The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Czarny Atlantyk: nowoczesność i podwójna świadomość)

Wprowadzenie

Paul Gilroy published “The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness” in 1993 with Verso and Harvard University Press. Its six chapters argue that the culture of the African diaspora cannot be understood in national or ethnic terms: it formed in the movement of people, ideas, texts and music between Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and Europe, for which Gilroy takes the ship as his image. He reads Frederick Douglass’s fight with the slave-breaker Covey against Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, W. E. B. Du Bois’s travels in Germany and his idea of double consciousness, Richard Wright’s years in Paris and the history of Black music from the Fisk Jubilee Singers to hip-hop, and describes a “counterculture of modernity” inside and against the West. Against both European nationalism and Afrocentrism he rejects “ethnic absolutism”. The book shaped diaspora studies, and its neglect of Africa and of anti-colonial nationalism has been debated, for example by Laura Chrisman.

Powiązania

Nawiązuje do

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Opowieść o życiu Fredericka Douglassa, amerykańskiego niewolnika)1845 · Frederick Douglass
• Dusze czarnego ludu1903 · W.E.B. Du Bois

Więcej dzieł: Paul Gilroy

• 1987There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Nie ma Czarnych w Union Jacku: kulturowa polityka rasy i narodu)