Kerry Bystrom, Joseph R. Slaughter, eds. The Global South Atlantic.

New York:
Fordham University Press, 2017. 345 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8232-7788-9.

Reviewed by Andrew J. Kettler (University of California, Los Angeles)

Published on H-Atlantic (December, 2019)
Commissioned by Bryan Rindfleisch (Marquette University)

Empowering and Emplacing the Global South Atlantic: Overcoming North Atlantic Hegemony through
Interdisciplinary, Postcolonial, and Multilingual Scholarship

Joseph Slaughter and Kerry Bystrom’s The Global not be overlooked due to the challenges provided by
South Atlantic starts with a reading of the Atlantic Char- the authors to out-of-date standards of thinking on peri-
ter (1941) as another document within a long line of po- odization, spatialization, disciplinary fields, and archival
litical totems that jettisoned the role of the South Atlantic documentation within the academic milieu of Atlantic
from modern world history. By further consolidating studies. Through collecting new essays and a few pub-
North Atlantic hegemony, the Atlantic Charter was ini- lished pieces, The Global South Atlantic reframes Atlantic
tially critiqued as anticolonial from leaders like Mahatma studies by asserting multiplicity and assemblages over
Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Regardless of these assess- homogenization and hegemonies. Attempting to offer
ments, which were articulated by postcolonial forces to many of these fresh interpretations for Atlantic studies,
even greater emphasis at Bandung in 1955, the Atlantic the edition is separated into three sections that focus
Charter became the model for NATO and the basis for ne- upon colonialism and slavery, decolonization and moder-
oliberal governance during the Cold War. Starting with nity, and contemporary aesthetics.
postcolonial discursive resistance to the Atlantic Char-
ter, deemed a triumph of modern transnational liberal- The first chapter, from Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, pro-
vides analysis of the slave trade in the Global South At-
ism, sets this edition at the crossroads of an important
lantic. Introduced with a relatively misleading histori-
current debate, which asserts a multivalent hegemony of
capitalism, whiteness, and nationalism consistently sup- ographical assertion that little work has been done on
presses knowledges from spaces and peoples deemed dis- African cultural impacts in the Americas, especially con-
tant from the North Atlantic. fusing considering recent efforts from Roquinaldo Fer-
reira, James Sweet, and Walter Hawthorne, the chapter
As part of this revisionist accounting, the edition rights itself through a more standard reading of Chris-
also provides a critical assessment of other disciplines tian arguments for the slave trade during the sixteenth
like area studies that emerged out of this hegemonic century, focusing on colonial privileges within Romanus
apparatus. The Global South Atlantic works to decolo- Pontifex. These discussions move into a summary of le-
nize scholars’ concentration on Westphalian, whiggish, gal arguments for slavery in the seventeenth century
positivist, and North Atlantic knowledges to shift atten- through the role of trades allowed through the asiento.
tion to the integrated and fluid systems of the broader Centralizing Portugal within the early South Atlantic,
Atlantic littoral. This is cutting-edge interdisciplinary, the chapter illustrates how contests between the Dutch
multilingual, and theoretical scholarship, which should and Portuguese defined the contours of the early Atlantic

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world, culminating in the early seventeenth century as consistent betrayal, Frydman also looks at the narrative
the Portuguese seized control of seaports in both Brazil of Omar ibn Sa’id to show how Orientalist tropes differed
and Angola.[1] through their ability to displace certain slave narratives
from public spheres that increasingly accepted only nar-
Jaime Hanneken provides the second chapter, mov- ratives of Christian redemption for wide-ranging publi-
ing the chronology quickly forward to discuss the social cation.
constructions of race in the nineteenth century through
a reading of the Saint-Simonian movement toward mys- The second section begins with an essay from Isabel
tical socialism. Reading the life of Prosper Enfantin, a Hofmeyr, which reads the history of the Antarctic into
devotee of the Saint Simonian movement of the 1830s, the Atlantic world by focusing on the history of voyages
the chapter engages discursive links between the Suez around the Cape of Good Hope as an erroneous cultural
and Panama through beliefs regarding a utopian and ge- boundary between western Europe and the Global North
ographical network of spiritual change. Discussions of to the othered spaces of the Global South. Rather, this es-
technological transformation and space-time compres- say portrays the environmental torments of the Cape as a
sion, to arrive through railroads and tighter global links move from South to South. The chapter looks specifically
of capital, were often asserted by Saint Simonians as pos- at the works of Yvette Christiansë, a poet who articulates
itives that would introduce new hierarchies of labor and a common Global South, especially through readings of
reproduction. St. Helena as an unbounded space linking many Souths
rather than separating West from East. The chapter then
Portrayed through the works of Michel Chevalier, the reads a history of the Scramble for Antarctica, currently
movement asserted that certain bodies were meant for
legalized through the Antarctic Treaty System of 1959, by
particular labor. As Hanneken shows, many Latin Amer-
focusing upon H. Rider Haggard’s novel Mary of Marion
icans took hold of these ideologies, marking race through Isle (1929) as an imperial romance of snow and whiteness
task orientations frequently between 1830 and 1930. In- on the colonial frontier. Interpreting Mojisola Adebayo’s
dustrial influences entangled with these discourses on play Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (1992), the
race and nation, whereby a notion of a Latin race of peo- chapter ends with an assertion of claims to Antarctica as
ples emerging during this time which was not specifically
something beyond simple political determinations.
based upon forms of scientific racism but was reliant on
religion, nationalism, and the prominence of the Latin The essential fifth chapter, from Anne Garland
language. Within the writings of José María Samper in Mahler, provides new narratives of grassroots resistance
New Granada and Jules de France in Panama, Hanneken to global capitalism across the Global South Atlantic.
explores how French and Latin American policymakers The essay offers how a new idea of power unmoored
tied together projects in North Africa and Latin Amer- from the nation-state emerged within the Global South,
ica through instrumentalizing the idea that race and la- which has become a specific, geographically oriented
bor were linked within natural hierarchies, which is akin term also denoting a sense of solidarity and resistance to
to the connection between skin color and commodities economic power in the Global North. Embodied initially
in Jonathan Robins’s Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic: in the Tricontinental of 1966 (Organization of Solidarity
Britain, Africa, and America, 1900-1920 (2016).[2] with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, or
OSPAAAL), this idea of such a transnational resistance
Jason Frydman’s chapter centers Islamic slave narra- movement transcended the declarations of Bandung that
tives within the Atlantic world. Muslim slave narratives,
were still trapped within forms of nation-state resistance.
for Frydman, should serve not as an addition to this field
The Tricontinental offers a Global South moving to a
but as a separate arena for a literature that includes dif- more fluid form of resistance beyond the nation-state,
ferent rhetorical codes and narratives structures. Cen- based on metonymic forms of blackness as a transna-
tralizing slave narratives out of Senegambia, the chapter tional global category of resistance to the hegemony of
defines the chosen writers as agents of both historical re- whiteness.
bellion and current archival resistance. Weaving Islam
not as other, but as a central part of the diasporic expe- Mahler consequently offers a chapter that reads
rience, Frydman reads the narrative of Ayuba Suleiman change within subaltern movements through Richard
Diallo in Maryland of the 1730s through ideas of power Wright’s diary from Bandung, which continued to es-
and literacy. Attempting to overcome an English Orien- sentialize color categories through antinationalist ide-
talism of the time, based upon Scheherazade and tropes of ologies. Tricontinental pursuits forced a later attempt

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beyond the nation, taking on Frantz Fanon’s call for history to literature, the edited collection exemplifies
racial synthesis as a form of resistance to a broader idea how disciplinary boundaries are themselves often part of
of power that exists beyond the empire. These rebel- North Atlantic academic hegemony. The eighth chapter,
lious ideals focused not so much on uniting blackness from Christina Civantos, looks at different discourses of
as an othered universal category but wedding white- Orientalism within Global South Atlantic literatures, fo-
ness more ardently to united categories of the adversary. cusing on translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who
Mahler demonstrates how this more fluid resistance can frequently used Arab characters within South American
better exemplify contemporary global resistance move- settings. Civantos provides a comparative reading of the
ments through readings of Michael Hardt and Antonio novelist’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) against the
Negri, whose Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004) provide work of Elias Khoury in The Collection of Secrets (1994)
similarly linked transnational underclasses that emerged to portray complications regarding South-South intellec-
from racial resistances often formed against remnants of tual linkages. These difficulties arise often within Latin
the nation-state. American literature that frequently retains Orientalism
dating as far back as Miguel Cervantes. A more caution-
The second section continues with an essay that ary essay than the rest of the collection, Civantos looks
searches the works of Mark Behr. The piece, from at possible hazards through understanding literary devel-
Bystrom, introduces Behr through his troubled past, as opment within a South-South contact zone as part of a
the author has admitted to working as a spy for the larger debate from Gayatri Spivak, Franco Moretti, and
apartheid government while at college in South Africa.
Emily Apter on the meanings of world literature.
The author’s well-regarded The Smell of Apples (1993,
1995) consequently confronted the legacy of apartheid The ninth chapter, from Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra,
through two narratives, one set within South Africa of looks at similarities and differences regarding novels fea-
the 1970s and one set during the late 1980s in Chile. Re- turing dictators from the Global South Atlantic. Read-
thinking the politics of South Africa in the context of the ing spiritual ideas of resistance, the essay explores imag-
Global South Atlantic and not only within a sphere of re- inings about dictators, whereby departures from reality
sistance to empire, racism, and the nation-state, Bystrom emerge within novels about different political spaces of
sees Behr’s use of Chile as a potent metaphor for South the Global South Atlantic. Through ideas of constella-
African oppression. Altogether, the essay exemplifies tion, the chapter resists magical realism as a dominant
links between broader Global Souths, as with attempts and possibly exclusionary field for postcolonial literary
at a South Atlantic Treaty Organization (SATO) during study. Looking specifically at Labou Tansi’s Life and a
the 1980s, through similar narratives of resistance to the Half (2011) as science fiction with a polymodality that is
dirty war of modern neoliberal capitalism. different from magical realism, Armillas-Tiseyra shows
how works about dictatorships, like Márquez’s The Au-
Oscar Hemer continues with his particular interpre-
tumn of the Patriarch (1975), Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the
tation of the Falklands War. The Falklands (Malvinas), Supreme (1974), Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the
often considered the space of the last colonial war, is Vote of the Wild Animals (1998), or Ngg wa Thiong’o’a
read opposingly by Hemer as the first major conflict Wizard of the Crow (2006) are frequently meant to dis-
over Antarctica. The essay focuses much on violence orient and estrange the reader and to introduce different
in Argentina, while reconsidering the Falklands within
considerations of power, spiritualism, and resistance.
a Global South Atlantic narrative of transnational resis-
tance. Hemer looks at how the war was imagined within Lanie Millar follows with the first piece of section 3,
literature to meet different ends. Most British works up offering a reading of texts regarding Cuban participation
to this point focus on the nation-state and define Ar- in the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002). The essay looks
gentina as needing to be freed from fascist rule. Instead, at the legacy of South-South solidarities through the An-
most Argentinian works read the incident as part of a na- golan film The Hero (2004) and the Cuban film Kangamba
tional trauma of colonial occupation and the continuing (2008). For Millar, Kangamba uses documentary style to
violence of dictatorship. However, as Hemer shows, link- highlight the importance of early Cuban revolutionary
ing the Global South Atlantic in these narratives can fur- impetus in Angola by focusing on a seven-day battle in-
ther transnational resistance to world powers that gaze volving Cuban forces in 1983. The Hero looks at different
upon the resources of Antarctica with wanton eyes. legacies of the Cuban involvement after the war regard-
ing populations of orphans, prostitutes, and the violence
Moving effortlessly within the South Atlantic from concerning the lack of material change that came with

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what was deemed the progress of independence. Like Waïl Hassan provides the final chapter, looking
Civantos and the editors of the edition, Millar does not again at tensions within discourses involving Oriental-
judge South-South solidarity solely through narratives of ism across South-South spaces, especially in representa-
romantic resistance. tions of Morocco and Islam in O Clone (2001-02), a Brazil-
ian telenovela. Therein, Morocco existed as both an oth-
Luís Madureira continues with a close reading of ered space in the wake of 9/11 and anti-Islamic tendencies
Cape Verde in Germano Almeida’s Eva (2006). Madureira
rising in the West, and a possible space for applying nar-
uses close-reading methods to concentrate on replicabil-
ratives of South-South solidarity. The telenovela specifi-
ity, desire, and the event. Read here as a series of per- cally offered a self-critical narrative that did not assert a
formances of identity for Cape Verdeans within a Global Western form of Orientalism but exposed a South-South
South Atlantic, Eva offers a critique of a particular idea brand of Orientalism that can be used to reveal more anx-
of an othered racial identity as singularly oppressed. The ieties and tensions within productive forms of aesthetic
central story is about a Portuguese woman, Eva, in Cape
resistance across the Atlantic world.
Verde, and the numerous men discussing her place in the
colonial and postcolonial world metaphorically through The essays in the edition follow lengthier intellectual
desire and control over her body. These narratives focus traditions from W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James to
on the debates over whether Cape Verde belongs within expose how the fluid drifts within Atlantic spaces can be
discussions of a colonial world of perceived racelessness used to reconceptualize a transgressive language for the
akin to Cuban and Brazilian nationalist narratives. Eva Atlantic world that can better encapsulate the transna-
offers a comment on the idea that Cape Verde is not part tional forces of the region within historical study and as
of this colonial world by tying Cape Verde more closely part of the contemporary world.[3] Still relevant and rel-
to Portugal through complex and gendered metaphors of atively recent historiography on similar topics include
rape and domination. editions on critical theory and historical memory from
Paul Gilroy, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, David Scott, Diana
The penultimate chapter, from Maja Horn, looks at Taylor, and Marisa Fuentes.[4]
recent anti-Haitian legalism in the Dominican Republic.
Since the rule of Rafael Trujillo, many scholars have been Whereas North Atlantic academies assert disciplines,
revising narratives that overemphasize Dominicans’ ha- archival rigor, canonization, and periodization as essen-
tred of Haitians. More modern discussions of this prob- tial for historical study within the humanities, there are
lematic tension regarding connections between the Do- many aspects of such rigid definitions that damage alter-
minican Republic and Haiti can be read through a com- native and productive spheres of Atlantic studies that use
bined black diasporic experience on South-South tra- the languages of the other to critique hegemonic West-
jectories, rather than as inherently divergent. Specifi- ern records. The Global South Atlantic is an important
cally searching the performance piece and art installation work because this edition exemplifies active scholarship
Sugar/Azúcal: A Sweet Sweet Tale of Terror (2003), Horn that can move beyond overstressed disciplinary catego-
exposes how the Global North still affects both sides of rizations, the use of only canonized texts, and false pe-
the island, and the need for South-South alliances should riodization. Finding interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and
become more important than the Dominican Republic multilingual fields for Atlantic studies provides impor-
factions that still assert genealogical and political links tant antitheses to challenge the consistent drudgery of
to the colonizer rather than colonized. the dominant Western narrative of progressive liberalism
and irreversible totems like the Atlantic Charter.

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Citation: Andrew J. Kettler. Review of Bystrom, Kerry; Slaughter, Joseph R., eds., The Global South Atlantic. H-
Atlantic, H-Net Reviews. December, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54678

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