The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.

Reviewed by

Peter Erickson Clark Art Institute 

It is no accident that Paul Gilroy's 1993 book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness cites both Adrienne Rich and Stuart Hall. These two writers can be seen as emblematic of Gilroy's desire to interweave American and British elements in the service of a nonseparatist, nonuniversalist model of cultural interactions. Gilroy's first book, 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), focused on analysis of identities that are both black and British. But Gilroy's second book is greatly expanded in scope. He now looks beyond Britain to the United States. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the impact of Gilroy's intervention as a black British critic in African American studies. Indeed, his position as an outsider helps to enact his argument that we need an international perspective. Opposing all forms of "ethnic absolutism" whether of the Eurocentric or Afrocentric variety, Gilroy proposes the concept of the Black Atlantic as the vehicle for "an explicitly transnational and intercultural" approach (15).

To construct an encapsulated, airtight African American tradition that stops at national borders is, in Gilroy's view, simply inaccurate. This "nationalist" effort neglects the significance of the actual European and African travels of many African American writers. Expressing his indictment in a roots/routes pun, Gilroy sees the problem of African American literary canon formation as its tendency to overemphasize static internal roots at the expense of dynamic external routes. A narrowly conceived canon artificially restricts African American writers to an American environment. Gilroy's argument is powerful because he so cogently proves his point through specific reconsiderations of major figures against the background of a much larger trans-Atlantic context. His overall analysis dramatically reopens the field of African American studies: He redraws the boundaries by enlarging in one stroke both the field's content and its interpretive framework. Of course calls for emphasizing African American culture as an intermixture are not entirely new. But what differentiates Gilroy's work from, for instance, Ralph Ellison's related commentary is Gilroy's greater stress on cross-national exchanges and his much sharper political vision.

Of all his extended discussions of individual writers, Gilroy's study of Richard Wright in the penultimate chapter is the most eloquent and compelling. The bracing tone of Gilroy's analysis is conveyed in the concluding summary:

The part of his work which resists assimilation to the great ethnocentric canon of African American literature has been left unread. . . .

Examining his route from the particular to the general, from America to Europe and Africa, would certainly get us out of a position where we have to choose between the unsatisfactory alternatives of Eurocentricism and black nationalism. The first ignores Wright, the second says that everything that happened to him after he left America is worthless for the schemes of black liberation. Wright was neither an affiliate of western metaphysics who just happened to be black nor an ethnic African American whose essential African identity asserted itself to animate his comprehensive critique of western radicalism. . . . His work articulates simultaneously an affirmation and a negation of the western civilisation that formed him. (186)

Gilroy not only provides a remarkably fresh perspective on Wright's career. He also helps break up the critical impasse stemming from an oversimple contrast of Wright with Zora Neale Hurston. A reassessment of Hurston after her revival by feminist critics has been undertaken by Mary Helen Washington in Invented Lives (1987), Hazel V. Carby in "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston" in Michael Awkward's New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God (1990), and Michele Wallace in "Who Owns Zora Neale Hurston?: Critics Carve Up the Legend" in her Invisibility Blues (1990). Gilroy now supplies the complicating perspective on Wright that dislodges the binary pattern on the other side.

Precisely because the chapter on Wright is so strong, two gaps in Gilroy's subsequent commentary are accentuated. The first is the lack of a corresponding detailed reading of James Baldwin, whose relocation to France surely qualifies him as a figure of the Black Atlantic. To pass over Baldwin (1924-1987) amounts to skipping a major writer in the generation after Richard Wright (1908-1960). Nor is it sufficient to dismiss Baldwin's relation to Wright on the grounds of Baldwin's criticism of Wright in "Everybody's Protest Novel" (1949), "Many Thousands Gone" (1951), and "Alas, Poor Richard" (1961). The connection goes much deeper, as Baldwin's epitaph intimates: "He had survived exile on three continents and lived long enough to begin to tell the tale." Wright's untold tale is part of his ongoing legacy to Baldwin and the resonance of his tale in Baldwin's work needs to be elaborated to complete and strengthen Gilroy's overall account. Especially germane is Toni Morrison's testimony at the memorial service for Baldwin published as "Life in His Language" in the December 20, 1987, New York Times Book Review. "You made American English honest - genuinely international."

The second gap concerns Gilroy's treatment of Toni Morrison's Beloved in the final chapter. Morrison certainly shares Gilroy's departure from Afrocentrism, as she makes clear at the outset in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992): "I do not want to encourage those totalizing approaches to African American scholarship which have no drive other than the exchange of domination - dominant Eurocentric scholarship replaced by dominant Afrocentric scholarship." But what is missing is a consideration of the motif of travel in relation to Morrison's work that is explicitly linked to Gilroy's previous deployment of this motif. As he presents it elsewhere, the theme of travel has a strong literal dimension expressed in Gilroy's interest both in actual journeys and in specific techniques of travel. The metaphorical level of the circulation of ideas is firmly grounded in the physical mobility represented by ships and trains: "I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol . . ." (4); "if the memory of slavery and the middle passage represents one form of geographical and cultural dislocation and these touristic journeys to Europe stand for a second, freely chosen variety, the figure of the Pullman porter and the chronotype of the train . . . exemplify a third and more complex kind of travel experience" (133).

Morrison appears not to be a figure of travel in the same sense as Richard Wright or James Baldwin since she has not repeated their sojourns in France but instead remained within the United States. Some recognition of this difference is needed to pursue Gilroy's argument. What modifications in Gilroy's conceptual scheme as it applies to the contemporary post-Baldwin period are required by the distinctive geographical configuration of Toni Morrison's career? This question is not meant in any way to deny the force and value of Gilroy's discussion of Beloved in terms of the parallel between Jewish thought and the concept of black diaspora. My point is rather to call attention to the abruptness with which Gilroy abandons his earlier formulations about travel and jumps to an exclusively general and figurative level when he turns to Morrison. This abruptness is left unexplored and unexplained. A more thorough rendering of the critical moves one has to make in the sequence from Richard Wright through James Baldwin to Toni Morrison would help to fill in important details in Gilroy's conception of travel.