Transpacific American studies and global indigeneity

[Extract] As University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings wrote in 2009, “America has continuously shaped and been shaped by its Atlantic and Pacific dimensions, but the Atlantic influences remain dominant.” Cumings attributed this dominance “to a longstanding mobilization of Atlanticist bias that overwhelms most of our institutions,” and he cited in particular how Bernard Bailyn's “idea of Atlantic history … emerged in the postwar period as a way to characterize Britain's imperial Atlantic order.”Footnote1 More recently, this “Atlanticist bias” has morphed under the influence of transnationalism into the assertion of David Armitage, Bailyn's fellow Harvard historian, that “we are all Atlanticists now.”Footnote2 Such a transatlantic cartography has been reinforced since the early 1990s by Paul Gilroy's now ubiquitous “black Atlantic” paradigm, which involves a triangulation of Africa, America and Europe. As Steven G. Yao noted in 2011, the Black Atlantic influence “continues to afford Europe in particular a disproportionately prominent and centralized place in its efforts to map the terrain of global modernity.”Footnote3