Page 57 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

known, many of this latter group themselves fled the inner cities leaving
millions of persons of color abandoned and facing intensified impover-
ishment. In the absence of a politically effective mass movement, signif-
icant numbers of black males resorted to drug running and criminality on
an unprecedented scale in a desperate attempt to maintain some sort of
economic viability. This was met with an aggressive mandatory sentenc-
ing policy for black offenders and the rapid construction of prisons. The
so-called ‘prison-industrial complex’ emerged.
As numerous scholars, but especially William J. Moses, have pointed
out, Afrocentricity – Gilroy’s bête noire in Black Atlantic – is an old and
deep tradition in the African-American community, long pre-dating the
1980s. It is a deep folk tradition which always re-surfaces during periods
of intensified oppression such as in the 1850s and in subsequent periods
of segregation and racism. 18 It was against the background of precisely
such a renewed phase of immiseration in the 1980s that essentialist ideo-
logies of blackness gained a much stronger hold in the black commu-
nity. These ideologies had as their main purpose the rejection of this
de-industrialization assault on the black community and the unprece-
dented mass impoverishment which ensued. Afrocentricity was basically
an ideology of self-defense. One form which this ideological defense took
was the growth of a cultural nationalism championing the integrity and
worth of the black community often in an essentialist and extreme form.
Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is a critique of this essentialism. But one reads it
in vain to find any reference to the real events shaping the entire politics,
culture and debates of the period. What Moses repeatedly decries as ‘pre-
sentism’ prevails throughout. 19
Critiques of this form of cultural studies have largely focused on
its literary nature – its assumption that one can read off the culture of
a period by focusing on its literary or popular culture in the main. This
objection is obviously valid but does not sufficiently raise the question of
how literary studies are to be adequately conducted. Such a critique simply
points out the literary illusions behind this approach, whether the culture
being depicted is elite or popular. In other words, it takes up the well-
known critiques of this form of cultural studies as a simple inversion of
Leavisite elite criticism – a form of cultural populism. In this form of cul-
tural studies where material forces have disappeared, broad intellectual,
aesthetic and social movements such as black cultural nationalism or, for
that matter, music are treated naïvely – simply as the ideas and writings
of this or that black intellectual, artiste or activist.
Inherent in this method is the complete failure to treat social movements
as anything other than thoughts which spring directly from the brow of

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