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The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism.
Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W.E.B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison.
In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.
Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W.E.B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison.
In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.
280 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1993
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About the author
Paul Gilroy
61books153followersPaul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is Professor of the Humanities and the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College, London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
December 5, 2021
I have recently found myself revisiting things I read decades ago and reflecting on how well some have stood the passage of time and how that passage has shifted my ways of seeing and thinking about some of these issues. Yet when I picked this up, having first delved into it in the mid 1990s I realised that, much as I had used both the book and its ideas in various bits of work, I had never read it as a single text. So for the first time and with my second copy of a now 28 year old key text in my field I am dealing with a single cover-to-cover reading. For the most part it has stood up well, even if many of the ideas do not seem quite so exciting � mainly because they’re more widely recognised, even though they are badly if barely used to their potential.
Gilroy’s case is, in some senses, quite simple: to understand the world and making of contemporary African-descent cultures and identities in the Americas and Europe, we need to consider them as transnational phenomena. That is to say, African-descent cultural practices and intellectual traditions need to be understood as linking the three points of the Triangular trade � Africa, Europe and the Americas. Yet as obvious as that might seem in contemporary ways of being and doing, I am still struck as how powerful national frames remain in many areas of practice and analysis.
The case is woven through with two binding themes. The first is that these African-descent cultural practices are grounded in modernity � and not some mystical and mythical essentialist condition. Second, those cultural and intellectual practices are shaped by WEB Du Bois� notion of double consciousness, where oppressed groups may function perfectly well in the dominant group’s ways of being, but also have ways of sense-making that are unseen and misrecognised by those dominators. This allows Gilroy to argue for a distinctive sense of African-descent engagement with and making of modernity, one that is counter-cultural.
He builds this analysis on three platforms. The first is explicitly theoretical, drawing on Du Bois� work to (re)think double consciousness in a transnational setting. Second, he builds a complex picture of the cultural and quotidian experiences of enslavement. Building on these two aspects he then delves into three specific cases that allow him to draw out this sense of transnational Blackness: music and claims to authenticity; Du Bois� Hegelian-inflected sociology, his engagements with Marxism and that sense of double consciousness and displacement; and Richard Wright’s ambiguous relations with the USA and his place in France. These three cases allow Gilroy to unpack modernity, to explore engagements with the points of the triangular trade and to get beyond Anglophone modes of sense making to build a way of looking at Atlantic transnationalism in a subaltern community.
From the vantage point of a quarter of a century, much of this argument has held up well, even if the writing reminds me of the difficulties of previous ways of doing cultural studies. What is more unsettling however is the uneven and in many senses very limited ways that scholars and other analysts have picked up on this case. We might have built the approach into our teaching, but in many disciplines the idea is at best acknowledged with a doffed cap. In my field, for instance, we may now look at some of these kinds of questions in sport history and sociology, but the studies that grapple with this sense of transnational Blackness in practice are few and far between � we remain a field framed by the modern nation-state.
To be fair, other subject areas � especially those more focused on activities more usually understand as ‘culture� such as music, fiction, visual arts and so forth � have picked up these ideas better. This unevenness goes to remind me just how disruptive these ideas were and are, and of the power of the nation as a framing device in scholarship and cultural identity making and struggles.
After several decades, Gilroy’s Black Atlantic remains essential and in need of revisiting and redeploying as a tool to help confront essentialism, forms of cultural nationalism and over-inflated senses of specificity and forms of transnationalism that finish up reasserting the primacy of the nation-state. It remains demanding, and it remains essential.
Gilroy’s case is, in some senses, quite simple: to understand the world and making of contemporary African-descent cultures and identities in the Americas and Europe, we need to consider them as transnational phenomena. That is to say, African-descent cultural practices and intellectual traditions need to be understood as linking the three points of the Triangular trade � Africa, Europe and the Americas. Yet as obvious as that might seem in contemporary ways of being and doing, I am still struck as how powerful national frames remain in many areas of practice and analysis.
The case is woven through with two binding themes. The first is that these African-descent cultural practices are grounded in modernity � and not some mystical and mythical essentialist condition. Second, those cultural and intellectual practices are shaped by WEB Du Bois� notion of double consciousness, where oppressed groups may function perfectly well in the dominant group’s ways of being, but also have ways of sense-making that are unseen and misrecognised by those dominators. This allows Gilroy to argue for a distinctive sense of African-descent engagement with and making of modernity, one that is counter-cultural.
He builds this analysis on three platforms. The first is explicitly theoretical, drawing on Du Bois� work to (re)think double consciousness in a transnational setting. Second, he builds a complex picture of the cultural and quotidian experiences of enslavement. Building on these two aspects he then delves into three specific cases that allow him to draw out this sense of transnational Blackness: music and claims to authenticity; Du Bois� Hegelian-inflected sociology, his engagements with Marxism and that sense of double consciousness and displacement; and Richard Wright’s ambiguous relations with the USA and his place in France. These three cases allow Gilroy to unpack modernity, to explore engagements with the points of the triangular trade and to get beyond Anglophone modes of sense making to build a way of looking at Atlantic transnationalism in a subaltern community.
From the vantage point of a quarter of a century, much of this argument has held up well, even if the writing reminds me of the difficulties of previous ways of doing cultural studies. What is more unsettling however is the uneven and in many senses very limited ways that scholars and other analysts have picked up on this case. We might have built the approach into our teaching, but in many disciplines the idea is at best acknowledged with a doffed cap. In my field, for instance, we may now look at some of these kinds of questions in sport history and sociology, but the studies that grapple with this sense of transnational Blackness in practice are few and far between � we remain a field framed by the modern nation-state.
To be fair, other subject areas � especially those more focused on activities more usually understand as ‘culture� such as music, fiction, visual arts and so forth � have picked up these ideas better. This unevenness goes to remind me just how disruptive these ideas were and are, and of the power of the nation as a framing device in scholarship and cultural identity making and struggles.
After several decades, Gilroy’s Black Atlantic remains essential and in need of revisiting and redeploying as a tool to help confront essentialism, forms of cultural nationalism and over-inflated senses of specificity and forms of transnationalism that finish up reasserting the primacy of the nation-state. It remains demanding, and it remains essential.
February 6, 2016
This is an important and nuanced book. Unfortunately, I also found it entirely unreadable -- and I have read a lot of theory. It's definitely on the opaque end of the spectrum, to the point where I could barely follow the author's argument. I wish it was written with more clarity and less jargon.
January 28, 2010
This is one of those books you wish you could have read when it first came out. I know Gilroy's been done to death, and the term "black Atlantic" doesn't have quite as much academic suction as it used to, but the transnationalism espoused by this book is a must read for anyone involved in the study of humanities (not to mention its retheorizing). What I most enjoyed were Gilroy's reclamation of forgotten corners of scholarship. His views on Richard Wright's European labors were especially refreshing. This book builds on lessons I learned from Gloria Anzaldua's work, but do so in a much more expansive manner. Are there holes? Of course. Are Gilroy's studies a little dominated by masculine perspectives? Maybe. But whether it's via a footnote or a veiled reference, I don't see any serious scholar getting around this book without a nod of respect.
December 15, 2023
This is about as an enlightening book as it is confusing. This is a paradigm shifting book in the field of African American studies, and is very Foucaultian in its free-form incorporation of philosophy, history, and popular culture. The Black Atlantic conceptualizes the Black Atlantic without using nationality or race, complicating W.E.B. Dubois' idea of double consciousness. For Gilroy, the idea of a black nation within the nation-state is untenable. Gilroy doesn't want to get rid of "blackness" entirely however, as he locates the unifying factor of the black Atlantic in experience of slave ship. This book makes the important point that the concept of an Afro-centric experience is based on modern ideas of nationalism and tradition [Hobsbawm], and not actually rooted in the experience of slavery. Gilroy provides many examples of how people use Afro-centrism in whatever ways that want that ultimately makes the concept meaningless.
The history of Atlantic World was borne out of WWI and WWII, as scholars sought a shared history for immediate purposes (Bernard Bailyn). R. R. Palmer begins Atlantic History with his Age of Revolutions, which is an intellectual history. In contrast, Black Atlantic Studies come out of cultural/anthropological (Herskowitz/Flash of the Spirit) field. This book represents the beginning of a new Back Atlantic since it writes black bodies into intellectual history.
Gilroy has several arguments in his piece, his most powerful being the idea of a pure or common African heritage, hermetically sealed from other cultures, is a false concept. The diaspora of African peoples resulted in many different experiences which combined with other cultures so as to make feckless the concept of some shared African-ness. Such an idea is the product of modernism, and according to Gilroy is used by black peoples to create their own imagined meanings. One of my favorite examples was of the musician Quincy Jones� effort to make an album that incorporated all forms of “black� music which he purported to share “the ‘traditions of the African griot storyteller that are continued today by the rappers'� [108]. Gilroy dismisses Jones� project, as his “appropriations of Brazilian rhythm and African language become entirely subservient to the need to legitimate African-American particularity. The promise of a truly compound diaspora or even global culture which could shift understanding of black cultural production away from the narrow concerns of ethnic exceptionalism and absolutism recedes rapidly.�
Gilroy’s second argument is that Africans participated in western modernity. This challenges the purity argument that asserts that Africans were always excluded from participating in Enlightenment discourse. Because European philosophers such as Hegel and David Hume associated blackness with natural degeneracy, Africans had to constantly resist the idea that “white is right� so to speak. Also the experience of slavery modified the Enlightenment notion of improvement by reason. Emancipation from slavery, even if by death, was how many members of the African diaspora interpreted improvement, which was ultimately predicated in realization of the self—seen notably for me in the life of Frederick Douglass. I also found interesting how Gilroy framed W.E.B. Du Bois� appeals for black internationalism in the same vein as other nationalist movements of the time, and not based on something metaphysically real.
Gilroy is really responding to black nationalism or efforts to unite the black community along national lines. He locates the origin of transnational black culture in the slave ship, which is a useful metaphor for the transitory nature of the African Diaspora. Rather than trying to recover something in the past from Africa alone, the Diaspora is an ongoing project or discourse. Trying to understand blackness in a nationalist frame tries to fit that experience into the western, enlightenment project. For Gilroy, the Diaspora serves as a counter to the modernist project; it is the meeting of different groups, often creating new things to trouble slavery, colonialism, segregation, or racism.
The history of Atlantic World was borne out of WWI and WWII, as scholars sought a shared history for immediate purposes (Bernard Bailyn). R. R. Palmer begins Atlantic History with his Age of Revolutions, which is an intellectual history. In contrast, Black Atlantic Studies come out of cultural/anthropological (Herskowitz/Flash of the Spirit) field. This book represents the beginning of a new Back Atlantic since it writes black bodies into intellectual history.
Gilroy has several arguments in his piece, his most powerful being the idea of a pure or common African heritage, hermetically sealed from other cultures, is a false concept. The diaspora of African peoples resulted in many different experiences which combined with other cultures so as to make feckless the concept of some shared African-ness. Such an idea is the product of modernism, and according to Gilroy is used by black peoples to create their own imagined meanings. One of my favorite examples was of the musician Quincy Jones� effort to make an album that incorporated all forms of “black� music which he purported to share “the ‘traditions of the African griot storyteller that are continued today by the rappers'� [108]. Gilroy dismisses Jones� project, as his “appropriations of Brazilian rhythm and African language become entirely subservient to the need to legitimate African-American particularity. The promise of a truly compound diaspora or even global culture which could shift understanding of black cultural production away from the narrow concerns of ethnic exceptionalism and absolutism recedes rapidly.�
Gilroy’s second argument is that Africans participated in western modernity. This challenges the purity argument that asserts that Africans were always excluded from participating in Enlightenment discourse. Because European philosophers such as Hegel and David Hume associated blackness with natural degeneracy, Africans had to constantly resist the idea that “white is right� so to speak. Also the experience of slavery modified the Enlightenment notion of improvement by reason. Emancipation from slavery, even if by death, was how many members of the African diaspora interpreted improvement, which was ultimately predicated in realization of the self—seen notably for me in the life of Frederick Douglass. I also found interesting how Gilroy framed W.E.B. Du Bois� appeals for black internationalism in the same vein as other nationalist movements of the time, and not based on something metaphysically real.
Gilroy is really responding to black nationalism or efforts to unite the black community along national lines. He locates the origin of transnational black culture in the slave ship, which is a useful metaphor for the transitory nature of the African Diaspora. Rather than trying to recover something in the past from Africa alone, the Diaspora is an ongoing project or discourse. Trying to understand blackness in a nationalist frame tries to fit that experience into the western, enlightenment project. For Gilroy, the Diaspora serves as a counter to the modernist project; it is the meeting of different groups, often creating new things to trouble slavery, colonialism, segregation, or racism.
September 12, 2018
I actually think I'd expected it it be better, or more mind-blowing, but some parts are truly brilliant, and it makes me really curious for an analysis applying Gilroy's thought to texts like Dirty Computer or The Unkindness of Ghosts.
February 18, 2019
O "Atlântico Negro" que dá título ao livro é um espaço mais topológico do que topográfico, pois transcende o Estado-nação e funda-se sobre pilares de lealdade e identidade, uma solidariedade própria que vincula indivíduos em diferentes partes do globo. Com isso, Gilroy dá relevo às formas culturais que, desconectando genealogia e geografia, são forjadas mediante o trânsito e a interpenetração de civilizações sobretudo a partir da experiência da escravidão nas Américas. Neste sentido, a imagem de "navios em movimento" nos entremeios que separam Europa, Américas, Caribe e África, é um símbolo central do empreendimento do autor, uma vez que figuram como microssistemas de hibridez linguística, cultural e política.
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Se o esforço da obra é desvelar a natureza desse espaço simbólico e da cultura híbrida que o caracteriza, o autor não se furta de apresentar dados empíricos que corroborem sua argumentação. Propõe, por exemplo, que as palavras prolongadas por melismas, complementadas pelos gritos e grunhidos típicos do modalismo africano, fazem parte de uma política que, a despeito de desvelarem desejos e ações sociais qualitativamente novos de uma "comunidade racial", apresenta-se como resistência em relação à situação de opressão encontrada no passado escravocrata. O prolongamento vocálico via melisma seria, de acordo com sua interpretação, uma tática indicativa do poder de resistência da população negra que, impossibilitada de bradar em favor de seus direitos frequentemente violados, utiliza-se de artifícios não-verbais como as danças, as encenações e o canto melismático para questionar a condição de opressão e subalternidade. Afinada com esse diapasão, sua análise indica que esse cantar é um dos elementos responsáveis por erigir um imaginário antimoderno, uma contracultura que reconstrói a própria genealogia do “Atlântico Negro� � uma esfera pública própria da população negra �, revelando as fissuras internas no conceito de modernidade.
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Se o esforço da obra é desvelar a natureza desse espaço simbólico e da cultura híbrida que o caracteriza, o autor não se furta de apresentar dados empíricos que corroborem sua argumentação. Propõe, por exemplo, que as palavras prolongadas por melismas, complementadas pelos gritos e grunhidos típicos do modalismo africano, fazem parte de uma política que, a despeito de desvelarem desejos e ações sociais qualitativamente novos de uma "comunidade racial", apresenta-se como resistência em relação à situação de opressão encontrada no passado escravocrata. O prolongamento vocálico via melisma seria, de acordo com sua interpretação, uma tática indicativa do poder de resistência da população negra que, impossibilitada de bradar em favor de seus direitos frequentemente violados, utiliza-se de artifícios não-verbais como as danças, as encenações e o canto melismático para questionar a condição de opressão e subalternidade. Afinada com esse diapasão, sua análise indica que esse cantar é um dos elementos responsáveis por erigir um imaginário antimoderno, uma contracultura que reconstrói a própria genealogia do “Atlântico Negro� � uma esfera pública própria da população negra �, revelando as fissuras internas no conceito de modernidade.
April 13, 2014
While the overall concept of "the black Atlantic" was quite innovative and helpful to approaching issues of transnational culture, this book was difficult to get through due to dense language and its rich diversity of cultural resources: popular music, black intellectuals' biographies, literature, etc. The basic concept takes issue with racial constructions of culture defined by national boundaries. As the 17th and 18th centuries' slave trade broke down national borders for Africans who were transported to various locations including North and South America, the Caribbean, England and other locales, Paul Gilroy contends for a new framework for analyzing the cultural developments of black people spread out across locations that were connected primarily by ships sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. These complex webs of culture do not flow in one-direction nor are they confined to three points of the slave trade triangle as history books are want to portray it in overly-simplified terms. Famous black intellectuals usually portrayed as strictly American figures, including Martin Robinson Delaney, Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, are recast as transnational figures who sailed between America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean being influenced and exerting influence on cultural spheres beyond American borders. The Roots of contemporary hip hop music are traced to spirituals sung during slavery and their exchange with Caribbean music to reveal a cultural literacy and communication outside the boundaries of traditional literacy--revealing both emotional resilience and outlet. Overall, this book has been very trend-setting and influential on the field of American Studies as a model for transnational considerations of American culture that is built almost entirely on immigration patterns and international influences.
November 27, 2019
Employing literary techniques to critique the nationalist and ethnic focus of cultural studies, Gilroy analyzes a range of texts, authors, and artists as seemingly discordant as W.E.B. Du Bois, Jimi Hendrix, Richard Wright, and 2 Live Crew. In doing so, he reveals how black intellectual history and the role of black slavery and oppression both fueled modernity, despite being largely absent from the academic record. He also addresses the inescapable hybridity, instability, and continual change of black identity embodied in Du Bois' "double consciousness." He uses the theoretical metaphor of a ship to focus attention on movement, layers, and locations of culture and political power, as well as the middle passage where ideas and people circulate between Europe, the US, Africa, and the Caribbean.
July 19, 2016
This is a great book with an important message concerning the writing of cultural history, but I gave it 4 stars because I have a problem with books that advocate large-scale change but are unnecessarily written in a way that makes it inaccessible to a large audience. The concepts Gilroy discusses, such as the double-identity of black Europeans, slavery as a reminder that history does not equal progress and the modern black identity that arose in the Atlantic outside of national/ethnic bounds, do not need to be explained with a string of ten dollar words.
November 23, 2010
Surely the worst book ever written about a great idea. The chapter on Wright was pretty good, the chapter on Dubois and 'Hegel' possibly the worst I've ever read, mainly because Gilroy seems to have followed the Althusser approach to analysis of philosophical argument, that is, not reading the book (Hegel's Phenomenology) he's talking about. Vastly influential, unreadable and unconvincing- but that central idea was a great one.
October 3, 2018
This may have been groundbreaking stuff in 1993 but now any class on race will cover his argument on the first week of class. He's not a great writer, so it's a lot of work just to access what is maybe not the most profound thesis. You can probably find more recent authors who have made the same argument much more clearly.
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June 21, 20244/58…I honestly found this really quite helpful for laying a groundwork and also for thinking about how developments in “Black Studies� that are maybe pinned to the current moment are steeped in a tradition that is historical and goes back to forms of black diasporic vernacular production emerging out of the encounters of modernity (if that makes sense). And when I say tradition I mean, as Gilroy emphasizes, a genealogy of black thought rather than like an “essential� blackness that persists through black thought
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October 11, 2023Read part of it for AFR335
April 15, 2021
Read this book and the Tinsley queer studies article “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic� for ENGL4002 class about queer erotic bonds as a form of resisting commodification brought in by slavery and oppression.
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March 4, 2018This is one of those *ambitious* books.
I am particularly taken by the early (and emblematic) reading of that Turner painting -- you know, that Turner painting. I've looked at it in the MFA about a dozen times. I knew it was a slave ship, and that it was an abolitionist painting, in addition to being a masterpiece of English (visual) Romanticism, all fire and water and turbulence. I didn't know it was in Ruskin's collection, and that he refused to interpret it as anything more than an aesthetic lesson on seascapes, and that it ended up where I've seen it as a result of discomfort and a failed English market -- "The painting has remained in the United States ever since. Its exile in Boston is yet another pointer towards the shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges." (14)
This is of pretty slight importance compared to most of Gilroy's other points, but it meshes with what I am currently thinking about - that, if the Atlantic (particularly, here, the black Atlantic) or any other transnational passageway occurs in a seascape of hybridity and interconnection, I would like to think about what oceanic qualities this "web" or route takes on.
It is also an example of the level of detail in this project. It is so grand in scope, which is part of why its grandest proclamations have become canon; conversely, there is such an interest in biographical details, overviews of oeuvres or authors or minor works, so that at points the narrative seems interested mostly in burnishing the critical reception of its target (Wright, Du Bois, Martin Delany, Jubilee spirituals, whatever) at the expense of driving forward any particular claim.
It gets lost in details, that is. Then again, what major project doesn't, sometimes? Certainly I'd rather get lost in these details, on the way to reading about some black Anglophone thinker or another's refiguring/critique of Hegel, than I would in similar details about, like, Hegel.
My sense is that Anglophone is the right word for the scope of this, unfortunately, and that "thinker" means "writer" or "political theorist" or both more than it means some of the other artistic terms it might encompass. The basic critiques I have seen of this are that it ignores that some countries (those which are not what he calls the "overdeveloped" nations) still feel the necessity for nationalist self-definition because of their status as underdefined and exploited colonial spaces, and, possibly similarly, that it...ironically doesn't do a great job of thinking about Africa as anything beyond a landing space in the transAtlantic movements of American and European black intellectuals. I can see each of these critiques, I think.
I like the characterization of black modernity as proximity to lived trauma (slavery and its consequences) and, therefore, as something which prefigured what we think of as modernity (which we could call 'white modernity.') I think temporal precedence is a good way, among others, to (re)center black modernity in the conversation without severing it from other thinking on modernity.
I am particularly taken by the early (and emblematic) reading of that Turner painting -- you know, that Turner painting. I've looked at it in the MFA about a dozen times. I knew it was a slave ship, and that it was an abolitionist painting, in addition to being a masterpiece of English (visual) Romanticism, all fire and water and turbulence. I didn't know it was in Ruskin's collection, and that he refused to interpret it as anything more than an aesthetic lesson on seascapes, and that it ended up where I've seen it as a result of discomfort and a failed English market -- "The painting has remained in the United States ever since. Its exile in Boston is yet another pointer towards the shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges." (14)
This is of pretty slight importance compared to most of Gilroy's other points, but it meshes with what I am currently thinking about - that, if the Atlantic (particularly, here, the black Atlantic) or any other transnational passageway occurs in a seascape of hybridity and interconnection, I would like to think about what oceanic qualities this "web" or route takes on.
It is also an example of the level of detail in this project. It is so grand in scope, which is part of why its grandest proclamations have become canon; conversely, there is such an interest in biographical details, overviews of oeuvres or authors or minor works, so that at points the narrative seems interested mostly in burnishing the critical reception of its target (Wright, Du Bois, Martin Delany, Jubilee spirituals, whatever) at the expense of driving forward any particular claim.
It gets lost in details, that is. Then again, what major project doesn't, sometimes? Certainly I'd rather get lost in these details, on the way to reading about some black Anglophone thinker or another's refiguring/critique of Hegel, than I would in similar details about, like, Hegel.
My sense is that Anglophone is the right word for the scope of this, unfortunately, and that "thinker" means "writer" or "political theorist" or both more than it means some of the other artistic terms it might encompass. The basic critiques I have seen of this are that it ignores that some countries (those which are not what he calls the "overdeveloped" nations) still feel the necessity for nationalist self-definition because of their status as underdefined and exploited colonial spaces, and, possibly similarly, that it...ironically doesn't do a great job of thinking about Africa as anything beyond a landing space in the transAtlantic movements of American and European black intellectuals. I can see each of these critiques, I think.
I like the characterization of black modernity as proximity to lived trauma (slavery and its consequences) and, therefore, as something which prefigured what we think of as modernity (which we could call 'white modernity.') I think temporal precedence is a good way, among others, to (re)center black modernity in the conversation without severing it from other thinking on modernity.
February 2, 2021
This book is a lot of nothing punctuated by brilliant insights. After an intial flurry of arguments in the opening chapter, he spends a lot of time summarizing what other people thought and every now and then sprinkles in his own argument. Then at the very end he doesn’t quite wrap it all up (there’s a lot here) but hits you with the “so-what� which I interpreted as being very similar to the argument I made in my Imperium in Imperio/Haitian Revolution/Climate Change paper, namely, there is such a thing as Black politics but it’s not bound to any essentialist notion of Blackness and for that reason has utility outside of an explicit discussion about racism as we try to deal with various global crises. I think Gilroy is perhaps too concerned with taking down Hoteps. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good Hotep takedown, but a lot of the book is that. Also, I think there’s a much more interesting discussion to have about Black nationalism (and to a lesser extent Afrocentrism) if you ignore the Hoteps. I think what I took away is that Black nationalism is bad if you’re a Hotep, which I knew. I would have liked some more critical thinking about whether Black nationalism could be good, particularly if, as Gilroy says, we de-essentialize race. Gilory is very dismissive of cultural nationalism despite other thinkers having taken it up much more rigorously and I think there’s
November 18, 2021
Gabriella Lott
Reading Response 2: The Black Atlantic
September 13, 2021
GEOG 814: Black Geographies
In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy illustrates how the identities of African-descended people in the Americas, Caribbean, and Europe are never just fixed categories, but “always unfinished, always being remade.� Gilroy posits that no identities are as separate from one another as we may think—for instance, he discusses how the cultural products of “the Black Atlantic� are influenced, and not always unwillingly, by the other cultures in our nation-states as well as the Diaspora.
In Chapters 2 and 3, Gilroy explores how Black musical exports have origins throughout the Diaspora. He assumes this makes it impossible for any single ethnic group to lay “claim� to a particular genre (such as rap music.) However, I can think of at least a few recent critiques about how the dilution of Black cultural origins in both media and politics makes it easier for elites to commodify the cultural products of more oppressed Black people. , To me, it seems unwise to overlook the specific “roots� of cultural elements, even as we notice the impossibility of trying to isolate each inspiration. I also think Gilroy 1) forgets his initial arguments about the limitations of a commercialized art form that is supposed to be representative, and 2) underestimates the extent to which our disillusion with much of today’s art can be tied to commercial artists losing the “grounding of the aesthetic with other dimensions of social life.� After the Drake release last weekend, people on my timeline were complaining about how artists ignore the countless world crises, while others were saying they never expect major rappers to have anything to say in the first place, because of their disconnection from the cultures their music allegedly represents.
On page 99, Gilroy intends to trouble the binary construction of authenticity (“my point here is that the unashamedly hybrid character of these Black Atlantic cultures continually confounds any simplistic…understanding of the relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal.� ) This makes me think back to a recent piece of Black musical criticism, which explains how part of what made Little Richard’s work so good was the way his musical identities and influences were always in flux:
Since Richard's death, I have been attempting to think about the relationship between religious spaces and their secular rivals, between churches and gay dance clubs for example, or sacred music and what was and is still sometimes called "the devil's music." And what is underscored is that the binary is an imprecision…Because although he transformed his lyrics, the energetic drive and bounce of the church world that he loved was carried into his performance practices…The practice of Blackpentecostal praise informed his stage persona even as he sang songs with the sex scrubbed out of them.
In this telling, Little Richard’s blurring of the lines between sacred and secular exposed the imprecision of these binaries of Black musical production. Despite my skepticism, I think this is an argument for Gilroy’s point that we can’t overprescribe singular authorship of hybrid cultures—it ignores the many composite parts of Black Atlantic art.
Finally, I was interested in the importance of the ship in theorizing the Black Atlantic. Gilroy studies Black Atlantic ships as literal transportation modes—of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, or after World War II, of Caribbean families in the Windrush generation to England. In each time period, he also highlights the symbolic meanings of the modes by which our people migrate. I thought of Cynthia Greenlee’s ruminations on the culinary and communal traditions her family lost when they began taking the interstate to visit family, instead of the older state highways that were flanked by local vendors. As Greenlee and her parents� transportation mode changed, they became “one of those New South families that took the road more traveled�, and lost their curbside access to boiled peanuts. In recent decades, transportation upgrades (such as greater flight access) increased the capacity of Black Atlantic residents to be what Gilroy calls a travelling culture—we often migrate further and further in search of economic and social opportunities. However, as Greenlee notes, many upgrades leave people behind. I wonder how the changing transportation modes of the Black Atlantic cause us to lose certain recipes.
Bibliography
Cooper, Bertrand. “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?� Current Affairs, July 25, 2021. .
Crawley, Ashon. “He Was An Architect: Little Richard And Blackqueer Grief.� NPR, December 22, 2020, sec. Music Features. .
Gilroy, Paul, 1956-. The Black Atlantic�: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass.�: Harvard University Press, 1993., 1993. .
Greenlee, Cynthia. “Highway 220 Daddy Lessons: Boiled Peanuts and Peaches by the Carolina Roadside.� Southern Foodways Alliance, December 15, 2017. .
Lauren, Genie. Twitter Post. September 4, 2021.
Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. “Identity Politics and Elite Capture.� Boston Review, May 7, 2020. .
Reading Response 2: The Black Atlantic
September 13, 2021
GEOG 814: Black Geographies
In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy illustrates how the identities of African-descended people in the Americas, Caribbean, and Europe are never just fixed categories, but “always unfinished, always being remade.� Gilroy posits that no identities are as separate from one another as we may think—for instance, he discusses how the cultural products of “the Black Atlantic� are influenced, and not always unwillingly, by the other cultures in our nation-states as well as the Diaspora.
In Chapters 2 and 3, Gilroy explores how Black musical exports have origins throughout the Diaspora. He assumes this makes it impossible for any single ethnic group to lay “claim� to a particular genre (such as rap music.) However, I can think of at least a few recent critiques about how the dilution of Black cultural origins in both media and politics makes it easier for elites to commodify the cultural products of more oppressed Black people. , To me, it seems unwise to overlook the specific “roots� of cultural elements, even as we notice the impossibility of trying to isolate each inspiration. I also think Gilroy 1) forgets his initial arguments about the limitations of a commercialized art form that is supposed to be representative, and 2) underestimates the extent to which our disillusion with much of today’s art can be tied to commercial artists losing the “grounding of the aesthetic with other dimensions of social life.� After the Drake release last weekend, people on my timeline were complaining about how artists ignore the countless world crises, while others were saying they never expect major rappers to have anything to say in the first place, because of their disconnection from the cultures their music allegedly represents.
On page 99, Gilroy intends to trouble the binary construction of authenticity (“my point here is that the unashamedly hybrid character of these Black Atlantic cultures continually confounds any simplistic…understanding of the relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal.� ) This makes me think back to a recent piece of Black musical criticism, which explains how part of what made Little Richard’s work so good was the way his musical identities and influences were always in flux:
Since Richard's death, I have been attempting to think about the relationship between religious spaces and their secular rivals, between churches and gay dance clubs for example, or sacred music and what was and is still sometimes called "the devil's music." And what is underscored is that the binary is an imprecision…Because although he transformed his lyrics, the energetic drive and bounce of the church world that he loved was carried into his performance practices…The practice of Blackpentecostal praise informed his stage persona even as he sang songs with the sex scrubbed out of them.
In this telling, Little Richard’s blurring of the lines between sacred and secular exposed the imprecision of these binaries of Black musical production. Despite my skepticism, I think this is an argument for Gilroy’s point that we can’t overprescribe singular authorship of hybrid cultures—it ignores the many composite parts of Black Atlantic art.
Finally, I was interested in the importance of the ship in theorizing the Black Atlantic. Gilroy studies Black Atlantic ships as literal transportation modes—of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, or after World War II, of Caribbean families in the Windrush generation to England. In each time period, he also highlights the symbolic meanings of the modes by which our people migrate. I thought of Cynthia Greenlee’s ruminations on the culinary and communal traditions her family lost when they began taking the interstate to visit family, instead of the older state highways that were flanked by local vendors. As Greenlee and her parents� transportation mode changed, they became “one of those New South families that took the road more traveled�, and lost their curbside access to boiled peanuts. In recent decades, transportation upgrades (such as greater flight access) increased the capacity of Black Atlantic residents to be what Gilroy calls a travelling culture—we often migrate further and further in search of economic and social opportunities. However, as Greenlee notes, many upgrades leave people behind. I wonder how the changing transportation modes of the Black Atlantic cause us to lose certain recipes.
Bibliography
Cooper, Bertrand. “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?� Current Affairs, July 25, 2021. .
Crawley, Ashon. “He Was An Architect: Little Richard And Blackqueer Grief.� NPR, December 22, 2020, sec. Music Features. .
Gilroy, Paul, 1956-. The Black Atlantic�: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass.�: Harvard University Press, 1993., 1993. .
Greenlee, Cynthia. “Highway 220 Daddy Lessons: Boiled Peanuts and Peaches by the Carolina Roadside.� Southern Foodways Alliance, December 15, 2017. .
Lauren, Genie. Twitter Post. September 4, 2021.
Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. “Identity Politics and Elite Capture.� Boston Review, May 7, 2020. .
August 16, 2009
Read this for my undergraduate History thesis. His discussion of authenticity as measured as the distance from codes of minstrrelsy was particularly salient to my discussion of Paul Robeson as a performer.
December 8, 2010
Right now no book is influencing my thinking and scholarship as much as this one.
A must-read for people interested in African-American Studies, Caribbean Studies, studies of popular music, Transnational Americas, the African Diaspora, post-colonial studies or anything like that.
A must-read for people interested in African-American Studies, Caribbean Studies, studies of popular music, Transnational Americas, the African Diaspora, post-colonial studies or anything like that.
January 30, 2008
canonical. meandering. frustrating.
i know i'll revisit this later.
i know i'll revisit this later.
Currently reading
January 24, 2009This is a difficult read.
October 28, 2015
Nope. Not at this point in the semester.
September 5, 2024
A re-read and still confusing tbh. I think I got the main points tho! Important 4 the diss
January 28, 2023
1.5 stars.
Gilroy sets out in this book to "develop the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective" as opposed to ethnocentric or nationalistic approaches.
As an intention, this sounds great. However, Gilroy fails to deliver anything resembling a coherent unit of analysis in his Black Atlantic notion.
I have several issues with this book.
1) the book is overly reliant on a neo Marxist lexicon that Gilroy heavily borrows from the Frankfurt School. This language does little to illuminate his proposal of the Black Atlantic. Rather, it completely obfuscates and cloaks his views in fog that leave the reader desperately looking for any forward direction. The book is painful to read. It is meandering and often borderline unintelligible.
2) the book doesn't provide any explanation of whom Gilroy considers Black or White. There are lots of people with varied ethnic backgrounds so is he only addressing certain Black people and certain White people? In addition to this glaring omission, he also really disturbingly suggests an equivalence between White people, Europe, Colonialism, and Modernity with slavery as if they are interchangeable terms. As an Irish man, from a country that was historically colonised and invaded, this was frankly insulting by the writer. Slavery also exists, and has existed, throughout history and was perpetuated by people of all ethnic backgrounds. He seems to suggest Africa is different to Europe (that it is more moral) but he ignores things like the ancient Egyptian and Mali societies that were built with slaves. These societies didn't have the White colonial influences he no doubt would blame for current issues in the continent.
3) the book doesn't properly address the issue of temporarility. Gilroy introduces an interesting concept of double consciousness from the work of W.E.B Du Bois and relates it to the experiences of slaves in the USA and Caribbean whose origins are in Africa. Effectively, Gilroy suggests that these people have a fractured cultural identity. In Chapter 4, he describes a three part relation describing this fracture. The first is "expressed in the need to gain admission to the national community". The second is "the need to make that national community live up to the promises inherent in its political and judicial rhetoric". The third is "the need either to integrate with or to disassociate from that community once its essentially illusory character had been recognised". I think this is a very stimulating idea to consider but the issue of temporarility has to be addressed. At what point does this fractured identity and attempt at reconciliation become obsolete? How relevant is this to a person in 2023 with a family history linking them to slavery? How relevant will this be to a person in 2123 with a family history linking them to slavery? This kind of thinking is left completely ignored.
4) the book homogenises people way too much. The slaves who came from Africa came from various backgrounds, tribes, and countries with varying cultural norms and customs. The Africa he says they lost is multivariate. Their fractured identities aren't homogeneous. Gilroy suggests they are either intentionally or via his garbled neo Marxist prose hiding clarification on this.
5) Gilroy doesn't do enough to connect African cultural identity with African American or African Caribbean cultural identity. For example, Gilroy could have explored the origins of much beloved American dishes (especially jambalaya) and their links to Africa. He could have discussed how this food preserves roots and opens connection with others. Instead, he focused on the musical link and emphasised the message of difference it contains as opposed to its unitary power.
6) For a book that supposedly wants to move from nationalistic and ethnocentric thinking to a more encompassing unit of cultural analysis, it sure feels like he wants to push for a separate black identity that excludes other ethnicities.
The above issues make this book a miss for me. I am glad I read it though. I got pointed to Richard Wright and Toni Morrison who look far more interesting as well as towards wonderful music by Fela Kuti and Big Bill Broonzy.
However, this isn't enough to recommend to others.
Gilroy sets out in this book to "develop the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective" as opposed to ethnocentric or nationalistic approaches.
As an intention, this sounds great. However, Gilroy fails to deliver anything resembling a coherent unit of analysis in his Black Atlantic notion.
I have several issues with this book.
1) the book is overly reliant on a neo Marxist lexicon that Gilroy heavily borrows from the Frankfurt School. This language does little to illuminate his proposal of the Black Atlantic. Rather, it completely obfuscates and cloaks his views in fog that leave the reader desperately looking for any forward direction. The book is painful to read. It is meandering and often borderline unintelligible.
2) the book doesn't provide any explanation of whom Gilroy considers Black or White. There are lots of people with varied ethnic backgrounds so is he only addressing certain Black people and certain White people? In addition to this glaring omission, he also really disturbingly suggests an equivalence between White people, Europe, Colonialism, and Modernity with slavery as if they are interchangeable terms. As an Irish man, from a country that was historically colonised and invaded, this was frankly insulting by the writer. Slavery also exists, and has existed, throughout history and was perpetuated by people of all ethnic backgrounds. He seems to suggest Africa is different to Europe (that it is more moral) but he ignores things like the ancient Egyptian and Mali societies that were built with slaves. These societies didn't have the White colonial influences he no doubt would blame for current issues in the continent.
3) the book doesn't properly address the issue of temporarility. Gilroy introduces an interesting concept of double consciousness from the work of W.E.B Du Bois and relates it to the experiences of slaves in the USA and Caribbean whose origins are in Africa. Effectively, Gilroy suggests that these people have a fractured cultural identity. In Chapter 4, he describes a three part relation describing this fracture. The first is "expressed in the need to gain admission to the national community". The second is "the need to make that national community live up to the promises inherent in its political and judicial rhetoric". The third is "the need either to integrate with or to disassociate from that community once its essentially illusory character had been recognised". I think this is a very stimulating idea to consider but the issue of temporarility has to be addressed. At what point does this fractured identity and attempt at reconciliation become obsolete? How relevant is this to a person in 2023 with a family history linking them to slavery? How relevant will this be to a person in 2123 with a family history linking them to slavery? This kind of thinking is left completely ignored.
4) the book homogenises people way too much. The slaves who came from Africa came from various backgrounds, tribes, and countries with varying cultural norms and customs. The Africa he says they lost is multivariate. Their fractured identities aren't homogeneous. Gilroy suggests they are either intentionally or via his garbled neo Marxist prose hiding clarification on this.
5) Gilroy doesn't do enough to connect African cultural identity with African American or African Caribbean cultural identity. For example, Gilroy could have explored the origins of much beloved American dishes (especially jambalaya) and their links to Africa. He could have discussed how this food preserves roots and opens connection with others. Instead, he focused on the musical link and emphasised the message of difference it contains as opposed to its unitary power.
6) For a book that supposedly wants to move from nationalistic and ethnocentric thinking to a more encompassing unit of cultural analysis, it sure feels like he wants to push for a separate black identity that excludes other ethnicities.
The above issues make this book a miss for me. I am glad I read it though. I got pointed to Richard Wright and Toni Morrison who look far more interesting as well as towards wonderful music by Fela Kuti and Big Bill Broonzy.
However, this isn't enough to recommend to others.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 25, 2025
As a contribution to "cultural studies," Gilroy argues that the "Black Atlantic" constitutes a coherent entity of (counter-)cultural production (in modernity), which seems fair enough, though the geographic bounds seem unclear: often he makes this point by relating African-American or Afro-Caribbean figures to their European influences, which seems assimilationist. He discusses "Black music and the politics [dialectics, contradictions] of authenticity," from Hendrix to Quincy Jones, alongside readings of Douglass, Du Bois, and Richard Wright. A lot of the commentary is relatively standard fare: race is not essentialist, borders are never non-porous, we find ourselves caught between different worlds. He's attune to the realities of misogyny, both in rap and in Wright's work and thought, though he also sees Wright's move to France and renewed interest in French philosophy as an attunement to the realities of international anti-colonial struggle as central to Black experience. Overall, I appreciate the historical specificity with which he approaches his work, adding relevant biographical information to our canonical know-how.
January 25, 2021
Una lettura un po' ardua per chi è digiuno di cultural studies. Le tesi centrali del libro, però, non sfuggono, perchè ripetute spesso e da tante angolature. Utile per chi voglia riconoscere e decostruire i nazionalismi di ogni provenienza. Prezioso per i continui riferimenti a gemme di cultura letteraria e musicale tutte da scoprire. Una mappa da seguire, e a cui tornare con i nuovi strumenti che fa acquisire.
January 21, 2021
Insight if dense read, particularly enjoyed Gilroy's reflections on WEB Du Bois concept of double consciousness - the special difficulties arising from black internalisation of an American identity, which emerged from the conflicting symbiosis between three modes of thinking, being and seeing - racial, nationalistic and diasporic
January 22, 2023
At times very dense, this book makes a powerful argument: modernity as we know it happened the moment the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas which set off a racial and class based economy built on enslaved labor which led to tremendous amounts of concentrated wealth and a reliance upon industrialization.
September 7, 2020
This work is a true shift in thinking, placing the Middle Passage and its ongoing forms of slavery as the pivotal framework of modernity. There is so much here about movements across, about nation-building and cultural texts, about sound and the body, about forms of kinship and togetherness.
October 11, 2018
Theoretically challenging, and most definitely for advanced reader. I will be returning to this book for many years.
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