Taken from a poem by Niyi Osumdare, Atlantic Cross Currents: Transatlantiques' was the theme of the 1993 meeting of the African Literature Association held in Guadeloupe, suggesting the movement of people, languages, cultures and ideas. The papers included in this volume are divided into three clusters, the first focusing on forms of linguistic communication and literary genres, the second on the construction of gender, memory, history and revolt against patriarchy, and the third on political change and nation-building.'

For centuries, African and Irish people have traversed the Atlantic, as slaves, servants, migrants, exiles, political organizers and cultural workers. Their experiences intersected; their cultures influenced one another. These essays explore the connections that have defined the 'Black and Green Atlantic' in culture, politics, race and labour.

Africans' influence in the Atlantic world before 1960 was not confined to their roles as victims in the one-way forced migration of the Atlantic slave trade and their labor on New World plantations. From the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, black people in the divided communities of the four Atlantic continents struggled to overcome geographical and cultural separations and build a broad coalition against discrimination and exploitation. David Northrup offers a collection of primary sources that presents the social, political, and intellectual interactions of black people around the Atlantic in their quests for advancement, liberation, and emancipation. His thoughtful introduction explores the themes woven through the history of the black Atlantic, in particular black people's search for security and self-fulfillment and their effort to find their place in a common humanity. Document headnotes, a chronology of key events, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography offer additional pedagogical support.

First presented at the conference 'Intercontinental Cross-Currents: Women's (Net-)Works across Europe and the Americas (1789-1939)' in Wittenberg, Germany, in December 2013, the papers assembled in this volume trace nineteenth-century women's networks inside and outside historical movements and literary texts, in diverse genres, at various historical moments, and from different vantage points. Considered together, the contributions attest to the potential of a woman-centered approach to transatlantic historiographical, cultural, and literary studies. Very much like the people, texts, and objects they examine, they are transatlantic in scope and perspective. Truly inspired by the idea and concept of the Atlantic Crosscurrents, these essays confirm and emphasize interdisciplinarity and methodological variety in (trans-)Atlantic studies.

This middle-grade historical novel follows three young girls living very different lives who are connected by one bottle that makes two journeys across the ocean. It's 1854 and eleven-year-old Bones is a slave on a Virginia plantation. When she finds her name in the slave-record book, she rips it out, rolls it up, and sets it free, corked inside a bottle alongside the carved peach pit heart her long-lost father made for her. Across the Atlantic on the Isle of Wight, motherless Lady Bess Kent and her sister discover Bones's bottle half-buried on the beach. Leaving Bones's name where it began and keeping the peach pit heart for herself, Bess hides her mother's pearl-encrusted cross necklace in the bottles so her scheming stepmother, Elsie, can't sell it off like she's done with other family heirlooms. When Harry, a local stonemason's son, takes the fall for Elsie's thefts, Bess works with her seafaring friend, Chap, to help him escape. She gives the bottle to Harry and tells him to sell the cross. Back across the Atlantic in Boston, Mary Margaret Casey and her father are at the docks when Mary Margaret spies something shiny. Her father fishes it out of the water, and they use the cross to pay for a much needed doctor's visit for Mary Margaret's ailing sister. As Bess did, Mary Margaret leaves Bones's name where it belongs. An epilogue returns briefly to each girl, completing the circle of the three unexpectedly interconnected lives.