TRANSATLANTIC CURRENTS AND CIRCULATION:THE MUTUAL INVENTION OF AMERICA AND EUROPE

Panel Chair:

Boris Vejdovsky (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland)

Boris.Vejdovsky@unil.ch

According to European legends, a man called (in English) Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic and discovered America. In 1552, Francisco López de Gómara called the this "The greatest event in world history excepting the birth and death of Christ," while five hundred years down the line The American Library Association would say that "Columbus's voyage to America began a legacy of European piracy, brutality, slave trading, murder, disease, conquest and ethnocide..." (1990). For Euro-centric consciousness (on both sides of the Atlantic) the colonization of America by European powers from the early Renaissance onward has often been perceived as a one-way movement from Europe to America whereby Europe imposed its culture on the other side of the Atlantic. This panel will take its cue from the metaphors and the material realities of Transatlantic travel to explore what Walter Mignolo has called the "darker side of the Renaissance." It will also examine productive and inaugural moments of movements that would gradually lead to the definition of what can be called American and European identities and their contemporaneous and deferred influence on each other.

This panel further proposes to examine the ways in which cultural, linguistic, political, or religious movements across the Atlantic need to be read in terms of circulation, crossing, merging, and blending of currents that affect its shores on both sides. Not unlike the Gulf Stream that determines much of the weather in Europe, or the Trade Winds that influence the world climate and have defined much of has become "America," the cultural currents that circulate in the Atlantic have impinged on Europe's culture and Europe's perception of itself and identity. Likewise, centers of low and high cultural, economic and religious pressure have caused circulation across the Atlantic, which has contributed to defining the world of the Americas. So, over centuries, goods, words, habits of America have shaped Europe; on the other hand, many a European concept and practice -- economics,, literature, religion, to name a few -- have been exported from, and re-imported back to, Europe via America. In the end, such concepts as "democracy" or "empire" whose etymologies indicate their deep Greek and Latin roots, can only be understood today as having traveled to America, and they bear witness to the need to consider the Transatlantic currents that have been shaping our world.

Suggested   topics:

- Transatlantic travel and the literary inventions of the "New World" in the Renaissance and beyond

- The Imaginary and political impact of ocean metaphors from Columbus's "33"-day crossing, to the Puritan desert, the "Middle Passage," and more

- The metaphorical exploration of the newly-encountered lands and its impact on the European literary imagination

- The mutual impact of American and European political formations

- America and Europe and the question of globalization

- What's an American?/What's a European? -- An ocean of questions

- European and American "hybrids" from Cabeza de Vaca to Caliban and Natty Bumpo, and beyond

- The formation of "American" literature and the question of the European and American canons

- Linguistic and semantic changes in the European and American vocabularies

- Impact of the American world on European literatures and cultures; or, when America writes back

- Mutual impact of the New and Old World economies on each other; or, or capital, capitalism and their others

- Transatlantic transfers of technology from the hammock to baldachin bed, and from print to the World Wide Web

- The mutual influence of European and American Studies on each other.