The black Atlantic,American studies and the politics of the postcolonial

Abstract

Twelve years of scholarship in the field of black-Atlantic-meets-American studies has resulted in a substantial body of knowledge around the extraterritorial excursions of US subjects and their cultural output. Despite the opportunities that the black Atlantic offered, it has begun to seem that the repositioning of academic perspective it stems from has itself become part of the discursive problems surrounding US American studies. This article suggests that it is time to rethink (black) Atlantic studies in the context of its partial institutionalization within the academy. First, it revisits the methodological and theoretical possibilities the field offered. Second, it examines some of the shortcomings which, in the early stages of the project, it was possible to overlook if not entirely ignore. Third, it looks at developments in the field of postcolonial studies, suggesting some conceptual tensions of relevance to postcolonial, US American, and American studies more generally.     

Post/past-'Orientalism' Orientalism and its dis/re-orientation

Abstract

In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said articulated more a cultural filter than a cultural divide, through a catalog of historical documents on the west's representation of the east, enabling readers to share a vocabulary that has now become a part of American intellectual history. In the last quarter century Orientalism has acquired a 'symbolic value' that was at best present as a 'potential value', thus realizing itself; from its initial position as an object of cultural study it has now become a subject imbued with the agency to change perception and understanding. It has problematized Orientalism itself and associated issues of the new globalism, such as immigration, diaspora, boundary crossings, cross-border terrorism, mixed ethnicities, international and inter-racial adoptions, and travel. The article focuses on the new social, political and economic faces of the old Orientalist attitudes, and calls for a radical revision of history.