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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

rightful recognition from the white intelligentsia and become part of the
established corpus of European literature.
Gilroy begins Black Atlantic with an account of the writings of Martin
R. Delany, the early African-American physician and black nationalist,
writer and explorer of Africa who lived from 1812–1885. Delany is useful
to Gilroy because he was claimed by Afrocentrists as a progenitor. Gilroy
aims to show that in fact Delany, while adhering to a variety of essentialist
ideas, did not conceive of his desired black nation along mainly Afrocentric
lines because he once favored Nicaragua as a possible location for the estab-
lishment of an independent black nation. Gilroy wrote: ‘Delany’s primary
concern was not with Africa as such but rather with the forms of citizenship
and belonging that arose from the (re)generation of modern nationality in
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the form of an autonomous, black nation state.’ Delany too had ‘outgrown
the boundaries of North America’ – traveling to Canada, Africa and Britain – the
Black Atlantic. In other words Delany was not narrowly Afrocentric nor
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purely American. This seems thin grounds on which to dissociate Delany
from the tradition of Pan Africanism which finds one expression in
Afrocentrism. For it is clear from other studies of Delany as well as from
Gilroy’s own quotations of his work, that Delany championed notions of the
unique cultural characteristics of people of African descent throughout thou-
sands of years of history – notions which Gilroy would characterize as
essentialist – as well as being willing to locate his desired nation–state out-
side of Africa if necessary. Moses calls attention to the ‘Egyptocentric’ feature
of Delany’s thought 23 and quotes the following characteristic Afrocentric
paragraph from Delany’s Principia of Ethnology:

And the enquiry naturally presents itself: How do the Africans of the present
day compare in morals and social polity with those of ancient times? We
answer, that those south of the ‘Sahara,’ uncontaminated by influence of the
coast, especially the Yarubas [Yorubas], are equal in susceptibility and
moral integrity to the ancient Africans. Those people have all the finer
elements of the highest civilization. 24

In other words, Delany held both views which are by no means as con-
tradictory as Gilroy suggests. Such an approach, far from being less, was
in fact, more essentialist and Afrocentric. The willingness to locate a
nation for people of African descent anywhere implied that ‘Africanity’
was so inherently enduring that a nation–state for people of African
descent did not need to be located in Africa in order to unfold its inner
Afrocentric essence.
Gilroy presents many details of Delany’s personal life but he fails to
locate Delany in a particular historical period with distinctive socio-cultural,

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