The black atlantic modernity and double consciousness pdf

Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture.

In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. In a final tour de force , Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.

Buy Elsewhere Bookshop. I was nothing before; I was a man now. It [the fight] recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be a free man. A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity..

I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of manly independence. I had reached a point at which I was not afraid to die. In Hegel's allegory, which correctly places slavery at the natal core of modem sociality, we see that one solipsistic combatant in the elemental struggle prefers his conqueror's version of reality to death and submits.

He becomes the slave while the other achieves mastery. Douglass's version is quite different. For him, the slave actively prefers the possibility of death to the continuing condition of inhumanity on which plantation slavery depends.

He anticipated a point made by Lacan some years later: "death, precisely because it has been drawn into the function of stake in the game For in the last analysis it is necessary for the loser not to perish, in order to become a slave.

In other words, the pact everywhere precedes violence before perpetuating it. Douglass's preference for death fits readily with archival material on the practice of slave suicide and needs also to be seen alongside other representations of death as agency that can be found in early African-American fiction. Douglass's departure from the pacifism that had marked his early work is directly relevant to his critical understanding of modernity.

It underscored the complicity of civilisation and brutality while emphasising that the order of authority on which the slave plantation relied cannot be undone Without recourse to the counter-violence of the oppressed. Douglass's description of his combat with Covey expresses this once again, offering 64 an interesting though distinctly masculinist resolution of slavery's inner oppositions.

However, it is interesting that this aspect of Douglass's political stance has been discussed elsewhere among the would-be savants and philosophes of the black Atlantic as a symptom of important differences in the philosophical and strategic orientations of black men and women.

In his famous essay "On the Damnation of Women" Du Bois recounts a story told to him by Wendell Phillips which pinpoints the problem with precision: Wendell Phillips says that he was once in Faneuil Hall, when Frederick Douglass was one of the chief speakers. Douglass had been describing the wrongs of the Negro race and as he proceeded he grew more and more excited and fimUly ended by saying that they had no hope of justice from whites, no possible hope except in their own right arms.

It must come to blood! They must fight for themselves. Sojourner Truth was sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat facing the plat-. In Germany at roughly the same time, another Frederick Nietzsche was pondering the philosophical and ethical implications of the same question. It remains implicit in the story of Douglass's struggles in and against slavery. It may also be a question that cannot be separated from the distinct mode of masculinity with which it has been articulated.

To counter any ambiguity around this point in Douglass's tale, I want to pursue similar philosophical conclusions which appeared elsewhere in the history of the abolitionist movement as an important cipher for its emergent feminist sensibilities shortly after Douglass's own tale was published.

A version of this tale is still circulating, both as part of the African-American literary tradition inaugurated by works like Douglass's The Heroic SiJwe and as part of what might be called the black feminist political project. Contemporary newspaper reports, abolitionist material, and various biographical and autobiographical accounts provide the sources from which.

The simplest details of the case shared by various accounts6" seem to be as follows. Taking advantage ofthe winter which froze the Ohio river that usually barred her way to freedom, Margaret Garner, a "mulatto, about five feet high, showing one fuurth or one third white blood. On reaching Ohio, the family separated from the other slaves, but they were discovered after they had sought assistance at the home of a relative, Elijah Kite.

Trapped in his house by the encircling slave catchers, Margaret killed her three-year-old daughter with a butcher's knife and attempted to kill the other children rather than let them be taken back into slavery by their master, Archibald K. Gaines, the owner of Margaret's husband and of the plantation adjacent to her own home. This case initiated a series oflegal battles over the scope of the Fugitive Slave Act,69 Margaret'S extradition, her legal subjectivity, and the respective powers of court officers in the different states.

Despite pleas that she be placed on trial for the murder of the little girl "whom she probably loved the best,»70 Margaret's master eventually sent her to the slave market in New Orleans. The contemporary reports of this episode are contradictory and burdened with the conflicting political interests that framed its central tragedy. One newspaper report suggested that the Garners' original decision to flee from bondage had, for example, been encouraged by a visit to the Gaines household by two English Ladies.

Coffin was a local Quaker abolitionist and reputed president o"f the Underground Railroad who had been peripherally involved in the tragedy. A number of interesting points emerge from that authoritative source as well as from newspaper articles about the case, the American Anti-Slavery Society'S annual report, an account given in the biography of Lucy Stone, the distinguished abolitionist and suffragist who visited Margaret Garner in prison and attended the court hearings, and a further version written fur the American Baptist by one P.

Bassett, who gave his address as the Fairmount Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. In a further struggle that took place after Gaines and his associates had succeeded in entering the house, one marshal had two fingers shot from his hand and lost several teeth from a ricocheting bullet. Coffin writes that "the slave men were armed and fought bravely," while the Anti.. In Coffin's version of the story it is only 4fter Margaret has appreciated the hopelessness of the slaves' besieged position and seen her husband overpowered that she begins her emancipa-, tory assault on her children.

Some newspaper reports said that after almost decapitating the little girl's body in the act of cutting her throat, Margaret called ont to"hea;. Other papers reported that the older woman could not endure the sight of her grandchildren being murdered and ran to take refuge under a bed.

What are we to make of these contrasting forms of violence, one coded as male and outward, directed towards the oppressor, and the other, coded as female, somehow internal, channelled towards a parent's most precious and intimate objects of love, pride, and desire? Archibald Gaines took the body of her dead daughter away so that he could bury it in Kentucky on land "consecrated to slavery.

From this perspective, much was to be made of the fact that the slain child had been female, killed by her mother lest she fall victim to this licentiousness. Lucy Stone emphasised this point to her biographer: "She was a beautiful woman, chestnut colored, with good features and wonderful eyes. It was no wild desperation that had impelled her, but a calm determination that, if she could not find freedom here, she would get 67 it with the angels.. Margaret had tried to kill all her children, but she had made sure of the little girl.

She had said that her daughter wOuld never suffer as she had. We are told by Coffin that Stone drew tears from many listeners when, in explaining her conduct before the court, she made this argument: "When I saw that poor fugitive, took her toil-hardened hand in mine, and read in her face deep suffering and an ardent longing for freedom, I could not help bid her be of good cheer. I told her that a thousand hearts were aching for her, and that they were glad one child of hers was safe with the angels.

Her only reply was a look of deep despair, of anguish such that no words can speak. Coffin quotes her as likening Margaret's spirit to that of those ancestors to whom the monument at Bunker Hill had been erected. She made the proto-feminist interpretation of Margaret's actions quite explicit: "The faded faces of the Negro Children tell too plainly to what degradation female slaves submit.

Rather than give her little daughter to that life, she killed it. Her concern throughout the one-and-a-half-hour lecture was to demonstrate the un-Christian and immoral character of slavery and to reveal its capacity to pervert both civilisation and the natural attributes of human beings. According to the conventions of abolitionist discourse, the image of abusive and coercive white male sexuality was prominently displayed.

The perversion of maternity by the institution of slavery was a well-seasoned theme in abolitionist propaganda. Frederick Douglass had made this very point in his Nil-rmtive, recounting an incident in which a white woman, Mrs. Hicks, murdered her slave-a cousin ofDouglass'sfor failing to keep the baby she was charged with minding sufficiently quiet during the night.

Hick's baby and during the night she fell asleep and the baby cried. She having lost her rest for several nights previous, did not hear the crying.

They were both in the room with Mrs. Hicks, finding the girl slow to move, jumped from her bed, seized an oak stick of wood by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl's nose and breastbone, and thus ended her life.

It is impossible to explore these important matters here. Like Douglass's, her tale constructs a conception of the slave ' subject as an agent. What appears in both stories to be a positive preference for death rather than continued servitude can be react as a contribtirioI1 towards slave discourse on the nature of freedom itself. It supplies a valuable clue towards answering the question of how the realm of freedom is conceptualised by those who have never been free.

This inclination towards death and away from bondage is fundamental. It reminds us that in the revolutionary eschatology which helps to define this primal history of modernity, whether apocalyptic or redemptive, it is the moment of jubilee that has the upper hand over the pursuit of utopia by rational means.

The discourse of black spirituality which legitimises these moments of violence possesses a utopian truth content that projects beyond the limits of the present. The repeated choice of death rather than bondage articulates a principle of negativity that is opposed to the formal logic and rational calculation characteristic of modem western thinking and expressed in the Hegelian slave's preference for bondage rather than death.

As part of his argument against her return to Kentucky, Margaret's lawyer, Mr. Jolliffe, told the court that she and the other fugitives "would all go singing to the gallows" rather than be returned to slavery.

The association of this apparent preference for death with song is also highly significant. It joins a moral and political gesture to an act of cultural creation and affirmation. This should be borne in mind when we come to consider how intervention in the memories of slavery is routinely practised as a form ofvemacular cultural history.

Douglass's writings and the popularity of the Garner narrative are also notable for marking out the process whereby the division of intellectual 69 labour within the abolitionist movement was transformed. The philosophical material for the abolitionist cause was no longer to be exclusively generated by white commentators who articulated the metaphysical core of simple, factual slave narratives. It is also important to emphasise that these texts offer far more than the reworking and transformation of the familiarHegelian allegory.

They express in the most powerful way a tradition of writing in which autobiography becomes an act or process of simultaneous self-creation and self-emancipation. It is important to note here that a new discursive economy emerges with the refusal to subordinate the particularity of the slave experience to the totalising power of universal reason held exclusively by white hands, pens, or publishing houses.

Authority and autonomy emerge directly from the deliberately personal tone of this history. Eagerly received by the movement to which they were addressed, these tales helped to mark out a dissident space within the bourgeois public sphere which they aimed to suffuse with their utopian content.

The autobiographical character of many statements like this is thus absolutely crucial. In moving a vast number of Africans around the world, the original proponents of white supremacy and racial domination — likely unwittingly — provided for blacks a unique and distinct role in the co-creation of modernity. But this role has not always been perceived as such; and even when it has, there has been deep disagreement about the best way to fill it, to make manifest what is seen as its true function.

Is la ks opportunity meant to provide a means of transcending our racial history or is it a means of embracing what is thought to be essentially Africentric about it by articulating norms of authenticity? Gil o s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness represents a singular and foundational effort in both contextualizing the tendency to assume this dichotomy is our only option as well as to argue against that dichotomy.

Gil o s lassi text represents something more than political theory, it represents a theory of the social and cultural consequences of displacing and transplanting around the globe millions of Africans. Lebron Yale University be one of the most morally offensive features of European modernity, the features of modernity itself are egalitarian — they cannot and ought not be assigned as the exclusive privilege of any one culture; and, moreover, that la ks elatio ship to modernity should be appreciated in this light precisely in service to the continued political aims of racial emancipation, both from a history of white supremacy as well as f o a o st ai ed ie of la ks past ultural contributions in an effort to put into a place a future signified by genuine freedom.

Roots and Routes It is common when discussing trans-Atlantic slavery to do so in terms of lives and money. Crudely, one might talk of trans-Atlantic slavery as a process of moving a large number of black bodies free slave labor across a vast expanse of ocean in the name of capitalism.

A major and often acknowledged condition of this proclamation is that domination of Africans was not merely incidental but the trade was also bound up with a commitment to domination of blacks as such.

Under this rubric, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a particular practice, during a particular time, for a particular purpose: it represented the expropriation of black bodies from the sixteenth th ough ea l i etee th e tu to do i ate la ks i se i e of the West s i easi gl globalized economy and the new forms of development, competition, and power politics this opened up between European powers and, later, the United States. Paul Gil o s enduring intellectual contribution consists in compelling readers of The Black Atlantic to re-imagine the importance of this trade by insisting that the Atlantic Ocean was more than a maritime conduit separating the Western powers trading in African chattel.

Lebron Yale University for not only black bodies but black culture. Crucial to this reconceptualization is that the transmission of black culture was and remains part and parcel of the advent of what has traditionally been viewed as Western modernity; the notion of Western modernity typically makes global black culture at most a hand-maiden of the West s uest fo modernity.

In Gilro s hands, theorization of the Atlantic conceptually makes apparent what he takes to have been a reality all along, namely, that global black culture has been, is, and will remain a full partner in the humanist traditions with which today we still grapple, converse, and consult.

The Black Atlantic presents itself as a kind of genealogy wherein we come to appreciate with greater vivacity that any claims to define modernity must attend to the status of blacks as equal culture makers; on the other side, Gilroy challenges those who want to claim for blacks a kind of authentic or essential mode of black expression by highlighting that to be a culture-maker in the modern sense always represents an inherent tension between the past and the possibilities of the future with the only resolution consisting in facing this tension for what it is: the modern dilemma modulated by a history of white supremacy.

Gilroy directs much of what passes as his admiration, and other times as his ire, at both academics and artists. The Black Atlantic represents his attempt to provide a model of grappling with the aforementioned tension, and in this sense Gilroy is the i telle tual s i telle tual.

His breadth of learning is astounding and he puts it to use in not merely clearing ground but in seeking to reconstitute it. Lebron Yale University mettisage, mestizaje, a d h idit. Gilroy 2 Here, Gilroy laments that those interested in making sense of the relationship between black culture and modernity often find themselves having to choose between, on the one hand, conceptions of culture that threaten to ossify and falsely unify the diversity of black intellectual and artistic modes of expression, while, on the other hand, there is the theorization of such a significant number of hybrid identities that identifying anything that might be in common among them is unnecessarily difficult.

Here, the idea of the Black Atlantic stands as a heuristic — an idea that at once insists on resisting the tendency to reduce black-ness to a monolithic notion that is only differentiated by the categories of pre- and post-slavery history. Simultaneously, the idea of the Black Atlantic suggests there is a kind of commonality that can help us make sense of black diversity in terms of identity and its cultural expressions.

In this regard, the Black Atlantic signifies a mode and process of the dispersal of black-ness that has had lasting and dynamic consequences for the development of something that e te all a e a ed la k ultu e ut that i te all must always negotiate the implications of a difficult, brutal, and unjust history with an ever-quickening and unsteady present in order to secure a future that is yet open to contingency.

In pursuit of this aim, Gilroy puts in place an idee fixe that is meant to make a distinction that underwrites his third way of theorizing modern black culture: the difference between roots and routes. And here the distinction is not oppositional but both playful and analytic. Gil o s dependence on homophones casually draws our attention to the easy substantive slide he perceives scholars making when discussing black ultu e, a el , that la ks oots at a gi e point in time have been set down as a result of a particular route to that place.

This allows Gilroy to analytically make space for the importance and lasting implications of journeys. Lebron Yale University following when Gilroy discusses two 18th e tu la k sailo s: It is particularly significant for the direction of my overall argument that both Wedderburn and his sometime associate Davidson had been sailors moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines that were themselves micro-s ste s of li guisti a d politi al h idit.

Notice here that Gilroy imbues the ship and its social circumstances with cultural and political significance — more than an instrument for getting from one place to another, trans-Atlantic ships were the initial site of what would become the iterative modern processes of adopting modes of communication, and negotiating power and cooperation. Thus, In opposition to both of [the] nationalist or ethnically absolute approaches, 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 pe spe ti e.

One strategy Gilroy puts to effective use is to employ not only historical examples of the movement of black culture, especially with respect to music, which I discuss below, but to embody the possibilities of that space in the lives of thinkers whose works represent, o Gil o s readings, coming to terms with the demands and complexities of that in-between space.

Primary among these is W. Du Bois: Du Bois is…appeali g a d i po ta t f o the poi t of iew of this ook e ause of his la k of oots a d the p olife atio of outes i his lo g o adi life. The te o adi should e u de stood apa iousl. Du Bois s life as a ked a g eat intellectual journey that is most commonly associated with his idea of double-consciousness, but e e he e Du Bois s outes o e i to pla.

As Gil o otes, Du Bois as a a aised i the o th and who became an educator in the south. Lebron Yale University intellectuals. Thus, Gilroy presses, Deali g e uall ith the sig ifi a e of oots a d outes…should undermine the purified appeal of either Africentrism or the Eurocentrisms it struggles to answer. This book has been more concerned with the flows, exchanges, and in-between elements that call the very desire to be centred into questio.

Methodology and Pathology As suggested above, the idea of the Black Atlantic serves the purpose of redirecting our attention when reflecting on race and modernity toward the implications of the dispersal of black culture and away from either essentializing it or conceding to a view of it that is unnecessarily fractious on account of what seems to strike Gilroy as an intellectual compulsion to recognize all forms of ethnic and racial hybridity.

In this regard, Gil o s innovation is meant to serve a second purpose, and that is to mark out yet another distinction — this one of my own naming — between methodology and pathology. Here, I use pathology in its very strict sense, as a term denoting the process of diagnostic treatment to reveal the cause of an ailment.

The idea of the Black Atlantic for Gilroy, in this sense, does not merely stake out ground for him to introduce a slate of stylized terms for his project but rather to inquire as to why others seem to have missed what he thinks has been before us all along when putting race and modernity side by side.

Lebron Yale University cultural difference associated with ontological essentialist standpoint provides an embarrassing link between the practice of blacks who comprehend racial politics through it and the activities of their foresworn opponents — the ethnic absolutists of the racist right — who approach the complex dynamics of race, nationality, and ethnicity through a similar set of pseudo-precise, culturalist equatio s.

Here, Gilroy exposes what he perceives to be a common act of self- deception on the part of race theorists. This group tends to think of itself as inherently authorized to ake fai l st o g lai s a out hat ou ts as la k e ough i a u e of do ai s , as what and what is not authentic in some regard. But Gilroy thinks that such a theoretical disposition does not represent a theoretically or empirically viable alternative to the socio- political conservative views of blacks that espouse a degree of natural inferiority — he thinks race theorists have merely been offering a different variation on the same ideological theme of un- scientific racial essentialism.

This is a key contribution by Gilroy because it allows The Black Atlantic to do what all good theories should and that is not to have the same conversation in different dialects but to have a different conversation in a shared language.

But to move the conversation Gilroy needs to couple methodology with pathology. His strategy here is less explicit than it might otherwise be but we can glean what that strategy is a of hat he sa s of othe s o k.

Returning to Du Bois, Gil o ites, The o th of the diaspo a o ept is i its atte pt to spe if diffe e tiatio a d identity in a way which enables one to think about the issue of racial commonality outside of constricting binary frameworks — especially those that counterpose essentialism and pluralism. The Souls was the first place where a diasporic, global perspective on the politics of racism and its overcoming interrupted the smooth flow of African-A e i a e eptio alis s.

While here he approves of the term diaspo a it ould e short-sighted to think that that is what he admires most in this passage. Rather, what Gilroy admires is hat Du Bois s use of the term allows us to do, and that is to move beyond a theoretically stagnant conversation, to overcome the intellectual vice of valuing explanations that are easy to formulate and allowing our vigorous use of easy explanations to stand in for genuine analytically valuable inquiry.

To the extent that this is correct, Gil o s i t odu tio of Bla k Atla ti i to ou theo eti al le i o does o e tha su sta ti el e te d the predecessor notion of diaspora but uses it as a methodological pivot by broadening our attention to reflect on the global dispersal of black culture and not only or primarily of black bodies. As indicated above, a significant goal of Gil o s work is to destabilize attempts to specify authentic black culture. This preoccupation is especially vivid in The Black Atlantic when Gilroy discusses authenticity in the context of music.

This theme may seem novel in contemporary times, especially when considering hip-hop both as a genre as well as a way of life. But Gilroy persuasively illustrates that this is a long-standing debate among blacks when he presents the case of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. The Fisk singers first came to wider public attention in when they were commissioned to perform for European royalty, such as the Earl of Shaftesbury.

Their performances became remarkably popular inspiring many similar acts. But the wide acclaim by white audiences combined with what would be considered today as o e ialized o pop music and production made many educated artistic blacks wary.

Hurston excoriated the Fisk singers and similar singing troupes for adhering to what she deemed a Glee Club style presentation and thus performing black spirituals in a way unintended by their original authors. Marsalis has based nearly the entirety of his legacy on preserving through education and institutional affiliation with Lincoln Center the rich and deep tradition of New Orleans-style jazz.

Here the poles of criticism seem reversed. Where Hurston iti ized the Fisk si ge s fo et a i g the usi s oots, Da is iti izes Ma salis fo et a i g his own skill as a musician a d asse ts that he should ealize that jazz as a d is dead. Da is ole here is to make an argument for authenticity that is bound up in constant flux and innovation.