Reflection on Gilroy's Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity

            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’.”