Paul gilroy the black atlantic ebook

This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a "survival," or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world.

Morever, they influenced Africa as much as Brazil. Vividly combining history and ethnography, Matory spotlights a so-called "folk" religion defined not by its closure or internal homogeneity but by the diversity of its connections to classes and places often far away.

Black Atlantic Religion sets a new standard for the study of transnationalism in its subaltern and often ancient manifestations. Author : K. This study focuses on pre-colonial English literary constructions and their effects on post-Independence Caribbean literature.

Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is,Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked.

Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism. In fact, as a brief online search will show, the term has now become a shorthand reference to any and all projects which have a transcultural dimension across one or more sections of the black African diasporic cultures of the region.

In the work that has followed, Gilroy himself has produced a series of studies of the effects of this historical process on contemporary social interaction in societies such as Britain Gilroy , Although critical of the failure of neo-liberalism to address the racism endemic in these cultures, he has not turned away from an attempt to discuss how the descendants of these intersecting cultures can forge effective means of working within a single polity.

Gilroy is careful to note that he does not mean that racism has disappeared. The radical openness that brings conviviality alive makes a nonsense of closed, fixed, reified identity and turns attention towards the always-unpredictable mechanisms of identification.

More filters. Sort order. Jan 13, Dave rated it it was amazing Shelves: read-in This is one of those books you wish you could have read when it first came out. I know Gilroy's been done to death, and the term "black Atlantic" doesn't have quite as much academic suction as it used to, but the transnationalism espoused by this book is a must read for anyone involved in the study of humanities not to mention its retheorizing.

What I most enjoyed were Gilroy's reclamation of forgotten corners of scholarship. His views on Richard Wright's European labors were especially refres This is one of those books you wish you could have read when it first came out. His views on Richard Wright's European labors were especially refreshing. This book builds on lessons I learned from Gloria Anzaldua's work, but do so in a much more expansive manner.

Are there holes? Of course. Are Gilroy's studies a little dominated by masculine perspectives? But whether it's via a footnote or a veiled reference, I don't see any serious scholar getting around this book without a nod of respect. This is an important and nuanced book.

Unfortunately, I also found it entirely unreadable -- and I have read a lot of theory. It's definitely on the opaque end of the spectrum, to the point where I could barely follow the author's argument.

I wish it was written with more clarity and less jargon. Sep 12, Teleseparatist rated it liked it Shelves: , research. I actually think I'd expected it it be better, or more mind-blowing, but some parts are truly brilliant, and it makes me really curious for an analysis applying Gilroy's thought to texts like Dirty Computer or The Unkindness of Ghosts.

Dec 05, Malcolm rated it really liked it Shelves: cultural-politics , cultural-studies , colonialism-post-colonialism , history-global. I have recently found myself revisiting things I read decades ago and reflecting on how well some have stood the passage of time and how that passage has shifted my ways of seeing and thinking about some of these issues.

Yet when I picked this up, having first delved into it in the mid s I realised that, much as I had used both the book and its ideas in various bits of work, I had never read it as a single text. So for the first time and with my second copy of a now 28 year old key text in m I have recently found myself revisiting things I read decades ago and reflecting on how well some have stood the passage of time and how that passage has shifted my ways of seeing and thinking about some of these issues.

So for the first time and with my second copy of a now 28 year old key text in my field I am dealing with a single cover-to-cover reading. That is to say, African-descent cultural practices and intellectual traditions need to be understood as linking the three points of the Triangular trade — Africa, Europe and the Americas. Yet as obvious as that might seem in contemporary ways of being and doing, I am still struck as how powerful national frames remain in many areas of practice and analysis.

The case is woven through with two binding themes. The first is that these African-descent cultural practices are grounded in modernity — and not some mystical and mythical essentialist condition.

This allows Gilroy to argue for a distinctive sense of African-descent engagement with and making of modernity, one that is counter-cultural. He builds this analysis on three platforms. Second, he builds a complex picture of the cultural and quotidian experiences of enslavement.

These three cases allow Gilroy to unpack modernity, to explore engagements with the points of the triangular trade and to get beyond Anglophone modes of sense making to build a way of looking at Atlantic transnationalism in a subaltern community. From the vantage point of a quarter of a century, much of this argument has held up well, even if the writing reminds me of the difficulties of previous ways of doing cultural studies.

What is more unsettling however is the uneven and in many senses very limited ways that scholars and other analysts have picked up on this case. We might have built the approach into our teaching, but in many disciplines the idea is at best acknowledged with a doffed cap. In my field, for instance, we may now look at some of these kinds of questions in sport history and sociology, but the studies that grapple with this sense of transnational Blackness in practice are few and far between — we remain a field framed by the modern nation-state.

This unevenness goes to remind me just how disruptive these ideas were and are, and of the power of the nation as a framing device in scholarship and cultural identity making and struggles. It remains demanding, and it remains essential. Oct 02, Ryan Murtha rated it liked it. This may have been groundbreaking stuff in but now any class on race will cover his argument on the first week of class. He's not a great writer, so it's a lot of work just to access what is maybe not the most profound thesis.

You can probably find more recent authors who have made the same argument much more clearly. Apr 15, britneyreads rated it it was amazing. Mar 03, MJ added it Shelves: read-in I am particularly taken by the early and emblematic reading of that Turner painting -- you know, that Turner painting.

I've looked at it in the MFA about a dozen times. I knew it was a slave ship, and that it was an abolitionist painting, in addition to being a masterpiece of English visual Romanticism, all fire and water and turbulence. I didn't know it was in Ruskin's collection, and that he refused to interpret it as anything more than an aesthetic lesson on seascapes, and that it ended up where I've seen it as a result of discomfort and a failed English market -- "The painting has remained in the United States ever since.

Its exile in Boston is yet another pointer towards the shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges. It is also an example of the level of detail in this project. It is so grand in scope, which is part of why its grandest proclamations have become canon; conversely, there is such an interest in biographical details, overviews of oeuvres or authors or minor works, so that at points the narrative seems interested mostly in burnishing the critical reception of its target Wright, Du Bois, Martin Delany, Jubilee spirituals, whatever at the expense of driving forward any particular claim.

It gets lost in details, that is. Then again, what major project doesn't, sometimes? My sense is that Anglophone is the right word for the scope of this, unfortunately, and that "thinker" means "writer" or "political theorist" or both more than it means some of the other artistic terms it might encompass.

The basic critiques I have seen of this are that it ignores that some countries those which are not what he calls the "overdeveloped" nations still feel the necessity for nationalist self-definition because of their status as underdefined and exploited colonial spaces, and, possibly similarly, that it I can see each of these critiques, I think.

I like the characterization of black modernity as proximity to lived trauma slavery and its consequences and, therefore, as something which prefigured what we think of as modernity which we could call 'white modernity.

View 1 comment. Oct 04, Samuel rated it it was ok. While the overall concept of "the black Atlantic" was quite innovative and helpful to approaching issues of transnational culture, this book was difficult to get through due to dense language and its rich diversity of cultural resources: popular music, black intellectuals' biographies, literature, etc.

The basic concept takes issue with racial constructions of culture defined by national boundaries. As the 17th and 18th centuries' slave trade broke down national borders for Africans who were tra While the overall concept of "the black Atlantic" was quite innovative and helpful to approaching issues of transnational culture, this book was difficult to get through due to dense language and its rich diversity of cultural resources: popular music, black intellectuals' biographies, literature, etc.

As the 17th and 18th centuries' slave trade broke down national borders for Africans who were transported to various locations including North and South America, the Caribbean, England and other locales, Paul Gilroy contends for a new framework for analyzing the cultural developments of black people spread out across locations that were connected primarily by ships sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.

These complex webs of culture do not flow in one-direction nor are they confined to three points of the slave trade triangle as history books are want to portray it in overly-simplified terms. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, are recast as transnational figures who sailed between America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean being influenced and exerting influence on cultural spheres beyond American borders.

The Roots of contemporary hip hop music are traced to spirituals sung during slavery and their exchange with Caribbean music to reveal a cultural literacy and communication outside the boundaries of traditional literacy--revealing both emotional resilience and outlet.

Overall, this book has been very trend-setting and influential on the field of American Studies as a model for transnational considerations of American culture that is built almost entirely on immigration patterns and international influences. Feb 02, Justin rated it really liked it. This book is a lot of nothing punctuated by brilliant insights. After an intial flurry of arguments in the opening chapter, he spends a lot of time summarizing what other people thought and every now and then sprinkles in his own argument.

I think Gilroy is perhaps too concerned with taking down Hoteps. I would have liked some more critical thinking about whether Black nationalism could be good, particularly if, as Gilroy says, we de-essentialize race.

Nov 08, Emily rated it it was ok Shelves: school. Employing literary techniques to critique the nationalist and ethnic focus of cultural studies, Gilroy analyzes a range of texts, authors, and artists as seemingly discordant as W.