The Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix

In the context of such a rich production of various kinds of work increasingly presented under the labels of Atlantic history or Atlantic studies, it is appropriate that we consider the gathering significance not only of its scholarly momentum and emerging set of practices, but also of its rising institutional affirmation as a new disciplinary paradigm. Over the last few decades, publishers, journal editors, academic scholars, and website masters have resorted to the seemingly natural expedient of early modern Atlantic maps when seeking to promote or identify their efforts as immediately relevant to the Atlantic world. The very process of mapping this world provides us with important visual evidence of a political, cultural, scientific, and ecological nature. One could even argue that early sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world maps provide us with variations in the primal scene of Atlantic studies as an identifiable epistemological domain and that whatever comes after must necessarily return to the map text as the authoritative site and central apparatus (dispositif, Foucault would say) of the Atlantic paradigm's vis et origo (force and origin) (Foucault, Dits 299–300).1 As scenes of inquiry, any number of these maps—say, a Juan de la Cosa, a Martin Waldseemuller, or a Giacomo Gastaldi—have the unique emblematic virtue of saving one from having to do a lot of explaining. Indeed, their synoptic intention is to present us with a coup d'oeil of a new oceanic order. In a single stroke, the Cantino planisphere of 1502 exemplifies one of the earliest surviving attempts to represent the mise-en-forme of the Atlantic world.2 I will argue that such maps, precisely because of their often inflamed political perspective and tradition-bound iconography, also help us to characterize the epistemological environment and internal strategies of what, over the last 15–20 years, has developed into a new Atlantic paideia. But what does that mean?