Despite the rise in oceanic, hemispheric, and regional studies in the past decade, and despite the institutional formations of Transatlantic, Black Atlantic, and Diaspora studies, the South Atlantic has not emerged as a particularly potent conceptual or analytical configuration in cultural studies. In “The Global South Atlantic,” we will examine some of the socio-historical linkages and cultural circulations among Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean; perhaps more importantly, we will also examine both the various ideological and cultural efforts to produce a coherent political and economic image-space of the “South Atlantic” and the forces that have kept it from coming into being or capturing the imagination. “Global” in the course title not only points to the international south-south connections that would constitute a functional system of relations called the “South Atlantic”; it also recognizes that the “South Atlantic” is an imaginary that has been thought and practiced variously from multiple locations.
Our primary literary texts from and about Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean engage periods and issues that establish and reconfigure relations among peoples around the south Atlantic: charter-company colonialism; the transatlantic slave trade and abolitionism; anti-colonialism and decolonization; tricontinentalism and the non-aligned movement; Cold War dictatorships, resource extraction, and human rights internationalism; indigenous movements and dirty wars; diasporas and exiled intellectuals; transitional justice and truth commissions; regional economic and security communities.
