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THREE Gilroy

Neither Black nor Atlantic

Whereas in the writings of Stuart Hall one still feels the presence of
economics at least implicitly and in the background, this is not the case
for the work of Paul Gilroy. One must distinguish in his case between the
earlier work (Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack and The Empire Strikes
Back) which are written from a structural Marxist and world systems
perspective, which is closer to the approach of Stuart Hall, and his later
work beginning with The Black Atlantic. In contrast to the explicitly social
and historicist framework utilized in the earlier work, in the latter work,
an analysis is developed which is largely literary and individualistic with
little or no appreciation for the specificities of the historical context of
any of these literary figures. More importantly, there is little grasp of how
this context arises out of a peculiar period in the economic and political
development of capitalism which gives the period and the literary figures
their peculiar sensibilities and orientation. I shall focus in this chapter on
some critical aspects of the well-known book The Black Atlantic although
the analysis here applies, mutatis mutandis, to the central themes of his
work as a whole, including his most recent book Against Race. 1
Black Atlantic, published in the early 1990s, was written at the height
of a particular crisis in the African American community and, equally
important, in the aftermath of the long economic and social malaise in
Britain during the Callaghan–Heath and early Thatcher period. In addi-
tion to the stagflation which gripped the British economy, there was the
persistent battles with the militant trade unions and the often violent
struggles between the police and some sections of the black community,
especially the riots of July 1981. It was also written in the wake of the
collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and the worldwide crisis in all