The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, published in 1993 by Harvard University Press, combines historical, social, political, and cultural dimensions to reconceptualize the contours of Western modernity. Paul Gilroy, noted sociologist and cultural historian, proposes that modernity can be better understood through the analytical frame of the Black Atlantic, a transnational, intercultural, fractal structure of Black political and expressive cultures in the West. Reflections of experiences of modernity by early Black Atlantic intellectuals and artists and their contemporary successors have produced a counterculture that is both embedded in and distinct from dominant Euro-American conceptions of modernity. Travel and the politics of location, as well as the integral role of Black Atlantic music in the creation, articulation, and reproduction of this counterculture, occupy central roles in Gilroy’s analysis. 

Summary

In the first chapter, Gilroy makes preliminary claims that are revisited throughout his analysis, the main one being the limitations of nationalist and ethnic absolutist paradigms when confronted by the realities of the Black Atlantic. He looks primarily at cultural studies on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly among white English and Black American cultural historians, who rely on absolutist nationalist and ethnic notions to analyze the character and contours of modernity.

In the second chapter, Gilroy elaborates on the failures of Eurocentric notions of modernity, noting how racial slavery was integral to Western civilization, yet race and the role of slavery are absent from contemporary debates. He demonstrates that the memory of slavery is an important interpretive device for intellectuals and artists of the Black Atlantic, who, unlike their Euro-American counterparts, have a sense of modernity’s complicity with racial terror. This sense is integral to their production of a counterculture that challenges Euro-American conceptions of modernity, the modern self, and the boundaries of political expression. 

In the third chapter, Gilroy elaborates on the limits of ethnic absolutism, particularly the ways that Black Atlantic music has been used to uphold notions of ethnic particularity, despite its transnational character. Paradoxically, it is the transnational character of Black Atlantic music that allows the development of discourses of racial authenticity. At the same time, analysis of these musical cultures through the Black Atlantic framework illustrates how the music itself calls nationalist and ethnic absolutist notions into question. 

To illustrate his points about the transnational and intercultural character of Black Atlantic political and expressive production, as well as the vital role that travel and the politics of location play in this cultural output, Gilroy analyzes the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright in the fourth and fifth chapters, respectively. For both writers, key themes are the confrontation between roots and routes, and the role of travel on transcending particularistic notions of race and nationality. Reading their lesser-known work intertextually with their more popular work, and reading their bodies of work intertextually with that of their European counterparts, demonstrates Du Bois’s and Wright’s ambivalence toward the West and the doubleness that characterizes their understandings and articulations of modernity. 

Gilroy concludes his analysis in the last chapter with an extended discussion of the concepts of diaspora and the memory of slavery as interpretive devices in the expressive culture of the Black Atlantic. Diaspora is significant because it is indicative of the intercultural hybridity of Black Atlantic political culture, and it holds important clues about modernity’s complicity with the brutalizing of certain populations. The memory of slavery illustrates modernity’s complicity with racialized terror. Taken together, diaspora consciousness and the memory of slavery are key components of the shifting, recombinant quality of Black identity as a political strategy in the modern world.