In
his introduction to the chapter, Gilroy seems to intentionally favor polarized
terminology in order to highlight the danger of Western culture’s norms in
defining racial duality. In this way, he refers to the “Manichean dynamic”
(p.1), a concept which predominantly concerns itself with the duality of “black”
and “white.” Western culture relies on the social tendency toward exclusivity,
whereas the parameters of race, ethnicity, and nationality are drawn with
hard-edged lines. Gilroy provides particular criticism to the idea of cultural
nationalism as “overintegrated conceptions of culture (p.2),” the integrity and
purity of which are threatened by the notion of diasporic identity.
Gilroy
regularly encourages the reader to doubt the universal standards of cultural aesthetics
and values set by the advancements of the Enlightenment into modern culture.
For examples, he refers to the racism and anti-Semitism in works by Kant and
Voltaire (p.8), the application of fetishism into Marxist politics and
psychoanalytic studies (p.9), and the moralizing of color in Burke’s approach
of the sublime (p.9). At the same time, Gilroy also acknowledges those who have
contested or outright rejected the same delineation of cultural and nationalist
standards, such as Salmon Rushdie in his attempts and struggle, as Gilroy
describes, “to construct a more pluralistic, post-colonial sense of British
culture and national identity (p.10-11);” Robert Wedderburn for his blasphemous
disreputation to incense slave uprising (p.12), most notably in “The Horrors of
Slavery”; J.M.W. Turner’s unfavorable reflection of the failings within English
politics in works including “The Slave Ship” (p.13-14, 16, 27).
I
think that Gilroy’s proposed resolution to the dilemma of Britain’s sweeping ideal
of cultural nationalism is admirable: “I want to develop the suggestion that
cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of
analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an
explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective (p.15).” At the same
time, I believe it would also be beneficial to read and consider more recent
critiques of this work, such as that of Laura Chrisman. Her book Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism (2003) includes a
chapter, “Journeying to Death: Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” which could offer an additional layer of context
in regard to the decade in which the work was written: “Gilroy’s
formulations mesh neatly with the 1990s metropolitan academic climate, which
saw the rise in popularity of concepts of fusion, hybridity and syncretism as
explanatory tools for the analysis of cultural formulation. The 1990s was also
a decade in which postmodernist intellectual concerns with language and
subjectivity infused both academia and 'new left’ politics to create a dominant
paradigm of ‘culturalism’ for the analysis of social relations. This
development risked abandoning the tenets and resources of socio-economic
analysis. Aesthetics and aestheticism were made to function both as explanation
of and solution to social and political processes. For these reasons, Gilroy’s
book is a ‘sign of the times’.”
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