The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

“The especially crude and reductive notions of culture that form the substance of racial politics today are clearly associated with an older discourse of racial and ethnic difference which is everywhere entangled in the history of the idea of culture in the modern West.”

Gilroy’s critique of contemporary debates about modernity points out that the line between the modern and postmodern is not so clear and rigid. Here, he points out that the centric universalisms found in contemporary debates are inherited from the modern era.

“In opposition to both of these nationalist or ethnically absolute approaches, I want to develop the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”

This is the raison d’etre of the book. Rather than the limited frameworks that cultural historians have been using to analyze modernity and its contours, Gilroy proposes accounting for the transnational and intercultural character of not only Black political culture, but modernity as a whole, especially when Black political culture is interwoven into the fabric of modernity.

“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.”

This is a point to which Gilroy returns throughout the book, as he provides specific examples of Black intellectuals, artists, and cultural products that exemplify the transcendence of nationalism and ethnic absolutism. It is only by analyzing the work through the Black Atlantic lens that the transcendence of nationalism and ethnicity becomes evident.