Transatlantic Context Research Articles

Making Whiteness Visible and Felt in Fairview

In this article I analyse how Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play Fairview makes white audience members feel white. As a play that exposes whiteness and calls white people to account for their racism, Fairview speaks to contemporary global antiracist activism efforts. Therefore, I begin by situating Fairview in the transatlantic cultural and political context of Black Lives Matter. I then discuss the theatrical devices Drury employs in Fairview in order to make whiteness felt before going on to analyse a range of white audience responses to the production at London’s Young Vic Theatre in 2019/2020. I reflect on these responses in relation to how white people react to accusations of white privilege and power in the public sphere and identify shared strategies for sustaining whiteness. In conclusion, I consider Fairview as a model of affective antiracist activism.

Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Paul B. Moyer

Reviewed by: Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Paul B. Moyer Molly J. Farrell New England, witchcraft, occult crime, witch trials, witch panic, Hartford witch hunt, gender and witchcraft, devil paul b. moyer. Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, Pp. xvi + 276. What if we attempted to understand the nature and contexts of witchcraft accusations in colonial New England outside of Salem? Paul B. Moyer's Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World places what the book defines more broadly as "occult crime" in a transatlantic context and focuses exclusively on the period before 1670. Stopping twenty-two years prior to the infamously exceptional witchcraft crisis in Essex county, Detestable and Wicked Arts looks across to England, and occasionally Bermuda, rather than forward to Salem for comparison and context. As a result, the book offers a detailed accounting of the first half century of reported incidents of witchcraft across colonial New England, proceeding methodically to present an overview of who the witches and their accusers were, of what precisely they were accused, and how the law [End Page 252] handled these reports. The book's frequent deployment of statistics—often putting demographic details about the accused in New England next to their contemporaries in England—is particularly helpful in making the book a resource for anyone interested in witchcraft in this distinctive time and place. Most of the time, as the book freely admits, the charts show that New England was not, in fact, all that distinctive but expressed many of the same fears and beliefs in many of the same ways as metropolitan communities. Occasionally, this transatlantic framework yields insights about, for example, the sources on which the New England Puritans were relying to understand and prosecute witchcraft. The book explains "the paucity of testimony concerning witch flight," for example, by the "more conservative stance" of the Protestant sources on the subject that New Englanders "imbibed" relative to continental sources. Similarly noteworthy, Moyer shows that husband and wife pairs were far more likely to be accused together in New England than anywhere else around the Atlantic and that, curiously, the "relative lack of children" of these married pairs of accused "[stands] out." Also, in this pre-Salem period, when compared with England and other colonies "New Englanders did not generally suspect the young as witches . . . or imagine the existence of witch families." Throughout, the book's discussions are accompanied by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century woodcut illustrations taken from English and continental sources on witchcraft, vivifying the ways that these figures and their malefic acts may have manifested in popular conceptions at the time. By compiling a comprehensive array of sources, data, and images from across these five decades, Detestable and Wicked Arts offers, like Moyer's previous books, a broad and multilayered portrait of the beliefs and practices of everyday settler colonists, shifting focus almost entirely away from colonial leaders, judges, printers, ministers, or other policymakers. Readers of a wide array of backgrounds who want to know who a New England witch was likely to be in the eyes of their peers or what they might be accused of—infesting their neighbor's cheese with maggots more often than flying by night to a large Satanic meeting, for example—will be provoked, intrigued, and entertained thanks to the book's uncomplicated prose and hospitable structure. The final two chapters are the strongest, and likely the most useful to those interested in witch-hunting across a wide array of time periods and locations. The book's sixth chapter, "Very Awful and Amazing," focuses in depth on how the Hartford witch hunt of 1662–1663, the largest in New England prior to Salem, spun out from the sudden sickening and death of a child from a humble family to ensnare many victims across the community, [End Page 253] ultimately resulting in fourteen accusations and four executions. The transatlantic focus is particularly helpful here in placing this hunt in the context of others in East Anglia and Bermuda and pointing out the...

International Relations and political violence: A study of the causes of domestic Jihadist violence in a transatlantic context

Two decades after the 9/11 attacks, homegrown jihadist violence (HJV) in the West has almost disappeared, but the causes and conditions fomenting the phenomenon have not changed much. In this paper, I argue that, despite the security services’ ability to physically destroy the structures and networks of HJV in separate national contexts, the spectre of HJV is haunting theWest as a transnational problem. Dealing effectively with this problem requires a comprehensive understanding of the root causes of HJV and its cross-level and transnational origins. This paper examines such causes through the lens of International Relations’ levels of analysis, which allows us to categorize and explain those causes at individual, group, and international levels. The paper seeks to add new insight to the HJV literature and, at the same time, provide a pre-theoretical basis for a broader debate on the causes of this global security problem.

Towards a New Arctic

Thus far, the strategic importance of the GIUK–N (Greenland–Iceland–UK–Norway) region has been understood in a transatlantic context. With the opening of the Arctic Ocean, however, the region’s strategic significance as the gateway to the Arctic is increasing. In this article, Rebecca Pincus argues for the incorporation of a new, transpolar perspective into strategic considerations of the GIUK–N. A strategic re-evaluation is timely to prepare US and NATO forces to play a shaping role as the Arctic Ocean continues to open and great power competition persists.■

The Neoconservative Moment in France: Raymond Aron, the United States, and the 1970s

This article tries to place the liberal thought of Raymond Aron during the 1970s in a transatlantic context. Doing so, it argues, allows for a better understanding of Aron’s liberalism during the so-called French liberal revival that occurred during this decade. Aron, it shows, was critical of much of the turn to liberalism during this time in France, and in particular the appeal that international human rights had for former French Marxists turned liberals. The paper shows that Aron’s critique of various elements of the French liberal revival only really make sense in light of his fears concerning US political and military decline due to the Vietnam War, economic inflation, the SALT treaty discussions, and perceived Soviet military advantages facilitated by the turn to a foreign policy of détente in the United States. These developments, signaled to Aron, the expansion of Soviet economic and political hegemony into Western Europe. Given these concerns, the trajectory of Aron’s thought took a decidedly neoconservative turn during the 1970s, much like the thought of his neoconservative allies in the United States whom remained uncompromising in their Cold War liberal commitments to containing Communism.

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction Eve Tavor Bannet and Roxann Wheeler We are grateful to our contributors and panel chairs for enabling us to put together what is both a timely and a forward-looking volume. This edition of SECC is, as always, wide-ranging in discipline and geographical reach. The essays address media from print to performance and from digital archives of music and song, as they impact theories, pedagogies, economies, manners, and research, and pertain to the Caribbean, Ireland, North America, Britain, France, and Poland. But these interventions also come together to shed new light on particularly pressing issues of the present. Barbara Fuch's Clifford Lecture on what can be learned from Robinson Crusoe's absence from his Brazilian sugar plantation introduces discussions of race, empire, slavery, and colonial rule as these material phenomena figure in surviving records and in the classroom. We include here for the first time the Race and Empire Caucus's prize-winning essay, which will be a regular feature of SECC from now on; and we congratulate Kimberley Takahata for being the first winner of this important prize. The essays on critical race theory and pedagogy on the one hand and new databases of slavery and abolition on the other hand robustly reflect on the intersection of eighteenth-century studies with current global events. Susan Lanser's compelling Presidential Lecture on the mystery of how there came to be a Marie-Antoinette House in Maine and on the persistence of the fakelore attached to it is a fascinating story that delves deeply into the signification of French royalty in a transatlantic context and into the persistent connection of Marie-Antoinette in the U.S. to whiteness. Lanser's deep and wide cultural study heralds several critical essays on diverse eighteenth-century forms of manufacture and transportation. The Material Culture section has a strong and welcome visual component. The study of [End Page xi] material culture is a fairly recent addition to our field, but it is clearly one that is very much coming into its own. The last section consists of forums which address some pressing emerging issues: where might current trends in theory take us in regard to the study of literature? Should we retain healthy skepticism of the past's literary productions or should we adopt a less adversarial approach to literary study? How might new archives and databases alter and reshape the relationship of Irish studies to English literary and cultural studies? How can we defend the humanities in general, and what we do in the eighteenth-century in particular, against defunding and marginalization? We have learned from all the work we have included and enjoyed it. We hope you will do the same. [End Page xii] Copyright © 2020 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism

Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism Meredith L. McGill (bio) One of the most interesting phases of jerome mcgann’s career has been his recent turn to writing about nineteenth-century American literature. One might say this turn isn’t altogether recent: his 1993 book on “The Visible Language of Modernism” takes its title from Stephen Crane’s Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and includes a sustained meditation on Emily Dickinson’s investment in the visual aspect of her writing.1 But since 2014, when he published two books—A New Republic of Letters, which includes substantial chapters on Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper, and The Poet Edgar Allan Poe—the pendulum of McGann’s attention has swung decisively in a transatlantic direction.2 This shift is particularly welcome to those who study nineteenth-century American literature—and especially American poetry—within a transatlantic context. A prominent Romanticist’s fascination with American texts and cultural formations does much to counter asymmetries in prestige and in critical attention that have long structured the transatlantic literary field. Admittedly, most students of nineteenth-century literature on both sides of the Atlantic have been content to write national histories that rarely, if ever, intersect with one another. Critics have addressed the great themes of Atlantic history, recognizing the importance of transatlantic trade and the transformative effects of the forced and voluntary migration of peoples, but they have done so largely from within the confines of nationally framed literary traditions. Indeed, as I noted over a decade ago in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), it would be difficult to underestimate the sway of the idea of a national literature over the discipline of literary study, structuring as it still does undergraduate [End Page 475] instruction, graduate training, and professional formation.3 A tacit or explicit literary nationalism continues to organize departments of English despite the fact that complexly intertwining histories of language and culture, publication, and literary form tug against the often unquestioned binary division of the field into British and American literatures. While specialists in nineteenth-century Anglophone literature share an atavistic, nationalist commitment to our materials of study, asymmetries of attention rooted in Romantic-era hierarchies of value continue to ensure that, while Americanists must grapple with British literary precedent and evaluate the literature they study against the backdrop of the dominant tradition, Romanticists and Victorianists are free to ignore contemporaneous literary production in Great Britain’s former American colonies. Even important recent scholarship that boldly reconceives nineteenth-century British literature in transnational terms repeats this omission: Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (2017) and Jason R. Rudy’s Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (2017) track the colonial uptake of British poetic forms and poetic ideals in India, British Guiana, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, but omit Britain’s former colony, the newly independent United States, from their field of vision.4 In Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2016), Daniel Hack examines the complexity of African American writers’ engagement with a broad range of British texts, but treats African American literature largely in isolation from larger trends in American literary history.5 The rising prestige of the American novel in the twentieth century has ensured that numerous comparative studies embrace the work of writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and James,6 but the exclusion of [End Page 476] nineteenth-century American poetry from serious transnational consideration—outside of the work of our two proto-modernists, Whitman and Dickinson—is striking.7 One can easily lay the blame for this omission at the feet of Americanist critics who tend to regard Americanness in poetry as discernible only in a break with British poetic norms. We have only recently begun to develop a critical language nuanced and flexible enough to describe the heady mix of cosmopolitanism and provinciality, originality and imitation, postcoloniality, and national and imperial ambition that characterizes metrically regular, formally recognizable American verse. Americanists tend to be embarrassed by the bombastic claims made by nineteenth-century poets and critics who proclaimed the virtues of now-obscure...

Az európai védelmi kezdeményezések törésvonalai

This study examines how the European Union’s Common Security and Defence Policy was shaped by the European defence initiatives after 2016. By asking what divisive issues appeared in connection with the main initiatives of the so-called Comprehensive Defense Package, the study systematically evaluates the emerging fault lines between member states. In the European context, the analysis shows that fault lines related to the internal (European) dynamics of these initiatives are connected to the functional prospects of the EU’s crisis-management tools, as well as to the increasing competences of the supranational EU institutions. Regarding the transatlantic context, the duplication of autonomous European capabilities with NATO, as well as the direction towards strengthening the autonomy of the European defence industry, generated tensions between the United States and the European Union, which has highlighted divisions between member states’ preferences in these matters as well.

Anna M. Nogar, Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present (2018) and Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova, Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue:

Reviewed by: Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present by Anna M. Nogar, and: Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico by Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova Elizabeth McDyer (bio) Anna M. Nogar, Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present. University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. 474. Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova, Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico. University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 88. In Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present, Anna Nogar takes her readers on an astonishing transatlantic journey through the centuries. She uncovers María de Ágreda, the at-times-forgotten or narratively limited Spanish nun historically identified as the protagonist of the [End Page 219] US Southwest "Lady in Blue" folkloric tale. According to the tale, de Ágreda bilocated, miraculously appearing to Indigenous populations in what is now the US Southwest to prepare them for Christianity and colonization although she never left Spain. As Nogar notes, scholars have largely ignored the Lady in Blue story except as a regional legend, disconnected from its larger historical context. In contrast, Nogar inserts the story of the Lady in Blue within its transatlantic context of Spain, New Spain, and the missionary zeal of what is now the US Southwest. By examining Lady in Blue narratives contextualized by historical, cultural, and oral sources, she argues that the staying power of the legend stems from de Ágreda's popularity as a spiritual author in Spain and New Spain. In so doing, she affirms María de Ágreda's preeminent role as a female colonial figure. To do this, she examines the miracle narrative over four centuries and the transatlantic circulation of de Ágreda's writing. After her well-crafted introduction, Nogar leads us through the history of the Lady in Blue narrative on the one hand, and the biography of María de Ágreda, including the diffusion and societal role of her spiritual writings, on the other. The first four chapters trace the narrative history alongside Sor María's biography and writings during the colonial era. Chapter 1 examines the foundational texts of the Lady in Blue narrative, with special attention to their writers (evangelizing missionaries) and their respective audiences. In chapter 2, Nogar establishes Sor María's importance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain as a spiritual author and confidant to King Phillip IV, which allowed her most famous text, Mística ciudad de Dios, to circulate broadly. Chapter 3 details how her prominence in Spain led to her role as an influential spiritual author and religious figure in New Spain, with wide publication of her works that made her ideas accessible to large swathes of colonial Mexican society. Sor María's popularity in Spain and New Spain formed a transatlantic devotional community. In chapter 4, Nogar turns her attention specifically to Northern New Spain (New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California). She shows that through Franciscan friars and Jesuits, de Ágreda's writing preceded and paved the way for the Lady in Blue narrative, which in turn became a foundational [End Page 220] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Illustration from Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico. Amy Cordova © 2017. Courtesy: University of New Mexico Press. story, "cited from both written and collective memory" and "an essential episode in the exploration and colonization" (7). The last two chapters span transformations of the Lady in Blue narrative from the nineteenth century onward. They contrast significantly with the first two centuries of the Lady in Blue narrative's history that intertwined María de Ágreda's authorial...

American Treatise Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister in Transatlantic Context

American Treatise Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister in Transatlantic Context

Rhythms of Soft Power Influence and Transatlantic Higher Education Relations

This article looks at transatlantic educational relations as an element of cultural relations more generally. It begins by locating higher education within the context of EU cultural diplomacy (CD) and soft power and in a comparative transatlantic context. Based on a study of key historical components in the transatlantic relationship and dialogue in higher education, it then shows how higher education relations across the Atlantic are subject to what we describe as the ‘rhythms of soft power’. The article concludes that while CD in general, and higher education relations as a component of soft power in particular, might try to assist in the mitigation of prevailing politicosecurity and economic dynamics, it is going to be an uphill battle in an era in which we are witnessing at best a crisis and at worst the pending collapse of the liberal international order.

A Work in Progress: Perspectives on the Evolution of American Legal Culture

A Work in ProgressPerspectives on the Evolution of American Legal Culture Ellen Holmes Pearson (bio) "Esteemed Bookes of Lawe" and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia Edited by warren m. billings and brent tarter Charlottesville University of Virginia Press 2017 248 pp. Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection matthew crow Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2017 282 pp. Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877 amalia d. kessler New Haven Yale University Press, 2017 464 pp. In the mid-1820s, Winchester, Virginia, law student Charles James Faulkner penned an essay on the distinctiveness of American law. He reviewed the history of Virginia's settlement and the English law that his forebears brought to the colony. Colonial Virginians considered themselves to be Englishmen, complete with the same rights and laws as those who remained in England. "By a kind of fiction," Faulkner asserted, Virginians "merely extended the bounds of that Empire where this law was to exercise its full influence & operation." It seemed very simple, the way that young Faulkner described it. English migrations extended the bounds of the British Empire, and the colonists carried with them an Anglo-American cultural identity that they associated with their parent country's law. But in reality, the work of establishing their own polities and laws was complicated and laborious. The tasks grew more difficult as the colonies expanded [End Page 217] and set out on their own after the Revolution. Historians too numerous to mention have traced the formation of Anglo-American law from the first colonial settlements onward, and in recent years, scholars such as Mary Sarah Bilder, Alexander Haskell, Daniel Hulsebosch, David Konig, and William Offutt have brought this subject into a transatlantic context that blends culture, society, politics and law into more nuanced depictions of early American legal culture. The three works reviewed below contribute to the historiography of Anglo-American law by providing a deeper understanding of the ways that Americans grappled with the complex enterprise of blending English and indigenous law into an Americanized legal culture. Conceptions of Anglo-American identity through the lens of the law inform each of these works. Beginning with the seventeenth-century origins of Virginia law and moving into the early national period, the authors in Warren M. Billings and Brent Tarter's excellent anthology, "Esteemed Books of Lawe" and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia, follow the arc of Virginia's early legal culture through the study of law books and libraries. This close study of law books and the men who owned and wrote them gives us another perspective on Virginia's evolution from English colony to a mature member of the new United States. In this carefully curated volume, the essays weave a pattern of professional relationships, networks, and change over time to create a coherent whole. The authors bring attention to the oft-neglected importance of legal practitioners and their books in the shaping of identity in early America. The anthology's first two essays reprise pathbreaking work originally published in the 1970s. Coeditor Warren M. Billings's essay on English legal literature's influence on seventeenth-century Virginia's law and practice, originally published in 1979, and W. Hamilton Bryson's Census of Law Books in Colonial Virginia (1978) opened doors to the history of the law book in colonial Virginia. Billings examines the men who were responsible for adapting English law to the exigencies of the newly established English outpost, their education, and the sources that they used to guide them in this unprecedented undertaking. Bryson's valuable inventory of colonial Virginia libraries, revised for the purpose of this essay, reveals not only the contents of the libraries but also the objectives and priorities of the owners of these collections. Both Billings and Bryson observe that throughout Virginia's formative years, most clerks of court, justices of the peace, sheriffs, [End Page 218] burgesses, and councilors did not receive formal education beyond apprenticeship for their trade, but they were not ignorant of the law. Regardless of their level of education, the most useful works consisted of, as Billings puts it, "how-to-do- it" manuals that instructed readers on...

Reconstruction in a Globalizing World ed. by David Prior

Reviewed by: Reconstruction in a Globalizing World ed. by David Prior A. James Fuller Reconstruction in a Globalizing World Reconstructing America. Edited by David Prior. Reconstructing America. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 224. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7831-2; cloth, $105.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7830-5.) History must be rewritten for every generation in order to make the past relevant to the present. It is therefore fitting that, in this age of globalization, scholars are interested in looking at American events in the context of world history. For some topics, this approach seems obvious, but Reconstruction has been a subject almost always analyzed with a domestic lens. After all, the settlement of the Civil War seemed to be an internal matter that offered enough complexity for scholarly interpretation within the parameters of the nation itself—until now. Reconstruction in a Globalizing World, edited by David Prior, is the latest installment in the Reconstructing America series from Fordham University Press. This slim volume of essays is one of the first attempts to place Reconstruction in a broader, global context, inviting scholars to see the postwar period in a new light and challenging them to look beyond the borders of the United States. [End Page 190] Prior's introduction places the essays at the nexus of Reconstruction scholarship and transnational history. While recognizing the difficulties of combining such disparate fields, Prior insists that doing so affords an opportunity to better explain and understand such matters as international markets, foreign affairs, and nationalism. Seeing Reconstruction through this lens reveals that the "postbellum United States was so struck through with transnational connections that it seems impossible that they were not relevant to Reconstruction" (p. 6). Thus, subjects such as "education, racial ideologies, grassroots political culture, [and] intellectual currents" were not simply important to Reconstruction, but also "had fascinating but neglected transnational dimensions" (p. 6). Yet, in the long run, this collection does more to highlight the values of setting nineteenth-century U.S. history in the context of a transatlantic culture than it does to show the influence of broader world history. Chapters by Evan C. Rothera and Matthew J. Hetrick examine the issues of race and education by looking at Argentina and Liberia, respectively. These two essays help place the efforts of northern reformers who went south to educate freedpeople during Reconstruction within a transatlantic context. Rothera shows how Argentina's president Domingo F. Sarmiento drew on his time in the United States to develop plans for education reform in his own country and to raise questions about the role of race in such reform work. Meanwhile, as Hetrick explains, educators started a college in Monrovia, Liberia, only to find that divisions of race and class, combined with waning interest from African Americans and white reformers in the United States, hampered their efforts. Transatlantic connections also inform two of the best essays in the book, as Mitchell Snay explores the ways Radical Republicans and the northern press saw the British Reform Act of 1867 and related it to the Reconstruction Acts in the United States. The complexities of their thinking underscored both the possibilities and the limitations of transatlantic liberalism, as U.S. reformers sought both to make British allies and to extol the superior virtues of American democracy when looking at the legal expansion of the franchise in Great Britain. The excellent essay by Alison Clark Efford examines the French arms scandal. Set in the context of the Franco-Prussian War, the scandal centered on whether the United States selling guns to France through a third party that was under contract with the French government violated American neutrality. The accusations briefly rocked the Washington, D.C., political scene but were soon eclipsed by other official misdeeds in the more famous scandals of the Ulysses S. Grant administration. Efford argues that the arms scandal had a longer legacy by marking a shift in the American political culture. Before it, Americans constantly crowed about the superiority of their political system in comparison with Europe. After it, they pointed to Britain and Prussia as examples of how the United States might do better when it came to...

The European Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right

This article places the intellectual inspirations behind the white nationalism of the Alt-Right in a Transatlantic context. It does so by first focusing on the late 1960s and the rise of New Right Movements throughout Europe that sprang up as a response to the New Left, which involved a hatred of liberal internationalism and multiculturalism, a thorough critique of global capitalism, and, in one way or another, promoted an identitarian form of race-based politics. The pivotal New Right figure here is Alain de Benoist whose key ideas this paper will summarize. The paper then shows how Benoist’s thought made its way into United States by the 1990s. I will conclude by unpacking a strange argument that it was in fact cultural Marxists, and specifically European emigre thinkers fleeing the Nazis, who provided a model for how the alt-Right could pursue a cultural revolution that would overthrow liberal understandings of race and identity

Mirrored Imaginaries: Urban Chroniclers in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1910-1936

This article explores the intertwined urban and cultural histories of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay during the early twentieth century. During the years from 1910 to 1936, Buenos Aires and Montevideo’s relationship evolved from being “mirrored” and “symbiotic” into an uneven relationship as Buenos Aires’s skyline and cultural commerce expanded to compare to larger metropolitan centers in the Atlantic world. This article examines how the relationship between the two cities was understood by flâneurs, travel writers, and cultural producers in the crucial period of metropolitan growth and cultural commerce for both Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The cultural connections between the two cities transpired in a wider transnational and transatlantic context of urban capitalism that spurred the construction of modern urban spaces such as skyscrapers, theaters, and department stores. The relationship between Buenos Aires and Montevideo was mirrored by neighboring and competing metropolises across the globe in the early twentieth century.

Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy: Edgar Allan Poe's Ambitions for the American Short Story

Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy:Edgar Allan Poe's Ambitions for the American Short Story Wanlin Li* (bio) Edgar Allan Poe's significance as a short story writer has been duly noted by critics. The voluminous criticism his stories received (and continue to receive) attests to the widely acknowledged importance of the writer. However, in comparison with his individual works, Poe's devotion primarily to short story writing in his brief but very productive career has elicited far less attention. Critics sometimes refer to the market potential of the genre as a strong motivation,1 which is at least partly true, but we must take into account nonfinancial considerations as well. Otherwise, we may not be able to explain why Poe decided to stay with the genre when other contemporary short story writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, gradually shifted to novel writing. Nor does the market theory of Poe's genre choice adequately explain why Poe showed such unswerving commitment to the genre in theory, praising its aesthetic value at every turn. To answer these questions, we need to place Poe's creative and critical efforts with respect to short story writing in a larger transatlantic context, in which American writers felt compelled to justify the distinctiveness and independence of American literature. Contrary to popular belief, I believe that Poe embraced the idea of a national literature as eagerly as many renowned literary nationalists, but instead of advocating thematic localization, Poe supported formal innovation, and turned to the short story as the primary [End Page 164] medium through which he could achieve his individualized ambitions for American literature. Understanding Poe's idiosyncratic vision for American literature has consequences for interpreting his literary theories and practices. Poe's aesthetic theory emphasizes the unity of effect and proposes a compositional model characterized by strong authorial control as a means for achieving such unity. Specifically, in order to produce a premeditated effect on the reader, the author needs to orchestrate his or her narrative resources in perfect coordination and leave nothing to chance. This compositional model gives the author the greatest advantage when he/she operates in a short medium. As a result, it allows Poe to foreground the generic merits of the short story in comparison with its British rival, the serialized novel (see the last section for a more nuanced argument and analysis). The latter's discursiveness, in Poe's eyes, greatly undermines its aesthetic quality. Governed by a new aesthetics, the short story stands for a literary medium through which American literature can achieve generic distinction. Not surprisingly, Poe's own creative efforts were geared towards demonstrating the power of such an aesthetic model, namely, how a writer can craft his or her stories in particular ways to produce vivid effects on the reader. Among the various strategies Poe designed for this purpose, ambiguity seems to be a most unlikely (though not infrequent) choice, since ambiguity,2 referring to the coexistence of mutually exclusive meanings, seems, on the surface, to work against the unity of effect. But if we recognize Poe's underlying desire for control, we would realize that ambiguity actually works for Poe's purpose, since it strengthens authorial control by way of forcing the reader to grapple more with parallel interpretive possibilities. In other words, in cases of ambiguity, Poe seeks the unity of effect not at the level of stable meaning, but at the level of making the reader aware of instability. To illustrate how ambiguity works in specific contexts, I offer my readings of several of Poe's fantastic stories, including "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "William Wilson," in analyses that foreground the irresolvable nature of their ambiguity, before I move on to interpret the significance of the ambiguity in relationship to Poe's aesthetic theory and his nationalistic ambition to outstrip British literature. My readings will hopefully bring an end to the efforts to resolve the apparent ambiguity in Poe's fantastic stories, as critics recognize how ambiguity serves the author's larger theoretical and historical goals. [End Page 165] The Irresolvable Ambiguity in "Ligeia" The ambiguity in "Ligeia" has been a source of continuing controversy in the critical history of...

‘Cruising toward nuclear danger’: Canadian anti-nuclear activism, Pierre Trudeau’s peace mission, and the transatlantic partnership

In March 1982, news broke that the US Air Force planned to test cruise missiles in Canada. The issue brought the Euromissiles Crisis home to Canada, as Canadians took to the streets in record numbers to oppose the tests. Anti-nuclear activists linked their ‘refuse the cruise’ protests to anti-nuclear demonstrations taking place across the West. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau too saw testing in a transatlantic context, insisting they were part of Canada’s NATO obligations. Neither European nor American, the Canadians had an unusual place in NATO. Often, this translated to being completely ignored: transatlantic issues, including the decade-long Euromissiles Crisis, tended to be seen as US–Western European issues. This article considers the ways in which the Euromissiles Crisis came home to Canada and situates Canada in a broader transatlantic landscape. The Euromissiles Crisis framed Canadian debates over cruise missile testing, encouraging activists and politicians to think about how the threat of nuclear war could be reduced.

Time Travelling in Dixie: Race, Music, and the Weight of the Past in the British “Televisual” South

This article examines a series of British travel documentaries on the American South made since 2008 which are representative of the way in which southern distinctiveness is maintained through television within a transatlantic context. The travelogues focus on historic racial struggles, southern food, and music, and frame the South as a distinctly historical space, where either historical moments obscure the contemporary South, or cultural continuity and resistance to change and modernity are celebrated. The article also discusses the similarities between the travelogues and the southern tourist industry, and how transatlantic “televisual tourism” works against the wider scholarly challenge to southern exceptionalism.

Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain

Since James Lockhart published in 1968 the pioneering Spanish Peru, 1532–1560, various scholars have successfully contributed to a better understanding of sixteenth-century Andean society. Jane Mangan offers in Transatlantic Obligations one of the most comprehensive attempts to study social dynamics in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the first century of colonization. Her focus is on the family, an institution that she understands as having played a central role in the colonial world due to its flexibility. Mangan shows how families established actions (via networks and obligations) and words (in a legal context) through which individuals were connected in different ways, such as dowries, bequests, legal powers, and letters. As these ties frequently linked spouses and children in several commitments from Peru to Spain and vice versa, Mangan's focus on the family assumes a transatlantic perspective, which gives this book its considerable value.The book is well grounded in an updated historiography from interdisciplinary fields such as family history, women's history, and migration history, though there are minor omissions. It would have been helpful for Mangan to take into account James Casey's 1987 research on the Mediterranean family and, more recently, Francisco Chacón and Joan Bestard's 2011 edited collection on the Spanish family; there is also considerable scholarship from Spanish scholars on migration history that could have been helpful in fleshing out these transatlantic connections discussed by Mangan. Her research is also based on a great deal of primary sources, a remarkable quality given how documentation for the sixteenth century in Latin America is often incomplete or has not been well preserved. Mangan faced this obstacle with thorough research in Andean and Spanish archives. The records come mostly from notaries, court cases, and bienes de difuntos (goods from Spaniards and foreigners deceased in the Spanish American territories whose transfer to inheritors was handled in Spain by the Casa de Contratación)—a considerable amount of primary sources that provide a firm foundation for the research.The book makes two main contributions. First, the author has been able to break the dichotomy between legal and other types of unions established by previous scholars who had studied the family in a transatlantic context, focusing primarily on legitimate structures. Mangan understands that in a society where illegitimacy was commonplace one must use an “expansive definition” of the family that follows how people in the sixteenth century understood their relationships to one another (p. 4). Hence the study gives attention to blood relations both legitimate and illegitimate. Most mestizo children lived with their indigenous mothers because Spanish fathers had abandoned them; but also, following Iberian patterns, Spanish families agreed to address economic and other demands from women who were not spouses and children who were not legitimate. Mangan describes, using numerous different examples, how many mestizo children in sixteenth-century Peru were moved from the home of their mothers to a Spanish household in order to give them a Spanish education; some even moved from Peru to Spain and never came back.The other remarkable achievement of this book is its taking into account of a wide range of historical actors, not only the elites and Spaniards who have been the focus of earlier historiography. Mangan focuses on fathers who neglected family duties or assumed them, such as the many conquistadores who actively fulfilled obligations to their children regardless of birth status or race. Legal powers and wills confirm these fathers' plans to ensure for their natural sons and daughters an Iberian and Christian upbringing, to such a degree that, remarkably, these children were named heirs in the later colonial period (pp. 174–77). As for indigenous women, the study makes clear the important roles that they performed as wives, companions, daughters, and, mainly, mothers active on behalf of their children, not always in accordance with the fathers (pp. 174–75). Spanish women—those wives left in the homeland, those who followed their husbands to Peru, or those required to raise the mestizo offspring of their own husbands or of other men in Peru and Spain—were principal characters in these stories of transatlantic ties. Finally, the picture is completed with an analysis of the emerging generation of mestizo children on both sides of the Atlantic.The book's documentary background and methodological perspectives allow Mangan to approach this colonial society via three variables: law, family, and race mixture. The final result is the first systematic study to show how the legal and cultural constructions of the family changed as a result of the conquest of Peru. This is a fascinating text that gives a panoramic view of blended families from both sides of the Atlantic. Mangan's book is undoubtedly an essential contribution to the social history of colonial Spanish America.

Book Review: The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War by Mark Bulik

Mark Bulik The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015; 384 pp.: ISBN 97808232O2236, $39.95 On 2 January 1863, five assassins killed James Bergen, a disabled Union Army veteran. A week later, two of his friends were shot and wounded. These events, iMark Bulik writes, marked the start of the first labour war in the United States. The assassins were Molly Maguires, members of a secret society noted for resorting to violence. From 1877 to 1878, 20 Mollies were tried and executed. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Molly Maguires. Some contemporaries derided them as primitive terrorists. Marxists and Socialists considered the executed Mollies martyrs. Much of what we know about the Mollies, the author argues, is either problematic or badly interpreted. Therefore, this book strips away some of the gray mist of myth, misinformation, and propaganda that has long shrouded the origins of the Molly Maguires' (p. 9). One of Bulik's principal objectives is to contextualize the Mollies by placing them in a transatlantic context. He contends that the lack of consensus about the Molly Maguires is partly because many writers tended to view the violence in a primarily American context, rather than an Irish one' (p. 7). To counter this trend, he spends nearly a third of the book hunting for the Irish roots of the Mollies. To his credit, he unearths fascinating information. For instance, he highlights the relationship between the Mollies and mummery, or, an ancient play performed by amateur troopers who visited nearby homes during the Christmas season' (p. 28). Mummers and the Mollies were different sides of the same coin. The mummers were the 'benevolent face of an alternative social order' (p. 43). The Mollies, the darker side, utilized violence to terrorize landlords in Ireland and mine owners in the United States. Thus, in addition to finding that the Molly Maguires and the mummers were of a piece, Bulik offers a social history of Ireland. He focusses on the fierce conflicts between tenants and landlords. In his analysis of organized agrarian violence, he discusses two broad groups. The Whiteboys were a loose-knit, largely apolitical southern Ireland organization concerned with 'issues related to the land and rural life' (p. 46). The Defenders and the Ribbonmen, on the other hand, concentrated in Ulster and 'busied themselves in sectarian battles, labor activity, nationalist politics, and tenant rights' (p. 46). The Defenders, the earlier organization, were suppressed and reborn as the Ribbonmen. The Molly Maguires debuted on 10 December 1844 and were quickly revealed to be Ribbonmen 'who had adopted a new name, a new agenda, and a new set of symbols, whole keeping their old organizational structure' (p. 87). The Mollies maintained a militant focus on access to land and food and 'showed a remarkable willingness to move beyond mere threats by taking on the authorities with aggressive shows of force' (p. 93). Throughout the rest of the book, Bulik discusses the consequences of transplanting this alternative social order to the United States. Irish immigrants carried their own legacy from the deadly competition for land in the north of Ireland--a tradition of collective action that soon became evident, in two related forms. …