The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness Summary PDF

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The Black Atlantic : Modernity and Double Consciousness Summary

Certain modernist notions of race are inadequate for understanding race, culture, nationality, and ethnicity as they relate to British history and politics. For example: · Cultural nationalism portrays “black culture” and “white culture” as essentialist, immutable, and separate cultures having nothing to do with each other. · Theories of creolization, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity connote racial impurity and polution. · Cultural insiderism implies an absolute sense of ethnic difference, where this difference is seen as more important than any other aspect of identity, culture, or experience. Meanwhile, ethnic groups are envisioned as internally culturally homogenous groups with nationalist ambitions. · These “ethnic absolutisms” pretend that groups are internally culturally homogenous and distinct from other groups, ignoring overlaps, intersections, and transformations Instead, Gilroy proposes that the unit of analysis be switched from a race or ethnic group to the Black Atlantic, a site of transnational and intercultural exchange. · The “Black Atlantic” is both a space and a symbol of contact among passengers from/to Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean. “Ships immediately focus attention on the Middle Passage, on the various projects of redemptive return to the African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activitsts as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, grammophone records, and choirs.” (53) · This switch addresses the nationalism and ethnocentrism existing in cultural studies, which doesn’t recognize the theoretical counterpoint to nationalism made by previous black intellectuals. · This switch helps us see that British culture was not internally self-generating, but that it was racialized long before the immigration of the 1950s. For example, Gilroy offers as an example the discourse of the Enlightenment. · It also draws attention to the cross-fertilization of ideas among travelers of diverse races, ethnicities, and nationalities, the interdependence of balck and white thinkers, the discontinuities of diaspora cultures, and the development of a pan-African consciousness. These transcend the nation-state and nationalism. Problems with Black Nationalism and Black Political Discourse · There are several problems with black nationalism. It attempts to “fix” the black community by recovering a more authentic, essential, rooted identity, implicitly criticizing contemporary black cultural expression. It also ignores internal diversity within the black community. It may stifle pluralist political discourse within the black community (especially where a spokesperson presumes to speak for the whole group) · Gilroy then interprets black music as counterculture to Modernity....