FIGURING ATLANTIC LEGACIES: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories

Trans-Atlantic studies does, indeed, derive much of its rationality from the investigation of the roots, the traces, and the effects of the capitalist/modern/colonial world order as it expanded across the unbounded space of Atlantic crossings. As is perfectly allegorized by the invisible Fukù Americanus in Junot Diaz’s novel, that order has not ceased to produce its effects, no matter if the proofs of its instantiation are missing: just like the condition of modern and colonial subjectivity was brought about by the maps and ships that instituted and installed modernity, so the Fukù, midwifedon the Antilles by the Admiral Christopher Columbus—who was also “one of its great European victims”—haunts the trans-Atlantic present, and binds cultures and histories ever since.