The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Building on W. E. B. Du Bois's early 20th-century theories of race and double-consciousness and taking Du Bois's own transatlantic career as a paradigmatic instance of the modernism of black experiences of diaspora, Gilroy accomplishes an exciting recharting of the complexities of black thought in the West...[The] book has the additional merit of providing remarkable rereadings of Du Bois, Richard Wright, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and others.
--Aldon L. Nielsen (Washington Post Book World )

The Black Atlantic uses the transnational concept of the diaspora to explore the migrations, discontinuities, fractal patterns of exchange and hybrid glory that join the black cultures of America, Britain, and the Caribbean to one another and to Africa. Gilroy isn't the first to chart The Black Atlantic, but he is the first to situate it...It is a bold and brilliant rethinking of the political geography of race.
--Eric Lott (The Nation )

This is a splendid book...Gilroy's main contribution to scholarship is that by inserting black people as central participants in the creation of the modern world he thereby rewrites the history of modernity and modernism.
--Hazel Carby (Yale University )

This book's many virtues of style combine with elegant local readings of Douglass, Wright, Du Bois, Morrison; of Adorno and Baumann; and a whole range of popular culture from jazz to Hip Hop...It is a mark of the ambition and the achievement of this book that so many readers will find it rewarding.
--Anthony Appiah, Harvard University

A thoughtful evaluation of Western black identity, and a scathing critique of the nationalist, 'ethical absolutist' position that posits that such identities are mutually exclusive...There is much to recommend about [it]: many thought-provoking questions and compelling arguments.
--Carrie B. Robinson (Quarterly Black Review of Books )

Against the grain of much contemporary thought that embraces ethnocentrism, Paul Gilroy has issued a stirring challenge to recognize the modern world as a cultural hybrid. The Black Atlantic is a wonderful chapter in the global intellectual history of the next century...Drawing on work in many disciplines, Gilroy provides a vivid alternative to competing positions in the current culture wars. He briefly outlines an intellectual rapprochement between Zionism and black nationalism, for example, and some of his most polemical remarks are reserved for those Afrocentrists who proclaim a linear inheritance from Africa but wish to ignore the intervening cultural hybridization produced by slavery...Present anxiety about the supposed disuniting and fraying of America's national culture, or about its forced concentration into an assimilating mold, might be significantly allayed if readers would pay serious attention to the invigorating claims of The Black Atlantic.
--Eric J. Sundquist (Newsday )

Spike Lee and Jazzie B., Walter Benjamin and the Jubilee Singers, Sonia Boyce and Keith Piper, Richard Wright, Theodor Adorno, J.M.W. Turner and W.E.B. Du Bois, Hegel, Hendrix, and 2 Live Crew: Very few writers could find things to say about every character on so dazzlingly eclectic a cast-list. Perhaps only Paul Gilroy could offer not merely striking insights about all of them, but present a compelling case for their belonging in the same narrative…Gilroy's lucidity is exemplary.
--Stephen Howe (New Statesman & Society )

Review

This book's many virtues of style combine with elegant local readings of Douglass, Wright, Du Bois, Morrison; of Adorno and Baumann; and a whole range of popular culture from jazz to Hip Hop...It is a mark of the ambition and the achievement of this book that so many readers will find it rewarding.
--Anthony Appiah (Harvard University ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 8, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674076060
• ISBN-13: 978-0674076068
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #132,044 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a textual odyssey of rethinking black political culture., September 2, 2001

By	martin de leon (houston, texas) - See all my reviews

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.

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An insightful look at black transglobal culture, January 14, 1999

By A Customer

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In Conversation About the Origin and Intellect of "Black" Expression, October 15, 2006

By	Adam Bahner - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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).