The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1993

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “‘Cheer the Weary Traveller’: W.E.B. Du Bois, Germany, and the Politics of Displacement”

The life and writings of 19th-century Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, creator of the theory of double consciousness, demonstrate the ways that Black Atlantic political culture changed and developed post-emancipation. Gilroy uses Du Bois to explore issues of roots and rootedness in Black political culture.

Gilroy extends Du Bois’s implicit argument regarding the ambivalences of Black Atlantic cultures about modernity and their locations within it, starting with Du Bois’s interpretation of the complicity of modernity and reason with racial terror. However, the experience of racial terror is not, for Du Bois or Gilroy, sufficient to account for the richness and consistency of the struggles of Black people in the West. This raises important questions about where the self-identity of international movements arises and about their means of reproduction and transmission. Gilroy posits that the neat political structures of Euro-American modernity are insufficient to answer these questions, so one must look to Black expressive cultures rather than to formal political practices defined by nationality.

This mode of analysis is undergirded by the concept of diaspora, which requires a global perspective that challenges the idea of Black American exceptionalism in terms of Black suffering and self-emancipation. This diasporic perspective first appears in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which is ambivalent about nationality and racial particularity. Double consciousness is not a perspective unique to Black Americans, but rather a defining characteristic of the entire Black Atlantic.

Critical dialogue with Hegel and other European modern thinkers is a significant element of Du Bois’s work, which demonstrates Du Bois’s location both within and without the West, but this dialogue is largely ignored by contemporary intellectuals who instead read firm cultural and geographical boundaries into Du Bois’s work. Gilroy suggests that Du Bois’s work, particularly his treatment of the Jubilee Singers in the final section of Souls, requires a departure from ethnocentrism to see Du Bois’s frustration with racial consciousness and nationalisms. Du Bois transcends racially closed and culturally-absolutist conceptions of identity and nationality particularly in his little-known novel Dark Princess, which fleshes out more fully Du Bois’s transcendence of nationality and ethnocentric particularity. The conclusion of the novel is important to Black Atlantic political culture because it indicates a hybridity and intermixture of cultural formations and transformations that lend themselves to the task of anti-colonial and anti-imperial politics.

Chapter 5 Summary: “‘Without the Consolation of Tears’: Richard Wright, France, and the Ambivalence of Community”

Gilroy examines the life and writing of Richard Wright, noted author of Native Son, Uncle Tom’s Children, and Black Boy, as well as various essays, lectures, and travel writings. Gilroy devotes his attention to Wright’s work produced outside of the United States, as these often ignored and dismissed writings provide valuable insight into intercultural hermeneutics that illuminate Wright’s theories about and the interrelatedness of race, modernity, and identity.

Wright was ambivalent towards vernacular cultures, particularly in contrast to nationalistic notions about folk art that came to dominate criticism of Black art and literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. This ambivalence led to Wright’s affirmations and harsh judgments of Black American music, church, and verbal play. Gilroy suggests that Wright’s criticisms of Black vernacular culture are not indicative of internalized hatred of Black people. Rather, Wright was showing the social and psychological tolls of racism and racial difference, which came both from white supremacy and intra-communal aspects of Black American life.

Work Wright after relocating to Europe features a theory of modernity. Wright’s book, The Outsider shows how Wright’s theory and perspective are refined by his international, transcultural location. The Outsider demonstrates Wright’s demystification of themes of high modernism and European distinctions between high and low art by showing correspondence between the everyday experiences of Black Americans and European philosophical existential anxieties. Wright’s theory of modernity also involves an autonomous Black culture with a distinct consciousness, emotional attitudes, psychological characteristics, and particular ideas of freedom and subjectivity, produced by the effects of slavery and racial subordination, and promoting specific forms of identity, strategies for survival, and distinct conceptions of social change.

Gilroy’s analysis of Wright’s work negates the consensus on both sides of the Atlantic that dismisses themes of violence in his work as evidence of misogyny. Instead, Gilroy suggests looking at Wright’s later work, such as Eight Men and The Long Dream, to see how gender roles and racial violence interact to produce a perspective on interracial and intra-racial social relations that complicate notions of a unified racial identity and mutuality among Black Americans.

Gilroy concludes the chapter by reiterating that analyses of Wright’s work have been limited by historians’ and critics’ preference for staying within the confines of nationality and ethnicity, therefore ascribing to Wright’s work the very narrow racialized expression that Wright himself wished to overturn. Furthermore, suggesting that Wright’s work should be read intertextually with that of the European modern thinkers with whom Wright was in dialogue, Gilroy states that Wright simultaneously affirms and negates the Western civilization that formed him and expresses the doubleness that traces back to slavery.

Chapter 6 Summary: “‘Not a Story to Pass On’: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime”

Gilroy rethinks the idea of tradition and problematizes its relationship to modernity by demonstrating a particular conception of time that emerges in Black Atlantic political discourses and strategies. He also discusses correspondences between Black and Jewish thought that are important to the concepts of diaspora, transcendence of ethnic absolutist and nationalist boundaries, and analyses of the inner workings of modernity.

Black modern thinkers periodized modernity differently from their European counterparts. Temporality, history, and the counterculture of modernity produced by the Black Atlantic are best understood through a redefinition of tradition. Rather than seeing the counterculture as a lost past, a culture of compensation to restore access to that past, or the opposite of modernity, all of which involve a wholesome image of Africa as the center, Gilroy suggests seeing it as “the living memory of the changing same” (198). That is, Black Atlantic cultures are an ensemble of narratives whose storytelling and retelling organize a racial consciousness and the inside/outside perspective that invents, maintains, and renews identities. This ensemble is “irreducibly modern, ex-centric, unstable, and asymmetrical” (198).

To illustrate his point, Gilroy elaborates on the particular form of storytelling that animates Black vernacular music, with special attention to the way that love and loss stories dominate Black popular culture. This turn towards less explicitly political narratives is a method of reading into “other forms of yearning and mourning associated with histories of dispersal and exile and the remembrance of unspeakable terror” (201). A rapport with the presence of death and an ontology of being in pain are part of the process of identity construction and the affirmation of racialized being that produce the fixed and stabilized boundaries of a closed racial community. Integral parts of this identity construction are a distinct conception of time, as well as a blurring of the line between the sacred and the secular.

Gilroy turns towards a discussion of the correspondences between Jewish and Black people, particularly with regards to the concept of diaspora. Acknowledging the longevity of correspondences between Jewish and Black thinkers, even when largely unacknowledged by those thinkers themselves, he notes that the dialogue is important for the future of Jewish and Black mutuality, as well as the future of Black Atlantic political culture. Citing the work of Edward Wilmot Blyden, a progenitor of Pan-Africanism, Gilroy lays out points of convergence that link Israeli politics and Africentrism: notions of return and point of origin, the condition of exile, and the belief in the special redemptive suffering of the oppressed group for all of humanity.

For Gilroy, the intercultural history of the diaspora is worth pursuing for the way it enforces the question of temporality and the relationship between the modern and the spiritual that both Jewish and Black thought construct. Furthermore, tradition and social memory are key to bringing the two spaces of thought together. Gilroy clarifies the need to acknowledge the correspondence between Black and Jewish thought through a critique of intellectuals from both sides who have failed to adequately treat the relationship between anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism in their analyses of Eurocentric conceptions of modernity.

The discussion of these inadequacies and contributions introduces Gilroy’s treatment of 20th-century Black literary works that share an “interest in history and social memory in an experimental and openly politically spirit” (218). An analysis of the work of Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Charles Johnson, and others demonstrates the use of the memory of the slave experience as a device that does not demarcate cultural absolutist or bipolar conceptions of African and European experience. Instead, the device examines the position of Black people in the modern world as heirs to multiple legacies, creating in that inheritance a counterculture of modernity and a Black political culture characterized by mutation, hybridity, and intermixture that transcends the limits of nationalism and cultural absolutism.

Gilroy concludes the book by saying that the history of Black people in the West and the social movements that have sprung up out of that history offer an opportunity to consider issues that have been posed within Black politics at relatively early points but are not restricted to Black people.

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

Black modern thought is characterized by interculturalism that shows Black thinkers to be embedded in Western thought even as they produce a counterculture of modernity. The extended discussions of W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright drive home the point that the work of Black modern intellectuals can and should be read intertextually with that of their European counterparts for a fuller picture of modernity’s contours.

For example, each chapter of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks “was prefaced by two epigraphs. The first was usually drawn from the canon of European literature while the other was a fragment extracted from one of the ‘sorrow songs’ to which the final chapter was entirely devoted” (125). An indication of the doubleness which Du Bois himself theorizes, the use of these epigraphs demonstrates that Du Bois familiar with European thought and cultural production and was using it as a frame of reference for his own production of thought. Furthermore, European thought stood alongside Du Bois’s experience of racialized being and his understanding of the significance of Black artistic production to articulate this experience.

Du Bois, a leading figure in the construction of sociology as a discipline and a scholar of history, saw these disciplines and their strict lines of demarcation and interpretation as inadequate for articulating his theories. Souls is, therefore, also marked by a stylistic innovation that “supplements recognisably sociological writing with personal and public history, fiction, autobiography, ethnography, and poetry” (115). Gilroy sees it as “a deliberate experiment produced from the realisation that none of these different registers of address could, by itself, convey the intensity of feeling that Du Bois believed the writing of black history and the exploration of racialised experience demanded” (115). Thus, in Du Bois’s use of and engagement with white Western thought, there is also an opportunity to transcend its limitations in order to produce thought that is distinct yet interrelated.

Gilroy observes a similar pattern of simultaneous affirmation and negation of Western civilization in the work of Richard Wright. Wright’s work produced after his relocation to Europe was “an extended exercise in intercultural hermeneutics which has important effects upon Wright’s theories about ‘race,’ modernity, identity, and their interrelation” (149), informed by his engagement with the work of Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel, Freud, de Beauvoir, Genet, and Sartre. The doubleness that characterizes his position as a Black person in the West produces a Western perspective that “conflicts at several points with the present, dominant outlook of the West” (162). Again, this shows that use of and engagement with white Western thought from the experience of racialized being produces a distinct and interrelated conception of modernity that should be considered in the overall discussion of modernity’s shape and character.

These intercultural hermeneutics are also important to the concept of diaspora and the global dimensions of racial subjugation as they relate to other political struggles in the modern world. Correspondences between Black and Jewish thought regarding the concept of diaspora and the Pan-African movement are born out of this globalist perspective. In particular, Edward Wilmot Blyden’s engagement in intercultural hermeneutics, particularly his interest in Jewish history and culture, alongside his interest in “the cultural nationalism of Herder and Fichte, as well as the political nationalism of contemporary figures like Mazzini and Dostoevsky” (209), had a profound impact on his formulations of Pan-Africanism and the entrance of the diaspora concept into Black political cultures. The link between Black and Jewish political struggles is especially significant: Critical dialogue between proponents of anti-racist and anti-fascist struggles opens space to learn “about the way that modernity operates, about the scope and status of rational conduct, about the claims of science, and perhaps most importantly about the ideologies of humanism with which these brutal histories can be shown to have been complicit” (217).

Similarly, both Du Bois and Wright connect the struggle against racial subjugation to other political struggles. Du Bois’s Dark Princess demonstrates a “link between anti-colonial politics and the development of African-American political culture” (144) and “expresses the upsurge of anti-imperial struggles during the 1920s” (144). Wright’s book The Outsider indicates his “enthusiasm for an emergent, global, anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics” (148); The Outsider contains a “decidedly anti-ethnocentric statement of the potential unity of peoples of colour on the earth” (148). The ability to articulate these connections between various political struggles is undoubtedly produced by the transnational and intercultural character of their intellectual engagement. Furthermore, it demonstrates a transcendence of the limits of nationalistic and ethnic absolutist racialized being.