The Black Atlanticby Paul Gilroy

Presentation by Julie Hewitt

Couple of Terms

Modernity- state or quality of being modern. Not traditional.

“Double Conciousness”- way of perceiving the world divided between two cultures. Term coined by W.E.B Du Bois, a scholar, activist, and co-founder of the NAACP.

Cultural nationalism portrays the “black culture” and the “white culture” as two completely separate cultures having nothing at all to do with one another.

British/European/American cultures completely separated and differentiated from African culture.

Black & White

“Regardless of their affiliation to the right, left, or centre, groups (political) have fallen back on the idea of cultural nationalism, on the overintegrated conceptions of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences in an absolute break in the histories and experiences of ‘black’ and ‘white’ people.”

This suggests there is a sense of an absolute ethnic difference and this difference is seen as being the most important aspect of one’s identity, culture or experience (cultural insiderism). Negation- the difference is noted and focused on, not similarities.

“ethnic absolutisms” make believe that groups are culturally very similar (homogenous) and distinct from any other group. They ignore any mixed aspects of the black and white cultures, any intersecting of the two or any overlapping.

Basically anyone white (Caucasian, Anglo (Saxon). Pure white.

“Theorization of creolisation, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity. From the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism, this would be a litany of pollution and impurity. These terms are rather unsatisfactory ways of naming the processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse.”

The theories of:

Creolization- new African American cultures emerging in the New World, mixture of African European.

Metissage- mixed heritage

Mestizaje- mixed

And hybridity are suggesting that an impure race, or polluted race, exists.

Black Atlantic- Ships

The Black Atlantic is both an actual space and a symbol of the intersecting and contact of passengers from Africa, Europe, America, and the Caribbean.

“Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage”

“They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected.”

Rather than focus on “English Blacks” or “American Blacks”, he proposes we talk about the Black Atlantic as a single unit where different identities are tied together. Focus on the combining force.

No Binaries Please

No longer look at the history of ethnicity and race in the West as being that of “white” versus “black”, but focus on the the combination of the two. No black/white, but the mixed cultures that live together. The Black Atlantic is where this happens.

Slavery

“A quarter of the British Navy was composed of Africans for whom the experience of slavery was a powerful orientation to the ideologies of liberty and justice.”

The ideologies of those who kept them. Wake up call to the policies of their white captors.

Slavery was a very pivotal moment for the rise of modernity, the modern thoughts on race, and the Black Atlantic as a “counterculture of modernity”- the different ways people of African descent reacted to as well as resisted that in this Modern West, the racial fear and the reasoning behind it were very connected to one another.

Racism

Dichotomy (splitting) of black and white, which first appeared in modern times, is not a thing of the past. Operates by relating the concept of nationality with the concept of culture. More about racial identity than cultural identity. More about color than about beliefs or

practices.

Our present day, current racism is inherited of the modern idea of a state inhabited by people all of the same culture, language, etc, a homogenous culture (nation states). This is still very much present in contemporary cultural studies.

Paul Gilroy

“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.”

Pop Culture/Real World Example

Idris Elba

British Actor- “Luther”

Done American work- “The Wire” (HBO)

African American-British man- blending of the cultures