Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T05:25:25.971Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Oceans of Longues Durées

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan Gillman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Anyone in literary studies who has looked recently at titles of books, conferences, research clusters, and even syllabi across the field cannot have missed two key words, borrowed from historical studies, that are doing substantial periodizing duty for literary and cultural criticism: one a chronological unit, the longue durée, and the other nominally a geographic unit, the Atlantic world. While it may not be obvious, each of these terms has spatial as well as temporal dimensions that reflect their shared origins with Ferdinand Braudel. Braudel first developed an application of the concept of the longue durée (pioneered by Marc Bloch) during the 1940s when, as a German prisoner of war, he wrote the initial draft of his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; later, in 1958, he published his famous conceptual piece on the longue durée in Annales. Braudel posits that time moves at different speeds, defined as geographic, social, and individual, each corresponding to a different durée (literally, a duration of time). The longue durée (usually translated as “long perspective” or “long term”) is the slowest-moving, operating on the scale of centuries, in which historical changes are humanly imperceptible. Braudel's Mediterranean constructs a geography commensurate with his theory of time, the methodological and conceptual frameworks of his book-its geohistorical plan, its comparative approach, its macrohistorical, multidimensional perspective, shifting from the longue durée to the courte durée of political events, embodied in its tripartite division into structures, conjunctures, and events, each section proposing a different mode of periodization and time scale. Braudel's Mediterranean thus consists spatially of multiple seas unfolding temporally over the longue durée and as such simultaneously provides literary studies with a flexible tool for revisionist periodization and Atlantic studies, both historical and literary, with the powerful model of a region as a unit of geographic and chronological analysis.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 2 , March 2012 , pp. 328 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. London: Verso, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
The Atlantic World Research Network. U of North Carolina, Greensboro, 13 Nov. 2011. Web. 10 Jan. 2012.Google Scholar
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. By Benjamin. Ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, 1968. 69–82. Print.Google Scholar
Braudel, Fernand. “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée.” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 13.4 (1958): 725–53. Print.Google Scholar
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 1949. Rev. 2nd ed. 1966. Trans. Reynolds, Siân. New York: Harper, 1973. Print.Google Scholar
Brier, Peter. “Prolonging the Long Eighteenth Century.” Huntington Library Quarterly 68.4 (2005): 69–98. Print.Google Scholar
Chedgzoy, Kate. Women's Writing in the Atlantic World: Memory, Place, and History, 1550–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diouf, Mamadou, and Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe, eds. Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World: Rituals and Remembrances. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Games, Alison. “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.” American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 741–57. Print.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Harootunian, Harry. “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem.” Boundary 2 32.2 (2005): 23–52. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Horden, Peregrine, and Purcell, Nicholas. “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology.‘” American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 722–40. Print.Google Scholar
Ionescu, Christina, and Schellenberg, Renata, eds. Word and Image in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Rev. 2nd ed. New York: Random, 1963. Print.Google Scholar
James, C. L. R. “Lectures on The Black Jacobins.” Small Axe 8 (2000): 65–112. Print.Google Scholar
James, C. L. R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. Introd. Donald E. Pease. Hanover: UP of New England, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Kaul, Suvir. Poems of a Nation, Anthems of an Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Tribe, Keith. Cambridge: MIT P, 1985. Print.Google Scholar
Lamb, Jonathan. The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century. London: Pickering, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Miller, Christopher L. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milling, Jane, and Lowerre, Kathryn, eds. Performance in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in Theatre, Music, Dance. 5 vols. to date. London: Ashgate, 2006–. Print.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Felicity. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. New York: Verso, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Pease, Donald E. “C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, and the World We Live In.” Introduction. James, Mariners vii–xxxiii.Google Scholar
Potkay, Adam, and Burr, Sandra, eds. Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas. New York: St. Martin's, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Slauter, Eric. “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World.” Early American Literature 43.1 (2008): 153–86. Print.Google Scholar
Sweeney, Fionnghuala. Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thaler, Ingrid. Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions: Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Nalo Hopkinson. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Warren, Kenneth W. What Was African American Literature?Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson, Tim. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor's Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons.” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 523–45. Print.Google Scholar