A geographical term used to describe a chain or cluster of islands, or a sea containing a large number of scattered islands, such as the Caribbean.

Below is an alphabetically listed glossary of terms relevant to the field of Black Atlantic studies.

Abolitionism

A broad term referring to those strands of twentieth-century transnational black art and literature affiliated to global modernism and composed of disparate strains of African tradition and experience [..]

A conflation of ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitan’, the term refers to an emergent, internationally mobile group of people of African origin able to exert cultural and economic influence on the world. It ha [..]

A political and cultural movement arising in the early 1960s, developed by Édouard Glissant (b. 1928), which sought to celebrate and assert a distinct Caribbean identity, Antillanité was a reaction to [..]

A Brazilian artistic and cultural movement heralded by the poet Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) in 1928, Antropofagia was a response to the cultural legacies imparted by European colonialism and aimed t [..]

Black Atlantic

Referring to the myth of Orpheus, the title of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 essay analysing Négritude that introduced a volume of francophone poetry called Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègr [..]

A political movement originating in the USA in the 1960s and greatly influenced by Malcolm X (1925–65), Black Power was developed into a coherent ideology by Stokely Carmichael (1941–98) and Charles H [..]