The islands on the construction of the atlantic

Objectives

The main goal of the curricular unit is to provide students a global and coherent view on the participation of the various islands and archipelagoes in the Atlantic world and on its contribution to the formation of that same Atlantic world, in a comparative history perspective and in connection with the global historical processes. 1. Generic skills:1. Organization and fluency of oral and written expression.2. Capacity of analysis and synthesis. 3. Capacity to cope with complex and contradictory information.4. Capacity to conceptualize and to question. 2. Specific skills:1. Generic knowledge on the participation of the various islands and archipelagoes in the Atlantic world and on its contribution to the formation of that same Atlantic world in a comparative history perspective. 2. Capacity to aprehend the most important dynamics and structures of those processes and the changes in the historiographical speeches between the early 15th century and the end of the 20th century.

Program

PART I — THINKING THE HISTORY OF THE ISLANDS

1. Islands in geography, in history and in the arts. The different functions and representations of the islands.

2. History and narratives: local histories versus global history; subaltern speeches and hegemonic speeches.

3. The islands as a territory for experiment and as a political and social model.

PART II — SOCIETIES AND CULTURES OF THE ISLANDS

1. Conquest, settlement and migration: resistence, dynamics and inertia.

2. Social models, local realities and cultural exchanges: the formation of the islands’s identities between the local and the global.

PART III — THE ECONOMY OF THE ISLANDS AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD

1. The islands – a fragile and dependent ecosystem: geography as a destiny?

2. The production of the islands: between selfsupply and external demand.

3. Networks and agents of trade: between the local and the global.

Teaching Methodologies

1. In the curricular unit the teaching methodologies will be of two kinds: magistral and student-centered active methodologies (oral presentation and debates).

2. The teacher’s magistral presentation will focus mainly on the theoretic issues and in the presentation of historical examples and of empirical data.

3. Students will read and debate in the class texts related with the central problems that are studied in the curricular unit. This will show if the concepts were correctely understood. Thus, the students themselves will participate in teaching in a way that we believe will improve the integration of teaching and learning.

4. Students should write a final essay with 20pp. A4 max.

Bibliography

AAVV, História dos Açores. Do descobrimento ao século XX, direcção científica de Artur Teodoro de Matos, Avelino de Freitas de Meneses e José Guilherme Reis Leite, Angra do Heroísmo, Instituto Açoriano de Cultura, 2008, 2 vols..

CURTIN, Philip D., The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Essays in Atlantic History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

GILLIS, John R., Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World, New York- Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

LA RÜE, E. Aubert de, L’Homme et les Îles, 9ª ed., Paris, Gallimard, 1956 [edição original: 1935].

RILEY, Carlos Guilherme, “O Corvo, um lugar à margem: histórias da perifericidade insular”, in AAVV, Actas do Colóquio O Faial e a Periferia Açoriana nos Séculos XV a XIX, Horta, Núcleo Cultural da Horta, 1995, pp. 57-70.

RODRIGUES, José Damião, Histórias Atlânticas: os Açores na primeira modernidade, Ponta Delgada, CHAM, 2012.