Paul Gilroy

Gilroy's 1993 book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness marks a turning point in the study of diasporas.[21] Applying a cultural studies approach, he provides a study of African intellectual history and its cultural construction.[22] Moving away from all cultural forms that could be deemed ethnic absolutism, Gilroy offers the concept of the Black Atlantic as a space of transnational cultural construction.[23] In his book, Gilroy makes the peoples who suffered from the Atlantic slave trade the emblem of his new concept of diasporic peoples. This new concept breaks with the traditional diasporic model based on the idea that diasporic people are separated by a communal source or origin, offering a second model that privileges hybridity.[21] Gilroy's theme of Double Consciousness involves Black Atlantic striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency being absolutely transformed.[23]

Rather than encapsulating the African-American tradition within national borders, Gilroy recognizes the actual significance of European and African travels of many African-American writers. To prove his point, he re-reads the works of African-American intellectuals against the background of a trans-Atlantic context.[24] Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic fundamentally disrupts contemporary forms of cultural nationalism and reopens the field of African-American studies by enlarging the field's interpretive framework.[24]

Gilroy offers a corrective to traditional notions of culture as rooted in a particular nation or history, suggesting instead an analytic that foregrounds movement and exchange. In an effort to disabuse scholars of cultural studies and cultural historians in the UK and the U.S. from assuming a "pure" racial, ethnic, and class-based politics/political history, Gilroy traces two legacies of political and cultural thought that emerge through cross-pollination. Gilroy critiques New Leftists for assuming a pure British nationalist identity that in fact was influenced by various Black histories and modes of exchange. Gilroy's initial claim seeks to trouble the assumptive logics of a "pure" western history (canon), offering instead a way to think these histories as mutually constituted and always already entangled.[25]

Gilroy uses the transatlantic slave trade to highlight the influence of "routes" on black identity. He uses the image of a ship to represent how authentic black culture is composed of cultural exchanges since the slave trade stifled blacks' ability to connect to a homeland. He claims that there was a cultural exchange as well as a commodity exchange that defines the transatlantic slave trade and thus black culture. In addition, he discusses how Black people and Black cultures were written out of European countries and cultures via the effort to equate white people with institutions and cultures, which causes whiteness to be conflated with Europe as a country and Black people being ignored and excluded. This causes Blackness and Britishness to be viewed as separate entities lacking symbiosis. Whiteness and Britishness even went so far as to create a culture such that Blackness becomes a threat to the sanctity of these European and British cultures. To further an understanding of this, one can think of how race is a taboo subject in Germany, which allows Blackness to never be introduced as a dimension of what it means to be German, allowing Black people and their struggles with racism to be unnamed, unmarked, and ignored.

An example of how Gilroy and his concepts in The Black Atlantic directly affected a specific field of African-American studies is its role in defining and influencing the shift between the political black British movement of the 1960/70s to the 1980/90s.[26] Gilroy came to reject outright the working-class movements of the 1970s and '80s on the basis that the system and logic behind the movements were fundamentally flawed as a result of their roots in the way of thinking that not only ignored race but also the trans-Atlantic experience as an integral part of the black experience and history.[27] This argument is expanded upon in one of his previous co-authored books, The Empire Strikes Back (1983), which was supported by the (now closed) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of the University of Birmingham in the UK. The Black Atlantic received an American Book Award in 1994. The book has subsequently been translated into Italian, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. The influence of the study is generally accepted to be profound, though academics continue to debate in exactly what form its greatest significance may lie.[28]

The theoretical use of the ocean as a liminal space alternative to the authority of nation-states has been highly generative in diasporic studies, in spite of Gilroy's own desire to avoid such conflations.[29] The image of water and migration has been taken up as well by later scholars of the Black diaspora, including Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Stephanie E. Smallwood, who expand Gilroy's theorizations by engaging questions of queerness, transnationality, and the middle passage.[30]

Among the academic responses to Gilroy's Black Atlantic thesis are: Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke (2012), edited by Joseph Pivato, and George Elliott Clarke's "Must All Blackness Be American? Locating Canada in Borden's 'Tightrope Time,' or Nationalizing Gilroy's The Black Atlantic" (1996, Canadian Ethnic Studies 28.3).[31]

Additionally, scholar Tsiti Ella Jaji discusses Gilroy and his conceptualization of the Black Atlantic as the "inspiration and provocation" for her 2014 book Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity.[32] While finding Gilroy’s discussion of music in the Black diaspora compelling and inspiring, Jaji has two main points of contention that provoked her to critique and to dissect his theories, the first being his failure to include continental Africa in this space of music production, creating an understanding of black diaspora that is exclusive of Africa.

Jaji's second point is that Gilroy fails to examine the role that gender plays in Black music production. Jaji discusses how Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, while enriching our collective understanding of trans-Atlantic Black cultural exchange, devalues the incorporation of gender into his analysis, as can be seen in chapter one of The Black Atlantic, where Gilroy says: "Black survival depends upon forging a new means to build alliances above and beyond petty issues like language, religion, skin colour, and to a lesser extent gender."[33] Further, Gilroy did not include female voices in his discussion of music and trans-Atlantic Black cultural exchange, which Jaji argues contributes to a gendered understanding of pan-Africanism that is largely male-dominated.

An additional academic response to Gilroy's work is by scholar Julian Henriques. Gilroy concludes the first chapter of his book The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness with the quote: "social self-creation through labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes....Artistic expression...therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation" (Gilroy, 40).[34] This quote about the liberatory potential of art as a transatlantic cultural product. Gilroy argues that for Black people forms of culture take on a heightened meaning in light of Black persons being excluded from representation in the traditional political apparatus. As such, Gilroy argues that culture is the mode through which Black persons should aspire to liberation. In working to understand Black culture, Gilroy implores us as readers to focus on routes of movement of Black persons and Black cultural production as opposed to focusing on roots of origin. However, scholar Julian Henriques argues Gilroy's focus on routes in itself is limiting to our understanding of the Black diaspora. Henriques introduces the idea of propagation of vibration, described as the diffusion of a spectrum of frequencies through a variety of media, in his paper Sonic diaspora, vibrations, and rhythm: thinking through the sounding of the Jamaican dancehall session (Henriques, 221).[35] This theory of the propagation of vibrations provides language to understand the diffusion of vibrations beyond the material (accessible) sonic and musical fields or the physical circulation of objects that can be tracked through Gilroy's routes. Henriques described vibrations as having corporeal (kinetic) and ethereal (meaning based) qualities that can be diffused similarly to the accessible fields, and argues that Gilroy's routes language does not encapsulate these frequencies of vibrations (224–226).[34] When considered together, Henriques and Gilroy's writing suggests that these plethora of vibrational frequencies propagate through the Black diaspora as part of Black musical production, with the potential to be used as a mode of liberatory practice.