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GILROY: NEITHER BLACK NOR ATLANTIC

many of them settled in cities such as Liverpool, Cardiff and Hamburg. 16
Even in this very direct sense then, the Black Atlantic had a material base
which is completely erased in Gilroy’s account.
So, the elements of his distinctively culturalist approach were already
present in Gilroy’s earlier work. What seems to have happened in his later
work is that, with the crisis in Marxism and the collapse of socialism, the
materialist side of his work subsided and the Foucauldian side came more
to the fore. It should also be noted that these changes occur also as the
subject of his work changes: the earlier material is focused on anti-black
racism in Britain and preoccupies itself with the reforms which would be
necessary to lead to the incorporation of black persons in British society,
culture and historical traditions. His later work continues this same,
deeply incorporationist, theme, but in the form of a critique of what he
sees as separatist and essentialist tendencies in African-American cultural
politics which threaten the larger project of the incorporation of black
people as a whole into a transformed (multicultural) British culture.
Of more significance, however, was the situation in the United States
when Gilroy published Black Atlantic in 1993. This was a period when
there had been a profound dissolution of the political economy of urban
black America by the processes of de-industrialization, neo-liberalism and
globalization. The deep restructuring of American capitalism, which began
after the United States abandoned the Bretton Woods system of fixed
exchange rates in 1973, culminated in the establishment of the Washington
Consensus and the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) in
1994. 17
These measures were both the result of the intense global competition
with Japan which decimated the American manufacturing sector as well
as the turn to neo-liberalism which attacked the social support systems
on which the white and black poor had come to depend in the United
States. The collapse of traditional sectors of black employment in the
automobile and ancillary industries consequent on devastating Japanese
competition, combined with the dramatic reduction in social support,
created an unprecedented crisis in the black urban communities of the
northern United States. From the vantage point of today, with a renewed
round of loss of manufacturing and high-level service jobs but this time
affecting primarily white workers and middle-class professionals, it is
apparent that the initial process of de-industrialization was simply a first
wave. In the case of the first wave, much of the legal rights and social and
economic progress won in the civil rights struggles was rolled back: the
black working class was decimated at the very same time as a larger
upwardly mobile professional black middle class emerged. As is well

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