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Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. 261 pp. $24.95 cloth/ $15.95 paper.
Reviewed by Peter Erickson
Clark Art Institute
It is no accident that Paul Gilroy's 1993 book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and DoubleConsciousness 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...