Thoughts on Paul Gilroy's "Black Atlantic and the Counterculture of Modernity"

Jessica Wildman

In Paul Gilroy’s, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity”, the author discusses the inherent hybridity of the Black Atlantic and how it is sustains a transnational cultural heritage. The transnationalism specific to the Black Atlantic has developed from a pan-african exchange. Mind tingling to me is that this exchange, started hundreds of years before the invention of the United States, permeates every facet of American Art and will as long as it lives.  

Gilroy likens pan-africanism to a ship in motion (p 4). The author describes pan-africanism as the back and forth exchange of ideas, like the ship traveling, “across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean...”. In my opinion, the remarkable thought in this passage is the idea that the exchange itself, the Black Atlantic diaspora, is the ship in constant motion. If these identities are in constant motion it forfeits any kind of ethnic absolutism in regard to Black Atlantic culture. The fusing of cultures via pan-africanism is not, as Gilroy points out in discussing the British music producer Jazzie B, distinctly “dependent upon or simply imitative of the African diaspora cultures of America and the Caribbean” (p 15). Created then, as Gilroy describes, is “another new black vernacular culture” that draws influence from the black diaspora while creating newness (p 15). The author refers to the conscious exchange in the sampling of music records from American and Jamaican artists as, “encapsulat[ing] the playful diasporic intimacy that has been a marked feature of the transnational black Atlantic creativity” (p16). Counterintuitive as it may sound, “diasporic intimacy” is what creates the Black Atlantic culture of exchange.  

It seems to me that more people can identify with the idea of hybridity than ever before. The Americas are good examples of the merging of cultures that contributes to hybridity and transnationalism. While colonialism and slavery have certainly contributed to the United States’ “cultural mutation” (p 2), as Paul Gilroy described in this chapter, a modern example of hybridity is a multicultural marriage creating a child. Perhaps it is a first generation Pakistani immigrant father and a sixth generation Irish immigrant mother.  This hypothetical child identifies in new ways and with new heritage than the preceding family members. Thus, a hybrid is born, and with that hybrid the formation of new ideas and a new perspective.