The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness by Paul Gilroy (review)

158 Canadian Review ofAmerican Studies Homestead Strike of 1892," Labor History 23, no. 1 [Winter: 1982]) lamented that there existed no account which "adequately unifies a narrative of events with discussion of the economic and ideological underpinnings of the strike" (49). Thanks to Krause this omission has now been rectified. Yet some questions remain. Given the prominence Krause accords republican ideologies in his study, a more rigorous analysis (or deconstruction) of both sides' rhetoric would have been welcome. Also, despite the author's attention to the role of women and eastern European workers in the events surrounding 1892, we learn little of daily working-class cultures or social relations in the Homestead. Krause's overall interpretation would be strengthened if he could provide a clearer picture of how republican ideals fitted in with such a culture on a day-to-day basis. To say there remains work to be done does not, of course, detract from Krause's considerable achievement. The Battle for Homestead steps "beyond the tired question of class and begin[s] to confront the ways all spheres of life reinforce relations of domination and subordination by making them seem natural" (359). Those who would defend "the tired question of class" now have their work cut out for them. David Bright University of Calgary Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 261 and index. Paul Gilroy has edited and written books-The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS/Hutchinson, 1982), There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (University of Chicago Press, 1991)and numerous essays regarding modern and contemporary issues of race, nationality, humanities, and positionality. The Black Atlantic, his most recent contribution to the study of Western black cultures, keeps company with other contemporary texts such as Houston A. Baker's Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Homi K. Bhabha's collection of essays, Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990), and Eric J. Book Reviezvs 159 Sundquist's To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Harvard University Press, 1993). The Black Atlantic argues that a determined lack of interest in the subordination of blacks and other non-Europeans continues to thwart any ability to fully comprehend modernism, and simultaneously he warns against the possibility of achieving one "tidy, holistic conception of modernity 1 ' (45). Gilroy reshapes modernity by situating so-called black constructs such as that of master and slave at modernism's "center." He establishes this need to revisit modernism based on the continued existence of racism today and on never-answered questions of racial terror inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century. Gilroy purports to make sense of modernity from a black Atlantic, rather than from a solely African-American, perspective. Although impeccably researched and accomplished in its theoretical and critical approach, The Black Atlantic fails in a significant way to accomplish Gilroy's goal, and in fact, he continues the project of privileging the African-American experience. He pursues his subject by way of an accumulative thesis deftly woven throughout The Black Atlantic. The thesis builds on Gilroy's primary reason for writing this book: to describe black agency as that emanating from identities always unstable, mutable, unfinished, and as that responding restlessly to a double-consciousness regarding race and nation. Gilroy organizes The Black Atlantic into six chapters with accompanying notes, preface, and index. Of the six chapters, four address African-American writers, which I see as a problematic overload for the goals of this text. Chapter 2, "Masters, Mistresses, Slaves, and the Antinomies of Modernity, 11 centres the construct of master and slave as a redefined crux of modernism. This chapter highlights Frederick Douglass in a far more eloquent and thorough way than that regarding Martin Delany in the previous chapter. This differential speaks to the paradox of writing a text that adamantly wishes not to privilege the African-American experience while the AfricanAmerican experience wields such literary, political, and social currency and accessibility that it lures even the most resistant writers into its trap. Chapter 4, "'Cheer the Weary Traveller': W. E. B. DuBois, Germany, and the...