The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

Martin R. Delany was a Black American abolitionist, writer, physician, and soldier. Born in 1812 in Charlestown, Virginia, to an enslaved father and free mother who were connected to royal African lineages, Delany and his family settled in Chambersburg, Virginia in the early 1820s, before his eventual departure from the United States in 1856 to travel to Canada, Africa, and Europe. Delany is a key figure in Gilroy’s analysis because his life and writings reveal a confrontation between nationalism and travel experiences and aspirations, and because he is hailed as the progenitor of Black nationalism. Delany’s life and work “provides an opportunity to examine the distinctive effects produced where the black Atlantic politics of location frames the doorway of double consciousness” (19).

In The Condition, Delany advocated for strong state and Zionist aspirations for Black Americans to politically challenge the white supremacist state. Delany’s primary concern in this early version of Black nationalism was not with an African homeland, per se, but rather the regeneration of modern conceptions of the nation state. Delany’s international travels resulted in the Official Report of the Niger Exploring Party in 1859, which provides insight into Delany’s ambivalence towards exile and homecoming, and contrasts Black American intellectuals and Africans, while linking Black American endeavors for racial uplift with the task of modernizing Africa. Delany’s novel Blake, or The Huts of America, a narrative of familial reconstruction, demonstrates that Delany can be recognized as the progenitor of Black Atlantic patriarchy. The patriarchy that undergirds the novel is a prominent feature of later Africentrist and Black nationalist models of racialized being, solidarity, and political identity. The structure of Blake illustrates Delany’s claims that he had outgrown the identity boundaries of North America, as expressed in the Official Report. For Gilroy, analyzing Blake through the Black Atlantic lens shows that Delany’s later version of Black solidarity is anti-ethnic and underscored by a Pan-African, diaspora sensibility; he points to Delany’s treatment of religion as evidence of a racial nationalism that is facilitated by transnationalism. 

German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, considered a leading figure in Western philosophy, was born in 1770. Hegel figures prominently in Gilroy’s theory and analysis of the Black Atlantic, particularly for his master-slave dialectic, a passage from Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s allegory connotes the intimate association of modernity and slavery and raises points about the dependency produced in the master/slave relationship. Furthermore, several Black intellectuals have engaged in critical dialogue with Hegel’s work, and in so doing, have demonstrated their ambivalent relationship to the West, as well as the counterculture of modernity produced from that ambivalence.

In the master-slave dialectic Hegel presents a universalist assumption that the modern person would prefer bondage to death. Hegel, a first-wave modern thinker, is guilty of making Eurocentric universalist assumptions, upholding Eurocentric conceptions of the modern self, which are then taken as universal and uniform across geographical and identity boundaries. When later modern philosophers and historians deal with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, they do not do so in terms of the literal reality of slavery and its association with modernity, but rather in terms of the psychological dimensions of the dialectic. Even in more social and historically specific readings of the dialectic, there is still no literal analysis. As part of his proposal for the reassessment of the relationship between modernity and slavery, Gilroy critiques the shortcomings and oversights of contemporary debates on modernism to include discussion of race/racism and the integral role of slavery in the construction of the modern self.

However, the Black Atlantic’s critical dialogue with Hegel’s work challenges these assumptions. Patricia Hill Collins’ dialogue with Hegel shows a critique of the universalist assumptions of white men integral to Enlightenment narratives, while her theory continues to be embedded in Enlightenment assumptions regarding “experience-centred knowledge claims that are made to be universal” (53) in her assertion that the perspective of Black female intellectuals opens the way towards resistance for “ordinary folks” (53). The autobiographical work of Frederick Douglass, particularly the story about the physical struggle between himself and a slave master, illustrates how Douglass’s engagement with master-slave dialectic produces a different reasoning from Hegel in the subjective sense of self constructed in the master/slave relationship. In contrast to Hegel’s assertion that the modern self would prefer bondage to death, Douglass’s account illustrates that “the slave actively prefers the possibility of death to the continuing condition of inhumanity on which plantation slavery depends” (63). 

Frederick Douglass was a Black American writer, orator, statesman, and abolitionist with a diverse racial background. Born in 1817into slavery in Maryland, Douglass escaped in 1838 by disguising himself as a sailor. He published three autobiographies throughout his lifetime, detailing his experience of slavery, escape, and eventual settlement in New York City. These autobiographies, as well as Douglass’s novel The Heroic Slave, demonstrate Douglass’s use of the literary form to reshape his public persona in different stages of his life and present important perspectives on the problem of modernity, particularly its aesthetic dimensions and periodization.

Douglass’s autobiographical narratives conceived the slave plantation as an institution out of place with the modern world and the enslaved person as a subject with agency to whom death was preferable over bondage. As discussed above, this contrasts with Hegel’s allegory, in which slavery is compatible with occidental modernity and which assumes a universal preference for bondage over death. Furthermore, Douglass’s work demonstrates the integral role of racial subordination and terror to the character of modernity, and the memory of this terror and of the slave experience is a primary device in Black expressive cultures. 

In his analysis of Douglass’s work, Gilroy discusses the role of gender as a mediating category of identity in racial politics. Douglass’s narratives demonstrate a covert feminist politic integral to the abolitionist movement, underscoring Gilroy’s point that Black thought and narratives were integral to producing the revolutionary consciousness of modernity. The presentation of a public persona is an enduring presence in Black Atlantic politics and expressive culture. Douglass’ writings echo the narrative of Margaret Garner’s attempted escape from slavery that resulted in her killing her own female child—a story integral to the development of a distinctly feminist abolitionist discourse, and one that also conceives of the enslaved subject as agent who preferred death to bondage.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers, an ensemble of vocalists from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, originally formed in 1871, are a group who still tour internationally. The Jubilee singers first popularized Negro spirituals, preserving the musical tradition. They play a prominent role in Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic because their international travels, as well as their treatment by later Black thinkers and theorists, raise important points about notions of racial authenticity, the use of the memory of slavery as an important device in Black expressive cultures, and the ways that Black expressive cultures blur the decisive distinction between aesthetics and politics that is thought to characterize modernity. 

The Jubilee Singers are one of several examples of Black Atlantic music that demonstrate the limits of nationalism in questions of racial authenticity. The story of the Jubilee Singers demonstrates the difficulties that accompany the entrance of Black American folk forms into popular international culture, particularly the use of music to demarcate lines of authenticity. Successive generations of Black thinkers used the story of the Jubilee Singers to develop their understandings of racialized being and notions of authenticity attached to that being. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois frames The Souls of the Black Folks with lyrics from the Singers’ repertoire and devotes an entire chapter to discussing their story. For Du Bois, the Singers, and Black music generally, serve as a symbol of reconciliation between the Talented Tenth and the Black American poor peasantry, and he names “slave music” as a central sign of Black authenticity (90). Zora Neale Hurston, in contrast, sees the Jubilee singers as inauthentic, precisely because of the removal from their location in folk culture and the integration of Europeanist aesthetics in the form of spirituals that the Jubilee Singers put on international stages. 

Gilroy also argues that the Jubilee Singers serve as an example of the blurred distinction between aesthetics and politics that characterizes Black modernity, in contrast to Euro-American notions of modernity. Black music seeks to “transform the relationship between the production and use of art, the everyday world, and the project of racial emancipation” (74) and to “challenge the privileged conceptions of both language and writing as preeminent expressions of human consciousness” (74). The Jubilee Singers do precisely this through serious efforts to distance the form from the racial minstrelsy that was concurrently popular. In contrast to the buffoonery and offensively stereotypical images of Blackness presented by minstrelsy, the Jubilee Singers conveyed the “moral rectitude that flowed from the commitment to political reform for which the imagery of elevation from slavery was emblematic long after emancipation” (90). Furthermore, it is significant that the Singers’ tours to England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland in the 1870s were funded by the Earl of Shaftesbury, a proponent of working-class rights, underscoring the integral role of Black modernist expression to the revolutionary consciousness of Western politics.

W.E.B. Du Bois was a Black American sociologist, historian, and writer, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. He was a leading figure in the development of sociology and Pan-Africanism. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, articulated in The Souls of Black Folks, is a prominent theme in Gilroy’s understanding of the simultaneously within and without subjectivity that characterizes Black Atlantic modernisms and expressive cultures. Du Bois’s life and writing exemplify the tension between roots and routes in the articulation of Black Atlantic political identities and racialized being in the modern world.

Du Bois’s “On the Damnation of Woman” exemplifies the differences between philosophies and strategies of Black men and Black women in political struggles against racial subordination. Du Bois is in an intermediary position between earlier Black modern thinkers like Douglass, and later expressions of vernacular culture, in which metaphysical questions of Black ontology arise.

While he is the focus of Chapter 4, Du Bois is referenced throughout The Black Atlantic, an integral figure to Gilroy’s analysis and theory of a transnational Black Atlantic political culture.

Richard Wright was a Black American author of novels, autobiography, short stories, poems, and essays. Born in 1908 in Mississippi, Wright is most celebrated for novels, such as Native Son, Uncle Tom’s Children, and Black Boy, which explore political injustices and racial terror in the United States at a time when the US government was loudly critical of Nazism and fascism in Europe. 

As with Du Bois, travel and the politics of location are prominent features of Wright’s work, indicating the limits of nationalism and ethnic absolutism, as well as the ambivalence of Black intellectuals to the West in their development of understandings regarding race/racism, modernity, and identity. Gilroy demonstrates that a more accurate interpretation of Wright requires intertextual analysis of his lesser-known work with the work for which he is most recognized. Wright’s travels outside of the United States, his involvement with the communist party, and his interest in sociology and psychoanalysis, produced a sophisticated perspective that links Black American struggles against racial subordination to the wider global dimensions of anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, and anti-colonialism.

Wright figures prominently throughout The Black Atlantic because his conceptions of modernity and Black expressive and political cultures lend much to Gilroy’s analysis.

Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in 1832 in the West Indies, was a writer, diplomat, politician, and educator. He was the progenitor of Pan-Africanism and Ethiopianism, and he played a highly influential role in the development of Liberia and its educational institutions. Like many of the figures discussed in the book, Blyden’s life and work were marked by international travel and intercultural considerations that provided mediating influences on his understandings of racial identity, modernity, and political goals. 

Gilroy’s discussion of Blyden underscores correspondences between Black and Jewish thinkers with regards to the concept of diaspora. From childhood onward, Blyden was associated with Jewish people and customs. Gilroy posits that Blyden’s interest in Jewish history, religion, language and culture, his understanding of shared histories between Black and Jewish people, and his interest in the cultural and political nationalism of some European thinkers, should be regarded as evidence of the intercultural hermeneutics that went into the development of Pan-Africanism. Blyden must be recognized for his impact in entering the diaspora concept into Black Atlantic political culture and legitimizing the term and concept in Pan-Africanism and other formulations of Black political identity.