The circum-Atlantic world was a complex network of economic and cultural relationships resulting from European colonization of the Americas and the subsequent transit of enslaved Africans to these colonies. This dissertation theorizes a critical framework called the Atlantic voice to consider how interactions between colonial and postcolonial texts provide new ways of understanding narratives separated by time but joined by their documentation of an extranational, transhistorical, uniquely circum-Atlantic culture. In considering how works by Natasha Trethewey, J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, and others, evoke the Atlantic voice, this study seeks to deepen our understanding of the unprecedented exchange of peoples and ideas around the Atlantic world and to examine how the colonial project influenced the development of Anglophone narrative.