7/3/25
Race, Writing and Decolonisation: Paul Gilroy’s ‘The Black Atlantic’.
● Diaspora writers - dispersal of people and cultures around the world.
● Critique of modernity (the condition of being modern).
Overview:
● Race is not fixed, but fluid and changeable.
● Transnational, diaspora identity, rather than national identity. (Critique of all
nationalisms).
● Frustration with reductive, ‘essentialise’ (to reduce something to its perceived bare
essentials; to stereotype) isn’t expectations based on race.
1. The Black Atlantic
● ‘The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation. I want to call the black
Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the
structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national
particularity.’
● Create a language to speak about contemporary experience and being black.
2. Double-Consciousness
● W.E.B Du Bois: ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of
always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by
the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness, - an American …; two souls, two thoughts, to us reconciled striving; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone kee[s it from being
torn asunder’.
● Concepts of ‘the veil’ and ‘double-consciousness’ - explain peculiar conditions which
AA find themselves in the USA and the specific tools at their disposal to understand
those conditions. The existence of AA ‘behind the veil’ of segregation is hidden from
the view of most white folk, but those who live behind it also move in the ‘white’
world. As such, they have knowledge about their own lives, about the functioning of
the veil, and about the activities of those who live on the other side of the veil as well.
The double-consciousness that ensures from being both an AA and an A provides
the basis for deeper insights into the social realm and the possibility for more
effective actions against the systems of domination in place.
3. Cultural Studies
● Set up primarily by Stuart Hall - ‘floating signifier’.
● Hall set up the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) with
Richard Hoggart in 1964.
● Texts as ‘cultural products’ - cultural studies pays attention to interrelation between
text and context.
● Associate with the New Left in 1960s.
Modernity
Race, Writing and Decolonisation: Paul Gilroy’s ‘The Black Atlantic’.
● Diaspora writers - dispersal of people and cultures around the world.
● Critique of modernity (the condition of being modern).
Overview:
● Race is not fixed, but fluid and changeable.
● Transnational, diaspora identity, rather than national identity. (Critique of all
nationalisms).
● Frustration with reductive, ‘essentialise’ (to reduce something to its perceived bare
essentials; to stereotype) isn’t expectations based on race.
1. The Black Atlantic
● ‘The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation. I want to call the black
Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the
structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national
particularity.’
● Create a language to speak about contemporary experience and being black.
2. Double-Consciousness
● W.E.B Du Bois: ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of
always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by
the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness, - an American …; two souls, two thoughts, to us reconciled striving; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone kee[s it from being
torn asunder’.
● Concepts of ‘the veil’ and ‘double-consciousness’ - explain peculiar conditions which
AA find themselves in the USA and the specific tools at their disposal to understand
those conditions. The existence of AA ‘behind the veil’ of segregation is hidden from
the view of most white folk, but those who live behind it also move in the ‘white’
world. As such, they have knowledge about their own lives, about the functioning of
the veil, and about the activities of those who live on the other side of the veil as well.
The double-consciousness that ensures from being both an AA and an A provides
the basis for deeper insights into the social realm and the possibility for more
effective actions against the systems of domination in place.
3. Cultural Studies
● Set up primarily by Stuart Hall - ‘floating signifier’.
● Hall set up the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) with
Richard Hoggart in 1964.
● Texts as ‘cultural products’ - cultural studies pays attention to interrelation between
text and context.
● Associate with the New Left in 1960s.
Modernity
