In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central issues in the study of similar case studies from South Africa and England to demonstrate how Chinese Atlantic seascapes frame globalization as we experience it today. Frequently focusing on art that interacts directly with the sites in which it is located, Metzger explores how Chinese migrant laborers and entrepreneurs did the same to shape—both physically and culturally—the new spaces in which they found themselves. In this manner, Metzger encourages us to see how artistic imagination and practice interact with migration to produce a new way of framing the global.

In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central issues in the study of similar case studies from South Africa and England to demonstrate how Chinese Atlantic seascapes frame globalization as we experience it today. Frequently focusing on art that interacts directly with the sites in which it is located, Metzger explores how Chinese migrant laborers and entrepreneurs did the same to shape—both physically and culturally—the new spaces in which they found themselves. In this manner, Metzger encourages us to see how artistic imagination and practice interact with migration to produce a new way of framing the global.

Historically, the Atlantic Ocean has served to define the relationship between the so-called worlds of the 'Old' and the 'New'. A geographical divide between continents, it is also no less a historical space across which peoples have travelled, sharing ideas and cultural practices, a site of encounter and exchange that has shaped the lives of communities and nations across the globe. This book maps this productive web of multi-layered connections, not just in terms of military, migratory, economic and commercial actions and processes, but also of shifting lines of translation that have mobilised ideas, fomented the exchange of experiences and opened up channels of communication. The Atlantic is considered here a global translation zone that has been created through a myriad of crossings, physical and conceptual, and historically shaped through the reciprocal influences between the different communities situated around and beyond its shores. In the final analysis, the book explores the Atlantic as a zone of created relation, characterised by the interaction between processes of translation, mobility and, in the best of cases, of hospitality; and most importantly, as a space no longer defined by economic and military power but by the multiplicity of identities forged in its ambit. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of translation studies, literature, history, human geography, politics, sociology, and cultural studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Atlantic Studies.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a pivotal moment deeply impacting the post-World War II order, with American nuclear might standing sentinel for the preservation of the liberal democratic values of the trans-Atlantic community. The end of the ideological struggle freed the forces shaping the postmodern world. The end of the security trade-off, American nuclear protection against critical but loyal European support, meant that a new partnership based on equality, mutual respect, and legitimate self-interest was needed and that stability and peace on the Eurasian landmass was the overriding goal. Neither the United States nor Europe, the two constituent communities of the Western world, grasped the opportunity to bring about the needed change. Both remained prisoners of their past instead of innovators of the common future. American exceptionalism and Russophobia was the maze that entrapped the first; introvert preoccupation and divisiveness of purpose lamed the other. The book traces the formative forces of the geopolitical environment during the Cold War and the decades beyond and places these in the context of the emerging postmodern world order: where regional and global project-driven functional cooperation is gradually replacing the Westphalian state, where the provision of physical security and the material well-being for the individual replaces ideology as the driving force for political action, and where the rule of law prevails over the rule of power. The penultimate section enumerates some of the most significant issues facing the trans-Atlantic partnership and formulates policy suggestions on how to deal with them. Acknowledging the significant differences within the partnership, the two main themes are: first, that these differences are more tactical than fundamental and can and must be overcome; and second, that the partnership is essential for the preservation of the values and beliefs of Western civilization.

In the waning decades of British colonial slavery, the Atlantic Ocean became a corridor for ethical advocacy to call attention to the condition of slaves, ex-slaves and North American Natives. A two-way flow of activists, orators, articles, pamphlets and opinions transformed the Atlantic into an effective trans-national network. This book asks how the Atlantic network created, shared and exploited individual texts in the manufacture of valuable advocacy products.