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The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness

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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.

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, Gilroy sees in black music an invocation to literacy (critical discourse that is abstract from present circumstance) that is morally constituted of a critique of the shortfallings of modernity. In other words, whereas Gates sought a distinctly African means of achieving critical thought as rooted in European knowledge aesthetics (a mind-body split--Gates's signification is a sophisticated life of the mind above the body), Gilroy sees the counterculture of modernity as negating this split between "ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics (page 39)." Whereas Gates shows that literacy and reason are not solely European genealogies, Gilroy shows that black vernacular is not necessary for black reason. For Gilroy, black expression ("counterculture") is a moral signification upon modernity. This counterculture does not reify textuality because it objects to knowledge as something abstract to the human lifeworld, a hallmark of European thought. Gilroy's counterculture is thus a "post-literate" mode of reason, an engagement with the intellectual future rather than the intellectual present (Gates) or the intellectual past (McLuhan/Ong/Levine).

gilroy writes of forms of transmission, historically describing communication of experience and culture by blacks from periods of history when direct communication was regimented, curtailed and silenced up to the post-literate musical culture of the twentieth century.

during slavery, ways of communication were found in song and dance, in utterance and gesture. in the case of margaret garner, an escaped slave on trail for killing her child, the violence of slavery and its effects were made known in several forms: the act of infancide, the publication of the act through the media, personal published accounts such as in a memoir by an abolitionist, levi coffin, the championing of the case by a noted suffragist of the day, lucy stoner, and, a century later, continued by the fictionalization of margaret garner's story by toni morrison in her novel, Beloved.

gilroy looks at two forms of transmission, sea travel and the artifact: books, records, and choirs. situating his book in the countries on the continents connected by the atlantic ocean, africa, europe and the north and south americas, he touches on communication on slave ships from africa, with deeper probing into communication by 19th century free black intellectuals, those fortunate to travel to other countries, and communication by blacks during the slave trade, free and enslaved, who worked on ships. for gilroy, the travels resulted in interaction, and the exchange and transmission of ideas.

delving into the double consciousness blacks experienced living in two cultures, gilroy argues that blacks were no strangers to modernity in europe and the americas, that modernity was not exclusive to whites, and that europe and the americas benefited from the contributions of blacks, slave, traveler, and citizen alike.

the writers, frederick douglass and richard wright, and their books, are given chapters, as is the fisk choir, and, more recently, the record in the hands of producers and performers of the hip hop generations.

although gilroy has included some interesting stories of black intellectuals that should appeal to the general reader, a word to the wise, The Black Atlantic is work by a serious scholar, highly researched, and part of an informed conversation among black intellectuals.

This is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking reads a person could ask for. It explains how difficult a double consciousness is to live with, break, and evolve from. This says more about the development of the Atlantic World than just about anything ever written.

The book was in very good condition, but it took longer than expected to receive it.

The Black Atlantic is an attempt to call to attention the contribution of the slaves to the progression of modernity. Submitting himself to the operation of Western modernity, Gilroy recognizes that there exists a double consciousness in the black flesh, that is, the black sees his own image through the 'other.' However, as to me, we should find the third term--denegation to revolute against the metaphysic difference and cultural strength instead. Denegation in its very essence is not to break down the established but rather to hold a critical eye on the contigent cultural transformation and has the self recognize the alterity.