Rethinking the Black Atlantic: Circuits, Spheres, Social Movements (HIST 2724) Instructor: Lara Putnam
A quarter century has passed since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. In stark contrast to nineteenth and early twentieth-century observers who routinely portrayed Afro-descended peoples as somehow the opposite of civilized progress, Gilroy re-read Afro-Atlantic intellectuals and cultural movements as not only engaged with, but essential to, the creation of modern cultural and intellectual life. Rather than portraying the cohesion of the African diaspora as a reflecting some essential cultural legacy—either to be lamented or celebrated—Gilroy saw the Black Atlantic as an intentional and evolving creation, a social collective actively imagined by men and women who placed themselves within it. At the same time, he also sought to make a case for the substance and specificity of what he termed "black political culture." Gilroy describes himself as putting forward an anti-anti-essentialist position.
Subsequent years have seen scholars from across disparate disciplines take up Gilroy’s arguments and push them in new directions. While most of Gilroy’s examples were drawn from the United States and Great Britain, other scholars have turned to West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and beyond to uncover the processes through which black internationalist perspectives were developed and debated across the twentieth century. While Gilroy’s case studies drew heavily (although not exclusively) on literary production, other scholars have explored transnational initiatives in the realms of religion, performance, and social and political movements. And whereas Gilroy centered the understandings of blackness, Africa, and trans-Atlantic connections articulated by a few pioneering intellectuals, new scholarship has explored the ideas and actions of a far broader and deeper range of social actors, revealing the active participation of ordinary men and women from Accra to Bahia to Colón in the creation of self-conscious supranational collectives in the twentieth century. What does it mean today, we will ask in conclusion, to speak of "the Black Atlantic"?