The American South and the Atlantic World

1. Caryl Phillips, David Armitage, and the Place of the American South in Atlantic and Other Worlds

1 Caryl Phillips, David Armitage, and the Place of the American South in Atlantic and Other Worlds Brian Ward In 2000, the St. Kitts–born, British-raised, American-based writer Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound, an account of his travels around the Atlantic World. Against the ineluctable backdrop of the transoceanic slave trade which had brought his ancestors from Africa to labor in the Caribbean , Phillips chronicled the complex circum-Atlantic mix of connection and rupture, belonging and estrangement from which his own sense of self, of his place in the world, and his hopes and fears for the future had emerged.1 In The Atlantic Sound, and in some of the essays collected in A New World Order, Phillips contemplated the interpenetrating histories and cultures of Europe, Africa, and the American South. Visiting Liverpool in England, the Elmina slave castle in contemporary Ghana, and Charleston in South Carolina, he explored an Atlantic heritage that for “countless millions” who “have traversed this water” accounts for a sense of permanent displacement.2 And yet if, in the words of another modern Atlantic sojourner, British-Guyanese author Fred D’Aguiar, this means that “home is always elsewhere,” the same mix of roots and routes also accounts for Phillips’s identification with multiple Atlantic homes.3 Those identifications are rarely unproblematic, and Gregory Smithers is probably right to suggest that for Phillips “existential questions of home and identity”—the central preoccupation of his writing—“are constantly in flux.”4 Nevertheless , it is through his encounters with an Atlantic World conceived as a fractured whole that Phillips can process and reconnect the “remembered fragments of a former life. Shards of memory.”5 For Phillips the Atlantic The Place of the American South in Atlantic and Other Worlds · 9 functions, much as the Caribbean did for Martinique poet, philosopher, and Faulkner scholar Édouard Glissant, as “a synthesizing space in which opposites can live comfortably together.”6 Phillips’s experiences in Liverpool, Elmina, and Charleston reveal a plethora of concrete historical connections between and symbolic echoes among each of these Atlantic sites enshrined in buildings, monuments, festivals, dances, music, foodways, religion, literature, academia, commerce , and tourism and embedded in shared social memories and individual consciousnesses. As he navigates this mix of the foreign and familiar , Phillips soaks up the commercial, cultural, symbolic, and human relationships that have bound together Africa, Europe, and the Americas since at least the fifteenth century, and exposes an Atlantic past that pours into the personal and collective present. Thus The Atlantic Sound offers a personal insight into the kinds of historical intersections and enduring cultural reverberations that more academic Atlantic studies often promise to explicate. Indeed, one justification for starting this essay with a nod to Phillips’s work is that it shares some of the major preoccupations of Atlantic studies in general, and scholarly efforts to use that framework to investigate the American South in particular. Phillips’s memoirs form part of a long tradition of travel narratives that plot the material, symbolic, and emotional coordinates of the Atlantic World. Alongside the theoretical work of Atlantic historian David Armitage , they also serve as a useful structuring mechanism and interpretive foil for this essay, which examines, in four thematic sections, how scholars from many disciplines have addressed the American South’s relationship to the Atlantic World. The first section deals with struggles to define an Atlantic World geographically, temporally, and substantively and the implications of those struggles for how the concept has been used to examine the histories and cultures of the American South. The second section considers the virtues and limitations of Atlantic perspectives in relation to other transnational moves in southern studies, notably the growing emphasis on a global South. The third section examines how scholars have dealt with the relationships between the South and the United States, indeed with nations and empires more generally, in the context of the growing commitment to transnationalism. The final section commends various particularist or “granular” approaches to the South’s links to the Atlantic World. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that it may seem counterintuitive, even heretical, to 10 · Brian Ward argue for studies of the local, the regional, and the national, or of the experiences of individuals and distinct social groups, or of particular themes in order to maximize the interpretive potential of Atlantic perspectives on the American South. Committed Atlanticists see the Atlantic Ocean not...