Transatlantic Women’s Networks

Many of these flows and relationships are less obvious than they may seem. While “to a considerable degree, French, Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonization of the Atlantic, along with the Africa slave trade that accompanied it, constructed distinctive and only partially overlapping Atlantics” (Gabaccia 2004, 6), it should also be acknowledged that research structures favor this image of distinctiveness due to disciplinary divisions that align with national and linguistic boundaries. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Benjamin Breen point out, although the Atlantic lens has frequently been employed to study patterns of circulation, movement, and exchange, research on the different European imperial powers often “follows separate trajectories, with the unhappy result that twenty-first-century scholars sometimes fail to notice influences that would have been obvious to early modern individuals” (2013, 597). However, the problematic nature of disciplinary divisions is not limited to a lack of sensitivity to influences between the different imperial Atlantic “worlds.” What often remains obscured in this research on the Atlantic are the roles of interior regions of America and Africa, their indigenous populations, and trade and travel trajectories that transcend the zones of influence of European powers and their transatlantic routes.

Indeed, as David Armitage points out, scholarship on the Atlantic was, for many years, “racially, if not necessarily ethnically, homogeneous” (2001, 479). Acknowledging the longstanding selectivity of the field of Atlantic Studies, scholars have come to distinguish between “the ‘white’ (European or Anglo-American empire building and cultural expansion ‘from above’), ‘Black’ (African and diasporic ‘from below’) and ‘red’ (rebellious, egalitarian and proletarian, ‘from below’) Atlantics” (Gabaccia 2004, 2). All these Atlantics and the research on them have different genealogies. The “White” has come to stand for colonial history from the perspective of the European empires, particularly between roughly 1500 and 1800, as well as mappings of intellectual exchange within the North Atlantic and the formation of political alliances, especially the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While it has, by now, lost its normative status, the “White” Atlantic should, therefore, not be misunderstood as a denominator for an outdated practice of historical research, but rather as a still vital field of study and a set of research perspectives among many.

Although he was hardly the first to develop the concept, the “Black Atlantic” continues to be associated with Paul Gilroy’s seminal text (2002 [1993]). What research on the “Black Atlantic” shares is a focus on cultural and social formations associated with the diasporization of Africans and the legacies of histories of enslavement and colonialism. Africa, the contributions of Black intellectuals, and the relational networks between the African, American, and European continents are brought to the map of research here. Accordingly, studies seek to retrace and understand resistance to enslavement, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist movements while frequently politically informed and decidedly transnational in scope. Yet, many scholars have noticed a certain heteronormative and Anglophone bias in some Black Atlantic scholarship, including Gilroy’s work, and have emphasized the need to revisit and “queer” the archive to address more explicitly intersections of race with sexuality and other geographic and linguistic settings (Phiri 2023).

The conceptual and genealogical contours of the “red/Red Atlantic” are less agreed upon. While Armitage argues that its origins reach “back to the cosmopolitanism of Marx” (2002, 15), Robert Stam and Ella Shohat suggest seeing the phrase as analogous to the “Black Atlantic” in calling attention to “the dispossession of indigenous peoples by Europeans” (2014, 66). According to the authors, “[t]he settler colonialism that dispossessed the ‘Red’ and the racial slavery that exploited the ‘Black’” should indeed be conceived as “the twin machines of racial supremacy” (Stam and Shohat 2014, 66). Thus, while Stam and Shohat mobilize Red as a “trope of color” to inquire into complex historical dynamics of coloniality and race in the context of indigenous populations, others rather understand it as “describ[ing] the formation of a multinational, multi-ethnic, multicultural working class in the English Atlantic world” (Armitage 2002, 15).

Adding yet another layer of complexity, ideas of the Atlantic have been structured around notions of temporality. This is most obvious in a concept like “Atlantic modernity,” which names the idea of a disruptive historical force associated with Columbus and the cross-Atlantic movements of people, goods, and ideas that followed it. Within this perspective, modernity is essentially understood “as meaningfully Atlantic in derivation” (Rezek 2014, 791). The implications of this assumption are wide-reaching since, as Joseph Rezek notes, it means that all phenomena associated with modernity are understood as outcomes of Atlantic history, encompassing “the histories of capitalism, slavery, empire, nationalism, Enlightenment, and revolution; the consolidation of modern phenomena such as credit, race, gender, individual rights, citizenship, and bourgeois subjectivity”; as well as “the emergence of modern aesthetic categories; and the contours of utopian resistance to modernity’s hegemony” (2014, 792).

In a more analytical vein, Donna Gabbacia (2004) suggests a trifold temporal taxonomy. Accordingly, the Atlantic of the period of early European exploration and colonization between the fifteenth century and roughly 1800 can be distinguished from both the Atlantic of early industrialization and mass migration in the nineteenth century and the Atlantic of the twentieth century, characterized by the United States’ economic and imperial power on a global scale. While these temporal frames seem useful for situating the Atlantic historically, Gabaccia is aware that they are not incontestable. Thinking about the Atlantic of the twentieth century in terms of U.S. hegemony, for example, marginalizes (once more) South Atlantic geographies, phenomena, and relational networks.

Rather than providing any transhistorical understanding of the Atlantic or coming up with an ultimate analytical paradigm, the present volume draws on the Atlantic as a lens to examine specific relational networks that unfold across North and South America, Africa, and Europe. Our aim is not to present the Atlantic as the ultimate paradigm for modernity and contemporary culture but to shed light on specific transatlantic constellations. Even if the “boom times” of transatlantic cultural and literary studies are, as Rezek suggests, already over, transatlantic perspectives still provide fruitful accounts of literary and cultural phenomena as a critical stance toward institutionalized academic fields. Following Cecilia Enjunto-Rangel et al.’s suggestion, we understand the transatlantic “not so much [as] a constituted field as an epistemic proposition to re-evaluate the cultural histories of the Atlantic,” which allows us to challenge national and essentialist frames and narratives and “to privilege a critical, transnational, and comparativist reconstruction of Atlantic archives” (2019, 7).

However, the analysis of these archives confronts us with complex and uneven interactions. Deeply shaped by imperial violence, colonial exploitation, enslavement, and the trade of enslaved people, archives have often been dominated by (White) male figures and organized around hegemonic norms of nationality, kinship, and power. However, from politics and gender to literary and cultural criticism, women have long shaped transatlantic (hi)stories in profound ways, advancing circuits of exchange that transcend more traditional divisions. Arts, literature, translation, epistolary correspondence, and criticism have proved to be vital avenues for women to foster transnational dialogues and create enduring circuits of knowledge sharing, activism, and collaboration, as well as cultural, political, and affection-based cooperation among countries and traditions. We certainly do not wish to suggest that identifying as a woman is somehow synonymous with political progressiveness; nor do we want to essentialize what being a “woman” means. The contributors to this volume approach gender and sexuality in different ways and the collection embraces this multiplicity.

Multiplicity also inspires our approach to another keyword of this volume: “networks.” Rather than taking the Atlantic as homogenous, the contributors to this volume analyze various transatlantic circuits of relationality and exchange. In its most basic definition, a network can be described as “a set of connections that link [discrete] elements” (Newman et al. apud Levine 2015, 113–114), which can take quite different forms. Particularly in this book, the authors look at interpersonal, intertextual, material, and imaginative networks. They analyze patterns, relationships, and contacts that unfold across time and space, and link different persons, texts, institutions, places, and trajectories. Following Caroline Levine, we contend that “[t]hough they are not self-enclosed totalities, networks have structural properties that can be analyzed formally. And attention to the [various] patterns governing networks will allow us to think in newly rigorous ways about political power and social experience” (2015, 113).

Networks are neither inherently emancipatory nor repressive. They can enforce exclusion and inequality but also foster connections and promote change. As Arjun Appadurai argues in “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” (1990), networks can have transformative power and enable communities to transcend national boundaries, fostering solidarity and co-creating new literacies and cultural connections. We are particularly interested in unearthing such transformative potentialities of networks among women in different transatlantic constellations. How do they coexist, struggle with, or contest other more repressive networks and social formations? How do they promote dynamic exchanges that reshape identities, cultural practices, and power dynamics?

Transatlantic Women’s Networks: Cultural Engagements from the 19th Century to the Present invites readers to critically consider these flows’ potential, vibrancy, and complexity, positioning them as indispensable for the cultural and social fabric of the Atlantic world. The volume emerges from a lively international conference that took place at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, in 2023. Building on conceptual frameworks such as Rita Felski’s in The Gender of Modernity (1995), which centers on women’s lived experiences to challenge conventional patriarchal theories of modernity, and Susan Stanford Friedman’s call for a feminist geopolitical literacy, a transnational and heterogeneous type of feminism that underscores mobility and encounters as transformative forces in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998), the essays in this collection shed light on how women have navigated, reshaped, and created alternative spaces of intellectual and cultural exchange. These networks not only resisted dominant patriarchal and nationalist narratives but also became sites of profound creativity, innovation, networking, and conviviality. They likewise facilitated new ways of thinking, being, and connecting that continue to challenge how we understand transnational history and culture.

By examining these networks through a lens of collaboration and exchange, this book also expands on scholarly conversations more recently carried out by Diana Brydon and Alice Staveley in The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2020 (2024). Their work highlights women’s central role in translation, publishing, and correspondence, and how their work enabled transnational flows of ideas and forged connections across linguistic, cultural, and political divides. This collection intends to extend the scope of Brydon and Staveley’s initiative of recovery by asking deeper questions: How have historically transcontinental connections and exchanges between feminist thinkers influenced current perspectives on gender, ethnicity, race, and class? What brought women together as builders of communities and creators of knowledge? What role do transatlantic networks play in grassroots activism and alternative forms of resistance and circulation? How do these transatlantic networks illuminate geographic, temporal, cultural, and spiritual experiences? What is the political impact of the host of vibrant, emerging peripherical actors (homosexual women, transgender women, etc.) in contemporary transatlantic networks, on and offline? And what can we learn from their successes and limitations about the possibilities of solidarity and connection across borders?