The Black Atlantic Archive

Abstract

What, exactly, is the Atlantic? It has been more than a decade since Paul Gilroy published his monograph, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Since three of the four books under review have the phrase in their titles (the fourth, Philip Gould's Barbaric Traffic, refers more generally to the 18th-century Atlantic world, presumably because many of the writers he considers were not black), we can begin by asking what these authors find most compelling about Gilroy's book. For Vincent Carretta and Gould, The Black Atlantic offers an influential path beyond nation and race as master terms, [i]magining instead a diasporic model of racial identity (3). In the fourth chapter of Barbaric Traffic, Gould contends that the autobiographies of John Marrant and Venture Smith argue against Gilroy's claim that liberalism and the Enlightenment are little more than engines of terror for black people in the eighteenth century (123). But Gould's very topic-antislavery rhetoric in England and Americaclearly follows Gilroy's lead in replacing the nation-state with a transatlantic context (7). Gilroy is most pervasively present as a model in Alan Rice's Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. For Rice, Gilroy's book was epochal, a paradigm shift beyond the narrow nationalisms of much African diasporan (23). Rice makes much of Gilroy's clever pun that the black Atlantic's counterculture of modernity was more a matter of routes than roots. Because their collection of primary texts focuses on black writers who moved, either physically or imaginatively, between the US, Nova Scotia, England, and Sierra Leone, Joanna Brooks and John Saillant unsurprisingly also seize on this pun in Face Zion Forward (5). Clearly, Gilroy's book remains a powerful model of thinking beyond the self-serving narratives of the nation-state, a shift of perspective that our current global self-consciousness finds right and proper. But this surely cannot be the whole reason for Gilroy's influence. Such a transnational vision was not in itself a new approach to black history and culture in 1993, after all. Scholars studying the cultural transformations of the African diaspora (Brooks and Saillant note particularly Robert Farris Thompson and Cedric Robinson