running through Dickinson's poetry and American poetry generally. This discourse demands reinterpretations of several ca-nonical Dickinson poems.

Nineteenth-century observers who saw Charles Brockden Brown's writing as inferior to and imitative of William Godwin's often framed that judgment in a discussion of their relative ages in the eras of their greatest productivity. An anonymous essay on Godwin in the Attic Miscellany of October 1824, for example, deemed Brown " a close and successful copy-ist of the English sage's style " and discerned " community of thought in their views, moral, religious, and political. " This " resemblance, " the anonymous critic opined, coincided with the " gigantic original[ity] " of Brown's writing, which was attributable to his youth, a state he defined implicitly as helpless in its lack of cultivation: " his imagination runs riot with him " where " Mr. Godwin has a command over himself in the manner of his recital which Brown has not been able to copy " (132). 2 Writing sixty years later in the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Wentworth Higginson deploys a similar valorization of mature self-control in his backhanded celebration of Brown's unprecedented influence, as a colonial American writer, upon his British contemporaries: Brown was " the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic, upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands toward an ocean-cable of thought " (57). 3 Even as Higginson's literary patriotism leads him to praise a colonial who commanded the attention of British writers, he is unable to regard that attention as merited by Brown's aesthetic achievement. The real inferiority of Brown's unpolished and wild novels to those by British

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century transatlantic traffic in books by analyzing one extraordinary letter by Phillis Wheatley. Written in Boston on 18 October 1773, and addressed to David Wooster, in New Haven, the letter enlists Wooster’s help selling copies of Wheatley’s book, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” describes Wheatley’s manumission from slavery, and mentions a number of books Wheatley acquired during her recent trip to London, including Paradise Lost, Alexander Pope’s complete Works, and Don Quixote. Many of the books Wheatley mentions have survived with her signed inscriptions. An examination of those particular books and the letter that describes them provides a rich understanding of Wheatley’s relationship to books as a reader and published author, an enslaved and freed person, and a literary celebrity. In emphasizing the intimacy of transatlantic traffic, Wheatley’s letter suggests printed books remain “unfinished” until they change hands from one person to another.

This work offers a panoramic view on transatlantic exchanges that took place between Spain and Puerto Rico after the establishment of the Royal Decree of 1815. It gives some examples to illustrate the way the Revista de Navegación y Comercio and La Ilustración Española y Americana represented Puerto Rico following the implementation of Decrees’ policies.

Susan Sontag’s visit to Thomas Mann on December 28, 1949 has, until now, tended to be treated as a parenthetical anecdote, a biographical curiosity – or, indeed, to be ignored altogether. The truly interesting question of the consequences of Sontag’s encounter with Mann and his work has not even come close to being answered. This article explores how Sontag’s – often partially autobiographical – statements concerning Thomas Mann combine reflections on authorship and storytelling with thoughts about Germany and, in particular, about the Shoah. Building on this, a further, more general question emerges: what role do the essayist’s secular Jewish origins play in her encounter with the German writer?

DOI 10.1515/naha-2015-0010

This special issue edited and directed by Emiliano Ferrari offers a series of transhistorical and interdisciplinary studies that draw the dense network of contexts, uses and meanings assumed by Montaigne’s figure and work in America, along different fields (literature, philosophy, political theory, cultural and gender studies). What emerges from the articles presented is a clear picture of the diversity of contexts, uses, and meanings that Montaigne and his Essais might have had along the progressive process of political and cultural self-definition of America since the 18th century. From the century of independence to the contemporary, from Benjamin Franklin to Judith Butler, Montaigne acted as an influential voice in the ongoing transatlantic conversation that shaped the American social, political, and cultural identity.

[Contributors to this issue: N. Kenny (Oxford), W. E. Engel (Sewanee), D. Thompson (South Carolina), D. R. Brunstetter (UC Irvine), P. Desan (Chicago), J.-C. Laursen and K. Pham (UC Riverside), C. Edelman (Incarnate Word), T. Gontier (Lyon 3), T. Birchal and V. Sommavilla (Minas Gerais) M. Schachter (Durham), E. Ferrari (Lyon 3), Z. Zalloua (Whitman College)].

'Impure researches' are those that mix methodologies and types of data, and in particular remind readers that reading is an impure bodily as well as mental experience. The article argues that if we neglect how our perception of the material format of a text affects our understanding, we stand to risk being blind to how a text comprises the ever increasing sum of the history of its sensuous presentation and perception. It takes as a case study the publication history of Ouida's most popular short story, «A Dog of Flanders» (1871). The story has uniformly been defined as a children's story from the late twentieth century onwards, yet this labelling is a result of marketing decisions that arose in the 1890s which affected the material format the story appeared in and thereafter the interpretative choices of critics and readers in general. By polluting both literary and book history through my own corporeal encounters with various material forms of this text, I am seeking to exemplify, in an iterable, practical way, claims by feminist and queer critics whose «return to the body» risks at times appearing immaterial and generic. Where does aesthetic literary impurity lie? Is it somehow 'in' the literary text, perhaps as a message or code that seeks to demarcate or query a boundary that determines the difference between good and bad taste, the disinterested and interested, commerce and art, dirty and clean? Might we regard impurity as the melding of distinct genres or discourses to various degrees, or the grafting of one onto another with various levels of ease or tension? The answer is yes to all of these of course. But we can also think of aesthetic attention to impurity as a methodological procedure. In a good deal of literary studies, attention to our perception of the material signs which comprise a text – the aesthesis of a text – still remains a devalued or circumscribed mode of enquiry. In its interpretative procedures, words are treated by close reading, for instance, as insubstantial abstract units regardless of their physical format. «History of the Book», where we may expect attention to the materiality of textual objects, has largely split off from literature to become a separate discipline and has sought to carve itself out a distinct niche by focussing on quantitative business history

Migrant literature has continued to gain increasing prominence in literary production due to what has been described as postcolonial impulse in the contemporary Third World literature. This is, in part, reflective of the experiences of the Third World countries in the face of increasing globalisation; and also, in part, reflective of the increasing residency of literary artists and critics of the third world countries in the West. Meanwhile, Afropolitanism falls into the general category of migrant literature. However, what sets it apart from other migrant literary discourse is its radical shift in thematic focus with regards to home, identity and in the construal of nationality. Afropolitanism has its provenance in the now seminal essay of multinational writer, Taiye Selasi (2005) titled, ByeBye Barbar or What is an Afropolitan? of whose major thematic thrust is the refusal to pander to the thematic expectations of a typical African in the diaspora. This study therefore engages with the ideas that underpin the thematic preoccupations of the Afropolitans. It adopts the qualitative approach for its methodology as two texts of veritable Afropolitan tilts, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah have been selected as primary analytical texts in order to explore the Afropolitanist constructs. The study also makes use of postcolonial theory as its theoretical framework. This study, thereafter, is able to foreground, through the exploration of such diasporic markers as race, identity, home, exilic feelings and cultural intermingling, that Afropolitan writings not only seek to problematize the conventional standards of engagement within the migrant literature but also to push forward into the front burner unheralded but legitimate ideas surrounding migrant experiences.

El estudio aborda exhaustivamente los avances de la historia de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial, su encaje en el ámbito hispanoafroamericano, la configuración de la identidad guineana, así como los retos pendientes de la crítica textual y la literaria.

Reiseliteratur besaß als Genre bis weit in die zweite Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts weitgehend marginale Bedeutung und wurde bestenfalls dokumentarisch gelesen oder sozialwissenschaftlich »ausgewertet«. Heute gehört sie zu jenen literarischen Vermittlungsformen, in denen sich am eindringlichsten die Probleme der (europäischen) Moderne, aber auch aktuelle transkulturelle Herausforderungen, Erfahrungsmodi, Projektionen und Sehnsüchte reflektieren. Der vorliegende Band behandelt Reiseliteratur systematisch wie historisch und stellt die Frage nach den ökonomischen, sozialen und politischen Hintergründen des Reisens, nach der Entwicklung der Gattung seit der frühen Neuzeit, nach den Strukturierungen reiseliterarisch dargestellter hermeneutischer Bewegungen, aber auch nach den Figuren von Reisenden und Lesenden. Im Zentrum stehen französisch-, spanisch- und italienischsprachige Reisen(de), aber auch deutsch- und englischsprachige Texte seit der Frühen Neuzeit sowie reiseliterarische Ausdrucksformen des ausgehenden 20. und beginnenden 21. Jahrhunderts. Sagt uns die Reiseliteratur, wohin die Reise unserer Gesellschaften geht?

García Márquez’s final full length novel, Del amor y otros demonios (1994), presents various difficulties to the reader. The novel’s layers of symbolism are readily identifiable with references in the novel to Roman Catholic hagiographies in juxtaposition to qualities and characteristics of the Orishas of the Yoruba Tradition. The period of the novel corresponds temporally with the formation of the syncretic religion known as Santería. The author’s use of period techniques such as conceptismo emphasizes the baroque era on a structural level. Furthermore, conceptismo plays a major role in the evolution of themes in the novel, which on final analysis shows distinct parallels with one of the earliest hagiographies of the Roman Catholic corpus. At the same moment, the strings of metaphors and doubling of motifs may also point to extraliterary texts. Those points stated, the novel’s African influences may be traced back to one of the author’s first stories, “Nabo el negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles” (1951), not merely as a reiteration of themes but as a means of analyzing the earlier piece with a more complete view of the author’s aesthetic trajectory. This leads to a clearer understanding of the place of Afro- Caribbean religion in García Márquez’s works as well as the ultimate refinement of his technical abilities as a novelist.

Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed: A Novel and Saidiya Hartman’s autobiographical journey along the atlantic slave route in Lose Your Mother encode the sea as an archive in which the afterlife of slavery continues to surface. Both narratives bring into provocative focus the figure of the mother – she who has been lost, and she who enacts kindermoord (child murder) – to foreground the wrenching impact of the voyage of slavery on the bonds of kinship; and both unfold from the space of the dungeon or penal island to and from which the slave ship has ferried its human cargo...

Political text writers are often tended to implement rhetorical strategies, including the discursive ideological strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, to imply and impose their ideological intentions on the audience. The utilization of such strategies may cause translation problems for translators of political texts. Political texts in particular usually act as a source of problem for novice translators who read texts in a traditional way and understand the texts in an uncritical manner. The present paper, attempting to introduce such political rhetorical strategies in English as the source language and their proper rendition in Farsi as the target language, offers a critical discourse analysis of Amir Ghaderi's Farsi translation of Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices (2014). To this end, Van Dijk's CDA approach (2004) was used. However, the study has explored only four strategies out of 27 including-hyperbole, euphemism, polarization and vagueness. The results showed that euphemism, with 41 instances out of total 60 instances, was the most frequently observed discursive strategy, as the source text had the political end of highlighting the power and dominance of the source text state to the reader. The other three discursive strategies were observed with relatively close rate: hyperbole =8, polarization =8, and vagueness=3. The findings of this study have the potentialities to make generalization about the meaningful high frequency of euphemism and the use of other discursive strategies in political texts.

The African continent banks on historical grounds as a very important key player and ally in the world. For ages, the world has depended on Africa for its supply of mineral resources like ore, gold, copper, oil, iron and more recently of cheap labour. Today, Africa stands out as a promising economic pillar for many countries of the world. Many developed countries have traded with Africa since the existence of ancient chieftainship, empires and kingdoms in Africa. As the world faces difficult challenges related to globalization,  economic backlash and security threats, the worlds peace and stability is at stake. As the globalized world seeks answers and innovations to realign itself with the current realities, the author of this paper attempts to retrieve the past through an Ethnohistorical account of pre-Colonial Africa, she examines the African Kingdoms, Empires, Monarchs And African Historical States as they used to be and draws comparisons as discussed by Vansina (1962) through  the classification of Sub-Saharan African kingdoms, mostly of Central, South, East Africa, and West African (Sahelian) kingdoms thus distinguishing them apart through their decrease in centralization of power.

This essay reimagines the centuries-long process through which printed objects in the Anglophone world became powerfully associated with white supremacy and ideologies of racial hierarchy. It argues that the racialization of print was not inevitable but contingent, uneven, and always contested; that it continually shifted, varying widely from place to place; and that it occurred in relation to the medium’s changing associations with such other unstable social and ideological categories as class, gender, religion, and nation. The essay proposes two phases for this historical process: the establishment phase, during which the hyperelite medium of the printed codex acquired an association with white authorship in the early modern period; and the essentializing phase, during which, over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a printed book by a single author came to be understood as capable of representing the essential nature of an entire race of people. Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley wrote during the shift between these two phases of print’s racialization. A comparative case study of Occom’s and Wheatley’s relationships to book publication suggests that early modern social and class hierarchies were more important to their navigation of the medium’s racialized dynamics than is commonly granted.

La constitución del espacio de revistas de literatura nueva en Argentina fue paralela al ocaso de las revistas españolas que dieron espacio al ultraísmo. La doble significación del ultraísmo –en retirada en España, en desarrollo en Argentina–, así como la doble significación de la concepción purista de la literatura –antivanguardista en España, provanguardista en Argentina– inunda de matices las producciones de la literatura nueva en ambos campos literarios, y produce efectos de lectura distintos en función de si una obra se lee en el contexto argentino o en el español. En esa ambigüedad nadó la revista Alfar, que recogió a los rezagados del ultraísmo español, y a sus defensores –como Guillermo de Torre–, tanto como a los clasicistas españoles; y a su vez, abrió las puertas a los renovadores argentinos. La significativa presencia de escritores argentinos en sus páginas, así como la mención constante a las publicaciones que formaron el espacio de revistas argentinas de vanguardia, hicieron de Alfar la principal plataforma de diálogo transatlántico de las poéticas nuevas durante la primera mitad de los años veinte.