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GILROY: NEITHER BLACK NOR ATLANTIC

more or less brilliant minds. Why these particular minds at these particular
times and in these particular places, why these ideas and not others
seem to resonate with the thinking of thousands of other black people –
this is not even perceived as an issue, much less discussed. The tale is
a drama of how ideas of one heroic individual confronted the ideas of
another in space and across time. Thus we have here not only an abstrac-
tion from the economy, the political situation and history. We also have
an abstraction from society as well. It is a drama of one intellect against
or in alliance with another. Presumably, since this is how the process
unfolded during the times of Delany, Crummel, DuBois and Richard
Wright in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this is also how it is
unfolding today. The ‘cultural constructions’ of contemporary black and
white intellectuals take precedence over the harsh material realities of
the struggles of millions of black and white people, such being the
power of culture and ideology. We are in the presence of a deep-seated
culturalism here.
This is particularly striking in his discussion of the early Pan
Africanists – Martin Delany and Alexander Crummel – but it is equally
striking in his discussion of the work of W.E.B. DuBois and especially of
the work of Richard Wright. In Black Atlantic Gilroy preoccupies himself
with the issue of the essentialism of this new wave of black cultural
nationalists in the United States in the 1980s. His approach to critiquing
this group is to argue that, far from being an isolated and inherently pure
essence, black culture in the West has always been ‘hybrid’ and creole
and has always transcended purely national boundaries – in this sense is
‘Atlantic’, neither American nor British. He further argues that this culture
is an inherent part of ‘modernity’, by which he seems to mean that the
culture developed within the framework of capitalism from the sixteenth
to the twentieth centuries. Black cultures, he states in the title of the first
chapter of the book are ‘a Counter Culture of Modernity’. 20
By this phrase, obviously influenced by writers such as Bauman and
the Adorno–Horkheimer branch of the Frankfurt School, Gilroy draws
closer to Central European anti-modernism and anti-Enlightenmentism.
Black cultures are argued to have been against modernity because they
were of modernity. His point is that the Black Atlantic – itself a very prob-
lematic concept – has always been an integral but unrecognized part of
modernity while all the time being critical of the failure of modernity to
eliminate racism and to realize its promises of equality and fraternity.
A major part of Gilroy’s mission is to rectify this ‘misrecognition’ and to put
black back into the Union Jack. The literary culture created by the black
population in Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas must find its

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