The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

During her years on the West Coast, the poet Lucille Clifton often told audiences that one of her new joys was writing poetry about the Pacific Ocean. She’d written poems of the Atlantic, but, as she put it, she always had some problems with the Atlantic Ocean. In the years since, Clifton has moved back to the East Coast and has written poetry about the ritual blessing of the boats in St. Mary’s County. Both Clifton’s mobility and the ironies implicit for black poets in the blessing of the Atlantic boats are constitutive features of the particular forms of double consciousness described by Paul Gilroy’s term “the Black Atlantic.”

It is absolutely crucial to note that Gilroy deploys this term as a heuristic device, a device that

addresses one small area in the grand consequence of this historical conjunction—the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating and remembering that [he has] heuristically called the black Atlantic world.

(3)

If this is not kept firmly in mind readers might feel that the concept of the Black Atlantic is positing an essentialist or otherwise limiting construction of identities. Those perched, however precariously, upon what we now call the “Pacific Rim” might wonder about possible exclusions entailed in Gilroy’s usage. Gilroy himself is well aware of the danger. In response to a question raised by Donna Haraway at the University of Illinois’s mammoth cultural studies conference in 1990, a question in which Haraway wondered if “this particular global mapping leaves out” really crucial questions, Gilroy said:

I feel that most of the decisive political battles are actually going to be registered at that intermediate level, between the local and the global. And I actually wanted to try and illustrate what it might mean to put some concepts in there in a very provisional way. And I hope it didn’t sound as if the Atlantic was supposed to exhaust that.... I think we need a new topography and I think that maybe, I’m not even sure about it, the Atlantic thing might be part of that. ¹

It is this heuristic function that provides the greatest value of Gilroy’s concept. He writes in The Black Atlantic that “Historians of ideas and movements have generally preferred to stay within the boundaries of nationality and ethnicity and have shown little enthusiasm for connecting the life of one movement with that of another” (186). I’ve no doubt that this claim will fall apart when considered on the largest scale; we can all think of counterexamples. But it too often does seem to be the case that scholars of African American culture have tended to look only to Africa and America, while scholars of American studies or of Western literary traditions have clearly preferred to stay out of Africa. Gilroy’s study demonstrates the necessity of examining the continuing cultural congress of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Major portions of this volume are given to interpretive studies of the trans-Atlantic careers of Martin Delany, W. E. B. DuBois, and Richard Wright. Gilroy’s work here is important not only for its bringing back to critical attention major efforts by these authors that have been overlooked or undervalued (DuBois’s German and African residencies and Wright’s later books in particular); it also grounds his larger argument about the need to reconceive modernity. Martin Delany is a key figure here. For many years Delany was known to literature scholars only for his remarkable novel Blake: or, The Huts of America, while he was known to historians primarily for his efforts as an African colonizationist and as a soldier. But Delany, who had been admitted to Harvard for medical training only on the condition that he leave the country afterwards and practice in Liberia, and who was asked to leave Harvard anyway by no less a personage...