The Black Atlantic and the Americas:
Cultural Theory and Philosophy
Lecture by Markus Heide
Lecture Series “Transatlantic Resonances”
GloPhi Center (Main Campus, H.0.10) & Livestream
30 June 2026, 2 p.m. (CEST)
This lecture explores the Atlantic world as a space of cultural exchange, mobility, and intellectual transformation. Drawing on concepts such as Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and recent approaches to transnational and postcolonial studies, it examines how dominant narratives of modernity have often privileged European and North American experiences while marginalizing the histories of slavery, forced migration, and the African diaspora.
Focusing on the early United States, the lecture discusses the tensions between revolutionary ideals of liberty and the realities of slavery and settler colonialism. It argues that American intellectual and cultural history can only be fully understood when viewed within the broader context of Atlantic entanglements connecting Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas.
The second part of the lecture turns to Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), one of the most influential autobiographical accounts of the transatlantic slave trade. Equiano’s text is examined as an early articulation of a transnational Black Atlantic consciousness that challenges Eurocentric understandings of modernity, freedom, and identity.
Through Equiano’s experiences of displacement, mobility, and cultural translation, the lecture highlights alternative perspectives on the formation of the modern Atlantic world and the intellectual foundations of the Americas.
More Information:
- Lecture Series “Transatlantic Resonances: Philosophical Entanglements between Africa and the Americas”
- Livestream of the Lecture
About the Presenter
Markus Heide is Professor of American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Before this position, he taught at Uppsala University, Humboldt University of Berlin, and LMU Munich, and was a visiting research scholar at various universities in North America, including Harvard University, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and Dartmouth College. He was a research fellow at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS) at UC San Diego, where he conducted fieldwork for his project, The U.S.–Mexico Borderlands as Contested Space: Film, Art, and Popular Culture. In addition to contemporary literature and film, his research concentrates on historical approaches to inter-American studies (co-editor of Hemispheric Encounters: The Early United States in a Transnational Perspective, 2016). In 2022, he published the monograph Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere: Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830) with Stockholm University Press. Since 2023, he has served as the international coordinator of the Erasmus+ cooperation partnership MigraMedia: Migration Narratives in European Media—Teaching, Learning, and Reflecting.