Acknowledgments My work on this book has coincided almost exactly with my time in Durham, and my first thanks are to my many generous colleagues in the Duke English department whose intellectual example and warm friendship have made life here so pleasurable and rich. Irene Tucker has left Duke but I count the two years we spent as colleagues in the English Department and the friendship we have continued since as among the finest gifts of this place to my life. Charlie Piot, with whom I have

more »

... ed and thought about the Atlantic more than with anyone else I know, has contributed far more to this book than I have had occasion to tell him, as have the other faculty and graduate students involved over the years in Duke's Atlantic Studies Research Group. To him and to them my thanks. My single most engaging year at Duke has undoubtedly been that I spent as a Fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute in the "Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory" seminar. All the members of that seminar ) read and commented on a draft of the first section of this text, and I am deeply grateful for all they taught me and for the sheer pleasure and intellectual delight of that year. I am particularly grateful to Srinivas and Charlie, who