Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World
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Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World

John Corrigan, John Corrigan

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Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World

John Corrigan, John Corrigan

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An interdisciplinary exploration of the influence of physical space in the study of religion

While the concept of an Atlantic world has been central to the work of historians for decades, the full implications of that spatial setting for the lives of religious people have received far less attention. In Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World, John Corrigan brings together research from geographers, anthropologists, literature scholars, historians, and religious studies specialists to explore some of the possibilities for and benefits of taking physical space more seriously in the study of religion.

Focusing on four domains that most readily reflect the importance of Atlantic world spaces for the shape and practice of religion (texts, design, distance, and civics), these essays explore subjects as varied as the siting of churches on the Peruvian Camino Real, the evolution of Hispanic cathedrals, Methodist identity in nineteenth-century Canada, and Lutherans in early eighteenth-century America. Such essays illustrate both how the organization of space was driven by religious interests and how religion adapted to spatial ordering and reordering initiated by other cultural authorities.

The case studies include the erasure of Native American sacred spaces by missionaries serving as cartographers, which contributed to a view of North America as a vast expanse of unmarked territory ripe for settlement. Spanish explorers and missionaries reorganized indigenous-built space to impress materially on people the "surveillance power" of Crown and Church. The new environment and culture often transformed old institutions, as in the reconception of the European cloister into a distinctly American space that offered autonomy and solidarity for religious women and served as a point of reference for social stability as convents assumed larger public roles in the outside community. Ultimately even the ocean was reconceptualized as space itself rather than as a connector defined by the land masses that it touched, requiring certain kinds of religious orientations—to both space and time—that differed markedly from those on land.

Collectively the contributors examine the locations and movement of people, ideas, texts, institutions, rituals, power, and status in and through space. They argue that just as the mental organization of our activity in the world and our recall of events have much to do with our experience of space, we should take seriously the degree to which that experience more broadly influences how we make sense of our lives.

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PART ONE
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MAPS
A SEA OF TEXTS
The Atlantic World, Spatial Mapping, and Equiano’s Narrative
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
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Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.
Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4–5
The “Atlantic World” is a spatial concept. Literally, the “Atlantic” is an ocean, and in recent years, historians and literary scholars have increasingly called upon this ocean to define the field of study in which they work. Scholars who might once have worked in the areas of early American literature or British imperial history have traded a politically and nationally delimited field for a spatially and geographically defined one. There are many good reasons for this development, not least of which is the challenge and excitement of constructing a field imaginary in which the nation-state does not (for those who work in prenational American contexts, for instance) anachronistically organize the canon of meaningful works and the shape of intellectual inquiry. And indeed, the “Atlantic world” is a term that seems to catch at the lived reality of the many people, goods, ideas, biota, and texts that circulated between and among Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the period of European colonization of the Americas, as well as in later periods—periods that may, in turn, be productively viewed in terms of the neoimperial and/or postcolonial national cultures accreted on the bones of this (Atlantic) colonial history. But what are the ramifications of turning to a spatial term to define a field of history and literature? More broadly, we might ask, what is the relation of Atlantic space to the humanities work being performed under the rubric of its title?
Atlantic Space
This essay offers some exploratory thoughts about the relation between space and the discipline of Atlantic literary and textual studies in particular. The term “Atlantic” currently appears to have many meanings: the Atlantic in the “Atlantic world” is an ocean, an economy, a cultural network, an imperial territory, and a map of diasporic dispersal, among other things. David Armitage’s useful three-part taxonomy of Atlantic history points to divergent methodologies that have taken shape within the field: Armitage distinguishes circum-Atlantic history (which is transnational, focusing on cultures and histories created by oceanic travel), trans-Atlantic history (which is international, focusing on comparing discrete nations around the Atlantic), and cis-Atlantic history (which is national or regional, focusing on specific sites as they exist within an Atlantic context).1 Armitage’s schematization indicates that divergent spatializations are encompassed in the field of Atlantic studies, but all of these spatializations presuppose the coherence of a shared geographical map—that is, they presuppose a standard cartographic notion of the Atlantic as a spatially homogenous field. This notion of space—one based on an ontology of “the God’s eye view of space as dead, static, closed, and representationally fixed,” as the geographer Matthew Sparkes puts it—has increasingly come under scrutiny in the field of critical geography.2 Building on critical understandings of space as multivalent and open-ended, this essay attends more closely to the unevenness that inheres within Atlantic space, pursuing, in particular, Doreen Massey’s account of space as “the product of interrelations 
 as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity”3 within an eighteenth-century Atlantic register.
The phrase “coexisting heterogeneity” is an apt descriptor of Olaudah Equiano’s self-presentation in the title of his well-known autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself (1789). The contrapuntal staging of his African name (“Olaudah Equiano”), his European name (“Gustavus Vassa,” a name enjoined upon him by a slave master), and the designation “African” within the title points to the coexistence of competing and not easily reconcilable identities: in short, the title indicates, there is not a way to inscribe Equiano’s name that is singular and reducible to one language, one cosmography, one nomenclature. Equiano’s text narrates the author’s extensive travels—both forced and free—within an eighteenth-century Atlantic world geography: born in Africa, sold in the slave yards of Barbados, forced to labor in the fields of Virginia, purchased by a captain in the British Royal Navy, baptized in London, battle-tested under fire in waters off France and Canada, beaten almost to death in the streets of Savannah, Georgia, freed while working as a merchant/sailor in the Caribbean, employed as a hairdresser in London and on ships traveling to locations from Smyrna to Greenland, hired to oversee slaves on a Mosquito Coast plantation, and ultimately destined for renown in England as an advocate for the abolitionist cause—Equiano’s narrative repeatedly crisscrosses the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, in its textual and spatial coverage of key sites and narratives of the Atlantic world, his text exemplifies the contours of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world: a map of the routes of Equiano’s travels (see fig. 1) thus sketches out a geography that gives material substance to the concept of the Atlantic world. Yet the map of Equiano’s routes of travel, much as it helpfully materializes the Atlantic-ness of Equiano’s life for us, nonetheless tends to flatten out the very heterogeneity of identity that Equiano asserts in the title of his narrative. In other words, the spatial register of the map—which depicts the Atlantic Ocean and its littoral as a unified field—tends to erase the disjunctive nature of the language Equiano himself employs to describe the experience of inhabiting the uneven terrain of the Atlantic world. How might one map, then, an Atlantic unevenness in such a way as to register the spatial nature of irreconcilable cosmologies, of forced encounter, of “coexisting heterogeneity” that informs Equiano’s Narrative, and, more broadly, the vast body of texts that the eighteenth-century Atlantic world generated?
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Fig. 1. Map of Equiano’s travels as described in the Narrative, created by Professor Miles Ogborn and Edward Oliver, School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. I am grateful to Miles Ogborn for permission to republish this map which appears in his book, Global Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2008), as well as on a website about Equiano authored by Brycchan Carey: http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/map1.htm.
What follows takes Equiano’s Narrative as a case study for considering some of the possibilities of textual mapping that new technologies offer us as a means of understanding the Atlantic world and its competing and uneven spatialities. This essay (and this volume) grows out of a working group on the topic of religion, the Atlantic world, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS); more broadly, the working group’s concern is with spatial thought, mapping technologies, and the humanities. Given that the mapping technology of GIS has largely been the purview of positivist scholarship, something of a conceptual wall separates much existing GIS work from scholarship in the humanities: as John Corrigan has argued, GIS scholarship “privileges disambiguation,” whereas humanities scholarship values the “multivalent, equivocal, and protean.”4 As such, the contrast between the flatness of the map of Equiano’s travels and the linguistic richness of Equiano’s multivalent title sketched out above would seem to serve as evidence of precisely the conceptual wall that enables humanities scholars—especially those invested in textual and literary analysis (including myself)—to dismiss positivist mapping technologies (including standard cartography and GIS) as ontologically insufficient tools of analysis. And yet a number of factors mitigate against such a dismissal, first among which is the spatial nature of the field of the Atlantic world that humanities scholars have recently turned to—a spatial nature that mapping technologies are inarguably well positioned to explore. Second among the important reasons for turning to technologies such as GIS for analyzing Atlantic world texts is the fact that vast digitization projects of these texts are now underway in the humanities. As such, the nature of the text itself has changed; databases of texts are now available for analysis that are too large for a single individual to read but that digital tools can parse in potentially meaningful and generative ways. Looking closely at the relations of text and space in Equiano’s Narrative demonstrates that forms of mapping using positivist technologies such as text-mining and GIS might indeed provide insight into the unevenness and heterogeneity of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the spatial dimensions of that field.
Textual Space
The online catalog of one major research library reveals that twelve separate electronic editions of Equiano’s Narrative are now available for download and immediate viewing on the computer screen of those with access to the library’s resources. While not all institutions will have as many editions available, such a catalog demonstrates that Equiano’s Narrative can be found in multiple forms in the databases of eighteenth-century English and colonial American texts compiled and marketed by Readex (Archive Americana), Gale Cengage (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), and Proquest (African Writers Series, Literature Online), all of which are increasingly widely available. An electronic edition of Equiano’s Narrative is also available through Project Gutenberg, a dataspace that digitizes texts not under copyright and makes them available for free. In addition to these electronic editions, at least fifteen different print editions of Equiano’s Narrative have appeared during the past decade. Clearly, Equiano’s Narrative is in wide circulation at the moment and is in particularly heavy rotation in the college classroom. Notably, however, the widespread presence and availability of electronic editions of a text such as Equiano’s Narrative, in addition to standard print editions aimed at the college market, is a recent development and one that has likely already changed the way the text is viewed and analyzed in the classroom by students.5
Why is reading an electronic edition of the text different from reading it on paper? Most obviously, the mode of navigating an electronic text is significantly different from that of perusing a printed text: rather than turning to a given page, one navigates to a page or passage by means of a numerical or keyword search. Thus, for instance, if a student using an electronic edition of the text is asked to turn to the page on which Equiano recounts the moment of purchasing his freedom from slavery, he or she might well perform a keyword search on the term “freedom” or “free”—a search that would return a list of passages from the Narrative that uses these terms. While such a search could (and likely would) be narrowed with additional keywords and/or phrases to locate the precise moment when Equiano is legally freed, the list of passages that include the words “freedom” and “free” is, nonetheless, intriguing and analytically suggestive. Indeed, this series of passages, read as a group (as a student might, while paging through these passages on the electronic screen), suggests that the moment of acquiring freedom is not singular for Equiano but rather, appears repeatedly in different discursive forms across the Narrative.
A brief look at a few of these passages gives one a sense of the range of discursive fields in which the term “freedom” operates for Equiano. Equiano’s legal release from slavery occurs in the seventh chapter of the book when Equiano pays the purchase price of forty pounds to his master, who then presents him with manumission papers. Equiano has rather emphatically chosen to purchase his freedom rather than to escape from slavery (despite numerous opportunities to do so), and, accordingly, at this point in the narrative he casts his freedom from slavery in terms that are embedded in the discourse of the market—namely the discourse of capital accumulation: “[My master] thought by carrying one little thing or other to different places [on board ship] to sell I might make money. [He indicated] that he also intended to encourage me in this by crediting me with half a puncheon of rum and half a hogshead of sugar at a time; so that, from being careful, I might have money enough, in some time, to purchase my freedom; and, when that was the case, I might depend upon it he would let me have it for forty pounds sterling money, which was only the same price he gave for me” (chapter 6).6 Here, the master trades in both slave bodies and hogsheads of sugar, and Equiano himself enters into this trade and system of credit to purchase his freedom. Freedom is, then, a matter (in Equiano’s words) of becoming the “master of a few pounds” (chapter 6) as much as, or more so, than a matter of escaping the violence and/or oppression of the master and the system of Atlantic race slavery in general. Intriguingly, however, immediately after Equiano purchases his manumission papers, he resorts to a different account of his freedom. Namely, this account associates freedom with his African nativity: when he is manumitted, he describes himself as “being as in my original free African state” (chapter 7). In this instance the “state” of freedom is geographically associated with Africa as a site external to the institution of Atlantic race slavery—a site physically and temporally “original” or prior to Equiano’s captivity and enslavement. In a number of subsequent passages, however, the term “free man” becomes associated with the threat of being returned to slavery without recourse to law: traveling in South America, Equiano is set upon by a ship owner named Hughes, who intends to enslave him despite his knowledge that Equiano is legally free. Equiano writes, “I simply asked [Hughes] what right he had to sell me? but, without another word, he made some of his people tie ropes round each of my ancles [sic], and also to each wrist, and another rope round my body, and hoisted me up without letting my feet touch or rest upon any thing. Thus I hung, without any crime committed, and without judge or jury; merely because I was a free man, and could not by the law get any redress from a white person in those parts of the world” (chapter 11). Here, Equiano is condemned to a form of torture because he is a “free man”—that is, he is a free black man in the Atlantic world who is therefore never unproblematically guaranteed the right of legal freedom to which whites have access. In this passage, as in a number of similar ones, being a “free man” is shorthand for being black and constantly subject to the threat of violence and captivity, particularly while on land in America. And in a final passage that might be added to a list of heterogeneous discourses of freedom, Equiano uses the word “free” in relation to Christianity. “By free grace,” he writes, “I was persuaded that I had a part in the first resurrection” (chapter 10). In this instance, freedom is associated with religion in a racially and geographically unmarked fashion: strikingly, then, a universal right to freedom seems most available to Equiano under the sign of religion rather ...

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