Gilroy — The Black Atlantic

Author: Paul Gilroy
Title: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
Year: 1993
Type: Academic book (Verso; Harvard University Press)

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is a book by the English sociologist and cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy, published in 1993 by Verso and Harvard University Press. It argues that the black Atlantic, a modern political and cultural formation, is defined in part by the wish to move beyond nation states and ethnic particularity, and it takes ships crossing between Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean as its organizing symbol. Its publisher describes the music the book surveys as running from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix and rap, and its writers from W. E. B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison. Its third chapter, on Black music and the politics of authenticity, argues against both essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts of Black identity for what Gilroy calls an “anti-anti-essentialism,” and it was later reprinted in readers of performance studies and popular music studies. The book won an American Book Award in 1994. Laura Chrisman wrote that it had been hailed across several disciplines as a major and original contribution, but argued that Gilroy’s project rests on a “decidedly mystical, idealist ideology,” and in a later essay that the book privileges the United States as the reference point for Black cross-cultural exchange.

Gilroy writes that “the specificity of the modern political and cultural formation I want to call the black Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.”¹ In the book’s opening pages he writes that he has “settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point.”² Verso’s description of the book says that the modern Black experience cannot be defined as African, American, Caribbean or British alone and can only be understood as a Black Atlantic culture that transcends ethnicity or nationality, a condition that comes out of a transoceanic experience “established first with the slave trade.”³

The book’s third chapter, “‘Jewels Brought from Bondage’: Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity,” runs from page 72 to page 110.^{4, 5} In it Gilroy writes that debate about identity and culture stages “a confrontation between two loosely organised perspectives” that have become “locked in an entirely fruitless relationship of mutual interdependency,” and that Black music points toward “an anti-anti-essentialism that sees racialised subjectivity as the product of the social practices that supposedly derive from it.”⁶ Verso describes the book as a tour of the music that has carried racial messages and feeling around the world for centuries, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix and rap, and of Black writing from the “double consciousness” of Du Bois to Toni Morrison.³ Its fourth and fifth chapters turn to Du Bois and Germany and to Richard Wright and France.⁵

Gilroy, an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar, published the book in 1993 with Verso and Harvard University Press, and it won an American Book Award in 1994.⁵ Its music chapter was reprinted in Performance Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), edited by Erin Striff, and in The Popular Music Studies Reader (Routledge), edited by Andy Bennett, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee.⁷

Laura Chrisman, in “Journeying to Death: Gilroy’s Black Atlantic” (Race & Class, October 1997), as quoted from the excerpt published by Binghamton University’s Crossings, wrote that the book had been “hailed as a major and original contribution” across several disciplines. She argued that Gilroy’s own project “subscribes to a decidedly mystical, idealist ideology, constructs a transcendental category of blackness,” and retains the “ethnicism” for which he faults Afrocentric nationalism.⁸ In a later essay, “Rethinking Black Atlanticism,” published in 2000, she argued, as the historian Nicholas Grant summarizes her, that Gilroy privileges the United States as the major reference point for Black cross-cultural exchange.⁹

Key contributions

• The black Atlantic as a modern political and cultural formation defined by a desire to transcend the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity.
• Ships in motion between Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean as the book’s organizing symbol.
• Anti-anti-essentialism: racialized subjectivity read as the product of the social practices, among them Black music, that are supposed to derive from it.

See also

• The transatlantic feedback loop — music carried between Britain and the United States
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats