The Black Atlantic paradigm : Paul Gilroy and the fractured landscape of "race"

Abstract

IF ONE WERE TO ATTEMPT TO LOCATE PAUL GILROY'S HEURISTIC BLACK Atlantic framework, one would have to look to (at least) three distinct geographical/national entities and their attendant intellectual traditions. The triangle of Africa, Britain and America should ring familiar to those even vaguely aware of the last two centuries of culture contact in which Africans have been brought (and then have brought themselves) deep into the intimacies of an increasingly dominant and simultaneously fragile world-concept. One would have to look much closer to note how this triangular trade has been as much an intellectual system of exchange as it has been the modern Mediterranean in which great financial empires rise, fall, rise again, and then re-write the fall. To name the integrated components of the black Atlantic-which for Gilroy is a structure of thought as well as the historical nexus of contemporary black identitiesone would have to include primarily British cultural studies, African American literary and cultural studies, and a latter-day Pan-Africanism which maps the landscape of race in its cultural sprawl, not in its essentialist homeland(s).