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GILROY: NEITHER BLACK NOR ATLANTIC

which have led to these transfigurative impulses lodging themselves in the
‘viscera’ of black musical popular culture. If this is the argument – it is by
no means clear – then it is simply a repetition of the tendency, already
noted, for Gilroy to locate the material sources of contemporary oppres-
sion in past historical processes. Moreover, as pointed out above, this kind
of opposition between culture and history is a false one which de-historicizes
culture. In any event, such an argument would not explain why, as Gilroy
claims, black Atlantic culture (or any other culture, for that matter) should
take a transfigurative rather than any other form, such as the form which
he describes as ‘fulfillment’. Unless one accords some special virtue to
‘Atlanticism’, why not black culture in Africa itself? It would seem that
given the depredations which followed the Conference of Berlin in 1884–85
and the unprecedented immiseration proceeding in Africa today, the con-
tinent itself would be the appropriate place in which to locate the center
of black struggles. Gilroy continues the annoying practice of presenting
black intellectuals and people in the West as in the vanguard of the struggles
of peoples of African descent. Once again, the intellectuals and peoples of
Africa herself bring up the rear.
Gilroy, as mentioned before, has no concept of a new stage of capital-
ism emerging at the end of the nineteenth century with the consolidation
of the power of finance capital. He conceives of current history simply as
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a ‘post-slavery experience’. He does not grasp that imperialism marked
a new era in human history which has resumed with unparalleled inten-
sity with the collapse of socialism. Instead he wrote vaguely and
abstractly of the political history of black struggle being divisible into
‘threefold processes’, of which the third is a ‘pursuit of an autonomous
space in the system of formal political relationships that distinguishes
occidental modernity’ – in plain language – the anti-colonial struggle for
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politically independent states in Africa and the Caribbean. This notion
of an abstract ‘modernity’ as already pointed out, completely obscures
the distinctiveness of the stage of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.
Gilroy living in the twenty-first century, does not grasp what DuBois
grasped in the early twentieth century, that the black nationalist and Pan
African struggle necessarily entered a new, anti-imperialist stage. Even
though, for obvious reasons, he does not formulate the change in these
terms, Moses implicitly recognizes this when he distinguishes the period
1895–1925 as a unique period designated the Black Nationalist Revival. 50
This was the period of Marcus Garvey and the early DuBois. In DuBois’
case the anti-imperialism becomes as explicit over time as that of George
Padmore or C.L.R. James. In the case of Garvey, whatever his own predilec-
tions, the realities of imperialist division and re-division of Africa compelled

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