The Black Atlantic:
It’s Coming Home
Alan Rice,
University of Central Lancashire, UK
Black Studies as a discipline emerged firstly in the United States out of the identity politics of
the sixties and in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. As such for around the next
twenty-five years there was an hegemony in the field which made African American history,
politics and culture central to most discussions of the global African Diaspora. For instance,
when I first became interested in the field, supervisors and senior scholars in the field urged
me to spend as much time as I could in the United States researching archives, revelling in
the attention given to the study and imbuing the culture. Such emphasis rather devalued the
sterling work of the Birmingham school wherein scholars like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy
were sketching more subtle maps of the African diaspora that foregrounded relations between
the Caribbean, Europe, Africa and the Americas that problematised some of the assumptions
of the Black Studies discipline. With the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double-Consciousness in 1993 this critique reached its high-water mark.
Gilroy’s accent on the importance of the intercultural, of Caribbean influence on the United
States and of African American visits to Europe to their maturation, mapped a more complex
picture of African diasporan activity than the rather Romanticised notions of Afrocentricity
which held sway in some of the most influential Black Studies programmes in the United
States.
For many European scholars it helped to show the value of their work on local manifestations
of the African diaspora. For me, it led directly to the organizing (with Martin Crawford) of a
conference on Frederick Douglass’s 1845 visit to Britain which highlighted the importance of
the contacts he made during the trip on his epochal breaking from the Garrisonians and his
development as an independent political figure (the conference proceedings are available in a
book of essays edited by Alan Rice and Martin Crawford, Liberating Sojourn: Frederick
Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Georgia, 1999). Douglass had played quite a large part
in Gilroy’s study, however, other less canonical Transatlantic figures were rather overlooked.
Gilroy had opened the floodgates with his theoretical paradigm now I and other scholars saw
a raft of new material that could help to flesh out the narrative of Transatlantic slavery and its
aftermath within a cultural studies paradigm. This is not to deny there were problems with
Gilroy’s theoretical turn. In switching emphasis to Europe and the Anglophone Caribbean
diaspora, Africa, Latin America and the Francophone diaspora are in different ways and to
different extents devalued. Also, as Laura Chrisman and Neil Lazarus point out, the
theoretical paradigm places value on the international and race rather than important national
valences and class.
What to me has been most exciting, however, are that local black British stories which have
either remained hidden or have only seemed of interest to local antiquarians are suddenly
seen in their most multifarious and Transatlantic contexts through the lens of the black
Atlantic. In my study Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic, 1 I trace some of these black
historical presences in Britain, from Scipio Kennedy in Ayrshire in the early eighteenth
century, through the brief sojourn of Sambo in Lancashire in 1736 and the London mendicant
Joseph Johnson who begged with a ship on his head in the early nineteenth century to
Pompey major-domo to Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who lived in rural Sussex from 1866 to 1885.
Such lesser-known figures are set alongside characters like Olaudah Equiano, Robert
Wedderburn and Mary Prince whose radical interventions helped to define and make a place
for a black British presence that thoroughly undermines crass generalisation which still
abound in popular histories about black Britons being a recent phenomenon. Historical black
figures are constantly being discovered in the most obscure corners of Britain in communities
that have generally been thought of as completely white. Of course, this should not surprise
us as trading relations between Britain and the West Indies in the slave trade and afterwards
meant that people were moved as well as goods. For instance, in the small coastal town of
Wigtown in South-West Scotland, a black lady, Margaret McGuffie, the daughter of the
provost no less, lived between 1841 and 1894 in the big house, then called Barbados Villas,
named for her birth-place. Her presence is attested to by still extant legends about the “dark
lady of the big house” and by her name on the family obelisk in Mochrum churchyard,
several miles Northwest. 2
One way in which academics can push for a greater public emphasis on the black presence in
our communities is to campaign for local memorials to the black presence in our towns and
cities. In Lancaster a partnership between the City Council, Museums Service, County
Education Service and the campaigning group Globalink with myself as academic advisor has
led to a grant from the Millennium Commission for an art work on the quayside to
commemorate the lives of those 30,000 and more slaves shipped on Lancaster slavers in the
eighteenth century. In the Spring the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) aims to
have a consultation day with the commissioned artist meeting the local community and
academics. Such a meeting aims to undermine the centuries of silence around Lancaster’s
murky past and to foreground ideas of exactly what kind of memorial would be appropriate.
At our launch event on November 15 th during Lancaster LitFest a specially commissioned
poem about Sambo’s Grave at Sunderland Point will be discussed and there will be
contributions from artists and historians.
For me, the development of such a dynamic project in my adopted town has brought the
black Atlantic back in a circle and shown me the limitations of Academic specialisms that are
too narrowly focused geographically. The concept of the black Atlantic is often attacked as
trendy, culturalist and partial. For me, it has helped me galvanise not only my own personal
research but also to join with others to effect the cultural politics of my home town. Not bad
for a trendy theory.
For more details about STAMP please email arice@uclan.ac.uk
1 Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic ( London: Continuum, 2003).
2 Donna Brewster, The House that Sugar Built (Bodmin: MPG, 1999), 3-4.