The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness

Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness begins with a clear problematic. Prevailing historical authority subscribes to racial, ethnic, or national essentialism in analyzing "blackness." This reduces the cultural and political history of "black" people to a physics of isolated particles. Instead of unrelated national histories, Gilroy seeks a postnational account of the black Diaspora. Gilroy's effort involves searching for common modes of reason across hybrid black Atlantic cultures. He believes that the academic endeavor of African studies, when framed by the nation state as a mode of inquiry (e.g. "African-American studies") can not engage the African Diaspora as a liquid phenomenon that is in constant dialogue with itself. For Gilroy, this Diaspora does not "fit" in the compartments of national boundaries. These boundaries impair present-day political resistance because they deny an alternative to European cultural hegemony in articulating the black relationship to modernity. Moreover, these boundaries obscure the hybrid legacy of prevailing "western" civilization. Importantly, Gilroy diverges from a number of other thinkers (in fields as diverse as Communications, Anthropology, and History) as to the origins of "black" artistic expression. Scholars like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Lawrence Levine would contend that black culture maintains an essential orality in the midst of modernity. Each has a way to avoid the tendency of this contention to exoticize blackness. (McLuhan concludes that modernity is oral and that technology is an extension of sensation in his "Gutenberg Galaxy" and "Understanding Media." Ong systematizes the cognitive aptitudes of oral and literate worldviews in his aptly titled "Orality and Literacy." Levine concludes that black expressive forms have been gradually inscribed by modernity in the century following the Civil War in his seminal "Black Culture and Black Consciousness.") These thinkers embody the idea of "latent orality" which framed the prevailing academic status of black cultural expression in the 1960s and 1970s. A major figure who broke this paradigm in the 1980s was Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates articulates a sophisticated and literate intellectual tradition through the way in which black vernacular signifies upon itself. The result is a critical conversation on political subjectivity within black expression. This resists the reduction of black cultural texts to latent orality or the reduction of black intellect to assimilation of Western knowledge aesthetics. Gates shows that black expression has a sophisticated textual criticism that predated and survived European hegemony. But for Gilroy, this does not go far enough. Gilroy sees "textuality" itself as a problematic instrument in analyzing black music. He ties the moral basis of black music to a critique of modernity in what he calls a "politics of transfiguration." In contrast to Gates's critique of black vernacular

In "The Black Atlantic" Paul Gilroy constructs an excellent text based on the black diasporic experience. His views of black culture as being a dynamic networked construct based on the idea of the diaspora derived from Jewish culture, is an illuminating concept that contains great substance. Gilroy's underlying transnational humanism (that can be read in his latest pseudo-utopian work "Against Race") and vital rethinking about the perils of cultural nationalism and the urgent benefits of a unique hybrid culture is a thoroughly needed breath in the stasis of linear monocultural thinking. The book functions in an excellent manner in addressing the complex dynamics of slavery, colonization, and their inherent residual effects on black political culture. In addition the method in which Gilroy weaves Adorno, Hendrix, hip-hop culture, Du Bois, Wright, Hegel and a host of others in a clear and eloquent manner is cause for reading in itself. In a nutshell, this is a valuable sociological and philosophical work that creates a rupture in linear, absolutist views of history, sexuality, identity and other various elements in relation to black particularity. In this book Gilroy composes the dynamics of intercultural exchange (whether artistic, political, social, moral etc.) as well as attributing to socialized historical memory through its brilliant text.

Paul Gilroy brings a fresh eye and mind to the challenging task of examining black cultural and political manifestations as they affect the transglobal community. Gilroy, unlike some cultural theorists, sees the interconnectedness between those discourses around race, class, gender, and sexuality and its impact on the black and world communities. It is his articulation of how these entities are intertwined that makes for a fresh and insightful examination of contemporary black diasporic experience.