The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

Two significant dimensions bolster Gilroy’s advocacy for the Black Atlantic as an analytical framework in the consideration of Black politics and expressive culture: first, the limits of nationalism, ethnic absolutism, and universalist assumptions in analyses and debates of modernity; and second, the paradox of the role that transnationalism and interculturalism play in the production of nationalist and ethnic absolutist discourses. Both dimensions are constantly revisited throughout the book and provide frames of reference for the specific examples and intermediary discussions Gilroy uses to shape the structure of the Black Atlantic. 

Gilroy critiques how white and Black theorists and cultural analysts have handled modernity and Black expression, given the limits of nationalism, ethnic absolutism, and universalist assumptions. In Chapter 1, Gilroy makes the claim that

in English cultural and historical studies, there is a dominant perspective that black history and culture are perceived, like black settlers themselves, as an illegitimate intrusion into a vision of authentic British national life that, prior to their arrival, was as stable and as peaceful as it was ethnically undifferentiated (7).

This dominant view is unable to adequately deal with the integral role of racial slavery in the production of modernity, and because of this inability, subjective conceptions of the modern self particular to white men are taken as universal. 

Gilroy provides examples of Eurocentric thinkers’ inability to acknowledge the role of slavery in the production of modernity. Nineteenth-century English artist JMW Turner used ships and maritime activities in his Romantic paintings. These paintings have been displayed in English national institutions and have become an enduring expression of the essence of Englishness. However, contemporary critics and cultural theorists make little note of the fact that the ships Turner depicts are slave ships. Gilroy also addresses the work of Jurgen Habermas and David Brion. Although they analyze Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, they do not do so in literal terms of the impact of slavery or the master-slave relationship in the production of modernity and modern subjectivities. These examples and others demonstrate the limits of national identity and universalisms when it comes to analyzing what defines modernity and conceptions of the modern self. 

Similarly, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Black American cultural studies, “popular cultural nationalism is featured in the work of several generations of radical scholars and an equal number of not so radical ones” (15), whereby “absolutist conceptions of cultural difference allied to a culturalist understanding of ‘race’ and ethnicity” (15) are used to make racial authenticity claims about Black cultural production. Gilroy challenges these essentialist perspectives by demonstrating that although later cultural theorists regard the work of earlier Black intellectuals like Crispus Attucks, Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and others, along ethnic absolutist lines, those earlier intellectuals themselves were marked by transnationalism, particularly through their dealings with ships and sailing. These travel experiences influenced their articulation of race/racism and their relationship to the revolutionary consciousness of the West. 

The transnational nature and intercultural character of Black Atlantic music belies the complicity of Black American intellectuals in nationalist and ethnic absolutist rhetoric. In discussing his 1990 LP Back on the Block, Quincy Jones deploys a narrative of Black American particularity, despite Jones’s use of Brazilian rhythms and African languages in the music. Hip-hop has a similar dynamic: 

Here we have to ask how a form which flaunts and glories in its own malleability as well as its transnational character becomes interpreted as an expression of some authentic African-American essence? […] What is it about black America’s writing elite which means they need to claim the diasporic cultural form in such an assertively nationalist way? (33-34).

In answering his own questions, Gilroy explores the paradox that Black music’s transnationalism facilitates the discourse on racial authenticity, which is “necessary to making non-European and non-American musics acceptable items in an expanding pop market” (99): This kind of authenticity is integral to “the marketing of successive black folk cultural forms to white audiences” (99). Because of the lasting impact of modern conceptions of the nation-state as the only legitimate political body, and because Eurocentric notions of art and culture have contested the value and legitimacy of Black cultures, nationalistically demarcated ethnic particularity becomes a political strategy and way of legitimizing Black art on the world stage. Therefore, notions of racial authenticity that are undergirded by nationalism have become integral to the presentation of that art.

However, this picture of authenticity can only take shape when Black music is dislocated from its national locations. The Fisk Jubilee Singers serve as a primary example of this dislocation. Their international tours in the 1870s prompted debates about racial authenticity: On the one hand, their speaking to the world through memory of slavery became a marker of authenticity, but on the other hand, the integrative nature of the Jubilee Singers’ spirituals and its dislocation from the United States brought that authenticity into question. Either way, the travel experience brings notions of racial authenticity to the fore. Another example is Jimi Hendrix. His entrance into popular culture from England made him, on the one hand, a symbol of racial authenticity for English audiences, and on the other hand, a betrayal of that authenticity from the perspective of Black Americans, particularly the Black Panther Party.