The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1993

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Intimate Association between Slavery and Modernity

The association between slavery and modernity is an enduring element of Gilroy’s analysis. Although he notes contemporary critics’ inability to adequately interpret this connection in literal terms, he also looks to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as an indication that early modern thinkers were aware of it. Furthermore, this association takes a leading role in the production of a Black modern counterculture. Douglass’s autobiographies are a prime example, as they all recount his experience of slavery and escape, informing the subjectivity that helps him articulate his understanding of modernity. The Jubilee Singers also serve as a prime example, as their use of “slave songs” on the international stage was a counter to the stereotypical images of Blackness that were made popular by minstrelsy.

The association between slavery and modernity is also important because it is the origin of the doubleness that is articulated in the work of later modern thinkers, such as Du Bois and Wright. However, as Gilroy illustrates in his discussion of Africentrism, not all Black thinkers see this association as generative of Black thought. For Africentrists, slavery and modernity are interruptions to the linear progress of African civilization and Black people, and they tried to obliterate Black tradition. Here, too, the association remains intact, even though it is not viewed in a way that recognizes the fluidity of Black identity or how that instability is integral to the overall landscape of modernity.

The Memory of Slavery as an Interpretive Device in Black Expressive Culture

The memory of slavery as an interpretive device in Black expressive culture is the thread that connects early modern Black thought to contemporary Black Atlantic expressive cultures. It is a homology that “helps to fix and to stabilise the boundaries of the closed racial community” (202), and it is used as a device in the construction and presentation of Black subjectivities that fragment universalist conceptions of the modern self, in addition to blurring the distinction between the modern and postmodern.

In earlier traditions, the device primarily takes the form of autobiography: For example, Frederick Douglass’s and Margaret Garner’s narratives contribute to the revolutionary rhetoric of the abolitionist movement. Later Black writers, like Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, and Charles Johnson, use imaginative reconstructions of the slave experience to “restage confrontations between rational, scientific, and enlightened Euro-American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook of prehistorical, cultureless, and bestial African slave” (220). It is a political and expressive strategy that attempts to demonstrate that capitalist racial slavery is intrinsic to the West and modernity.

The device is also deployed in Black Atlantic music; the form of storytelling, autobiographical self-dramatization, and public self-construction transcode the experience of racialized being produced from slavery. Although not as explicit in its political discourse, Black Atlantic music, such as hip-hop, is marked by the hybridity, changes, breaks, and re-combinations that constitute Black identity in the Western modern world. The prevalence of love and loss motifs in Black Atlantic music, such as blues and R&B, shows that “guilt, suffering, and reconciliation” (202) and the ontology of “being in pain” (203) in the memory of slavery are integral to the construction and ritual re-creation of racialized identities.

The Confrontation between Roots and Routes in Black Political Culture

An enduring element of Gilroy’s analysis throughout the book is that,

Marked by its European origins, modem black political culture has always been more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes (19).

He discusses experiences of travel, exile, and dislocation that have informed the work of Black thinkers and their transcendence of racially and nationally particularistic identities.

Without forsaking his argument that routes more accurately capture and convey the construction and transformation of racialized identity and modern thought, Gilroy explains that “the acquisition of roots became an urgent issue only when diaspora blacks sought to construct a political agenda in which the ideal of rootedness was identified as a prerequisite for the forms of cultural integrity that could guarantee the nationhood and statehood” (112). The appeal to roots and rootedness underlies Africentric discourses—a symptom of and response to modernity in which nationalistically centered forms of identity are considered the most legitimate in terms of self-determination and political autonomy and authority.

However, the paradox in this appeal to roots is that it is a discourse generated by routes, transnationalism, and dislocation from fixed places that could be home. Thus, the Black Atlantic, in its construction of racial and political identities and articulations of those in intellectual and expressive work, is constantly facing the confrontation between roots and routes, and this confrontation is central to analyzing and understanding Black Atlantic political cultures.

The Mediating Role of Gender on Notions of Racial Identity and Racial Authenticity

The mediating role of gender on notions of racial identity and racial authenticity occupies an integral role in Gilroy’s analysis. He suggests that racial identity is “regularly and frequently drawn from deeply held gender identities, particular ideas about sexuality and a dogged belief that experiencing the conflict between men and women at a special pitch is itself expressive of racial difference” (202).

For example, he discusses the patriarchy circumscribing Delany’s Black nationalism, as well as Douglass’s articulation of a distinctly masculinist approach to racial justice. Africentric notions of tradition and the recovery of a lost African past are also deeply patriarchal. The perception of Jimi Hendrix’s racial authenticity to English audiences was informed by his performativity of an overt sexuality. There is also an extended discussion of Wright’s dealing with Black masculinity. In addition, Gilroy notes the ways that the performance of racialized being in hip-hop is masculinist and marked by a contentious relationship between Black men and women. These and other examples throughout the book demonstrate that attention to the dynamics of gender within and between racial groups is required for an adequate understanding of racialized being and articulations of modernity.