Not only were more African slaves transported to South America than to North, but overlapping imperialisms and shared resistance to them have linked Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean for over five centuries. Yet despite the rise in transatlantic, oceanic, hemispheric, and regional studies, and even the growing interest in South-South connections, the South Atlantic has not yet emerged as a site that captures the attention it deserves. The Global South Atlantic traces literary exchanges and interlaced networks of communication and investment—financial, political, socio-cultural, libidinal—across and around the southern ocean. Bringing together scholars working in a range of languages, from Spanish to Arabic, the book shows the range of ways people, governments, political movements, social imaginaries, cultural artefacts, goods, and markets cross the South Atlantic, or sometimes fail to cross. As a region made up of multiple intersecting regions, and as a vision made up of complementary and competing visions, the South Atlantic can only be understood comparatively. Exploring the Atlantic as an effect of structures of power and knowledge that issue from the Global South as much as from Europe and North America, The Global South Atlantic helps to rebalance global literary studies by making visible a multi-textured South Atlantic system that is neither singular nor stable.

The book presents results of recent projects in oceanography and marine geosciences (e.g. WOCE, JGOFS, PAGES, ODP) regarding present and past circulation in the South Atlantic. The objective of the book is to integrate results from both oceanographic and geological studies. As the connecting link between the Antarctic and the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic plays a crucial role with regard to the heat budget of the North Atlantic and to the biogeochemical budget of the global ocean. New results from studies of meridional water mass and heat transports are presented. The central theme of geological investigations is the reconstruction of current and productivity systems in the South Atlantic during the late Quaternary.

Everyone working in a problem as complex as continental drift, must at some time have feit the need for an objective data summary in fields other than his own. It is a scientific dilemma that, aIthough there is evident need for researchers with competence in many fields (the classical natural scientist), the time in volved in acquiring such broad experience is so great as to ren der the task largely impossible. The alternative seems to be the team approach, and we have espoused it in tbis volume. Editors and contributors alike have tried in this book to keep the accent upon factual information and to reduce interpretation to a minimum. Interpretation there must be, however, since without it science is but an inteHectual pastime comparable to pbilately. The librarian's need to classify results in the appearance of our names upon the spine oftbis volume, however, we would like to make it clear that the book has been a truly cooperative effort and could not have succeeded but for the active help of the individual contributors, whose assistance seldom was re stricted to their chapters. Special thanks must be given to our South American coHeagues, for the tolerance with which they viewed out editorial attempts, and to Dr. E. Machens, for his careful review of the translation of his manu script. We wish also to acknowledge the help of Dr. C. W.