Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic Analysis

Paul Gilroy introduced the concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ in his 1993 novel The Black Atlantic:Modernity and Double Consciousness as he describes a counterculture to European modernity and modernism. Gilroy’s thesis argues against essentialist versions of racial identities and nationalisms and rather emphasizes the concept of a shared culture, relatable to a majority of diverse communities around the world. He proposes the idea of the Atlantic to be treated as “one single, complex unit of analysis” liable to “produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” which recognises the value of developments within culture, relating them to that of metaculture defined by Gilroy as a ‘network’. During Gilroy’s analysis, he emphasizes the importance of journey’s which …show more content…
‘Double consciousness’ remains a central theme in Gilroy’s novel, using the writings of W.E.B Du Bois of splitting subjectivity and raceconsciousness that Du Bois observes as inherent to the experience of being African-American, an awareness of existing simultaneously both within and outside the dominant culture which is what Gilroy argues is one of the defining characteristics of Black Atlantic expressive culture. Although some critics refute Gilroy’s ideals, noting his novel as “a sign of times” describing it as little more than a produce of “the rise in popularity of concepts of fusion, hybridity and syncretism as explanatory tools for the analysis of cultural formation”. Yet, for Gilroy, the utopianism of Black Atlantic culture emerges out of what he maintains is the inherent anticapitalism concomitant to transnational black experience: “for the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery and subordination”. Thus, ‘work’ is distinguished from just a form of “artistic expression” which, Gilroy writes becomes “the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal