The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

Africentrism (sometimes spelled Afrocentrism) is an approach to the study of world history that focuses on Africa, its people, and its history—specifically their contributions to world history and Western civilization. It is often a counter to Eurocentrism and the ways that Eurocentric notions have dominated studies of world history, philosophy, culture, the arts, etc. Gilroy critiques Africentrism throughout The Black Atlantic, particularly noting the ways that its “totalisng conception of black culture” (87) is rooted in Cartesian dualism and cannot account for the multiplicity, changes, and recombinations of Black identities, politics, and cultures in the modern world. Its conception of time and tradition is problematic because it sees modernity and racial slavery as an interruption to Black people’s links with a largely mythic African past that can be recovered and restored, as opposed to seeing modernity and racial slavery as integral aspects to the construction of Black identities, political structures, and expressive cultures.

The Black Atlantic refers to the transnational, fractal structure of “cultural and political exchange and transformation” (15) among Black peoples in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. It exceeds the limits of nationalist and ethnic absolutist boundaries that have been used to demarcate lines of political and cultural expression in dominant narratives of modernity, which have been Eurocentric and Africentric.