The Black Atlantic
by Paul Gilroy (excerpt)
Just over a hundred years ago, a twenty-four year old African American, W. E. B. Du Bois, set out across the
Atlantic en route for Europe. He crossed the ocean from West to East, in the opposite direction to the forced
journeys undertaken by his enslaved and traumatised ancestors. Four hundred years after Columbus’ had
inaugurated Atlantic commerce in live human beings, this Creole descendant of both slaves and slaveholders was
a Harvard history and philosophy student holding a prestigious scholarship to continue his elite education in
Berlin. Du Bois spoke for many other black American travellers--before and since--when he described the
significance and impact of his stay in Europe thus:
Europe modified profoundly my outlook on life and my thought and feeling toward it . . . something of
the possible beauty and elegance of life permeated my soul; I gained a respect for manners. I had been
before, above all, in a hurry. I wanted a world, hard, smooth and swift, and had no time for rounded
corners and ornament, for unhurried thought and slow contemplation. Now at times I sat still. I came to
know Beethoven’s symphonies and Wagner’s Ring. I looked long at the colors of Rembrandt and
Titian. I saw in arch and stone and steeple the history and striving of men and also their taste and
expression. Form, color and words took new combinations and meanings.i
The black Atlantic helps to make sense of complicated sentiments like these. The term refers to a system of
historical, cultural, linguistic and political interaction and communication that originated in the process of
enslaving Africans. Though novel commercial processes were at the core of that modern market in human
beings, slavery should not be understood as an exclusively economic affair. It had profound cultural
consequences in all the territories it touched. As it evolved, New World slavery threw together diverse groups of
people in complex combinations they could not have anticipated. Their histories, languages, religious outlooks,
their divergent understandings of phenomena like nature, time and space mutated and combined in a living,
dynamic pattern that was not the simple product of any single one of its many sources. A basic illustration of this
complex cultural formation lies in the way that slaves from many places in Africa, with different ethnic
backgrounds were brought together and forced to communicate in the languages of their masters and mistresses.
The Black Atlantic encompasses the story of how they took gradual possession of those alien languages and
habits. Against the sanction of death, they learned to read and write; adapting their new skills to the project of
emancipation and employing them as a means to force slaveholders in every part of the Americas into an
unwelcome confrontation with the creativity and thus the humanity of their slaves. In a sustained battle against
these brutal regimes they influenced the direction and character of New World cultures and societies more than
their race-conscious rulers were able to imagine or concede.
By drawing attention to the untidy complexity of this process and some of its unforeseen and
unintended consequences, the Black Atlantic brushes, our understanding of culture against the grain. It directs us
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Complete text in German translation published in «Der Black Atlantic» (3-9808851-5-1) | 2004
not to the land, where we find that special soil in which we are told national culture takes root, but towards the
sea and the maritime life that ringed and crossed the Atlantic ocean bringing more fluid and less fixed “hybrid”
cultures to life. The sea’s liquid contamination involved both mixture and movement. By directing attention
repeatedly towards crossing experiences and other translocal histories, the idea of the black Atlantic not only
deepens our understanding of modern statecraft, commercial power and their relationship to territory and space,
it also summons some of the tough, conceptual problems that can imprison or ossify the idea of culture. The
potential gains here can be glimpsed even in the over-simple contrast between settled, essentially sedentary
nations, rooted in one spot even if their imperial tendrils extended further, and the patterns of flow and itinerancy
that characterise outer-national adventure and cross-cultural creativity.
Land and sea suggest the different ecologies of belonging that reveal themselves in the opposition
between geography and genealogy. We can begin to perceive the irresistible force of the ocean and the
associated impact of those who made their mobile dwellings on it, as an alternative form of power that confined,
regulated, inhibited and sometimes even defied, the exercise of territorial sovereignty. Here, the Black Atlantic
opens out into theories of diaspora culture and dispersion, memory, identity and difference.
Du Bois’ remarks about his European journeys typify the experiences of numerous other African-
American and Caribbean wanderers who were transformed by their journeying outside the closed, absolutely
racialised worlds that had been configured in their new world homelands by slavery and maintained during its
aftermath. I have suggested that the distinctive pattern of crossing and cultural production in which he appeared
goes right back to the initial workings of the slave and plantation systems. However, it is with the black
abolitionist culture of the later eighteenth-century, particularly in famous figures like Olaudah Equiano and
Phillis Wheatley that the Black Atlantic found its first, self-conscious representatives.
Equiano sometime slave and seafarer, became a political activist in pursuit of abolition. He had been
kidnapped as a child and shipped across the Atlantic. Passed between several masters in different parts of the
Americas, his passage from chattel to free man and the processes of self-making that it entailed are
communicated in the most obvious way by the variety of different names by which he was known during the
different stages of his life--Michael, then Jacob and eventually Gustavus Vassa, the appellation of a celebrated
Swedish patriot.
Wheatley, a distinguished poet, literary celebrity and eloquent eyewitness to the political upheavals of
the American revolutionary war against the British, was Equiano’s contemporary. She had been taken from
Senegal as a girl and arrived in Boston in 1761. Phillis repaid her owners’ unusual investment in her mental
capacity with a torrent of extraordinary poetry that reflected upon her personal transformation from African to
American as well as the morality of the wider system that had fostered it. Wheatley was the first black person to
publish a book. Her 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was printed in London and
has been placed by many critics at the head of a distinctive tradition of African American literary creativity. Like
Equiano and many other ex-slaves and their descendants who would follow in the wake of the revolutionary
upheaval, Phillis crossed the Atlantic several times. Her journeying took her to London where she moved in
some exalted social circles and made her abolitionist sympathies known. …
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Complete text in German translation published in «Der Black Atlantic» (3-9808851-5-1) | 2004