The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, published in 1993 by Harvard University Press, combines historical, social, political, and cultural dimensions to reconceptualize the contours of Western modernity. Paul Gilroy, noted sociologist and cultural historian, proposes that modernity can be better understood through the analytical frame of the Black Atlantic, a transnational, intercultural, fractal structure of Black political and expressive cultures in the West. Reflections of experiences of modernity by early Black Atlantic intellectuals and artists and their contemporary successors have produced a counterculture that is both embedded in and distinct from dominant Euro-American conceptions of modernity. Travel and the politics of location, as well as the integral role of Black Atlantic music in the creation, articulation, and reproduction of this counterculture, occupy central roles in Gilroy’s analysis. 

Summary

In the first chapter, Gilroy makes preliminary claims that are revisited throughout his analysis, the main one being the limitations of nationalist and ethnic absolutist paradigms when confronted by the realities of the Black Atlantic. He looks primarily at cultural studies on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly among white English and Black American cultural historians, who rely on absolutist nationalist and ethnic notions to analyze the character and contours of modernity.