Year of the Atlantic World Lecture Series (2007-2008)

This presentation focuses on various artistic traditions found in the Americas as a result of the African Diaspora. It will highlight two classroom art projects in which the postmodern art of installation is used to interpret the artistic and philosophical principles of several traditional religions that generate from the practices of Ifa, originally generated by the Yoruba peoples of Nigeria. These evolutions in faith, largely determined by the new experiences of an uprooted people, enjoy a vast pantheon of divinities, much like the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman religions. Oshun is a divinity associated with communication, love, inspiration, and creativity. The orisha, Olokun, was considered the great protector of the Yoruba people as they were forced on the slave ships leaving for their new world. Olokun is a figure that can be likened to the classical Poseidon – ruler of the deep blue sea and its inhabitants, provider of wealth and prosperity, but more importantly a healer for those in physical, psychological or spiritual distress. Some deities retained the “Olokun” signifier, while others absorbed this male entity within female entities (especially Yemaya of Cuban Santeria/Lucumi tradition and Yemoja in the Brazilian Candomble tradition). Both projects demonstrate how cross-cultural connections can be effectively experienced in the classroom, while maintaining relevance to student's own lives and culture.

The objective of this lecture is to offer a critical framework that will provide historical, geopolitical, discursive, and cultural coordinates in order to understand the emergence and development of Lusophone African nations within the larger context of the Portuguese-speaking world and in relationship to Portugal and Brazil. These nations have been varyingly interconnected for several centuries through the experience of colonialism as well as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but more recently, through globalization. This lecture explores the deep-seated cultural, material, ideological, and political linkages of Lusophone Africa with Portugal as well as with Brazil that are rooted in the colonial era, but that continue to evolve under the ambivalent sign of "postcolonialism."

Among the many issues taken up by studies of the African Diaspora is the question of identity. How have Africans in Diaspora identified or constructed their identities at various times? Using the example of two men, this talk explores themes of Diaspora, migration and identity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and explores ways in which individuals of African descent, usually men, attempted to fit into Atlantic societies in the New World and in Africa.

Of all the momentous changes that took place in the Atlantic World in the wake of Columbus’s voyage of 1492, perhaps none was more frequent than the transformation of group identity. Settlers of the Atlantic rim were constantly discarding old names, behaviors, and personalities and assuming new ones. One cohort that shed its old identity and created a new one was the estimated 17,000 African-Americans that were repatriated to Liberia throughout the nineteenth century. On the African side of the Atlantic Ocean, these African-Americans became Americo-Liberians. This paper briefly examines some of the historical circumstances that led the African-American to become Americo-Liberian.

This paper will investigate the Creole refusal to be treated as part of the African Diaspora because they regard themselves as “Natives of the Caribbean,” and that, they are “all mixed up” biologically. The paper will draw heavily on archival records as well as the work of scholars not only in history but across all disciplines to reinterpret the process by which Afri-Belizeans, and particularly their cultural and political elites, have chosen to represent themselves and their group in one rather than another category. Not only will this paper challenge the dominant view of Creole identity as derived exclusively from their Anglo-Saxon ‘fathers’, but perhaps more important, it will contribute to a re-examination of how we use the term ‘African Diaspora’ albeit, loosely without consulting those for whom we apply the term.

Dennis Blanton, Curator of Native American Archeology, Fernbank, discusses "The Legacy of Spain in Georgia- Historical Records and Archaeological Traces"

What role has women’s writing played in shaping the culture of the Atlantic World? How have women’s texts embodied and examined such recurring themes as cross-cultural exchange, cultural hybridity, and the telling of histories from a range of perspectives. Sarah Robbins’s presentation will focus on Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem as a representative “Atlantic World” text addressing such key issues. She will also set Condé’s work in conversation with books by several other twentieth-century Caribbean American women writers.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Prince of Asturias Professor at Tufts University and Professorial Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, discusses the "Environmental History of the Atlantic World."

A newly expanded version of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database will be made available on an open access web site in 2008. It now contains details of 35,000 slaving voyages, one third more than in 1999 and much new information on other voyages that were included in the 1999 CD-ROM. This major addition of new data has made it possible to uncover new patterns in the transatlantic slave trade and present those patterns in visually compelling ways. It is now apparent that two distinct transatlantic slave trades existed, that the largest centers for organizing slave voyages were in the Americas, not in Europe, and that African resistance was a major factor in shaping the slave traffic. It is also apparent that abolition of the slave trade had a considerable influence over the composition and direction of transatlantic migration from the Old World to the New in the nineteenth century.

In the late sixteenth century, Dutch ships, thus far confined to European waters, began to explore the wider world. This expansion took place in the midst of the lengthy war between the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Habsburg Spain, which lasted for eighty years. After 1621, Dutch activities afloat and ashore in the Atlantic world were coordinated by the West India Company. The Company used various forms of violence against their Iberian rivals in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America – in Brazil alone, 276 battles with enemy forces have been counted in the seventeenth century. This lecture will engage Bernard Bailyn’s recent assertion that in the New World, civility was lost and indiscriminate murder was the rule. Was this the case in the Dutch Atlantic? How different was this violence from the military encounters that took place in Europe between Dutchmen and Iberians? In other words, did Dutch transatlantic warfare have a specific character?

World historians do not agree on the essential causes behind Europe’s modernization and rise to global power. Some historians explain the rise of Europe based on an early cultural, intellectual, or scientific superiority over the rest of the world, other historians find nothing particular or superior about Europe, at least not until after the integration of the Atlantic World into the European economy. To this 2nd group of historians, it is the Americas, Africa, and the Atlantic World that allowed Western Europe to eventually develop global power. This presentation will evaluate these arguments as well as consider the impact on Native Americans.

This lecture explores the social history of British and American slave ships that crossed the Atlantic from 1700 until the abolition of the trade in 1807-1808, treating the slaver as a framework for human -- and inhuman -- interaction. Special emphasis is given to the experience of the multi-ethnic enslaved Africans who found themselves thrown together on the lower deck of the slave ship. This was a place not only of terror, suffering, and death, but also, against great obstacles, a place of cultural creativity. Aboard the slave ship we can see the maritime origins of African-American culture.

Over 60 countries and dependencies border directly on the Atlantic Ocean, which covers 31,800,000 square miles (82,400,000 sq. km.) of the earth’s surface, the western world’s second great historical maritime highway after the Mediterranean Sea. As a former Merchant Marine Officer, Dr. Trendell is delighted to take you on a vicarious geographic voyage of discovery on the Atlantic Ocean. He will present a review of the oceanic geography and climatic factors that have impacted the historical, political and cultural dramas that unfolded, over the centuries, across this vast aquatic bridge between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. This colorful and informative presentation will set the geographic stage for the lectures in the Year of the Atlantic World series.

William E. Allen, Alan Lebaron, Jesse Benjamin, Jessica Stephenson, Robert Simon, Eva Thompson and Akanmu Adebayo discuss "Why the Atlantic World?".