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  • Transatlantic Currents
  • Kate Flint (bio)

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858. Although its poor manufacture meant that it was a failure (success came in 1865), the attempt was recorded on a contemporary map, printed in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on 21 August 1858. Shown in a bold dot-dash line, the cable’s path lies between the notation of steamer routes, running dead straight between Newfoundland, Glasgow, or Galway. It branches off into the veins of railway networks that thread their way across Britain and the continent. Communicating between opposite sides of the Atlantic is made to look as easy as stretching taut a piece of string.

But such a map ignores the reality of the Atlantic itself, and the field of transatlantic studies cannot afford to do this. I am deliberately deploying an oxymoron, juxtaposing the ground, the land, the potentially tillable, fertile territory of individual nation-states with the fluid, mutable, dangerous oceanic: the Atlantic as the body of water that both unites and divides. As an undulating surface, signaling space, distance, the abstract and empty potential of water and air, the Atlantic—at least until the advent of jet air travel—required significant time and effort to cross, even after the inauguration in 1838 of steamship services. As Elisa Tamarkin puts it, travel by steamship “seemed to diminish the distance between Britain and the United States and to promise a new period of collaborative enterprise and commercial alliance” (58). The very experience of crossing, of being out of sight of land, was one likely to conflate material and metaphysical reflection. Even if the accounts of many nineteenth-century sea travelers dwell as much on sea-sickness and slippery decks as on their own perilous smallness and isolation, one must not lose sight of the way in which the experience of being out on the Atlantic could be a dislocating one. The Lakota Sioux chief, Black Elk, recalling what it meant to cross “the big water” to perform with Buffalo Bill’s Wild [End Page 324] West show in England in 1892, said “Afterwhile I could see nothing but water, water, water, and we did not seem to be going anywhere, just up and down; but we were told that we were going fast. If we were, I thought that we must drop off where the water ended; or maybe we might have to stop where the sky came down to the water. There was nothing but mist where the big town used to be and nothing but water all around” (Neihardt 168).

For the ocean is very different from the land, and its properties are ones that destabilize the idea that Britain and the US share common ideological ground in any uncomplicated way. The Atlantic is a space of translation and transformation, rather than of straightforward transmission. The importance of this difference crucially informed the writing of the first modern Atlantic studies scholar, Hugh Grotius. In his Mare Liberum (1609), the “Free Sea,” he asserts the principle that the seas were international territory, un-ownable. Dwelling on these watery spaces ensured that rights became linked not to concepts of nationhood and land ownership, with all the knock-on implications of democratic entitlement, but were seen as relating to freedom of movement, and hence to the transport, translation (and for that matter piracy) of goods, people, and ideas. It has been the task of transatlantic studies, and of its close relatives, Atlantic studies and Atlantic World studies, to replace the language of the frontier with that of the oceanic; to substitute for notions of nationhood that depend on ideas of pushing forwards and outwards, of expansion and conquering, a concern with fluidity, transmission, and exchange. Even the borders of these fields are relatively open and uncertain.

Most properly, the books under consideration here fall under the rubric of Anglo-American rather than transatlantic studies: they are concerned with the passage of people, political theory, literary genres, popular responses, and moral sensibilities back and forth between Britain and the US. This inevitably entails a geographic and linguistic constriction of the Atlantic—indeed, of the Americas. When Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double...

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