Work · African & Africana Philosophy
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
Essays on Black intellectuals and music between Africa, the Americas and Europe – Douglass, Du Bois, Richard Wright, Jimi Hendrix – that take the slave ship as the image of a culture formed in movement: Black culture belongs to modernity, not to a lost origin, and its nationalist and Afrocentric versions repeat the logic of race.
Introduction
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.
Connections
Builds on
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave1845 · Frederick Douglass
- The Souls of Black Folk1903 · W. E. B. Du Bois
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