American art’s Western horizons

Writing at the turn of the current century, the historian David Armitage proclaimed, “We are all Atlanticists now.”1 His claim evinces bravado, but carries a good deal of truth. When at its best, Atlantic Studies sought (and still seeks) to open methodological and historical perspectives onto the networks – be they physical, imagined, or some combination thereof – that connected people and goods of the Americas and Africa with those of Western Europe. There has been a pronounced hemispheric slant to this project, such that histories of the North have been more commonly written and fully developed than those of the South. Yet Atlantic Studies has been successful in pressing Americanists to grapple with the Atlantic as both lived space and metaphor, not merely as continental boundary.2 Today, Atlantic Studies still exerts more sway among those who study the United States and Great Britain than, say, Brazil or Ghana, but its intellectual project is now familiar. When it comes to the west, and more specifically, the Pacific, however, there is no parallel..