Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources notes from Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and the Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and the Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

ix some of the things that black intellectuals had said—sometimes as defenders of the West, sometimes as its sharpest critics—about their sense of embeddedness in the modern world.

ix how different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cultural history fail when confronted by the intercultural and transnational formation that I call the black Atlantic.

ix casts a fresh eye on the history of black nationalist thought that has had to repress its own ambivalence about exile from Africa.

x demonstrate why the polarization between essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of black identity has become unhelpful.

X Wright is applauded for his attempts to link the plight of black Americans with the experiences of other colonized peoples and to build a theory of racial subordination that included a psychology

X The book concludes with a critical discussion of Africentrism and the way it has understood the idea of tradition as invariant repetition rather than a stimulus toward innovation and change.

Xi the relationship between ethnic sameness and differentiation: a changing same.

Xi pattern of movement, transformation, and relocation

Repudiate the dangerous obsession with “racial” purity which are circulating inside and outside black politics. . . . the inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas.

Xi The history of the black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade.

2 My concern here is . . . exploring some of the special political problems that arise from the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture.

2 creolisation, metissage, mestizaje, 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 and avoid capture by its agents.

3 structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering that I have heuristically called the black Atlantic world. . . . effort involved in trying to face (at least) two ways at once.

3 the continuing lure of ethnic absolutisms

3 broader questions of ethnic identity that have contributed to the scholarship and the political strategies that Britain’s black settlers have generated and to the underlying sense of England as a coherent cultural community against which their self-conception has so often been defined. Here the ideas of nation, nationality, national belonging, and nationalism are paramount. They are extensively supported by a clutch of rhetorical strategies that can be named “cultural insiderism.” The essential trademark of cultural insiderism which also supplies the key to its popularity is an absolute sense of ethnic difference. . . . incontestable priority

4 My search for resources with which to comprehend the doubleness and cultural intermixture that distinguish the experience of black Britons in contemporary Europe required me to seek inspiration from other sources and, in effect, to make an intellectual journey across the Atlantic. In Black America’s histories of cultural and political debate and organization I found another, second perspective with which to orient my own position. . . .

4 . . . that narrowness of vision which is content with the merely national has also been challenged from within that black community by thinkers who were prepared to renounce the easy claims of African American exceptionalism in favour of a global, coalitional politics in which anti-imperialism and anti-racism might be seen to interact if not to fuse.

4 . . . a nationalistic focus that is antithetical to the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the black Atlantic.

6 . . . the struggle to have blacks perceived as agents, as people with cognitive capacities and even with an intellectual history—attributes denied by modern racism—that is for me the primary reason for writing this book.

6 intermediate concepts, lodged between the local and global

7 relationship between the politics of information and the practices of capital accumulation.

7 black Britain’s social and historical formation. This blending is misunderstood if it is conceived in simple ethnic terms, but right and left, racist and anti-racist, black and white tacitly share a view of it as little more than a collision between fully formed and mutually exclusive cultural communities. . . . black history and culture are perceived, like black settlers themselves, as an illegitimate intrusion into a vision of authentic  British national life that, prior to their arrival, was as stable and as peaceful as it was ethnically undifferentiated.

8 In the nineteenth century, the term “race” was used very much in the way that the world “culture” is used today.

10 Enlightenment assumptions about culture, cultural value and aesthetics go on being tested by those who do not accept them as universal moral standards. These conflicts are, in a sense, the outcome of a distinct historical period in which a new, ethnically absolute and culturalist racism was produced. . . . a political discourse which aligned “race” closely with the idea of national belonging and which stressed complex cultural difference rather than simple biological hierarchy.

12 long-neglected involvement of black slaves and their descendants in the radical history of our country in general and its working class movements in particular. Olaudah Equiano, whose involvement in the beginnings of organized working-class politics is now being widely recognized . . . .

12 sailors, moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines that were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity.

13 Crispus Attucks at the head of his “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars” and can trak Denmark Vesey sailing the Caribbean and picking up inspirational stories of the Haitian revolution . . . . shining example of Frederick Douglass, whose autobiographies reveal that he learnt of freedom in the North from Irish sailors while working as a ship’s caulker in Baltimore. He had less to say about the embarrassing fact that the vessels he readied for the ocean—Baltimore Clippers—were slavers, the fastest ships in the world and the only craft capable of outrunning the British blockade. . . . The involvement of Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes with ships and sailors lends additional support to [Peter] Linebaugh’s prescient suggestion that “the ship remained perhaps the most important conduit of Pan-African communication before the appearance of the long-playing record.

14 the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges . . . .

15 A concern with the Atlantic as a cultural and political system has been forced on black historiography and intellectual history by the economic and historical matrix in which plantation slavery—“capitalism with its clothes off”—was one special moment.

17 reconceptualize the orthodox relationship between modernity and what passes for its prehistory. . . . the ship is the first of the novel chronotopes presupposed by my attempts to rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemisphere.

17 reevaluating Garvey and Garveyism, pan-Africanism, and Black Power as hemispheric if not global phenomena. . . . require fresh thinking about the importance of Haiti and its revolution for the development of African-American political thought and movements of resistance. . . . W W Brown’s five years in Europe as a fugitive slave, on Alexander Crummell’s living and studying in Cambridge, and upon Martin Delany’s experiences at the London congress of the International Statistical Congress in 1860. . . . Du Bois’s childhood interest in Bismarck, his investment in modeling his dress and moustache on that of Kaiser Wilhelm II . . . .

17 Notable black American travelers, from the poet Phyllis Wheatley onwards, went to Europe and had their perceptions of America and racial domination shifted as a result of their experiences there. . . . Ida B. Wells . . .

19 Marked by its European origins, modern black political culture has always been more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes.

23 Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1859) . . . vision of a dynamic alliance, both commercial and civilizing, between English capital, black American intellect, and African labor power.

26 his [Brown's] novel Blake; or, The Huts of America as a narrative of familial reconstruction.

186 get us out of a position where we have to choose between the unsatisfactory alternatives of Eurocentrism and black nationalism.

Ch. 6 “Not a Story to Pass On”: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime

187 [Tradition] operates as a means to assert the close kinship of cultural forms and practices generated from the irrepressible diversity of black experience. . . . a complex term that is often understood to be modernity’s antithesis.

188 several black writers who held out against this form of retreat and opted instead to embrace the fragmentation of self (doubling and splitting) which modernity seems to promote. However, this option is less fashionable these days. Appeals to the notion of purity as the basis of racial solidarity are more popular. These appeals are often anchored in ideas of invariant tradition and provisioned equally by positivistic certainty and an idea of politicas as a therapeutic activity. The first aim of this chapter is to rethink the concept of tradition so that it can no longer function as modernity’s polar opposite.

188 The idea of tradition gets understandably invoked to underscore the historical continuities, subcultural conversations, intertextual and intercultural cross fertilizations which make the notion of a distinctive and self-conscious black culture appear plausible. This usage is important and inescapable because racisms work insidiously and consistently to deny both historicity and cultural integrity to the artistic and cultural fruits of black life. . . . However, the idea of tradition is often also the culmination, or center-piece, of a rhetorical gesture that asserts the legitimacy of a black political culture locked in a defensive posture against the unjust powers of white supremacy. This gesture sets tradition and modernity against each other as simple polar alternatives as starkly differentiated and oppositional as the signs black and white. . . . the idea of tradition can constitute a refuge. . . . a temporary home . . . .

189 Slavery is the site of black victimage and thus of tradition’s intended erasure. When the emphasis shifts towards the elements of invariant tradition that heroically survive slavery, any desire to remember slavery itself becomes something of an obstacle. It seems as if the complexity of slavery and its location within modernity has to be actively forgotten if a clear orientation to tradition and thus to the present circumstances of blacks is to be acquired. . . . slavery becomes a cluster of negative associations that are best left behind. . . . to replace it at the center of our thinking with a mystical and ruthlessly positive notion of Africa that is indifferent to intraracial variation and is frozen at the point where blacks boarded the ships that would carry them into the woes and horrors of the middle passage.

190 Slavery, which is so deeply embedded in modernity . . . .

190 . . . routinely complemented by the argument that the unique civilization to which the West lays claim is itself the product of African civilization. Cheik Anta Diop, George James, and others have demonstrated the power of these claims which even in their crudest form have the virtue of demystifying and rejecting “European particularism” dressed up “as universal.”

190 Dealing equally with the significance of roots and routes . . . . particular conceptions of time that emerge in black political culture. . . . The desire to bring a new historicity into black political culture is more important than the vehicles that have been chosen to bring this end about.

190 The Africentric movement appears to rely upon a linear idea of time . . . enclosed at each end by the grand narrative of African advancement.

191 Blacks become dominant by virtue of either biology or culture; whites are allocated a subordinate role. The desperate manner in which this inversion proceeds betrays it as merely another symptom of white supremacy’s continuing power.

191 The enthusiasm for tradition there expresses not so much the ambivalence of blacks towards modernity, but the fallout from modernity’s protracted ambivalence towards the blacks who haunt its dreams of ordered civilization.

191 the trope of family which is such a recurrent feature of their discourse is itself a characteristically American means for comprehending the limits and dynamics of racial community.

191 diaspora temporality . . . a distinctive relationship of antagonistic indebtedness

191-2 In moving toward a different and more modest formulation of tradition, it asks initially whether the premium placed on duration and generation can itself be read as a response to the turbulent patterns of modern social life that have taken blacks from Africa via slavery into an incompletely realized democracy that racializes and thus withholds the loudly proclaimed benefits of modern citizenship.

192 Similarly skeptical views of the value of the premodern . . . .

193 . . . the bodily fruits of imagined African sensibility can provide a bulwark against the corrosive effects of racism, poverty, and immiseration on individuals and communities. But it is deeply significant that ideas about masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are so prominent in this redemptive journey back to Africa. . . . reconstruction of an appropriately gendered self . . . .

194 symbolic reconstruction of community is projected onto an image of the ideal heterosexual couple. . . . The integrity of the race is thus made interchangeable with the integrity of black masculinity . . . . a protracted crisis of masculinity . . . rather than work towards something like its transcendence. . . . transnational entertainment corporations unwittingly supply a vehicle for circulating these ideas in the form of black popular music. These means of distribution are capable of dissolving distance and creating new and unpredictable forms of identification and cultural affinity between groups that dwell far apart. . . . In particular, the invocation of tradition becomes both more desperate and more politically charged as the sheer irrepressible heterology of black cultures becomes harder to avoid.

195 developing awareness of the African diaspora as a transnational and intercultural multiplicity.

195 [second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, Rome 1959] The “Colonial experience” was, for example, identified as an additional source of cultural synthesis and convergence. This key term was used so broadly as to include slavery, colonialism, racial discrimination, and the rise of national(ist) consciousness(es) charged with colonialism’s negation.

196 a tension around the teleology of black experience and the registering of time itself. Diaspora time is not, it would seem, African time. The words “original” and “inherent” belong to one cultural field while “evolution” and “scattered” operate in a different plane. Bringing them together requires a stereoscopic sensibility adequate to building a dialogue with the West: within and without.

196 F Jameson . . . observation that a fascination with the workings of existential time and deep memory are a definitive characteristic of the high modern.

196 tension between temporalities

197 Writers, particularly those closest to the slave experience, repudiated the heroic narrative of western civilization and used a philosophically informed approach to slavery in order to undermine the monumental time that supports it. Whatever their disagreements about the teleology of black emancipation, Du Bois, Douglass, Wright, and the rest shared a sense that the modern world was fragmented along axes constituted by racial conflict and could accommodate non-synchronous, heterocultural modes of social life in close proximity. Their conceptions of modernity were periodized differently. They were founded on the catastrophic rupture of the middle passage rather than the dream of revolutionary transformation. They were punctuated by the processes of acculturation and terror that followed that catastrophe and by the countertextual aspirations towards freedom, citizenship, and autonomy that developed after it among slaves and their descendants.

197 The redefinition of tradition towards which this chapter is moving also requires a shift in understanding modernity. To put it another way, it matters a great deal whether modern racial slavery is identified as a repository in which the consciousness of traditional culture could be secreted and condensed into ever more potent forms or seen alternatively as the site of premodern tradition’s most comprehensive erasure.

198 The idea of diaspora might itself be understood as a response to these promptings—a utopian eruption of space into the linear temporal order of modern black politics which enforces the obligation that space and time must be considered relationally in their interarticulation with racialized being.

198 . . . that rapport with death emerges continually in the literature and expressive cultures of the black Atlantic. It is integral, for example, to the narratives of loss, exile, and journeying which, like particular elements of musical performance, serve a mnemonic function: directing the consciousness of the group back to significant, nodal points in its common history and its social memory.

198 . . . the different practices, cognitive, habitual, and performative, that are required to invent, maintain, and renew identity. These have constituted the black Atlantic as a non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern ex-centric, unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble that cannot be apprehended through the Manichean logic of binary coding. . . . the living memory of the changing same.

198 [tradition] does not stand in opposition to modernity . . .

199 . . . the circulation and mutation of music across the black Atlantic explodes the dualistic structure which puts Africa, authenticity, purity, and origin in crude opposition to the Americas, hybridity, creolization, and rootlessness.

199 slaves who returned to Nigeria from Brazil in the 1840s. All of them are untidy elements in a story of hybridization and intermixture that inevitably disappoints the desire for cultural and therefore racial purity, whatever its source.

200 listening to music is not associated with passivity

200 ubiquity of antiphonal social forms that underpin and enclose the plurality of black cultures in the western hemisphere. A relationship of identity is enacted in the way that the performance dissolves into the crowd.

200 the identity-giving model of democracy / community that has become the valuable intersubjective resource that I call the ethics of antiphony.

200 during the process of performance the dramatic power of narrative as a form is celebrated. The simple content of the stories is dominated by the ritual act of story-telling itself.

201 what we can call, following H A Baker Jr, the tactics of sound developed as a form of black metacommunication in a cultural repertoire increasingly dominated by music, dance, and performance.

202 a syncopated temporality—a different rhythm of living and being in which “the night time is the right time” . . . .

207 . . . it was Exodus which provided the primary semantic resource in the elaboration of slave identity, slave historicity, and a distinctive sense of time. Albert Raboteau, the historian of African American religion, describes this: “The appropriation of the Exodus story was for the slaves a way of articulating their sense of historical identity as a people . . . . The Christian slaves applied the Exodus story, whose end they knew, to their own experience of slavery, which had not ended. . . . Exodus functioned as an archetypal event for slaves.” The heroic figure of Moses proved especially resonant for slaves and their descendants. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Marcus Garvey are only two of the most obvious modern leaders who drew on the power of Old Testament patriarchy to cement their own political authority. Yet this identification with the exodus narrative and with the history of the chosen people and their departure from Egypt seems to be waning. Blacks today appear to identify far more readily with the glamorous pharaohs than with the abject plight of those they held in bondage. This change betrays a profound transformation in the moral basis of black Atlantic political culture.

208 notion of a return to the point of origin . . . . the condition of exile

208 The idea that the suffering of both blacks and Jews has a special redemptive power, not for themselves alone but for humanity as a whole . . . .

210 the affinity b/w Jews and blacks based around the axes provided by suffering and servitude.

212 How do black expressive cultures practice remembrance? . . . Adorno’s remarks about the capacity of remembrance “to give flesh and blood to the notion of utopia, without betraying it to empirical life.” The concept of Jubilee emerges in black Atlantic culture to mark a special break or rupture in the conception of time defined and enforced by the regimes that sanctioned bondage.

216 The capacity of blacks to redeem and transform the modern world through the truth and clarity of perception that emerge from their pain, is for example, a familiar element in the theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., which argues not only that black suffering has a meaning but that its meaning could be externalized and amplified so that it could be of benefit to the moral status of the whole world. [Miller, West, James H. Cone]

217 relationship between terror and memory, sublimity and the impossible desire to forget the unforgettable. [Jewish Holocaust and slavery:] precious resources from which we might learn something valuable about the way that modernity operates.

218 terrors that exhaust the resources of language amidst the debris of a catastrophe which prohibits the existence of their art at the same time as demanding its continuance.

219 The source of these concerns may be equally located in the shift between oral and written culture and a response to the dominance of autobiographical writing within the vernacular mode of black literary production.

219 Morrison: “Margaret Garner didn’t do what Medea did and kill her children because of some guy.”

219 confrontation between two opposed yet interdependent cultural and ideological systems and their attendant conceptions of reason, history, property, and kinship. One is the dilute product of Africa, the other is an antinomian expression of western modernity. Their meeting ground is the system of plantation slavery.

220 The desire to return to slavery and to explore it in imaginative writing has offered Morrison and a number of other contemporary black writers a means to restage confrontation between rational, scientific, and enlightened Euro-American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook of prehistorical, cultureless, and bestial African slaves.

221 the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marked out blacks as the first truly modern people.

221 Morrison: modern life begins with slavery . . . From a women’s point of view, in terms of confronting the problem of where the world is now, black women had to deal with post-modern problems in the nineteenth century and earlier. . . . Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy. You can’t do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves.

222 We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or it’s romanticized. This culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with the truth about the past.

221 minority modernism

221 Confluence of racism, rationality and systematic terror to configure both their disenchantment with modernity and their aspirations for its fulfillment.

222 racial traditions that would be content forever to invoke the premodern as the anti-modern. It is proposed here above all as a means to figure the inescapability and legitimate values of mutation, hybridity, and intermixture en route to better theories of racism and black political culture . . .

222 a lesson not restricted to blacks. They raise issues of more general significance that have been posed within black politics at a relatively early point.

222 a response to racism that doesn’t reify the concept of race

222 ethnicity = an infinite process of identity construction.

“Living Memory: Meeting Toni Morrison,” in Paul Gilroy Small Acts (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), pp. 175-182.