Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic
In this book Paul Gilroy covers the relationship between
modernity and African-Americans based primarily on W.E.B. Du Bois and
Richard Wright. The Atlantic is used as an image for the cultural
connection between Europeans and Africans. The central theme of the
Black Atlantic as a "counterculture of modernity" is the neglecting of
slavery and African diaspora in modern and postmodern theory, although
- following Gilroy's argumentation - both topics are on the one hand
important in understanding European 20th century thinking and on the
other hand writings of many black intellectuals are highly compatible
with Western modernity adding important experiences and histories to a
eurocentric construct. Gilroy appeals to include African(-American)
sources into the theory, emphasizing the fact of "black and Hispanic
presence in the ruins of the modern city".
Gilroy proposes to add to European modernity's rational
reasoning something like truth and authenticity, but also double
consciousness and utopia. According to Gilroy these are the important
topics necessary to understand African-American culture and the social
discrimination of slavery's descendants. His critique of modernity aims
at the scientific concept of race; parallel to postmodern
self-criticism The Black Atlantic urges to take up a
non-eurocentralist perspective and include the slavery experience into
contemporary thinking.
In terms of contemporary politics and social
theory, the value of [blacks' critical approach towards occidental
rationality] lies in its promise to uncover both an ethics of freedom
to set alongside modernity's ethics of law and the new conceptions of
selfhood and individuation that are waiting to be constructed from the
slaves' standpoint - forever dissociated from the psychological and
epistemic correlates of racial subordination.1)
Besides African-American writers and thinkers Gilroy discusses
in detail "music and its attendant social relations". Music has a
remarkable position in African-American culture, partly due to fact
that most of the slaves were illiterate. Southern Soul and gospel were
the medium through which black people passed on their state of living
and their experiences. Through various stages during the 20th century
the styles have changed and mixed with European and Carribean
aesthetics. Nowadays hip hop is the mouthpiece of black history and
black underclass knowledge with rap as the language and beats for
wordless communication passing on the "sources of feeling" and
"conceptions of blackness".
The calls and responses no longer converge in
the tidy patterns of secret, ethnically encoded dialogue. Tne original
call is becoming harder to locate. If we privilege it over the
subsequent sounds that compete with one another to make the most
appropriate reply, we will have to remember that these communicative
gestures are not expressive of an essence that exists outside of the
acts which perform them and thereby transmit the structures of racial
feeling to wider, as yet uncharted, worlds.2)
1) Gilroy 56
2) Gilroy 110
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