The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

“In opposition to both of these nationalist or ethnically absolute approaches, I want 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.”

This is the raison d’etre of the book. Rather than the limited frameworks that cultural historians have been using to analyze modernity and its contours, Gilroy proposes accounting for the transnational and intercultural character of not only Black political culture, but modernity as a whole, especially when Black political culture is interwoven into the fabric of modernity.

“The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation I want to call the black Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.”

This is a point to which Gilroy returns throughout the book, as he provides specific examples of Black intellectuals, artists, and cultural products that exemplify the transcendence of nationalism and ethnic absolutism. It is only by analyzing the work through the Black Atlantic lens that the transcendence of nationalism and ethnicity becomes evident.

“The version of black solidarity Blake advances is explicitly antiethnic and opposes narrow African-American exceptionalism in the name of a truly pan-African, diaspora sensibility. This makes blackness a matter of politics rather than a common cultural condition.”

Gilroy’s argument is based on the assertion that Black identity is neither fixed, stable, nor rooted in nationalistic and ethnic particularity—rather, it is deployed as a political strategy, and in that deployment, is adapted to suit the political needs of those identifying as Black. Here, Gilroy provides an early example of the way that diaspora consciousness and Pan-Africanism transcend the limits of nationalism and ethnic absolutism to define the contours of Black identity for political purposes.

“The politics of fulfillment is mostly content to play occidental rationality at its own game. It necessitates a hermeneutic orientation that can assimilate the semiotic, verbal, and textual. The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic, and performative.”

Two separate, but interrelated, political strategies characterize the intellectual and artistic work of the Black Atlantic. The politics of fulfillment is exemplified in the work of Black intellectuals and artists who use the written word to stage confrontations between Enlightenment ideals and the lived experiences of Black people in the West. The politics of transfiguration is exemplified in music, where the form of storytelling, autobiography, and autopoiesis challenges the compartmentalization of politics and aesthetics, and the sacred and secular, supported by dominant notions of modernity.

“I am proposing, then, that we reread and rethink this expressive counterculture not simply as a succession of literary tropes and genres but as a philosophical discourse which refuses the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics.” 

Here, Gilroy elaborates on the politics of transfiguration strategy used in Black Atlantic music. Its interaction with the politics of fulfillment should not be read as a simple causal relationship, but rather as an articulation of a counter discourse which continues to interact with and influence the articulation of Black identity in the work of Black intellectuals.

“For the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and subordination. Artistic expression, expanded beyond recognition from the grudging gifts offered by the masters as a token substitute for freedom from bondage, therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”

The lived experience of racialized being produces a counterculture of modernity. Artistic expression, which is not considered useful or serious by dominant conceptions of modernity, is a means of liberation. This demonstrates how the lived experiences of Black people in the West challenge Eurocentric universalisms and dominant notions of a unified modern self.

“The distinctive historical experiences of this diaspora's populations have created a unique body of reflections on modernity and its discontents which is an enduring presence in the cultural and political struggles of their descendants today.”

The memory of slavery is an interpretive device in the intellectual and artistic productions of the Black Atlantic, producing a distinct temporality. Unlike Eurocentric debates, which attempt to distinguish the modern from the postmodern, the diaspora’s reflections of modernity involve a continuity between the modern and the postmodern.

“The key to comprehending this lies not in the overhasty separation of the cultural forms particular to both groups into some ethnic typology but in a detailed and comprehensive grasp of their complex interpenetration. The intellectual and cultural achievements of the black Atlantic populations exist partly inside and not always against the grand narrative of Enlightenment and its operational principles.”

Gilroy finds interesting the dependency produced in the master-slave relationship in Hegel’s dialectic, as well as the doubleness that characterizes Black experiences in the West. The embeddedness of Black people in the West and the unique reflections of modernity produced from the experience of racialized being need to be read into the fabric and contours of modernity for a greater understanding of modernity and its contents.

“A preoccupation with the striking doubleness that results from this unique position—in an expanded West but not completely of it—is a definitive characteristic of the intellectual history of the black Atlantic.”

Gilroy, again, points to the embeddedness of Black people in the West, as well as the unique reflections of the West produced from the experience of racialized being. He also wrests double consciousness from Black American particularity and extends it to include the entire Black Atlantic.

“Examining the place of music in the black Atlantic world means surveying the self-understanding articulated by the musicians who have made it, the symbolic use to which their music is put by other black artists and writers, and the social relations which have produced and reproduced the unique expressive culture in which music comprises a central and even foundational element.”

Here, Gilroy appeals for the importance of music in the political strategies of the Black Atlantic. The way that Black Atlantic music conveys Black subjectivities and reproduces notions of Black identity is worthy of consideration in analyses of Black Atlantic political culture. The music is foundational to Black Atlantic political culture, and it is the primary method of relating and transforming ideas about Black identity among the diaspora.

“The intense and often bitter dialogues which make the black arts movement move offer a small reminder that there is a democratic, communitarian moment enshrined in the practice of antiphony which symbolises and anticipates (but does not guarantee) new, non-dominating social relationships. Lines between self and other are blurred and special forms of pleasure are created as a result of the meetings and conversations that are established between one fractured, incomplete, and unfinished racial self and others. Antiphony is the structure that hosts these essential encounters.”

Gilroy elaborates on why Black Atlantic music is integral to Black Atlantic political culture. Call-and-response, or antiphony, is a practice that allows Black subjectivities to be conveyed through music, thereby fostering changes, breaks, and re-combinations in Black identity and the fashioning of the self in a modern world circumscribed by race/racism.

“Thus the role of external meanings around blackness, drawn in particular from black America, became important in the elaboration of a connective culture which drew these different "national" groups together into a new pattern that was not ethnically marked in the way that their Caribbean cultural inheritances had been.”

Black Atlantic music conveys meanings about Black identities and the transnational nature of these identities. As Gilroy describes the impact of Black Atlantic music on Black Britons, Blackness is shown to be an anti-ethnic political identity which connects the diaspora in new cultural formations, facilitated by the call-and-response element integral to Black Atlantic music.

“Black people singing slave songs as mass entertainment set new public standards of authenticity for black cultural expression. The legitimacy of these new cultural forms was established precisely through their distance from the racial codes of minstrelsy. The Jubilee Singers' journey out of America was a critical stage in making this possible.”

It is a paradox that notions of racial authenticity, typically undergirded by ethnic absolutist and nationalistic particularity, are facilitated by transnationalism. This is one of many examples where Gilroy demonstrates that travel experiences and dislocation from a national home prompt cultural analysts to confront roots and routes, particularly when it comes to the global dissemination of Black music.

“The purist idea of one-way flow of African culture from east to west was instantly revealed to be absurd. The global dimensions of diaspora dialogue were momentarily visible and, as his casual words lit up the black Atlantic landscape like a flash of lightning on a summer night, the value of music as the principal symbol of racial authenticity was simultaneously confirmed and placed in question.”

Nelson Mandela revealed that he listened to Motown music while a political prisoner in South Africa—a fact Gilroy references in his discussion of the 1990 reggae hit, “Proud of Mandela.” Gilroy invites readers to consider the limitations of Africentric models and essentialist discourses of racial authenticity and tradition which do not account for the multidirectional flow of information and culture across the diaspora.

“My point here is that the unashamedly hybrid character of these black Atlantic cultures continually confounds any simplistic (essentialist or anti-essentialist) understanding of the relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal. Here the idea of the racial community as a family has been invoked and appealed to as a means to signify connectedness and experiential continuity that is everywhere denied by the profane realities of black life amidst the debris of de-industrialisation.”

Here, Gilroy is, once again, critiquing notions of an undifferentiated, unilateral understanding of Black identity. He points out that the appeal to “family” and “tradition” is an attempt to denote a singular culture of Blackness, which does not accord with the reality of the intercultural, transnational, ever-changing character of Black identity.

“Where the communities of interpretation, needs, and solidarity on which the cultures of the black Atlantic rest become an intellectual and political multiplicity, they assume a fractal form in which the relationship between similarity and difference becomes so complex that it may continually deceive the senses. Our ability to generalise about and compare black cultures is therefore circumscribed by the scale of the analysis being conducted.”

Gilroy understands the shape of the Black Atlantic as a fractal pattern, implying a never-ending transmission of notions of Black identity and belying notions of a linear one-way transmission of ideas and culture. Furthermore, the location of the analyst colors the analysis, since the location determines the scale of what that analyst can see in terms of the Black Atlantic’s shape.

“Much has been written recently about travel and the politics of location. These themes are important in the study of identities and political cultures because the limits of approaches premised on fixity were reached sometime ago. They are especially important in the history of the black Atlantic, where movement, relocation, displacement, and restlessness are the norms rather than the exceptions and where, as we have already seen, there are long histories of the association of self-exploration with the exploration of new territories and the cultural differences that exist both between and within the groups that get called races.”

This passage is significant because it points out that movement and relocation is a norm for Black people. This underscores Gilroy’s point throughout the book that the confrontation between roots and routes is an enduring element of Black Atlantic political culture. This confrontation contributes to self-exploration because intra-racial and interracial similarities and differences must be considered in one’s articulation of one’s subjectivity.

“The patterns of internal repression, guilt, misery, and desperation established under the social discipline of slavery endure even though the political and economic order that created them bas been partially transformed. Wright was making the still heretical argument that the effects of racism on black people were not generated by the leviathan machine of white supremacy alone. He was suggesting that blacks should bear some measure of responsibility for the evil and destructive things that we do to one another, that racism should not provide an alibi for the anti-social aspects of our communal life.”

Wright was ambivalent about the idea of race and racial mutuality among Black people, challenging the idea of a unified, undifferentiated racial family to which essentialist discourses have tried to adhere. The paradox is that while racialized identity is a manifestation of Western modernity, that same modernity makes the notion of intra-racial mutuality absurd.

“Wright's relationship to the work of Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche was more complex than many critics seem to appreciate. It is worth repeating that he was not straining to validate African-American experience in their European terms but rather demonstrating how the everyday experience of blacks in the United States enabled them to see with a special clarity of vision-a dreadful objectivity—the same constellation of problems which these existentialist authors had identified in more exalted settings.”

Two key aspects of Gilroy’s argument show why Wright is an exemplary figure in his analysis: First, Wright and many other Black intellectuals and artists, for that matter, need to be read intertextually with their European counterparts; and second, the transnational and intercultural character of the work allows the struggle against racial subordination to be connected to other political struggles in the modern world. In connecting the experience of Black folks to the existential anxieties of European philosophers, Wright blurs the distinction between high and low culture that characterizes dominant conceptions of modernity, thereby producing a counterculture by his doubleness.

“Tradition crops up frequently in the cultural criticism that has cultivated. a dialogue with black political discourse. It operates as a means to assert the close kinship of cultural forms and practices generated from the repressible diversity of black experience. This suggests that, in the hands if some black intellectuals and artists at least, the pursuit of social and political autonomy has turned away from the promise of modernity and found new expression in a complex term that is often understood to be modernity’s antithesis.”

Appeals to tradition have been a centerpiece of Black political discourse because in a modern society where the nation-state is conceived as the most legitimate political body and the location from which legitimate culture springs, such appeals, often undergirded by an ethnic absolutist and nationalistic sensibility, make sense. However, this belies the actual discontinuity, changes, breaks, and re-combinations of Black identity in the Western world. For Gilroy, the changes themselves are the tradition and are modern, even when they are not construed as such in the political discourse.

“In the shadow of these decisive shifts, I want to suggest that the concept of diaspora can itself provide an underutilised device with which to explore the fragmentary relationship between blacks and Jews and the difficult political questions to which it plays host: the status of ethnic identity, the power of cultural nationalism, and the manner in which carefully preserved social histories of ethnocidal suffering can function to supply ethical and political legitimacy.”

Gilroy explains why the concept of diaspora is important for present and future cooperation among Black and Jewish intellectuals. The “decisive shifts” are from earlier understandings of Black identity, where Black people related the plight of Jewish people, particularly in Biblical stories, to later Africentric models whereby Black identity became associated with the luxury and lavishness of the Egyptian pharaohs. Furthermore, the correspondences between Black and Jewish thought regarding the concept of diaspora can reveal something about the inner workings of modernity and how brutalizing certain populations is intrinsic to it.

“The desire to pit these cultural systems against one another arises from present conditions. In particular, it is formed by the need to indict those forms of rationality which have been rendered implausible by their racially exclusive character and further explore the history of their complicity with terror systematically and rationally practised as a form of political and economic administration.”

Gilroy articulates how the memory of slavery as an interpretive device functions in Black Atlantic expressive culture: It shows the intimate association between slavery and modernity, confronting the fact that racial terror is intrinsic to modernity’s notions of rationality, politics, and economics.

“It is being suggested that the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marked out blacks as the first truly modern people, handling in the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would only become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later.”

Gilroy argues that interventionist and radical political strategies found in 20th century European scholarship had already been articulated previously in Black cultural history and theory. This point underscores Gilroy’s argument that the work of the Black Atlantic need not only be read intertextually with that of European scholarship, but also that the Black Atlantic is an integral part of the social, cultural, historical, and political fabric of the West.