In a work of critical reflection and innovation, William Boelhower
examines the cultural shift represented by the new paradigm of
Atlantic studies, a discipline forged from older models of Atlantic
history, with their grounding in imperial traditions, and newer
critical fronts that draw on insights from postcolonial and
cultural studies occurring throughout the humanities. Atlantic
Studies: Prospects and Challenges presents a critical survey of the
field that also proposes new horizons for inquiry and critique. The
first section, Prospects and Genealogy, analyzes the
interdisciplinary methodologies that emerged to approach the
Atlantic world in a larger, circumatlantic context, studying the
exchanges of peoples and cultures instead of rigidly defined
national and international boundaries. Case Studies across the
Humanities, the second section, offers new cross-disciplinary
readings of three well-known literary texts- Shakespeare's The
Tempest, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Frederick
Douglass's The Heroic Slave- as exemplars of how an Atlantic
studies perspective acknowledges spatial and cultural dimensions
that disrupt the traditional scales of national literatures. By
foregrounding the challenges of interpreting nomadic and
disenfranchised characters like Caliban, Hester Prynne, and Madison
Washington, Boelhower models critical practices that embrace a
multicentered, composite world marked by sudden shifts in
perspective and scale. The final section, The Cartographic
Challenge, considers the new expertise that went into the mapping
of the Atlantic Ocean and the rise of the Atlantic world as it
emerged in the early modern period, focusing on three world maps
produced by Europeans in the early sixteenth century, conceivably
the most influential visual representations of the dawning Mundus
Novus described by the likes of Columbus and Vespucci. Revealing
how such maps inform discursive genres like travel literature, the
utopia, and the shipwreck narrative, Boelhower argues for the
importance of analyzing cartographic practices and strategies to
understand how they shaped the visual and textual representations
of the Atlantic world. Written by one of the founders of the
discipline, Atlantic Studies: Prospects and Challenges provides
both an insightful overview of the field and an engaging reflection
on the challenges it faces going forward.
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