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Book reviewsBrackette F. Williams a , George Lipsitz b & Tommy Lee Lott ca University of Arizonab University of California , San Diegoc San José State University , USAPublished online: 23 Apr 2010.

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Social Identities, Volume 1, Number 1,1995 175

Book Reviews

Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double ConsciousnessPaul GilroyCambridge MA: Harvard University Press, October 1993.

BRACKETTE F. WILLIAMSUniversity of Arizona

Paul Gilroy issues a clarion call to theorists of cultural production to rethink thepast in order to see a future that includes a different angle on identities and thecommitments they entail. Amidst the pared down cultural nationalismsgenerated in particular vectors of force and competition among those who mayhave come finally face-to-face with the limits of decades of integrationistrhetorics, Gilroy asks us to rethink the unit of black cultural production, arguingthat 'nationality, ethnicity, authenticity, and cultural integrity are character-istically modern phenomena that have profound implications for culturalcriticism and cultural history' (p. 2). Crystallizing 'with the revolutionarytransformations of the West at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning ofthe 19th centuries' (p. 2), these categories, he argues, constituted 'novel typo-logies and modes of identification' the power of which 'has ... grown, and theirubiquity as a means to make political sense of the world is currentlyunparalleled by the languages of class and socialism by which they onceappeared to have been surpassed' (p. 2).

Gilroy seeks the means to explore 'some of the special political problems thatarise from the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept ofculture and the affinities and affiliations which link the blacks of the West to oneof their adoptive, parental cultures ...' (p. 2). Specifically, he addresses thequestion of what it is about 'black America's writing elite which means that theyneed to claim ... diasporic cultural forms ... in an assertively nationalist way'(p.34). The motivations and hopes informing his pr oject are a desire to'repudiate the dangerous obsessions with 'racial purity', which he contends are'circulating inside and outside black polities', to raise a plea 'against the closureof categories with which we conduct our political lives', and to take advantageof the lessons attention to the black Atlantic 'yields ... as to the inevitability andmutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade'(p.xi). Works focusing on black Atlantic political thought and culturalproduction, Gilroy contends, will offer intermediate concepts that are 'lodgedbetween the local and the global ... [and of] wider applicability in cultural

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history and politics precisely because they offer an alternative to the nationalistfocus which dominates cultural criticism' (p. 6). These intermediate concepts,'break the dogmatic focus on discrete national dynamics which has characterisedso much of modern Euro-American cultural thought' (p. 6).

This broader focus facilitates Gilroy's wider goal 'to get beyond ... nationaland nationalist perspectives' to confront the 'urgent obligation to re-evaluate thesignificance of the modern nation state as a political, economic, and culturalunit, and, to examine the tragic popularity of ideas about the integrity andpurity of cultures... especially the relationship between nationality and ethnicity'which has 'a special force in Europe, but is also reflected directly in the post-colonial histories and complex, trans-cultural, political trajectories of Britain'sblack settlers' (p. 7).

Gilroy's larger effort to repudiate such dangerous obsessions and to exposean inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas, entails debunking notionsof 'African American ethnic particularity' in black cultural production. Objectingboth to 'ethnic absolutism' (in its competing forms of 'ontological and pluralistessentialisms') and its manifestation in African American presumptions of ethnicparticularity, Gilroy suggests 'that much of the precious intellectual legacyclaimed by African-American intellectuals as the substance of their particularityis in fact only partly their absolute ethnic property' (p. 15). Likewise, hecriticizes British cultural historians, especially leading New Left intellectuals fortheir failure to integrate the trans-cultural processes of the black Atlanticadequately, resulting in a reproduction in their scholarship of nationalism andits ethnocentrism which deny 'imaginary, invented Englishness any externalreferents whatsoever' (p. 14).

Opening these particularistic and nationalistic bonds and boundaries toexplore what, following James Clifford, he calls 'travelling culture', Gilroyrequires analyses of

the impact this outer-national, trans-cultural reconceptualization mighthave on the political and cultural history of black Americans and that ofblacks in Europe. In recent history, this will certainly mean re-evaluatingGarvey and Garveyism, pan-Africanism, and Black Power as ahemispheric if not global phenomena. In periodizing modern blackpolitics it will require fresh thinking about the importance of Haiti and itsrevolution for the development of African-American political thought andmovements of resistance. From the European side, it will no doubt benecessary to reconsider Frederick Douglass' relationship to English andScottish radicalisms and to meditate on the significance of Williams WellsBrowns's five years in Europe as a fugitive slave, on AlexanderCrummell's living and studying in Cambridge, and upon Martin Delany'sexperiences at the London congress of the International StatisticalCongress in 1860. It will require comprehension of such difficult andcomplex questions as W.E.B. Du Bois's childhood interests in Bismarck,his investment in modelling his dress and moustache on that of KaiserWilhelm II, his likely thoughts while sitting in Heinrich Von Treitscheke'sseminars, and the use his tragic heroes make of European culture (p. 17).

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That studies of this type have yet to be seriously undertaken, Gilroyproclaims, results from the politics of identity and its reliance on race andethnicity, which encourage concerns with authenticity and claims to ethnicproperty which are linked to the efforts of intellectuals to maintain the positionof the political vanguard.

intellectuals can claim this vanguard position by virtue of an ability totranslate from one culture to another, mediating decisive oppositionsalong the way.... Today's black intellectuals have persistently succumbedto the lure of those romantic conceptions of 'race', 'people', and 'nation'which place themselves, rather than the people they supposedly represent,in charge of the strategies for nation building, state formation, and racialuplift ... Furthermore, the dependence of those black intellectuals whohave tried to deal with these matters on theoretical reflections derivedfrom the canon of occidental modernity — from Herder to Von Trietschkeand beyond — is surely salient (p. 34).

To escape from this racially defined, nationally limiting box of intellectualtools and political projects, Gilroy moves to establish the black Atlantic as atransnational, trans-cultural unit adequate to stand in opposition to claims ofAfrican American particularity and ethnic property and, to a lesser extent, theself-reproducing purity of the British New Left. Although Gilroy charges thatAfrican American intellectuals are joined in this 'masked arbitrariness' by theBritish New Left, because he is primarily concerned with the internal dynamicsof the 'African diaspora', the central focus of each chapter is either on particularblack intellectuals of the United States or on 'black' trans-cultural productionssuch as music and literature. He confronts the nationalistic arbitrariness that, heargues, masks the politics of choices made by African American scholars andpolitical activists such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois,and Richard Wright, by treating the black Atlantic 'as a cultural and politicalsystem' consisting in 'the fractal patterns of cultural and political exchange andtransformation that we try and specify through manifestly inadequate theoreticalterms like creolization and syncretism' (p. 15).

As an alternative to nationalistic approaches and the inadequacies ofcreolization and syncretism, he directs our attention to forms of exchange in theblack Atlantic that he conjectures to be indicative of 'how both ethnicities andpolitical cultures have been made anew in ways that are significant not simplyfor the peoples of the Caribbean but for Europe, for Africa, specially Liberia andSierra Leone, and of course, for black America' (p. 15). Attention to the blackAtlantic as a unit of analysis, he suggests, should allow cultural historians totreat black cultural production as a single, complex in discussions of the modernworld to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective (p. 15).

Its history beginning just before Columbus, Gilroy's black Atlantic isproduced of and expressed through the crisscrossing movements of 'blackpeople ... not only as commodities', but as human agents 'engaged in variousstruggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship' (p. 2). He directsour attention to this unit as a means to 're-examine the problems of nationality,location, identity, and historical memory' (p. 16). In and through the context

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created of black Atlantic processes, Gilroy expects, these concepts will beclarified as they emerge from the muddle of 'national, nationalistic, andethnically absolute paradigms of cultural criticism to be found in England andAmerica with those hidden expressions, both residual and emergent, thatattempt to be global or outer-national in nature' (p. 16). The transnational,trans-cultural traditions of the black Atlantic, he contends, 'have supportedcountercultures of modernity that touched the workers' movement but are notreducible to it' (p. 16). Instead, these countercultures 'supplied importantfoundations on which [the workers's movement] could build' (p. 16). For thesereasons, he positions the utility and specificity of the black Atlantic as a modernpolitical and cultural formation against ethnic absolutisms and their dependenceon what he terms an 'overintegrated' view of cultures.

The black Atlantic can be defined on one level by the black intellectual'desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints ofethnicity and national particularity', and on another by the 'strategic choicesforced on black movements and individuals embedded in national politicalcultures and nation states in America, the Caribbean, and Europe' (p. 19). Hefloats the black Atlantic ships — his chosen metaphor for the transporting unitsof micro-political and cultural unities — on streams (largely masculinetributaries) of music, literature, and political thought in order to consider twointerwoven themes. How and why black intellectuals employ these concepts intheir writings, political thought and discourse form one theme. The otherconcerns how the problematic juncture of these concepts is represented in andby musical forms exemplifying transnational modes of production.

Chapter 2, 'Masters, Mistresses, Slaves, and the Antimonies of Modernity',begins the voyage to explore the manner in which black Atlantic thoughtprefigured and foreshadowed aspects of modernity in post-modernity (p. 42).By returning to Hegel's discourse on the master/slave relationship, Gilroyrepositions racial slavery in relation to Utopian constructions of Westernrationality, in order to reveal that 'racial terror is not merely compatible withoccidental rationality but cheerfully complicit with it' (p. 56). His goal is to'question the credibility of a tidy, holistic conception of modernity but also toargue for the inversion of the relationship between margin and centre as itappears within the master discourses of the master race' (p. 45). Following abrief critical assessment of the failure of intellectuals, outside the black Atlantic,debating the problems of modernity to capture the centrality of race and slavery,he turns to the autobiographical renderings of Frederick Douglass to place theself-consciousness of the racial slave both within and outside the West.

In this position, Gilroy concludes, the racial slave, unlike Hegel's slave, chosethe revolutionary moment of jubilee over a steady rational pursuit of freedom.Under these conditions, he maintains, death became freedom from the alreadyinstituted 'social death' that was plantation life — a life of extended mourning.The slave redefined death as agency. In the concluding chapter, he returns tothis issue, exploring aspects of gender in the redefinition of death as agency. Ina brief discussion of the Garner family's attempted escape from slavery heemphasizes the functions an account of this event serves when it reappears astrope for the return to a memory of the slave past in Toni Morrison's Beloved.

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By centring racial violence in the rationality of the West, Gilroy argues thatfrom a position at once inside and outside the West, the racial slave inverted thepulls of utopia and jubilee, but never eradicated the pulls of utopia because deathas agency co-existed with the turn to the performative; the creation of anexpressive culture wherein the arts permitted a continuity between subjectivityand rationality.

art, particularly in the form of music and dance, was offered to slaves asa substitute for the formal political freedoms they were denied under theplantation regime... In contradistinction to the Enlightenment assumptionof a fundamental separation between art and life, these expressive formsreiterate the continuity of art and life. They celebrate the grounding of theaesthetic with the other dimensions of social life. The particular aestheticwhich the continuity of expressive culture preserves derives not fromdispassionate and rational evaluation of the artistic object but from aninescapable subjective contemplation of the mimetic functions of artisticperformance in the process of struggle towards emancipation, citizenship,and eventual autonomy (pp. 56-57).

Chapter 3, 'Jewels Brought from Bondage: Black Music and the Politics ofAuthenticity', centres and continues the emphasis on the role of expressiveculture. Focusing on rap, hip hop, and an historical account of the transatlanticvoyages of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, Gilroy claims for music a long-established dominance within expressive culture and an ability (as legacy fromslavery) to 'preserve in artistic form needs and desires which go far beyond themere satisfaction of material wants' (p. 57).

For the plantation slave and the prefigured modern black Atlantic, musicbecomes both the living icon of this expressive culture and the hatch throughwhich we can enter what he deems its emphasis on a politic of transfigurationover one of fulfilment (p. 37). Thus, 'black music' takes a seat at the captain'stable as a consequence of the relations it poses between the 'politics offulfilment', as the 'notion that a future society will be able to realise the socialand political promise that present society has left unaccomplished', and 'thepolitics of transfiguration', as an emphasis on 'the emergence of qualitativelynew desires, social relations, and modes of association within the racialcommunity of interpretation and resistance and between that group and itserstwhile oppressors' (p. 37). Hence, for Gilroy musics of the diaspora are aphilosophical discourse because they refuse the 'the modern, occidentalseparation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and polities', and in so doingprivilege the politics of transfiguration over that of fulfilment. Whereas thepolitics of fulfilment is 'mostly content to play occidental rationality at its owngame ... the politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime,struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable' (p. 38).

According to Gilroy's thesis, transnational exchanges move the loci ofproduction within this diasporic expressive culture. Musical and other forms ofexpressive culture, which at some point, he contends, were simply mimicked orreproduced wholesale, 'lovingly borrowed, respectfully stolen, or brazenlyhighjacked' (p. 86) into black British culture, are no longer understandable in

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these terms. Changes in modes of production, thus necessitate a readjustment'so that the dynamics of dispersal and local autonomy can be shown alongsidethe unforeseen detours and circuits which mark the new journeys and newarrivals that, in turn, release new political and cultural possibilities' (p. 86).Constructing an expanded sense of loci of production and creativity in diasporais to be facilitated, then, by attention to music and its tributaries of productionand transfiguration.

The history and utility of black music ... enables us to trace something ofthe means through which the unity of ethics and politics has beenreproduced as a form of folk knowledge. This subculture often appearsto be the intuitive expression of some racial essence but is in fact anelementary historical acquisition produced from the viscera of analternative body of cultural and political expression that considers theworld critically from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation.In the future, it will become a place which is capable of satisfying the(redefined) needs of human beings that will emerge once the violence —epistemic and concrete — of racial typology is at an end. Reason is thusreunited with the happiness and freedom of individuals and the reign ofjustice within the collectivity (p. 39).

Moreover, musics are critical, if not the critical, elements of expressive culturebecause they are modern: having been 'marked by their hybrid, creóle originsin the West, because they have struggled to escape their status as commoditiesand the position within the cultural industries it specifies, and because they areproduced by artists whose understanding of their own position relative to theracial group and the role of art in mediating individual creativity with socialdynamics is shaped by a sense of artistic practice as an autonomous domaineither reluctantly or happily divorced from the everyday lifeworld' (p. 73).

Chapter 4, 'Cheer the Weary Traveller: W.E.B. Du Bois, Germany, and thePolitics of (Dis)placement', returns us to the land of a black intellectual, politicalactivist to explore transformations in his racial consciousness seen through thelens of selected works and their association with his European travels. Chapter5, 'Without the Consolation of Tears: Richard Wright, France, and theAmbivalence of Community', focuses on the ambivalence of identity and itsrelation to critical evaluations of authenticity. Gilroy carries out this projectthrough an interpretation of the impact of Richard Wright's experiences in Parison his writing and his sense of community. He examines constructions andcritiques of racial consciousness in selected writings, exploring them againstother US African American intellectuals' assessments of the authenticity andvalidity of these 'Parisian' works relative to Wright's earlier work, presumablybased in his experience of US American racism. Chapter 6, 'Not a Story to PassOn: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime', draws general conclusions for thereader from the substantive lessons of the previous chapters. Based on hisdiscussion of particularity, trans-cultural influences on consciousness andproduction, and the problems they pose for the place of the black Atlantic inmodernity, Gilroy attempts to problematize the 'relationship between traditionand modernity' by turning attention to 'particular conceptions of time that

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emerge in black political culture from Delany on' (p. 190). His primary concernsare to 'bring a new history into black political culture' (p. 190) which 'integratesthe spatial focus on the diaspora idea ... with the diaspora temporality andhistoricity, memory, and narrativity' that otherwise articulate the principles ofblack political counterculture that grew inside modernity in a distinctiverelationship of antagonistic indebtedness' (p. 191). Focusing on the politics offulfilment, he asks 'whether the premium placed on duration and generation canitself be read as a response to the turbulent patterns of modern life that havetaken blacks from Africa via slavery into an incompletely realised democracythat racializes and thus frequently withholds the loudly proclaimed benefits ofmodern citizenship' (p. 192). The 'transformation of cultural space and thesubordination of distance', he declares are among the factors that contribute toa parallel change in the significance of appeals to tradition, time, and history(p-194).

The appeal to tradition becomes, in Gilroy's estimation, more 'desperate andpolitically charged as the sheer irrepressible heterology of black culture becomesharder to avoid' (p. 194). In addition, he links the turn to tradition to the samemotivations that return black political culture to the memory of slavery, with itsfoci on death and suffering. To the salience of tradition Gilroy also attributes thetendency to construe racial redemption as masculine redemption and to appealto African history (particularly its creative and spatial relations to the productionof the West) for criteria on which to judge redemption. These factors becomemeans to define commonality and continuity in the diaspora. Gilroy does notreject appeals to tradition per se, but instead sees tradition and memory as keysto how we might compare the African diaspora with other groups' experiencesof victimization, especially the Jewish diaspora with which, he notes, the termoriginated although its beginning in Jewish conceptual history has beeninadequately acknowledged (p. 212).

Who is responsible for the failure to explore commonalities of victimizationor the manner in which memories and histories of suffering are invoked inconceptions of victimization? Gilroy places it at the feet of those in the 'smallworld of black cultural and intellectual history ... who fear that the integrity ofblack particularity could be compromised by attempts to open a complexdialogue with other consciousness of affliction' (p. 215). The invocation oftradition he wants to reserve for 'the nameless, evasive, minimal qualities thatmake these diaspora conversations possible ... keeping the term as a way tospeak about the apparently magical processes of connectedness that arise asmuch from the transformation of Africa by diaspora cultures as from theaffiliation of diaspora cultures to and the traces of Africa those diaspora culturesenclose' (p. 199).

Locating the Politics of Politics: the Last Great Battle of the West?

In Gilroy's Black Atlantic we lack an intellectual connection with past efforts tounderstand processes of cultural production which are products and producersof trans-cultural, pre-national, or extra-national conceptual and grounded unities.This is the old problem of how to locate and define the new in the vectors ofpower that produce and legitimate productions as new. Sidney Mintz raised the

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question with regard to the newness of New World processes of identity formationthat over hundreds of years, have wittingly and unwittingly forgedthe instruments that now trumpet calls for a New World Order.

If we ask what, in some essential sense, makes an American, the firstanswer is likely to be geography; however, only the Amerindians, of allAmericans, can really lay prior claim to a world that was to become 'new'in total ethnocentric innocence — in 1492. But if this answer fails tosatisfy, we may seek to specify further. We who are Americans live insocieties and bear cultures whose origins are elsewhere, transformed bythe migrations of our ancestors and the novel challenges this New Worldimposed upon them. Today, the consequences of transplantation and ofadjustment during a period nearly five centuries long define us, eventhose of us who are Native Americans ... And yet it should be within thiswidest context — the Hemisphere and its five short centuries of newness— that North Americans begin to explore Afro-America. The very wordis hybrid, expressing symbolically the linkages of two worlds — but it isinnocent, as is Euro-America, or Mestizo-America ... and no morehybridized. We who think of ourselves as athwart the American traditionmay claim to feel no need for hybrid words and hyphens, and to resenttheir implication — except, of course, on St. Patrick's Day, Columbus Day,and certain other Days, and in memories, dreams, and subtly persistentinsecurities. Hyphens are supposedly laid aside ... We claim to honor apast; yet we have difficulty in admitting that it ever had a beginning forparticular persons among us (Mintz, 1974:1-3).

Although we should handle with care notions of culture bearing units, theunderlying creolization (in the sense of made on the new soil made of mixedingredients, or both) supplies the assumptions that support the sense ofcomparability for culture claiming units, whether labelled the black Atlanticdiaspora or the black race in X nation. And, of course, it is also theseassumptions on which we rely when we take complex individual units ofconsciousness and reduce them to forms of shared racial consciousness that arethen said to experience a common crossing to a categoric space that is both thesame and different at each historical juncture. Thus, against the newness ofcategoric transformations — the ontological newness of historical conjunctures—that crystallized, as Gilroy notes, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the19th centuries, these ongoing 'particularities' are necessarily apprehended inlocales as the historical specificity of a form of 'racial consciousness' qua identityformation (e.g. a generic African Americanness).

Assumptions stemming from such an overdetermined historical specificitymake possible Gilroy's critique of absolutisms at the same time that largerstereotypical over-determinations (i.e. diaspora defined in terms of its Atlanticcrossings) of the politics they entail undermine the credibility of same critiqueas a route to a stable hybrid future. Therefore, by leaving the ethno-historicalcharacter of the blackness of the 'black intellectual' and the politics of itsproduction unproblematized, Gilroy's effort to décentre the master narrative ofthe master race fails. It does nothing to loosen the moorings that link the

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concept of culture to that of nation as racial patrimony; it simply enlarges theracialized unit of patrimonial productions. Processes within that larger unitremain unclear because its diversity and complexity are, at best under-represented in Gilroy's presentations of the problems to be addressed. Where dowe locate and what are we to make of transnational blackness of Africanicity?How do we continue to locate its power dynamic as it fades, ideologically, towhitened class-based representations of culture-as-race in the spatial moves fromanglophone to lusophone, to hispanophone, and francophone derivatives of theproducts of a hemispheric Americana poised for transatlantic dispersal andeventual transformation?

Gilroy's approach leaves little ground on which to understand theconnections between selectivity in expression or their links to contestations ofownership and the 'strategic choices forced on black movements and individualsembedded in national political cultures and nation states in America, theCaribbean, and Europe' — his second level of motivations that define exchangesversus claims in the black Atlantic. Yet, these complex connections, not theinevitability of intermixture itself, set the constraints within which politicalcategories are fashioned within the African diaspora. And, no less significantly,they constrain relations among all diasporas also struggling with the same issuesof how to link heterogeneity to the production of a homogeneity that lendscredence and legitimacy to a quest for political unity (see, for example, Espíritu,1992).i

Although Gilroy claims to recognize that nationalist precepts order differencein relation to the myth of homogeneity, he fails to make this recognition part ofhis analytic scaffolding when he treats the implications of hybridity inmodernity. Purity in myths of homogeneity come from the power to define andposition the 'mongrel', not from whether it is made and where it is made. So weask: black Atlantic for what and for whom? Surely the academic purelyinterested in its conceptual shape might ignore this question, but only at the riskof losing the ground necessary to analyse the motivations operating within it.This is not a position from which we are likely to contribute much to anunderstanding of African American politics, black British politics, or to therelations between them in form or function. Certainly we are not likely to makemuch headway in repudiating the dangerous obsessions with racial purity andcultural property or concerns with its integrity and authenticity in eithernational or transnational configurations and sought-after unities. The view fromGilroy is, instead, one in which ethnic absolutists (indistinguishable from thosehe labels cultural purists, in both their ontological or pluralist guises) appear tobe simply disingenuous, self-serving or'just plain wrongheaded — vanguardistsdefining a population to be led. This view obscures the politics of politics. Thereare no dynamics of power within the black Atlantic diaspora and the politicalstruggles within it seem to have no relation to either the politics of fulfilmentor those of transfiguration and (dis)placement. The result is lots of 'polities', butno politics; lots of struggle, but no strategic engagements. In its place we havea global slogan solution to political transformation: 'just say no'.

Gilroy's call to rethink the meaning of the nation state as a political,economic, and cultural unit fails on these points in part because he positions the

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opposing forces of darkness (i.e. ethnic absolutisms and essentialisms of varyingsorts) without so much as an analytic nod to the complex ideologicalproductions taking place on the field of nationalist subordination underlying theconcepts of ethnicity, race, and culture or to the structuring of their utility inhegemonic struggles for power in putatively homogeneous, but continuallyfracturing, hyphenated, nation states.

Economic issues and their relations to conceptions of the moral ground forintra- and international competition and co-operation among units self- andother-identified as ethnic find no berth on Gilroy's ship. This is so despite hisconcluding discussion wherein he acknowledges that 'the history of contendingracial identities affords a specific illustration of the general lessons involved intrying to keep the unstable, profane categories of black political culture open'(p. 223). He suggests the utility of diaspora concepts as a means to investigate'the fragmentary relationship between blacks and Jews and the difficult politicalquestions to which it plays host: the status of ethnic identity, the power ofcultural rationalism, and the manner in which carefully preserved socialhistories of ethnocidal suffering can function to supply ethical and politicallegitimacy' (p. 207). Even so, he does not seem to recognize that such a dialogueis more broadly useful for understanding the definition and bounding ofethnicities and cultures in general both across racioethnic boundaries as well aswithin what he deems the 'irrepressible heterology' of the African diaspora.

Moreover, beyond passing comments on slavery as 'capitalism with itsclothes off, Gilroy draws no links to the specifics of power and economy in theshaping of racial consciousness and ethnic absolutism for rethinking the socialand spatial relations of production in black Atlantic transformations. Obviouslythe identity politics which Gilroy would debunk are in no simple way drivenmerely by economistic reckonings. Just as previously, however, identity politicscannot be understood apart from economic policies and the shifting criteriaunderlying categoric competition. Those conditions encourage the selectiveentailments of identities in relation to inferred entitlements, themselves linkedto specificities of historical experience in particular economic regimes of spaceand place — the latter both in the sense of locality and of positionality(Horowitz, 1985). Gilroy does note that ethnic competition or proto-nationalistchauvinism endures and thrives even as the nation state becomes less central asthe site of political power, economic order, and cultural unity. Moreover, heprovides no commentaries adequate to serve as analyses of linkages between thepast as dead-end purist strategies and the future as open-ended mestizajepossibilities. In these terms his question concerning the motivation to nationalistappropriations of ethnic property is at best innocent and worst merelypolemical.

Granted, his expressed concern is to question the special political problemsthat arise as a result of the fatal junctures of the concepts of nation and culturerather than with the concepts' longevity and enduring appeal. Nonetheless is itnot reasonable to ask whether one can address this question in an analyticallyfruitful manner apart from the context of the shifting historical specificities ofthe ideological field on which such concepts, and the precepts out which theyare formulated, are continually fashioned and refashioned within and across

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changing economic regimes thereby resulting in the 'inevitability and mutabilityof identities which are always unfinished, always being remade' (p. xi)? We knowthe history of nationalism as one in which yesterday's impurity becomestoday's purity and serves as the icon of tomorrow's battle to created hierarchiesof presumed racial privilege. Consequently, to derive analytic benefits from thisblack Atlantic lesson of inevitability and mutability requires a stance from whichcontinually to ask and answer the question: compared with what?

The ethnic bonds and boundaries that vanguard scholar-activists wouldexploit must be continually remade and positioned relative to other identities,the power and legitimacy of which are part of what is at issue in theestablishment of the moral basis of a capitalist economy; still more often thannot and for most people, that is economy is lived locally even as it is producedglobally. 'My nationality is my reality', an expression of a doubled sense of bondand antinomy in lived identities, also suggests the sites or experiences withinglobal processes that serve as dressing rooms wherein capitalism with its clothesoff views capitalism putting its clothes on. That observation turns to productionin this room does not surprise, but it also does not inform us. Most certainly itsproducts cannot in and of themselves save us from our classificatory proclivitiesand their connections to empowerment struggles. Thus, reading against the tideof a rapidly developing new myth of trans-cultural unity in transcendentproductions, we sense the undertow and the doubling in Kool G. Rap's 'Mynationality is my reality' (one of the epigrams that open Chapter 3, p. 72).

From this standpoint Gilroy's protestations about ethnic absolutism andparticularity threaten at times to collapse into nothing more than aspects of anot-so-subtle, QE-too polemic on the relative merits of blacks in 'our glorious'[British] nation versus (p. 11) the counter-claims made by black folks in 'theseUnited States' — subalterns speaking the language of imperialism with itsclothes on. A well-known story indeed. Yet, Gilroy's account is a rather one-sided and ultra-static version of the old tale. It gives short-shrift to how historiesof dominant and subordinate groupings' competitive positionings of inter-national, sub-national constructions of superiority/inferiority informs the rangeof political conjunctions out of which the diaspora has been produced as aconceptual and empirical unit. It does not problematize the complexity andshifting diversity of US African American form and identity, or that its blackBritish compartment has little room for any but the black English. Caribbean andcontinental streams of anglophonic difference and cultural production that mighthave opened the latter category's anglophonic dimensions more widely arelargely lost. Black Britishness is stabilized in an uncritical and unspoken parentalmyth of amalgamation within a primarily English construction which is thenstood in opposition and to a 'just black', not African, America.

For example, in the South Bronx it is Jamaican youth (i.e. African American-Jamaicans) who make hip hop not a Caribbean Britishness repositioned as anelement of just black American blacks producing culture for export in that nowclassic Third Word sense where things otherwise made for home consumptionare stamped 'export quality'. Nonetheless, it is elite black America's writers thatGilroy accuses of nationalist appropriation of an avowedly hybrid music in thename of ethnic absolutism. If we are not too bedazzled by the emotional appeal

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of throwing off the shackles of nationalism, we might reasonably ask who,ethnic absolutists or Gilroy, in this instance has foreclosed the categories ofpolitical discourse by forcing creativity back onto its ethnic terrain?

Intentionally or not, in Gilroy's black Atlantic nationalized racial identityterrain remains territorialized through the implicit and often explicit forceaccorded jus solis (i.e. nationalized natal spaces) as opposed to locales ofproduction, the points of productive departure for the creative juxtaposition ofcomplex, shifting identity formations within the diaspora. It seems fair tosuggest that the complexities and difficulties entailed in these tasks might bemore productive for understanding the dangerous juncture of nation and culturethan the most detailed treatise on Du Bois' childhood fascinations and adultfashion statements. The thinness and one-sided character of this trice told talealso stems Gilroy's failure to situate either the claims of particularity or theproposed transformations of consciousness in the historicity of production beforenaming its transcendence.

What is at stake and how are views of the stakes altered by the transatlanticvoyage? For which objective subjects — persons as agents — do stakes vary inrelation to their specific involvement in political struggles? On the good shipblack Atlantic, the politics of politics disappears into the politics of'(dis)placement'. Despite a claim to examine the manner in which black politicswas transformed following the early struggle for emancipation — by mostaccounts an anti-Hegelian moment during which black intellectuals (and theirorganic intellectual counterparts) sought to disprove Hegel's contention thatAfricans contributed nothing to civilization — the particulars of otherperiodizations and shifting political foci with their uneven ramifications withinthe diaspora are not adequately considered. Hence, the comparability of formsand processes of consciousness, even individual ones, are analysed without duerecognition of regional and class variables in intranational culture productionand its consciousness.

Du Bois was not Wright before he left the United States. Although the erasof their political formation overlapped, the experiences Du Bois, the grand oldyankee clipper, had both at home and abroad were not the Wright experienceeven before Du Bois selected Germany and certain German intellectual overParis and French philosophical and political influences that would orderWright's transatlantic musings. And, one might wonder how popular Bismarckwas down on the Delta as slave music was being reborn as jick-joint blues, thatsoon got too big for its britches when it moved up to Chicago, or as it met up onBeal Street to sing a centuries-long duet with blue grass and the Grand OldOpry while the Fisk Jubilee Singers got dressed to take some of it back to theother Celtic country, preparing, perhaps, a womb for the birth of the AverageWhite Band.

It would serve us well to know what is being displaced by knowing thespecificity of the place of displacement rather than its racial — black Atlantic —over-determination. What is the speed of crossing for yankee clippers whencompared to ghetto-fashioned schooners? What would an answer tell us abouthow to evaluate alternative — chronotypical — readings of intellectual crossingsand cultural graftings? All ships become gray in the dark as we lose sight of the

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implications of a history of identity formation within the nation state. Suchsightings would remind us that the strategy of ethnic claims to cultural propertyand its political deployment in race-based political struggles is one which US-born African Americans (presumed to have no known genealogical connectionsto voluntary immigrants of African descent, the 'just blacks') have been onlyrecently enabled to employ. Immigrants of 'African descent, from Africa, SouthAmerica, and the Caribbean, when compared with these other forms of AfricanAmericanness assimilated to a predefined 'just black' category, had 'culture'deemed to have been retained or 'made in the Americas' under the kinder, if noless watchful eyes, of their erstwhile masters. Expansions of ethnic politics asidentity politics have opened the previously closed race category which definedthe just blacks as a race in white dress. This opening makes 'the race' acontender for prized label 'ethnic'. Here, Gilroy's thinking may have beensharpened by travelling the Cape Verdian route to roots followed by MarilynHalter (1993)4 in her analysis of the historical background to contemporaryidentity politics among self-identified Afro-Portuguese immigrants from CapeVerde to the United States. Cape Verdian Americans struggle to presentthemselves as a people whose unity and authenticity is situated 'between raceand ethnicity'.

Comparison of the transnational with the national warrants an understandingof the processual and structural complexities of the national as that which apolitics of transfiguration would transcend rather than fulfil. Neither thetheoretical nor the practical implications of the contemporary manifestation ofthe intra- and transnational status politics wrought in this earlier era can befruitfully understood without a critical assessment of what is meant by 'ethnicparticularity'. Associated problems have, as Skinner (1993) and others trying todefine the analytic utility of the diaspora concept argue, have been a major forceshaping the dialectic between diaspora and homeland as well as withinhomelands and their identities. Their conclusions applied, with historicalvariation and differing political consequence, to both the continent as homelandand to territorial locales within the diaspora.

Consequently, in order to examine the historicity of particularity as a conceptone is drawn to critique the silences of the Black Atlantic discourse in relation toother discourses on intra-racial interactions within and across nation-stateboundaries. Such interactions are aspects of contests over place and position inthe identity formation 'African American' and its relation to structure, power,and modes of symbolic legitimacy (critical features of the authenticity debate)within the 'diaspora'. As we address these particular issues we are alsomotivated to ask other questions. How much one should know about previousreadings of transnational and hemispheric modes of production? How familiarshould one be with the debates on what has at times been called 'loosely-integrated' cultural formations before proposing yet another alternative —however preliminary and provisional? How have relations among national,hemispheric, and transoceanic processes of amalgamation and transformationbeen presented in forms of scholarship which have looked beyond the nation asthe site of cultural production?

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Lost to the reader is reference to and a dialogue with those, from MelvilleHerkovits (1941) on the making of culture and the (dis)memorying of the pastto Roger Bastide (1978) interpénétration of civilizations through religions andtheir expressive elements. Silenced are several generations of scholars from andstudents of the Caribbean and Latin America whose work speaks to the rangeof issues Gilroy raises throughout the Black Atlantic. With differing degrees ofsuccess, these scholars of varied hues have tried to understand processes ofcultural production and identity formation in conceptual units spanninggeographical spaces and overlapping economic regimes.^ Gilroy's extremeselectivity of intellectual precursors and the perfunctory references to previouswork leaves us with an inaccurate sense of tabula rasa on which Gilroy thendrafts his preliminary thoughts.

Black Atlantic thus remains closer to its most laudable pedagogical beginningsthan it does to the ambitious tasks it sets for itself as a book. It teachesdisinterested sociology students about Enlightenment thought, while infusingits teaching with the idea that African intellectual productions and livedexperiences are parts of the West. That is to say, the chapters of the BlackAtlantic read like independent projects that lack the surrounding reading liststhat might ground them in the contemporary intellectual history that informs therange and types of questions the book asks.

Black Atlantic takes on too few passengers thereby limiting the forms ofshipboard dialogues, in ways that The World and Africa, Du Bois's early effort tocreate a constructive dialogue between Black Atlantis and what Martin Bernaiwould later dub Black Athena, does not.5 Attention, therefore, to this work mayhave served Gilroy's decentring project better than his own effort to (dis)placeDu Bois. This possibility is further encouraged because in that book's prefacethat Du Bois describes his intellectual indebtedness, rejections, and efforts toaugment the conceptual frameworks and empirical inquiries of his Europeanand Euro-American teachers and collégial mentors. He aims both to overcomethe racist limitations his intellectual inheritance and to think about differentways of entering and presenting the African history in relation to the slave andcolonial pasts it contains. Gilroy's treatment of Du Bois misses the inter-textualdoubling of intellectual consciousness that generally characterizes the synthesiswithin and across intellectual projects, as he concentrates on linear,individualistic crossings and psycho-graftings. Thus, on most topics we arequickly set adrift without adequate recognition of work that has advanced ourunderstandings, or shaped our sense of the politics of the possible, on issuesthat Gilroy finds 'interesting' and perhaps far more novel than he ought.

Gilroy's call for his interest in an African American /Jewish dialogue onredemptive suffering is a case in point. His comment in the concluding chapterthat 'the idea that the suffering of both blacks and Jews has a special redemptivepower, not for themselves alone but for humanity as a whole, is a third commontheme that has some interesting consequences for modern black politicalthought' (p. 208) could have served as more than a passing remark, had heplaced it in dialogue with Gresson (1982), Henry (1990) and Goldfield (1990).This is to note but three scholars whose efforts speak directly to the patterns andprocesses contained in and shaped by the metaphoric and strategic power of the

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symbolics of competitive suffering in the black/slavery, Jewish /holocaustdiscourses on social and moral redemption. Attention to works of this typecould have fleshed out Gilroy's concern with motivations underlying elite blackAmerican writers' claims of ethnic particularity and provided him a clearporthole from which to view the nature of black politics — whether scanningfor vanguard's desire to lead or for the perspectives of those they seek to lead.

Gresson provides a highly insightful discussion of sub-national, racialidentity as 'spoiled sacrifice' and the connection of this sacrifice to thepsychology of 'dis-identification' as betrayal. Henry addresses the rise andtransformation of the jeremiad in African American politics as a stylistic meansto wed the symbolics of suffering to the construction of black folk as the 'chosenof the chosen people' — those then deemed morally capable of setting the bestpath both for their redemption as well as that of the national and internationalsocial orders. Henry's discussion is especially relevant to Gilroy's concern withrelations between the politics of fulfilment and the politics of transfiguration inexpressive culture. In the jeremiad — a secularized preaching style — one couldargue, an artistic form other than music sought and perhaps found a means towork the juncture of the politics of fulfilment and the politics of transfiguration.Despite the premised dominance of music in expressive culture we may havegained a sense of the inter-relation of forms.

Through such works one might sight the land on which vanguardism and itswomanist turns to standpoint epistemologies, might be displaced withalternative theoretical conceptions and practical strategies that rethink the logicof who and how struggle is directed if not led in the diaspora. In these terms,even as some of its premises and the optimism of its conclusions remaindebatable, Goldfield's effort to disclose the moral basis of politics shared byblacks and whites even as they struggled over civil rights, independent ofGresson and Henry, augments our understanding of black political culture ashe brings together the symbolics of suffer and redemption to discern the line,he suggests, black and white southerners drew as the moral limits of injusticethat ultimately made the successes of the civil rights movement possible and,Gilroy's call for rethinking Garvey and Garveyism, a glance back at Burkett(1978) might square yet another knot between conceptions of moral and socialredemption and the shape and process of the politics of black culture. Likewise,his conclusion concerning Douglass' turn to violence and its relation to gendercould benefit from a dialogue with McCartney's (1992) treatment of the sameissue as regards Douglass' construction of a moral universe, his insistence thatwithin such a universe violence was a last resort, and, course, his answer toSojourner Truth's query about the death of God.

We may round out the picture with direct attention to other theoriststhinking about the dialectics of blacks and Jews and the problem of modernity;what Cuddihy (1974)^ called the 'ordeal of civility' in the 'struggle withmodernity'. Cuddihy's thesis is an especially relevant context for Gilroy'sinterests in the role of black intellectual concepts and the prefiguring ofmodernity, in furthering the dialogue between Jews and blacks on the relationsto unfilled promises of the West, and in the constraints of nationalistic thought.His interest in the position given music in expressive culture also begs

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contextualization in the earlier analyses of Ulf Hannerz's (1969) discussion musicand gender relations, and Lawrence Levine's systematic treatment of music,expressive culture and black consciousness. These by no means exhaust theimmediately relevant works on issue of modernity, tradition, history, memory,and relations between expressive culture and representations of consciousnessthat may serve both to advance Gilroy's project and to situate his conclusionsabout problems and processes in the 'black Atlantic' by giving the reader a senseof the historical specificity of roots and routes adequate to address the ever-present question: compared with what?

Ultimately, we must get beyond the sense of mixing that takes the twopurified hybrids (a European X and a cross-the-Atlantic Y) plaguing Gilroy'sBlack Atlantic to consider the further operations of hybridized thought and itsspace. Despite Gilroy's claim that Hegel was Martin Luther King Jr's favouritephilosopher, its was Ghandi's philosophy that linked King's vanguardism andits constructions of the possibilities lying somewhere between the jubilee ofdancing with a fire hose and the Utopian rationality entailed in confronting theteeth of an unleashed dog. In this, King was heir and contributor to a longtradition of thinking across the spaces of Americas, South Africa, and the Indiansubcontinent (Seshachari 1969; Garrow 1986; Kapur 1992). It would seem thatcareful attention to the measure and meter of intranational cultural productionacross its regions and categoric spaces would be a required grounding againstwhich to better specify (processually and structurally) the means andjustifications for comparability at the level of diaspora — black Atlantic or somelarger unit — in its transnational, trans-cultural production. In the end thislaudable effort may best teach how difficult indeed it is to think outside andbeyond over-determinations of the racioethnic the dustjacket declares as one ofthe book's central themes, 'blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation,within the shared culture of the black Atlantic'. The constraints of its nationalistproclivities are alive and well in the ideological undercurrents of Gilroy'sprotests.

Notes

1. Of course, Espiritu's work should read in the context of the longer discourseof conjunctions and disjunctions between the East Indians and West Indiansas components of Asian and African diasporas spanning the sites of blackAtlantic creativity.

2. This is not to imply that Gilroy should have consulted Halter which wouldnot have been available as he wrote the Black Atlantic, but is instead intendedto suggest attention to issues these patterns of migrations and identityentailed as African American came to be seen as just another ethnic grouprather than as a racial group among ethnic groups with transported andrebuilt cultures which creates the space for manoeuvre these immigrants nowwork.

3. To note but a few such efforts in this long tradition: 'plantation America', seeWagley and Harris, 1955; Wagley, 1957; Wolf and Mintz, 1957. For theCaribbean region as a culture area, see Mintz (1966), and for 'nuestra

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America', see Saldivar (1991). For Afro-America early examples mightinclude, Williams (1932), Greenfield, (1961), Mintz and Price (1976), andBastide (1969). These and many other works have invoked and developedconceptions of the interpenetration and creativity of 'cultures' which, despitethe prevalence of a language of closure, they also recognized as alreadyhybrid and always both in the process of being and becoming — as is thecase with anything one would call either a culture or an identity (onproblems in the use of the concept of identity, see Handler (1994).

4. For example, Gilroy's effort to replace the centre with the margin as a meanto claim racial terror's complicity in rationality, would have benefitted froma reading of Nathan Huggin's much earlier effort to do the same (seeHuggins, 1990).

5. Moreover, Gilroy's analysis of Du Bois's (dis)placement might have beenbetter situated and have less the feel or tone of strawdog positioning hadattention also been given to Du Bois's (1947) effort on the same front, andother works that prefigured the arguments presented therein on the integralcentrality of slavery and racial terror in the creation of the West.

6. Originally published in 1974, its thesis was deemed quite controversial.

References

Bastide, R. (1978) The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of theInterpenetration of Civilizations, trans. Helen Sebba, Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins University Press.

- (1969) 'Etat Actuel et Perspectives d'Avenir des Recherches Afro-Américaines', Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 58: 7-29.

Burkett, R.K. (1978) Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Movement,Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Cuddihy, J.M. (1987) The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi Strauss, and theJewish Struggle with Modernity, Boston: Beacon Press.

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1947) World and Africa: an Inquiry into the Part Africa has Playedin World History, New York: Viking Press.

Espiritu, Y.L. (1992) Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions andIdentities, Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

Garrow, D.J. (1986) 'The Intellectual Development of Martin Luther King, Jr:Influences and Commentaries', Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 60: 5-20;

Goldfield, D.R. (1990) Black, White and Southern: Race Relations and SouthernCulture 1940 to the Present, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Greenfield, S.M. (1961) English Rustics in Black Skin, New Haven: Yale Collegeand University Press.

Gresson, A. (1982)The Dialectics of Betrayal: Sacrifice, Violation, and the Oppressed,Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Halter, M. (1993) Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean Immigrants, 1860-1965,Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Handler, R. (1994) 'Is 'Identity' a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept', in J.R. Gillis(ed.) Commemorations: the Politics of National Identity, Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Hannerz, U. (1969) Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community, NewYork: Columbia University Press.

Henry, C.P. (1990) Culture and African American Politics, Indiana andBloomington: Indiana University Press.

Herskovits, M.J. (1941) The Myth of the Negro Past, New York: Harper and Bros.Horowitz, D.L. (1985) Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press.Huggins, N.I. (1990) 'Introduction: the Deforming Mirror of Truth', in Black

Odyssey: the African American Ordeal in Slavery, New York: Random House.Kapur, S. (1992) Raising up a Prophet: the African American Encounter with Gandhi,

Boston: Beacon Press.Levine, L.W. (1977) Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk

Thought from Slavery to Freedom, New York: Oxford University Press.McCartney, J.T. (1992) Black Power Ideologies: an Essay in African-American Political

Thought, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Mintz, M.W., (1974) Caribbean Transformations, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

University Press.Mintz, S.W. (1966) 'The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area', Cahiers d'Histoire

Mondiale, XI: 916-41.Mintz, S.W. and R. Price (1976) An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American

Past: a Caribbean Perspective, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of HumanIssues.

Saldívar, J.D. (1991) The Dialectics of our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, andLiterary History, Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Seschachari, C. (1969) Gandhi and the American Scene: an Intellectual History andInquiry, Bombay: Nachiketa Publications.

Skinner, E.P. (1993) 'The Dialectic Between Diasporas and Homelands', in J.E.Harris (ed.) Global Dimension of the African Diaspora, 2nd edn, Washington,DC: Howard University Press.

Wagley, C. (1957) 'Plantation-America: a Cultural Sphere', in V. Rubin (ed.)Caribbean Studies: a Symposium, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Wagley, C. and M. Harris (1955) 'A Typology of Latin American Subcultures',American Anthropologist, 57: 428-51.

Williams, J. (1932) Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica, New York: Dial.Wolf, E.R. and S.W. Mintz (1957) 'Haciendas and Plantations in Middle America

and the Caribbean', Social and Economic Studies, 6: 380-412.

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GEORGE LIPSITZUniversity of California at San Diego

Black Atlantic is the kind of work that comes along only one in a great while, abook that generates a fundamentally new framework for understandingimportant issues, that succeeds so well that it will force researchers toincorporate its insights and ideas into their own scholarship for years to come.

In this book, Paul Gilroy argues for the importance of what he calls 'blackmodernism', an artistic and critical stance emerging from the experiences of theAfrican diaspora. His objects of study range from Richard Wright to ragamuffinmusic, from 2 Live Crew to W.E.B. Du Bois. But Gilroy unites these diverseobjects of study with an extraordinarily unified framework that focuses on theways in which the history of racialized identities illuminates important issuesabout knowledge and nationalism. Most important, Gilroy insists that culture ispolitical, that black music especially projects a 'politics of fulfilment' and a'politics of transfiguration' that resists the separation of politics from culture —and consequently holds great potential for solving problems that affect allpeople in our inter-connected world.

Gilroy shows how common experiences with colonialization, slavery, andracism positioned diasporic Africans in different continents and countries tofashion unique understandings of the limits of nationalism in an internationalworld, to see how the existence of racism and slavery influenced the corecategories and concerns of the Enlightenment, and to fashion artistic andpolitical strategies for the future based on the 'inescapable hybridity andintermixture of ideas' (p. 2). Gilroy identifies and explains black modernism notjust to add material about diasporic Africans to what we already know aboutmodernity, but to show how the experience of black modernists forced them toconfront issues of knowledge and nationalism that might have been more easilyoverlooked by others. His interest in black modernism shows the uniqueburdens borne by black people, but it also details how intellectuals, artists, andactivists from diasporic African communities have used those experiences tofashion a critique of modernity that 'can provide a lesson which is not restrictedto blacks' (p. 223).

With his impressive command of a vast range of topics, concepts, and ideas,Gilroy makes major contributions to our understanding of how nationalism andknowledge in the west have been shaped by the African diaspora. He is lesssuccessful when he attempts to convert his cultural and ideological critique topractical political activity. Gilroy proves that it is easier to call for transnationaldiasporic politics than to implement them, but it is a testimony to his politicalintegrity and his intellectual ambition that he even makes the attempt.

In arguing for transnational politics modelled on the realities of the Africandiaspora, Gilroy presents a persuasive critique of purely national approaches toculture and politics. But he often underestimates how national experiences giveparticular inflections to local identities, how they sometimes require narrowlynational as well as broadly international responses. Gilroy lauds black modern-ism for its ability to see beyond the limits of the nation state as the sole site forpolitical and cultural contestation, but this leads him on occasion to

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underestimate the strategic importance of the state itself for many diasporicAfricans struggling against exploitation and oppression.

To his credit, Gilroy refuses to separate his readings of literary and musicalpractices from his political analysis of the historical matrices in which they areconstructed. Rather than reducing cultural expressions purely to formalproperties, he shows how artists built affect through aesthetic choices thatreference and reconfigure the lived experiences of their audiences. But Gilroydisplays far greater interest in delineating the political implications of culturaltexts than he does in describing the cultural components of political struggle.Nonetheless, the arguments about nationalism, the nation state, and politics thatGilroy is sure to provoke by Black Atlantic will testify to the original andgenerative nature of his work and to the impossibility of avoiding it in futurescholarly studies on these important issues.

Gilroy demonstrates how much we can learn about modernity by seeing itfrom the perspective of slaves and their descendants. The modernisms of themetropolitan cities of Europe depended — at least in part — upon sugarplantations and slavery. The critiques of exploitation and oppression fashionedwithin the slave quarters made important contributions to modernist thought.Gilroy marvels at the blindness of conventional historical interpretations thatassign the experience of slavery only to blacks, as 'our special property ratherthan a part of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West as a whole' (p. 49).At the same time, these conventional interpretations often give credit forcritiques of injustice only to Europe, ignoring the challenge to Europe's moralcomplacency posed by slave resistance and abolition movements. In history,interaction between the 'centre' and the 'periphery' formed identities in bothsites, but in too many contemporary intellectual fights over cultural patrimony,scholars separate Europe from Africa, insisting on either Euro-centric or Afro-centric approaches. In these arguments, the mutually defining relationshipbetween Europe and Africa that helped create what we know as modernitydisappears.

In Gilroy's view, the critique of modernity fashioned by slaves and theirdescendants has been particularly important precisely because they could beneither entirely inside nor entirely outside modernity. Instead, they experienceda critical marginality that gave them unique insights about how the world mightbe reformed. The experience of slavery and its enduring memories led diasporicAfricans to be suspicious about many of the claims of modern philosophy andsocial thought. They understood and attempted to use modernism's goals, butfused them with other kinds of knowledge and belief.

In important and persuasive discussions about Martin Delaney, RichardWright, W.E.B. Du Bois, and black popular music, Gilroy shows how diasporicAfricans have influenced Europe and been influenced by it in substantive ways.Drawing on pre-modern images and symbols, the transnational diasporiccommunity honed and refined forms of cultural and political expression thatinsisted on the continuity between life and art as an oppositional stance againsta modernity that assigned them to separate spheres. Because the slaveplantations proved virtually impervious to rational and reasoned critique or tointervention by the state, they forced diasporic Africans to realise that they could

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not rely on either reason or the state for their freedom, indeed they encouragedthem to see through the mystifications that employed concepts like 'reason' andthe 'state' to mask diverse forms of exploitation, hierarchy, and privilege. Yetslaves and free blacks also showed themselves fully capable of fashioningsuccessful strategies for emancipation based on appeals to reason and rightswhen opportunities permitted. But most important, they developed alternativemeans of understanding and changing their condition through what Gilroyterms a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of memory. These criticaltraditions have played an important role in past struggles over the meaning ofmodernity, but they take on even more importance in the world today as therapid movement of transnational capital has everywhere undermined appealsto the nation state or to universal reason as the basic forms of oppositionaldiscourse and action.

Gilroy displays great expertise about African American culture and its linksto Europe. The strength of his project lies in his ability to see beyond onenational context. But too often he assumes that African American intellectualshave got things 'wrong' for no good reason, rather than inquiring about thedifferences in national contexts that lead him and them to different conclusions.For example, Gilroy rightly praises the excellent work of Houston Baker, buttakes to task Henry Louis Gates and Patricia Hill Collins for what Gilroy seesas 'essentialist' thinking; but many, or perhaps even most US readers might,rather, see the positions advanced by Gates and Collins as accurate descriptionsof the distinctive historical experiences with race and gender faced by black menand women in America.

Even more of a problem in a book celebrating 'hybridity' is Gilroy's lack ofengagement with the leading theorists of anti-essentialism in the US — writerswho designate themselves 'women of colour' — including (among others)Patricia Williams, Lisa Lowe, Gloria Anzaldua, Elaine Kim, Chela Sandoval, andKimberle Crenshaw. Their critiques resonating with hybridity, heterogeneity,and intersectionality contain the intellectual complexity Gilroy calls for, butmore important, they demonstrate the necessity of connecting intellectualcritique to the lived experiences of everyday life among ordinary people. Forthem, new theories emerge largely because the experiences of women of colourcannot be explained by gender, race, or class alone, but demand a multi-layeredmulti-level analysis. They connect the formal complexity of cultural texts toactivist politics in ways that have much to teach us all through their efforts atbuilding cross-class, pan-ethnic, anti-racist, feminist alliances that connectprofessional academics with immigrant garment workers, for example, andspeak to the commonalities and contrasts that unite and divide women alonglines of class, race, and sexual preference.

Gilroy's brilliance as a cultural critic enables us to theorize many of theconnections between vernacular forms of dance, speech, or song with theconcerns and creations of elite intellectuals. But by emphasizing culture in theway that he does, Gilroy sometimes gives short shrift to economics and politics.For example, in the course of a perfectly reasonable critique of the Marxisttendency to elevate the relations of production over all other social relations,Gilroy simply inverts the 'vulgar Marxist' position and contends that 'in the

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critical thought of blacks in the West, social self-creation through labour is notthe centre-piece of emancipatory hopes. For the descendants of slaves, worksignifies only servitude, misery, and subordination' (p. 40). Here, Gilroyproperly attempts to redress an imbalance between 'lived crisis and systemiccrisis' in Marxist thought, but the two spheres should not be separated in thefirst place; no 'lived crisis' lacks systemic causes and consequences, not'systematic crisis' spares the lived experience of ordinary people. Numerousstudies on black workers (including those by C.L.R. James, Tera Hunter, GeorgeRawick, Nell Irvin Painter, Hosea Hudson, Charles Denby, Robin D.G. Kelley,Joe Trotter, and Earl Lewis) indicate that a racialized class experience (to useLewis's term) makes it impossible for working class blacks to separate the livedcrisis from the systemic crisis or to view work as 'only servitude, misery, andsubordination'. In Denby's Indignant Heart and Hudson's Black Worker in the DeepSouth especially, the authors write impassioned descriptions of how they lovetheir work but resent the capitalist social relations that prevent them from doingit well or from receiving proper reward for it. Elsewhere in Black Atlantic, Gilroywrites clearly and convincingly about race as the modality in which class islived and about gender as the modality in which race is lived. But no linear pathcan trace the interaction among identities; class is also a modality in which raceand gender are lived.

In all of his arguments, Gilroy argues for international rather than nationalapproaches to racism, and for social constructionist rather than essentialistapproaches to race. But it is precisely on these points that the limits of his ownnational context and intellectual preferences come into sharp relief. Inter-nationalism, after all, is the project of transnational capital as well as onestructure of resistance against it. Social constructionism without adequateunderstanding of diverse histories can distort resistance based on sharedhistorical experience, misrepresenting it as biological essentialism. Too often,Gilroy condemns African American intellectuals and activists for their recourseto purely national struggles or to solidarity along ethnic lines withoutacknowledging the historical circumstances and strategic imperatives behindthese choices.

Gilroy's commitments to internationalism lead him to misread thesignificance of struggles over state power in the US. For example, he notes withalarm and annoyance Martin Delaney's 'America-centric brand of patriotism'which he views as a betrayal of the author's Euro-American modernity (p. 29).But as Gilroy acknowledges, Delaney and other African Americans developedtheir allegiance to the state because of its role during emancipation and the earlyyears of reconstruction. Gilroy is certainly right to recognize the tension betweenDelaney's national and international commitments, but it would be unrealisticand unwise to expect African Americans to ignore the hard battles they havefought and won to use the state for their own survival, protection, andadvancement.

Gilroy's critique of Afro-centrism and black nationalism suffers from asimilar unwillingness to consider fully the concrete conditions of social life andsocial struggle facing African Americans. While devastatingly accurate in hisrebuttal of nationalist claims for primordial, trans-cultural, and trans-historical

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essences uniting diasporic Africans, Gilroy unfortunately defines as 'essentialist'just about any strategy that relies on ethnic solidarity. But people who catch helljust because they are black act logically and reasonably when they use blacknessas a means of augmenting group power and solidarity.

Recourse to the strategic essentialism of black nationalism in the US hasfrequently enabled a people under siege to transform themselves from adespised cultural minority to part of a global majority, to render the terms andconditions of white supremacy in the US relative, provisional, and contingentrather than absolute. The generations of African Americans in slavery and infreedom who buried their dead facing Africa and who placed broken glass ontheir graves in the African manner reminded themselves of their history in theworld before captivity and slavery. They were not engaging in essentialism: onthe contrary, their actions reminded them of the historical — and thereforechangeable — nature of their bondage.

Gilroy, however, acknowledges no need for nationalism, no matter what itsaccomplishments. He dismisses Afro-centricity as a 'poor basis for the writingof cultural history and the calculation of political choices', even though heconcedes that it may be 'useful in developing communal discipline andindividual self-worth' and 'even in galvanizing black communities to resist theencroachments of crack cocaine' (p. 188). But what kind of politics extols theformer at the expense of the latter? Any 'calculation of political choices' thattakes place without respecting what people think, how they make meaning forthemselves, what brings order to them in the face of chaos, what enables themto turn oppression into self-affirmation rather than self-hatred is certainlydoomed to failure no matter how theoretically astute it may be.

Gilroy carries his elevation of abstract intellectual principles over practicalpolitical struggle one step further in his dismissal of 'the family trope withinblack political and academic discourse' as 'both symptom and signature of aneo-nationalist outlook that is best understood asií flexible essentialism' (p. 99).This family trope goes back as far as slavery; in communities where familiescould be broken up at any moment calling each other 'brother' and 'sister' and'cousin' and 'uncle' and 'aunt' built alternative networks of mutuality andsupport. But even more important, the contemporary devastating impact of de-industrialization on inter-generational authority and communication in AfricanAmerican communities has left a social void that the invocation of familyattempts to fulfil.

What kind of politics demeans the strategies people develop to definethemselves, and instead demands that they undergo terrible pain in order toremain faithful to theoretical abstractions? One answer appears in a shortdiscussion in volume one of Capital where Karl Marx addresses the oppositionto mechanized production among British Luddites in the early 19th century.After delineating the logic of the Luddite position, Marx nonetheless goes on tochide the Luddites for their immaturity in attacking the machines instead ofattacking capital, for failing to accept the inevitability of progress, and for notrecognizing the futility of attacking machines as a strategic response to it. Marx'sdiscussion of the Luddites is impressive because he understands so much andso little at the same time. Who else could have outlined in such convincing

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fashion the growth of mechanized production and its impact on social relations?On the other had, as Stan Weir has often asked, how could someone see soclearly the consequences of automation and not support those struggling againstit more fully? How could he not appreciate that they knew better than he whatmachine production did to their lives or how to stop it? After all, the Britishgovernment sent more troops to suppress the Luddites than it deployed againstNapoleon, and their resistance succeeded in delaying the introduction ofmachines and enabling them to keep their jobs for almost ten years. How couldKarl Marx — of all people — fail to see that asking people to accept their ownannihilation as the price of progress replicated rather than challenged the systemof hierarchy and exploitation that Marx himself criticised so brilliantly in hisother writing.

Gilroy's analysis of Afro-centrism owes its origins to the kind of thinking thatMarx displayed in respect to the Luddites. It is vanguardist thinking, the kindthat has done so much to discredit the socialist project everywhere. Whenthinkers as sophisticated, perceptive, humane, and progressive as Marx andGilroy engage in this kind of argument it should alert us all the more to thedifficulties as well as the urgency of uniting intellectual critique with politicalpractice.

There are truths to be seen from both close up and far away, but the bestanalysis comes from a fusion of the two, from seeing things from both close upand far away. Luddites and Afro-centrists are easy to dismiss at a distance, butdealing with them close up is a different matter. They succeed because theyprovide concrete solutions to immediate problems, because they make sense topeople embattled against superior power. If there is a greater truth that thesepeople need to see, it will not be communicated to them through disdain orneglect, but rather, through common, collective, and reciprocal action anddialogue.

At the conclusion of his book, Gilroy does offer a concrete political project.He calls for an alliance between Jews and blacks because both groups havediasporic experiences, and because their sufferings from slavery and theholocaust provide them with insight into the tragic costs of racism. Gilroy's clearstand against anti-semitism is certainly laudable, and his desire for a politicsbased on affinities of ideology rather than identity, on culture rather than colour,is clearly progressive. But as a project for the present crisis facing AfricanAmericans, it is sadly out of touch with reality. Gilroy correctly sees intellectualand cultural connections between Jews and blacks, but does not examine theirstructural relations with one another. He does not investigate, for instance, thelong history of real estate discrimination in the US that has given benefits to allwhites, including Jews, at the expense of blacks. He does not ask where Jewishorganizations have been on questions of affirmative action. He ignores MichaelRogin's brilliant exposure of how Euro-American ethnic inclusion has repeatedlytaken place through racial exclusion. Gilroy condemns black essentialism andAfro-centricity, but offers no parallel critique of while essentialism or of Zionismwhich are at least as prevalent and certainly a lot more powerful in Americansociety.

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Gilroy argues that memory of the holocaust serves as a source of socialjustice in our world, but surely he knows that it also serves as a symbol ofvictimization among people more concerned with the identities of the victimsthat with the nature of the victimization. Palestinians rarely derive any practicalbenefits from the holocaust narrative, and there is no reason to think that blackswill fare any better form it. Jewish organizations have show extensive interestin lecturing blacks about the holocaust and in surveying how black people feelabout Jews. But they have devoted far fewer resources to exploring the causesand consequences of the apocalypse on the instalment plan that AfricanAmerican communities have suffered from de-industrialism, economic restruc-turing, and neo-conservative politics over the past two decades.

In addition, Gilroy falls into the trap of connecting black self-activity withanti-semitism. Journalistic stories about Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrackhan, andeven the rap artist Professor Griff almost always associate them with past anti-semitic remarks. But they seldom do the same for Richard Nixon who ordereda White House aide to count the number of Jews in the Bureau of LabourStatistics when that agency released unemployment figures that wereunfavourable to the Nixon administration. They never mention anti-semitism inconnection with Fred Malek, the aide who carried out Nixon's request and mostrecently served as a high official in George Bush's re-election campaign. In ourpublic discourse, anti-semitism only seems offensive or memorable when itpurportedly comes from blacks.

To be sure, anti-semitism exists among black people and black organizations;it is necessary and desirable that we criticise and condemn it. But by any stretchof the imagination, anti-semitism is a far less pressing problem in blackcommunities and in American society in general than unemployment,homelessness, disease, police brutality, and poverty. Reconciliation betweenblacks and Jews over the holocaust would help both groups, but it would do farless for the interest of blacks than it would do for the interests of Jews. Gilroycomplains that Stanley Elkins' 'misguided but extremely influential attempts toimport the Holocaust as a comparative example into the literature on the slavepersonality' have been forgotten (pp. 213-14). But Gilroy forgets that Elkins losthis influence precisely because blacks refused to accept his portrayal of AfricanAmerican slaves as simply dehumanized, deculturalized, brutalized, andinfantalized victims.

In one of his most persuasive arguments in Black Atlantic, Gilroy shows howFrederick Douglass' account of his fist fight with Edward Covey, the slavebreaker, allows us to see an alternative to the master slave relationship asdelineated by Hegel. Gilroy's impressive skills as an interpreter of bothenlightenment philosophy and African American literature stand him in goodstead here; he proves conclusively how experience as a slave enabled Douglassto forge a complicated and revisionist relationship with dominant ideology. ButDouglass' account also underscores the important physical relationship betweenoppressors and the oppressed. His fist fight with Covey helped Douglassdemystify slavery by revealing the physical force that lay behind it and bysuggesting that it might be challenged by another kind of force. By facing his

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foe and using force against him, Douglass understood some aspects of slaveryand his relationship to it, for the first time.

The physical relationships that oppressed people have with power deserveour attention as much as the cultural and intellectual dimensions of oppression.Gilroy's imaginative, original, and sophisticated analysis of black modernism hasmuch to offer, but his problem — and ours — is how to turn insight aboutintellectual and cultural issues into actions that change everyday life. Steppingback and seeing what we can learn from far away is an essential element in thatendeavour, but so is stepping forward to get a better look at what people havelearned through experience and struggle from close up at the grass roots.

It is dangerous to become dogmatic about identity, the state, and modernity.No one path leads to freedom, no one tradition has all the answers. Oppressedpeople cannot afford to be monolithically essentialist or monolithically anti-essentialist, monolithically nationalist or monolithically internationalist,monolithically modernist, monolithically anti-modernist or monolithically post-modernist. Without abandoning the all-important issues of teleology andideology, oppressed people must also use all the philosophical and tacticalweapons at their disposal to find the right weapon for the right occasion.

In his conclusion, Gilroy claims confidently that in the next century racismwill recede as a problem and that sustainable development and closing the gapbetween rich and poor nations will replace race as the central axis of politicalconflict. He may be right, but there is no way that he can know this for sure.More important, there is certainly no reason why people suffering form racismevery day should believe him. They will more likely trust what they see andhear from close-up, and act accordingly. Any intellectual or political frameworkfor change that ignores their insights and interests, that fails to connect grandtheories to immediate realities will fail, and deservedly so. But pragmatic politicsuninformed by historical analysis, cultural critique, or diasporic imagination willalso fail. The challenge posed to us by Gilroy's exciting and provocative bookis to combine local and global knowledge, to learn how to see things from closeup as well as from far away.

TOMMY LEE LOTTSan José State University, USA

In a famous passage from The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois speaks of AfricanAmericans as having 'two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; twowarring ideals in one dark body' (Du Bois, 1961). He asserted that this doubleself must be merged to achieve a true self-consciousness, or rather aconsciousness of 'a better and truer self. Taken literally, this notion of a mergedself suggests a synthesis of an African self with a European self. But what doesit mean to speak of a group of black people in this manner? In his new book,Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy employs Du Bois' notion of double consciousness toargue that New World black cultures are a hybrid of pre-modern African andmodern European influences. His persuasive analysis of the social and political

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significance of music in black Atlantic vernacular cultures aims to show thatcertain pre-modern aspects of black vernacular cultures constitute an anti-modern perspective. Rather than take Du Bois' claim that African Americanshave two souls literally, Gilroy reinterprets it to mean that New World blackpeople are constituted by their experience of being 'in the West, but not of it'(Gilroy, 1993). Gilroy applies this interpretation of double consciousness cross-culturally to identify common elements in black Atlantic cultures. The out-standing characteristic commonly shared among New World black people is thecultural expression of an inherently critical stance toward Western rationality.

The question of how black people in the New World relate to each other, andto Africa, immediately raises other questions regarding the similarities anddifferences between various black cultures. Gilroy takes on the anti-essentialistprohibition against any attempt to identify cultural practices that link diasporablack people with each other and Africa. He characterizes the 'commonsensibilities' of different diaspora black cultures as twofold: those residuallyinherited from Africa and those generated from New World slavery. While hetakes pains to avoid embracing the essentialism that sometimes accompanies thisview, Gilroy steadfastly contends that 'the post-slave cultures of the Atlanticworld are in some significant way related to one another and to the Africancultures from which they partly derive' (p. 81). Although I think this claim isincontestable, I nonetheless have reservations regarding Gilroy's account ofethnic particularity and cultural identity. He seems to acknowledge the role ofdouble consciousness in the creation of ethnic identities, even noting that it hassometimes been a major factor inhibiting certain groups from adopting a blackdiaspora consciousness. By considering the importance of cultural differences forthe construction of sorio-historically specific identities, I show that the doubleconsciousness Gilroy champions is apiece with the ethnic absolutism he wantsto denounce.

Double Consciousness and Authenticity

Du Bois viewed double consciousness as a psychological problem of raceidentity.2 He asked, 'Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both?' (DuBois, 1897). He claimed that this self-questioning leads African Americans tohesitation, vacillation and contradiction. The experience of double consciousnessinvolves having a distinct sensation, a feeling of twoness that produces alonging to merge one's double self into something more authentic; it is 'a dimfeeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and notanother' (Du Bois, 1981). Although Du Bois thought that double consciousnesscan lead to self-disparagement and despair, he also believed that through themerging of this doubleness self-realization and self-respect could be attained.

Du Bois understood double consciousness to have an emancipatory potential,at least to the extent that it can be constructively harnessed. He spoke of itinvolving a dialectic exchange of 'two unreconciled strivings, or two warringideals'. Although African Americans are American by birth, political ideals andlanguage, there are opposing values inherent in double consciousness that derivefrom having an undesirable racial status. Du Bois proposed to reconcile theconflicting tendencies produced by double consciousness in the direction of a

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group loyalty. Group ideals would develop from the collective endeavour toconstruct a diaspora race identity. African-American race identity must becultivated by pursuing a distinct cultural mission as a unified group of diasporablack people. The two warring ideals can be reconciled by African Americans'all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, theideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race' (DuBois, 1981).

In a similar vein Gilroy proclaims the emancipatory potential of doubleconsciousness. Like Du Bois, he focuses on the rehabilitative role of an identityconstructed from black cultural practices. Du Bois (1897) claimed that 'the full,complete Negro message of the whole Negro race has not yet been given to theworld'. To combat the "nameless prejudice' that disrespects, mocks, ridicules,distorts and systematically humiliates African Americans, the black race must"develop for civilization its particular message or ideal'.3 Gilroy's very astutereflections on the musical achievements of black vernacular cultures suggest thatblack people throughout the diaspora, in fact, have been actively engaged in thispursuit. Unlike Du Bois, who understood the striving for "Negro ideals' as acomplement to American (or Western) ideals, Gilroy explores the socialmeanings of various forms of cultural expression to bring to our attention adecidedly critical perspective.

Relying on Douglass' narrative, as well as on accounts of the tragic ordeal ofMargaret Garner, Gilroy argues that the terrors of enslavement produced in theslave a different concept of freedom. He refers to Garner's tale as 'an elementof the moral critique that anchors black antipathy to the forms of rationality andcivilized conduct which made racial slavery and its brutality legitimate' (p. 65).Indeed, Garner's 'emancipatory assault' on her children represents a 'trans-valuation of post-sacral, modern values' (pp. 68, 64). Gilroy uses this insightregarding the slave's assertive nihilism to indicate how slaves sometimes sawdeath as a release from bondage and terror. According to Gilroy, this value'articulates a principle of negativity that is opposed to the formal logic andrational calculation characteristic of modern western thinking and expressed inthe Hegelian slave's preference for bondage rather than death' (p. 68). He pointsout that there is no mode of rational, moral calculation that can inform MargaretGarner's appeal to her mother to help kill her children before the slave-catchersarrive. In this regard Gilroy's analysis amounts to a rejection of Du Bois' (1981)claim that the ideals of the black race are 'not in opposition to or contempt forother races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the AmericanRepublic'.

Surprisingly, Du Bois' view of 'Negro' and American ideals ascomplementary accommodates what Gilroy refers to as the anti-modern 'turntowards death' represented by Garner and Douglass. Gilroy discusses the shortstory, 'Of The Coming of John', in which Du Bois depicts the values andmotivations of the story's overly-assimilated black protagonist as similar to thoseof his white counterpart. The aim of this representation was to dramatize thepoint that once the protagonist's veil is lifted the price of his having a truer self-consciousness is suicidal death. Nevertheless, it also reveals the depth of DuBois' commitment to Euro-American values (see Judy, 1993). Gilroy quotes Du

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Bois' (1977) statement, 'This the American black man knows: his fight here is afight to the finish. Either he dies or wins'. He takes these remarks to indicate DuBois' concern with the inclusion of black people in the history of the West;another clear indication that, despite Du Bois' critical perspective, in many wayshe affirms Western ideals. For both Du Bois and Gilroy, double consciousnessinvolves a certain amount of ambivalence. Du Bois maintained that AfricanAmericans would neither 'Africanize America' nor 'bleach' their black souls.Gilroy restates this point in the following manner: 'These modern black politicalformations stand simultaneously both inside and outside the western culturewhich has been their peculiar step-parent' (pp. 48-49). The development of blackAtlantic cultures 'inside modernity in a distinctive relationship of antagonisticindebtedness' has produced a double consciousness that entails both acommitment to Western ideals and a rejection of them (p. 191).

Du Bois (1897) conceived double consciousness as a conflict of values in asingle person that arises from, and is similar to, the friction between racialgroups caused by cultural differences. Double consciousness is theinternalization of racial oppression accompanied by an urge to resist itsdamaging effects. This internalized dialectic is vividly portrayed in his essay,'The Souls of White Folk':

I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, 'I am white!' Welland good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough fortwo colours, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour yourown vitals if I answer even as proudly, 'I am black!' (Du Bois, 1920/1969).

The point Du Bois stresses here has more to do with his view of the inventionof colour by Europeans as a basis for global imperialism than with whiteAmerican racism. He claims that whiteness was a discovery made very late inthe modern era, a discovery that has led the white race to construct a falseimage of white people as superior to all other humans and to look upon blackpeople as beasts, or only half-human. Imperialism sustains the assumption thatwhiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than all other hues and,hence, that the white race is entitled to own the world 'forever and ever, Amen!'(Du Bois, 1920/1969).

Du Bois understood clearly that this oppressive feature of doubleconsciousness can only be partially internalized, for he maintained that the spellis broken when the white claim to certain privileges is disputed. In his highlyracialized critique of Western imperialism Du Bois divides the world into whiteand non-white people to highlight the economic basis for the European's racistattitude toward non-white people. The racism that arises from the European'sconsciousness of colour parallels the double consciousness of non-white people.With regard to the effects of European racism Du Bois asks, 'Am I, in myblackness, the sole sufferer?' He goes on to cite the kinds of hateful misdeedsthat white people are led to commit as a result of being 'imprisoned andenthralled' by their sense of having established a fully justified whitesupremacy. 'Slowly but surely white culture is evolving the theory that 'darkies'are born beasts of burden for white folk'. Almost in a voice of forgiveness, Du

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Bois remarked that, above the suffering this fantasy has caused, he feels pity forwhites who have been taken in by it.

Some of Du Bois' remarks regarding white identity suggest that he thoughtit was unauthentic, and in a fashion that parallels non-white doubleconsciousness. Both varieties of unauthenticity represent particular forms ofalienation. The alienation experienced by African Americans, however, cannotbe understood in terms of the self-deception that leads whites to construct theirunauthentic identities. On the contrary, Du Bois considered the chief effect ofdouble consciousness to be a lack of race identity suffered by African Americansas a group. This missing group identity can be provided only by overcoming thedesire for 'self-obliteration' with the self-conscious adoption of a diaspora raceidentity. When Du Bois spoke of the African American's longing to merge boththe 'Negro' and the American components of double consciousness, his pointwas that the dubious status of being an American cannot be allowed to hinderthe group's pursuit of 'Negro ideals'.

Gilroy comments on Du Bois' extension of Hegel's list of world-historic races,but does not notice that this list included Egyptians as a racial group distinctfrom 'Negroes' (p. 134). There seems to be nothing objectionable about Du Bois'use of the term 'Negro' to refer ambiguously to African Americans in particularas well as to black people in general. This ambiguity, however, generates aninconsistency in his thinking about race and culture. When he used the term'Negro' to refer generally to all people of African descent sometimes he includedEgyptians under its rubric. As noted above, sometimes he also used this term torefer exclusively to African Americans so as to suggest that Egyptians are not'Negroes' (Du Bois, 1897). This apparent lapse cannot be rectified simply byobserving a distinction between Du Bois' use of the term 'Negro' to designatea race and his use of it to specify African Americans as a particular ethnic groupwithin that race. For if a racial group is to be defined in terms of itssocio-historical particularity it makes no sense to speak of a 'Negro' race towhich both African Americans and Egyptians belong. Indeed, for Du Bois aracial group is a cultural group. Given their distinct cultures, this entails thatAfrican Americans and Egyptians are members of separate races.

We can see this problem in Du Bois' essay, 'The Conservation of Races'. Herehe refers to 'the Negroes of Africa and America' and claimed that the racialcategory Negro is 'the most indefinite of all' because it 'combines Mulattoes andZamboes of America and the Egyptians, Bantus and Bushmen of Africa' (DuBois, 1897). As Gilroy notes, Du Bois' notion of race identity is ambiguous withregard to whether it applies to an African-American diaspora consciousness, orto an African American consciousness of African-American particularity. Theblack diaspora identity Du Bois touted, presumably, would emerge from theexperience of black people striving together as a single unified race pursuing acommonly held cultural ideal. Apparently Du Bois saw no conflict between hisconception of races as cultural groups and the multicultural nature of theAfrican diaspora.4

We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by ourpolitical ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, ourAmericanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a

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vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but halfawakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland (Du Bois, 1897).

But if cultural identity derives from 'the cohesiveness and continuity of thesegroups' there must be some sense in which there are 'deeper differences'between black Americans and white Americans than between black Americansand other members of the African diaspora. Du Bois (1897) says two things thattend to defeat this suggestion. First, he points out that in addition to the eightmajor socio-historical categories of race there are 'other minor race groups, asthe American Indians'. Secondly, he claims that the binding force of a racialgroup is 'a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life'.

Du Bois' inclusion of 'Zamboes' in the 'Negro' category is interesting becauseit raises the question of how minor race groups are created. It also raises thequestion of why some cultural groups, such as the Egyptians, are considered tobe ethnically distinct while others, such as 'Zamboes', are not. His suggestionthat race is an 'invention' allowed Du Bois to maintain both that there is a'Negro' race that transcends the ethnic differences among black people and that,in certain cases, there are cultural differences that transcend race. African-American double consciousness involves a cultural identity that somehow mustbe merged with a race identity in order to pursue 'Negro' (or diaspora) ideals.This 'merging' would require diaspora black people to give race consciousnessa greater priority over their socio-historically specific cultural identities. Thismay be too great a demand, especially with regard to those large numbers ofassimilated black people in Latin American societies. In circumstances underwhich double consciousness is indexed less by race than by class many blackdiaspora people have the identities of their national cultures. This contrastssharply with the legacy of legal segregation and official denial of citizenship toblack people in the US, a legacy that has led some hybrid groups, such asAmerasians and creóles from Cape Verde and Louisiana, to construct raceidentities that are neither black nor white. In these instances the expression ofethnic particularity accents the differences between the respective group'sdistinctive biological hybridity and its Asian, black, or white heritage. Thesecases also indicate how sometimes ethnic particularity thrives on a special sortof double consciousness, for the binding force of these 'minor' race groups is theneither/nor racial status that provides a basis for their respective culturalidentities.

Du Bois' proposed synthesis of double consciousness into a 'merged selfsuggests that African-American identity can be thought of as a creóle identity.But there is an important distinction between a group of black people with amixed cultural heritage and a group of creóles with a mixed culture. Gilroy'sview of African-American culture as a creolized social formation raises thequestion of whether it is also a creóle culture that has shifted the ground ofAfrican-American cultural identity away from Africa. His characterizations ofAfrican-American culture, as well as black English culture, sometimes movefrom the paradigm of a primarily African culture mixed with Europeaninfluences to the paradigm of a new kind of American or English culture mixedwith African influences. Gilroy's tendency to conflate these paradigms is a major

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shortcoming of his account of mutation and hybridity in the culturaltransformation of the New World.

Intermingling and Cultural Hybridity

Gilroy maintains that New World black cultures have drawn upon 'one of theiradoptive, parent cultures: the intellectual heritage of the West since theEnlightenment' as well as upon 'pre-modern images and symbols that gain anextra power in proportion to the brute facts of modern slavery' (pp. 2,56). Thesemodern and pre-modern elements are combined through a process of 'culturalmutation'. On the face of it, the suggestion that African-American culture is amutation from its parent cultures seems quite plausible, but underneath lies atroublesome question regarding the nature of this mutation. What does it meanto speak of a black culture as a 'mutation?' There seems to be an inherenttension in Gilroy's use of the terms 'hybridity' and 'mutation' to characterizeblack Atlantic cultures, for both terms can refer either to stages of a process orto the end result of that process. A hybrid culture that is the end result of aprocess of mutation sometimes may have a different social status than a hybridculture that is still in formation, for in some cases, once this process has reacheda certain level of maturity, the former ceases to be thought of as a hybrid.5

The inclination to think of a group's cultural hybridity as a by-product of thebiological hybridity of its members is irresistible, although it is quite plain thatin many cases the biological hybridity of a group does not always yield acorresponding hybrid culture (see Douglass, 1886; Du Bois, 1897; Herskovitz,1968). In many parts of Brazil there is a noticeable African element that ismanifested in both a biological hybridity and a hybrid culture, whereas inMexico, perhaps due to a much smaller number of slaves imported, the Africancontribution to its biological hybridity is less apparent, and there are even fewertraces of any African elements in its hybrid culture.6 Although in both casesthere is a biological hybridization of Africans and Europeans, to use Du Bois'expression, Brazil's dominant culture has been Africanized to a far greater extentthan Mexico's. For this reason 'Brazilian' music is typically included among thecultural products of the black Atlantic, whereas 'Mexican' music typically is notincluded.

The interplay of race and culture can be shown to be relatively complex incertain instances of cultural contact and exchange. Consider, for example, agroup of biologically mixed Africans and Native Americans who have a Native-American cultural identity as compared with a group of Africans who were notbiologically mixed with Native Americans, but who acquired a Native-Americanidentity by adopting their language and cultural practices.7 In both cases thereis cultural hybridity, yet we continue to refer to these groups as either NativeAmericans or African American, depending on the weight attached to race orculture. Given the history of legal segregation, 'Zamboes' as a separate racialcategory has never been fully established in the US, any more than 'mulattoes'or 'creóles'.

The ideals that have shaped the cultural identities of blacks in England andAmerica represent two quite different versions of black ethnicity. Gilroy'sopposition to the nationalist variety of ethnic particularity does not sufficiently

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account for all varieties of the absolutist conception of cultural difference. Hisinsightful account of the circulation of diaspora cultures via a black Atlanticnetwork is consistent with the fact that blacks in America and England seethemselves as culturally distinct. One consequence of Gilroy's proposal that theblack Atlantic be viewed as 'one single, complex unit of analysis' is that thissense of cultural distinctiveness would be unduly diminished (p. 15). This worrystems from the tension created by the juxtaposition of hybridity and mutationin Gilroy's account. He readily acknowledges that black English culture is ahybrid in a sense quite different from the hybridity of black American culture.He tells us that 'Britain's black settler communities have forged a compoundculture from disparate sources' and that they have created a 'newer blackvernacular culture' that is neither 'dependent upon [n]or simply imitative of theblack cultures from which it partly derives' (p. 15). The distinctiveness of blackEnglish culture is a product of the intermixture of the American, Caribbean andAfrican elements within the context of Britain's special brand of racialsubordination.8

According to Gilroy, this newly created black vernacular culture 'graduallybecame an important factor in facilitating the transition of diverse settlers to adistinct mode of lived blackness' (p. 82). Since, in England, the use of the term'black' is grounded on the post-colonial experience of migration rather than thememory of slavery, it has a unique application to people of both Asian andAfrican descent. Gilroy points out that the processes of cultural syncretisminvolving the adaptation and transformation of African-American and Caribbeanforms also have been appropriated by an Asian youth culture. Indeed, given thatin England the black communities are never more than fifty per cent non-white,these adaptations and transformations are frequently reappropriated again bya white working-class mainstream who lay claim to them on the basis of locality(Gilroy, 1993).

The hybridity of black English culture derives from a process of socialformation in England that is quite unlike the history of cultural exchanges thatinfluenced the hybridization of black culture in the US. The idea of constructinga concept of black identity that extends to people who are not of African descentis peculiar to black English culture. The uniqueness of this concept of blackpeople is matched by a suitable form of racism. Gilroy points out that the 'newracism' of contemporary England does not rely on a biological classification ofraces, for 'race is now being defined almost exclusively through the ideas ofculture and identity' (Gilroy, 1993). But even on Gilroy's alternative model of'UK Blak' as 'shifting unstable political collectivities', his account of race andculture seems incoherent. What sense are we to make of his claim that, 'Whetherthese people were of African, Caribbean, or Asian descent, their commonalitywas often defined by its reference to the central, irreducible sign of theircommon racial subordination — the colour black'. If English racism is now'culturalist' in the above sense, terms that refer to locale and lifestyle could nothave the clear racial designation that Gilroy claims, given that blackneighbourhoods in England are fifty per cent white and working class whitesliving in those neighbourhoods have appropriated black cultural forms.

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In a section entitled 'Young Black Teenagers Then and Now', Gilroy assertsthat 'the most important lesson music still has to teach us is that its inner secretsand its ethnic rules can be taught and learned' (p. 109). He cites a host of whiteAmerican blues masters to illustrate the point that the call and response gestures'are not expressive of an essence that exists outside of the acts which performthem and thereby transmit the structures of racial feeling to wider, as yetuncharted, worlds' (p. 110). The upshot of these remarks seems to be that musicis the primary cultural ingredient of black identity and that the practicesthrough which this identity is reconstituted can no longer be limited to peopleof colour. This suggestion seems inconsistent with his reliance on somebiological notion of race to characterize the recent breakdown of the coalitionbetween 'Asian' and 'Afro-Caribbean' people.

Du Bois proposed a similar account of racism in terms of friction between twocultural groups who are pursuing different ideals. But Du Bois' 'culturalist'account would easily apply to intragroup friction between black Atlanticcultures. Du Bois' injunction to adopt a diaspora race identity presupposedopposition between one's race identity and one's cultural identity. It alsopresupposed that one's race identity will always override one's cultural identity,due to the influence of this double consciousness. Du Bois' notion of raceidentity, however, was conceived as a political construction whose aim wasprimarily to remedy a privation, namely, social denial and exclusion based oncolour. Because double consciousness debilitates by allowing black people onlyto see themselves 'through the revelation of the other world ... a world thatlooks on in amused contempt and pity', it is the common struggle against whiteracism that seems to be the real tie that binds the black Atlantic (Du Bois, 1981).This poses a difficulty for Gilroy's account because, as he acknowledges in thecase of the multiracial coalition of the black English, the struggle against whiteracism also seems to be a tie that can extend beyond the black Atlantic.

Gilroy draws upon Delany's Blake to support his argument against 'thespurious invocation of ethnic particularity' (p. 29). Like Delany, he points to abasis for a 'new metacultural identity' for New World black people in thecommon history of slavery and the intercultural connection established by thetransnational structure of the slave trade itself. Gilroy's readiness to combatwhat he considers 'the easy claims of African-American exceptionalism' occludesthe troublesome nature of the metacultural identity he endorses. He proposesto replace 'the lure of ethnic particularism and nationalism' with 'a global,coalition politics in which anti-imperialism and anti-racism might be seen tointeract if not fuse' (p. 4). But if anti-imperialism and anti-racism are the basesfor the group identity of the black Atlantic, the cultural links that establish racesolidarity seem to have been replaced entirely with a multiracial coalition againsteconomic and racial oppression. This global struggle encompasses muchmore than the black Atlantic and, hence, cannot provide a basis forunderstanding the particularity of black diaspora race identity.

This worry has not entirely escaped Gilroy's attention for he highlights asimilar feature of Du Bois' view by connecting Du Bois' (1989) notion of doubleconsciousness with the internationalist outlook of his famous remark that 'Theproblem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line'. Double

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consciousness involves not only a tension between African-American ethnicidentity and diaspora race identity, but also between diaspora race identity anda Third World identity based on the struggle against global imperialism. If DuBois' diaspora race identity, or Gilroy's metacultural identity, is grounded onresistance to European global domination, it cannot be employed to designatea specific racial or cultural group since it refers to all people of colour who areengaged in this resistance. Although the point of this criticism must be well-taken, I want briefly to consider an alternative available to Du Bois and Gilroywhich seems to mitigate some of the critical force.

What if we were to view the relationship between the various ethnic groupscomprising the black Atlantic as having a metacultural link with each other onthe model of the culturally diverse Jewish diaspora, or similar to the relationshipbetween the culturally diverse Islamic groups throughout the world?9 Just asthere are many different races and cultures that are Jewish or Islamic 'boundand welded together' by a common religion, similarly, the various black ethnicgroups have some commonly held cultural feature that binds us together andby virtue of which we are referred to as 'Negro', or black. Unfortunately,specifying this commonly held cultural feature is not as easy as Du Bois andGilroy would have it. Du Bois maintained that the cultural link derivesprimarily from having a common African heritage, while Gilroy insists uponincluding the history of New World slavery as equally important. But, inaddition to Britain's Asian-descended population, there is another 'UK Blak'group in Australia that has no history of slavery and is not of African descent.In the case of black Australians, these criteria are neither necessary norsufficient. The appeal to cultural continuity loses plausibility given that theiridentity as a distinct black ethnic group is a political construction based largelyon their own rich cultural heritage and the biologically-based racism they face(Sykes, 1989). Although there are 'cultural links' with other diaspora blackpeople, it seems more plausible to consider race, in some biological sense, ratherthan culture per se as what connects black Australians with the black Atlantic.10

Doubleness and Ethnic Particularity

Gilroy uses ethnic terms to designate the various black cultures that are referredto by the generic term 'black English'. This appeal to ethnic particularitysuggests that these various cultural groups have cultural identities distinct fromthe 'black' identity they share in common. He speaks of cultural hybridizationin England, but leaves unclear whether cultural exchange has occurred withouta resulting cultural mutation. Even if we suppose that the appropriation of blackcultural forms by Asian youth in England has either introduced a process ofmutation, or resulted in a mutation neither version of their hybridity seems tohave changed their cultural status as a group of Asian people. With an eye tothe multicultural nature of Britain's Caribbean populations, Gilroy wiselycautions that,

The cultural and political histories of Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados,Grenada, Trinidad, and St Lucia, like the economic forces at work ingenerating their respective migrations to Europe, are widely dissimilar.

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Even if it were possible, let alone desirable, their synthesis into a singleblack British culture could never have been guaranteed by the effects ofracism alone (p. 82).

With regard to the recent rejection of the multiracial political notion of blacknessin England, Gilroy goes on to point out that 'this fragile unity in action hasfragmented and their self-conception has separated into its various constituentelements' (p. 86). Apparently the process of cultural mutation in England has notyet produced a distinct hybrid culture.

In the US, the process of cultural mutation for African Americans is governedby social codes based on a rigid biological classification of races. Gilroy'semphasis on black music as a cultural practice of remembrance makes clearhow, in fact, Du Bois' imperative to 'not bleach his Negro soul in a flood ofwhite Americanism' while pursuing the cultural ideals transmitted bysucceeding generations since slavery has been carried out primarily throughmusic and folklore. The hybridization that has resulted from this complexdialectical process constitutes what is often understood to be the mutation ofAfrican Americans into a new ethnic group, the identity of which has beenconstructed on the basis of a biological concept of race.11 The appeal to diasporaconsciousness by both Du Bois and Gilroy is grounded on a wholly culturalnotion of race that derives from (and replaces) a deconstruction of the biologicalnotion. Gilroy wants to account for the British practice of including Asiansunder the rubric 'black' on the basis of colour by identifying the more opennotion of the 'black English' with a newly created vernacular culture. To theextent that ethnically particular cultural identities have persisted among itsmultiracial constituents, this process did not yield a hybrid culture. Rather, itmay have introduced only hybrid elements into Britain's Asian youth culture.

The notion of cultural hybridity Gilroy employs seems to entail two quitedifferent phenomena. New World black cultures 'are configured by theircompound and multiple origins in the mix of African and other cultural forms'(p. 75). With regard to this 'mix' of different cultural forms, Gilroy has in mindthe contacts and exchanges between African and European cultures. But he isequally concerned with contacts and exchanges between various black culturessuch as those that have occurred between Brazilians, West Indians and AfricanAmericans. Where the former leads to double consciousness, the latterestablishes the cultural links between the black Atlantic. One quite significantaspect of the difference between a European-African cultural hybrid and culturalhybridity between black diaspora groups is that the latter, but not the former,does not seem to disturb the group's identity. This issue ties in with Du Bois'observation regarding the cultural hegemony of imperialism, which grantsEuropean cultural influences a greater impact than others. The reggae elementsin hip-hop that Gilroy cites do not affect the status of hip-hop as an African-American cultural form any more than the rhythm and blues elements in reggaechange its status as a Jamaican cultural form. Gilroy 's observation that theimpact of the global marketing of reggae has affected its status in England,transforming it into a universal West Indian music, does not warrant aconclusion that reggae has lost its ethnic particularity simply because it is nowproduced by artists from other parts of the Caribbean.

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The appropriation of blues and jazz by other diaspora black people, or bywhite Americans and Europeans, does not entail that these cultural forms areno longer African American. To say this is not, as Gilroy would have it, merelyto indulge a fetish for origins, although he rightly notes some of the clear signsof this tendency. There is no reason to doubt that the mass marketing and globalcirculation of African-American culture has contributed to various 'mutations'(Malar, 1993). The process of cultural mutation, however, becomes problematicespecially when it results in the transfer of a cultural form from one group toanother for purposes of commercial exploitation. Following the commercialsuccess in the 1980s of the white gospel singer Amy Grant, Billboard Magazineintroduced a new category of 'Black Gospel'. Notice that the music industry'sracial code manifested a delineation of gospel as having two versions. Theseracially indexed categories represent a desire by the record industry to capitalizeon the mass marketing of a white Grammy award winner. Putting asidequestions regarding authenticity for the moment, whatever mutation gospel hasundergone as a result of the influence of white singers, it certainly has not lostits ethnic particularity as an African-American cultural form.

'The Most Detestable Noise'

When Gilroy speaks of black vernacular culture as a link between theconstituents of the black Atlantic, he has in mind primarily music.12 Hisreflections on the social and political significance of black music practices areskilfully employed to show the connection between black Atlantic cultures aswell as to specify their pre-modern, modern and anti-modern elements. Heattributes to Du Bois the insight that music can be a primary mode of expressinga non-textual popular black critique of racial subjection. Supplementing thisthesis with his own contention that music has been the central medium throughwhich black identities are constructed and linked throughout the diaspora, heargues that the commonly shared 'rituals of performance' provide the chiefmechanism, for in these rituals 'the closeness to the ineffable terror of slaverywas kept alive' (p. 73).

Despite the role of music in establishing the self-identity of a group, Gilroymaintains that it is problematic to hold that a particular form of music is'expressive of the absolute essence of the group that produced it' (p. 75). Heprotests some of the ways music has been used to prove racial authenticity.When authenticity is based on origins, there is a problem of dislocation createdby the global dissemination of black music. The value placed on its origins iscontested by the occurrence of 'opposing mutations' (p. 75). He cites AlainLocke's reference to the double value of the spirituals as both nationally andracially characteristic to indicate the mishandling by African-Americanintellectuals of issues pertaining to cultural mutation. It is far from clear,however, how Locke's remarks are supposed to confront the intellectualtradition that relies on an image of the 'authentic folk' as 'an essentiallyinvariant, anti-historical notion of black particularity' (p. 100). Although Lockedid not hold this essentialist view, his general critique of African-Americancultural practices was influenced strongly by a non-essentialist demand for more'authentic' representations of African-American folk culture.

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Locke maintained a notion of the 'authentic folk' that was predicated upona theory of African-American cultural growth and development. His variousremarks regarding the doubleness of the spirituals are grounded on his view ofcultural mutation as the outcome of an historical process. Even while bemoaningthe passing of a dying black folk culture, he spoke favourably of contemporaryversions of the spirituals. He held the general view that 'truly Negro music mustreflect the folk spirit and eventually epitomize the race experience' (Locke, 1983).His conception of the ethnic particularity of African-American music asexpressing the essence of African Americans as a group did not entail theabsolutism Gilroy opposes. Indeed, his general theory of African-American musicschematically represented the various stages of its development from the'primitive' African survivals, to classic folk expressions, to sophisticated hybridfolk art forms. The amount of interest in African-American music shown byclassical composers led Locke to declare that 'the masters of Negro musicalidiom so far are not Negro'. The pioneers, in Locke's opinion, were whitecomposers such as Dvorak, Aaron Copeland, Alden Carpenter, GeorgeGershwin, Paul Whiteman and Sesana. Moreover, Locke criticized blackcomposers for giving treatments of the spirituals that he claimed resulted in themost 'sophisticated and diluted arrangements'. Gilroy's citing of Locke's viewof the doubleness of the spirituals omits the quite nuanced criteria Locke usedto gauge their authenticity.

Gilroy instead chooses Hurston and Wright to represent a tradition ofAfrican-American intellectuals who have appealed to a notion of the 'authenticfolk'. Hurston, for example, accused the Fisk singers of performing unauthenticversions of the spirituals. It is interesting that Gilroy points to this criticism toshow that her appeal to cultural authenticity was self-serving. Gilroy fullyunderstands the political significance of her question regarding therepresentation of the spirituals by the Fisk Singers. Given his own endorsementof Rakim's cultural malpractice charge against 2-Live Crew, it seems inconsistentfor him to dismiss Hurston's similar charge against the Fisk Singers13. Needlessto say, Hurston was not alone in expressing this worry. Locke, for instance,thought the Fisk Singers were far better than any of the other theatre groupsbecause they maintained the 'real simplicity and dignity' of the spirituals, yethe concurred with Hurston's criticism and quotes it in his analysis of thehistorical development of the spirituals (Locke, 1991).

In keeping with his general theory of art, Locke believed that 'much classicalmusic is folk music at second or third remove from the original source' (Locke,1991). According to his historical account of the development of African-American music, there were seven stages between slavery and the present(1936). The age of the sorrow songs (1830-50) was the classic folk period of thegreat spirituals. This folk tradition was disrupted between 1850-95 by thepredominance of the minstrel tradition, but in the 20th century it has steadilyevolved towards the age of classical jazz. Locke noted that 'Spirituals are stillbeing created, but no one doubts that the real age of the sorrow songs haspassed'. His view that the spirituals, and the Negro folk idiom in general, arein some sense both 'racial' and 'national' fits into his historical account. It isimportant for our understanding of Gilroy's objection to invocations of 'cultural

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authenticity' by African-American intellectuals to get clear about the racial-national doubleness Locke had in mind.

Locke did not conceive of race in biological terms. He maintained that we callracial what is 'only an intensified variety of the same elements that we callednational'.14 He denies any genetic basis for the musical abilities of black peopleby citing the peasant stocks of the Irish, Italian, German and Russian nations asthe well-springs of folk music in European societies. 'It has simply been the lot ofthe Negro in America to be the peasant class, and thus to furnish the musicalsubsoil of our national music'. There is a twofold reason for this historicaldevelopment. First, African Americans have had a peculiar need for emotionalexpression, given their experience under slavery. Secondly, the Anglo-Saxonwhite population that is 'the dominant force in American civilization' isrelatively less musically endowed.

Locke (1991) shared Hurston's concern with the authenticity of the spiritualsbecause he worried that, under the influence of minstrelsy and the concert stage,'pseudo-Negro characterization led to misrepresentative music'. By this he didnot mean that truly representative music would be 'invariant' folk forms.Instead, Locke claimed,

Negro folk melodies and their harmonic style have been regarded by mostmusicians as the purest and most valuable musical ore in America; theraw materials of a native American music. Eventually on another level,they will come back to their original power and purity. We should alwaysremember that they are not sentimental nor theatrical, but epic and fullof simple dignity (Locke, 1991, p. 21).

For Locke, 'purity' does not mean 'unmixed' for he acknowledged the hybridityof the spirituals in his historical account. Locke's concern with authenticity, then,was focused on the nature of the fusion and hybridization of African-Americanfolk music. He often criticized both black and white musicians for creatinghybrid forms that were 'artificial', 'unstable and anaemic', and 'terrible'. Wemust keep in mind that Locke's point here was not that hybridity itself isartificial, or anaemic, and therefore unauthentic, but that some forms wereartificial, or anaemic, and less authentic in this sense than others.

Locke cites the music of George Gershwin as a case in which 'the effort to liftjazz to the level and form of the classics has devitalized it'. He endorsed OlinDownes' critical advice to the Negro University Chorus to do more singing in'the true Negro idiom and less imitation of other types of choral singing'. Thisadvice reflected Locke's opinion that even African-American composers hadbeen too much influenced by formal European idioms and mannerisms in thequest to transform the spirituals from a folk-form to an art-form. What Locke'sdemand for authenticity sought was a 'true union and healthy vigourous fusionof jazz and classical tradition'. He insisted upon 'a style more fused and closerto the original Negro musical idioms'. Rather than 'artificial hybrids' he wanted'genuine developments of the intimate native idioms of jazz itself. Heemphasized that this demand does not stipulate any one style of renderingspirituals. Rather it requires only that 'the folk quality and atmosphere shouldbe preserved as much as possible'.

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Locke's aesthetic concern with the authenticity of the spirituals, and African-American folk art in general, sometimes manifested a sharp political focus. Forexample, he protested the popularity of Stephen Foster's music. He believedthat, because of it, the plantation legend that glorified slavery 'wormed its wayinto the heart of America'. Locke directed a similar criticism to later forms ofminstrelsy.

Superficially they reflected some of the characteristic traits of the Negro,but instead of his real peasant humour, his real folk farce, his amazingribaldry, the minstrels made a decoction of their own of slap-stick,caricature and asininity (Locke, 1991, p. 478).

Locke's relatively strong position on the question of whether minstrelsy isalways to be condemned as unauthentic is vulnerable to the objection thatsometimes the answer is a matter of whether the alleged minstrelsy aims toperpetuate oppression, or whether it has emancipatory aims. For example, thesubversive elements in minstrelsy account for the ironic interplay between'authentic' jubilee singing and minstrel versions. Locke claimed that the FiskSingers saved a by-gone folk form from extinction. Toll (1974) has pointed out,however, that jubilee music in minstrelsy was a 'more authentic' religious musicthan that sang by the Fisk Singers. Whatever we may think of these variousclaims regarding the authenticity of the spirituals sung by the Fisk Singers, it isimportant to note that the political dimension of this debate over therepresentation of the spirituals derives from their hybridization under theinfluence of a thoroughly racist mainstream popular culture.

Black Music and Black Identity

Gilroy refers to 'our enduring traditions — the African ones and the ones forgedfrom the slave experience' — as a basis for the creation of modern blacktraditions. Although he frequently acknowledges that African retentions are animportant component of black Atlantic cultures, he focuses on the vernacularforms that derive from the slave experience because they constitute rituals ofactive remembrance in contemporary practices. This move to empower the voiceof the masses is congruent with other less politically orientated anthropologicalstudies, for example, those by John Farris Thompson (1993) that focus on theretention of sacred religious practices in black Atlantic cultures. Gilroy's claimthat the most 'enduring' Africanism is found in form and not content does notseem to apply to the African rituals that, in some cases, have been rigidlypreserved in the African religious practices of Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, Surinam,Puerto Rico and other parts of the New World. He focuses on slavery as thebasis for black Atlantic cultures, heavily criticizing the Afro-centric nationalistuse of notions of anterior traditions and cultural continuity to account for their'syncretic complexity' (p. 101). Although Gilroy acknowledges that there iscultural continuity in the form of retentions, he maintains that none of theseaspects of black anterior cultures survived slavery un transformed.

There is no retention of a static African tradition because remembrance of apre-slave past is actively practised in black music as recurring acts of identitythat operate through the antiphony of performers and listeners. As a paradigm

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of a transformed retention, 20th century black music constitutes a transcodedexpression of slavery's unspeakable horror. This disguised expression of thememory of slavery does not erase the anterior culture, for The irrepressiblerhythms of the once forbidden drum are often still audible' (p. 76). Gilroyprovides an illustration of a transformed retention expressed in vernacularculture by reference to Percy Mayfield's song, 'The River's Invitation'. Like somany black love and loss songs, it expresses displaced feelings of mourning andyearning. The lyrics, however, also represent a consciousness of African ecologyand cosmology that illustrate the persistence of a theme of death as freedomfrom suffering.15

Gilroy's recognition that black identity is often experienced as 'natural andspontaneous' and 'is lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential senseof self is what inclines him to reject the anti-essentialist claims regardingcultural continuity (p.102). He quotes Foucault (1979) to lend force to hisassertion that music can produce 'the imaginary effect of an internal racial coreor essence'. He adds that, by this, Foucault did not mean that the soul is onlyan illusion. It has a reality, but solely 'as the product of the social practices thatsupposedly derive from it' (p. 102). Once the notion of a black essence isunderstood in this manner, music can be shown to represent the endurance ofthe past in the form of a 'changing same' (p. 101). Gilroy insists that this'changing same' can be explicated only in terms of a 'dramaturgy', and not interms of 'textuality and narrative' (p. 75). Diaspora music practices developedwithin the surviving oral structures, along with gesture and dance, to create the'pre- and anti-discursive constituents of black metacommunication'. Theseperformative aspects of black music comprise the foundational element in thecontinuity of post-slave cultural forms. The significance of what Gilroy calls anti-anti-essentialism lies in his criticisms of both 'a squeamish, nationalistessentialism and a sceptical, saturnalian pluralism' (p. 102). He charges that bothsides of this debate have ignored the dramaturgy and performative aspects ofmusic. Racialized subjectivity is the outcome of practical activity such as'language, gesture, bodily significations, desires' (p. 102). Black identity isproduced in relation to a body through the process of musical performanceinvolving the production and reception of black music. This racial identity is theproduct of the music that is supposed to derive from it.

Gilroy's position here seems much too strong. Why not allow identities to bereconstituted and expressed (or represented) through music? He admits thatmusic does not have a monopoly on the construction of racial identity, butnonetheless presents his notion of a 'changing same' to satisfy the demand foran internalized racial essence. He proposes to understand identity constructionin terms of a fluid ongoing process of hybridization, rather than the preservationof certain static elements that are supposed to represent a racial core. By virtueof the performative aspects of black music, black identity is constantlyreconstituted. According to Gilroy, 'Its characteristic syncopations still animatethe basic desires — to be free and to be oneself — that are revealed in thiscounterculture's unique conjunction of body and music' (p. 76). This point seemsto be less emphasized at various crucial places in his account of cultural identity.His discussion of the impact of hybrid influences often leaves out the fact that

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music can represent the experiences of a group by expressing certain veryparticular thoughts and emotions that are exclusive to people who have beenvictimized on the basis of their colour.

Gilroy invokes Alain Locke's view of the spirituals as a hybrid cultural formwithout giving due consideration to Locke's concern that not all mutations areequally expressive of the black experience. Locke distinguished those hybridelements that 'mixed in' from others he thought were only 'artificially fused' or'grafted'. As I have noted above, he rejected ethnic absolutism by refusing todefine African-American music in terms of African-American authorship.Nevertheless, Locke was known to be critical at times of the black musicperformed by white musicians, or written by white composers. He referred, forinstance, to the 'white spirituals'as 'sterile' and 'stereotyped'.16 The distinctionhe made between black and white versions of the spirituals invokes ethnicparticularity as a ground for his criticism, for his various comments regardingthe racial element can be taken to mean that white versions sometimes fail torepresent the African-American experience. It was for this reason that heproclaimed that black composers such as Duke Ellington would most likely'create the classical jazz towards which so many are striving' (Locke, 1983b).

It is not clear whether on Gilroy's account of the hybridity of black musicLocke's criticism of the renderings of African-American music by whitemusicians and composers can be sustained. Gilroy views black music asconstitutive of black identity and contends that black identities can be producedin other races by their participation in black music practices. But if blackidentities can be acquired by whites in this manner, then Locke's distinctionbetween black and white versions of the spirituals is misguided. Here Gilroy'scritique of ethnic absolutism seems to rely too heavily on the black Englishparadigm. If the meaning of the term 'black' as a racial designation differs inEngland and the US, some of Gilroy's claims may apply in England, but not inthe US. Unlike African Americans, the black English are a newly combinedmultiracial group. Although they are constituted primarily by a fragile politicalalliance, they have a commonly shared black vernacular culture. Given the racialapartheid of the music industry in the US, however, it makes no sense to speakof a black vernacular culture in the US that is commonly shared with whites.Instead, there is a black vernacular culture produced by African Americansprimarily for a black audience that in turn is selectively mass-marketed to whiteaudiences by the culture industries.

Within the context of commercial music in America there is reason to bewary of Gilroy's talk of a black vernacular culture that is commonly shared withwhites. In the case of 2-Live Crew, Gilroy acknowledges that some forms ofblack vernacular culture that have circulated through mainstream media mustbe questioned as misrepresentations of black culture, although it is not clearwhether Gilroy shares Rakim's worry about the authenticity of 2-Live Crew'smusic. He tells us that 'The discourse of authenticity has been a notable presencein the mass marketing of successive black folk-cultural forms to white audiences'(p. 99). When the question of authenticity arises in hip-hop culture, it issometimes posed by rap artists in terms of a distinction between 'hardcore' and'commercial' rap music. Hip-hop's cultural norm against 'selling out' to increase

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record sales by crossing over into a mainstream market appeals to a Du Boisianaesthetic principle that is concerned with commercialization as involving toomuch 'bleaching' of the black soul.

Perhaps what Gilroy discerned in Locke's view of the doubleness of thespirituals is the suggestion that, because they are simultaneously racial andnational, they can both retain and lose their racial distinctiveness. Whitecomposers who work in a black musical idiom are tapping into a nationaltreasure of American folk culture. How do their appropriations differ from themusic composed by blacks? Gilroy (1993) speaks of the symbolic invocation ofthe pre-modern in black music and refers to Locke's 'celebratory enthusiasm forthe primitive' as one notable instance of this (p. 162). He claims that in The NewNegro Locke appeals to the pre-modern as part of the black artist's critique of themodern. He does not, however, attempt to square this interpretation with someof the social implications of Locke's concept of the 'New Negro'. This conceptrepresents the historical stage in a process of African-American culturalhybridization in which the synthesis of diverse cultural forms yield syncretisedforms. Rather than view black music as only a symbolic invocation ofpre-modernity, Locke thought instead that it would express this pre-modernityin modern terms.

Gilroy and Locke maintain a similar view of the dynamic history of blackcultural traditions. Consider, for instance, whether John Coltrane's rendition ofthe Rogers and Hammerstein tune, 'My Favourite Things', is just another jazzversion of a popular tune from a Broadway musical. By contrast with the jazzappropriations of classical composers such as Stravinsky, Coltrane's musicincorporated highly evolved principles of pre-modern and modern music-making that have been transmitted within a black cultural tradition bysuccessive generations of African-American musicians. If we recall Locke'sproposal that 'Negro' folk forms provide the raw materials for both black andwhite composers to fuse with European classical forms creating genuineAmerican hybrids, jazz history provides many illustrations of how a reversal ofthis proposal has occurred in accord with his principles of cultural exchange.Coltrane's many different versions of 'My Favourite Things' treats the highlycommercial music of Rogers and Hammerstein as the ore for his musicalexplorations within an African-American tradition that is continuous with itsAfrican origins. In keeping with Gilroy's analysis of Percy Mayfield's treatmentof 'The River's Edge', it can be argued that by relying on his own transformedAfrican heritage Coltrane in turn transformed a commercial show tune into aspiritually inspired piece of black sacred music.

Gilroy's notion of 'a changing same' aims to capture the truth of Du Bois'view of double consciousness and diaspora race identity without presupposing,or positing, an essential subject. The racial subject Du Bois had in mind,however, operated with a double consciousness that imposed a cultural normagainst passing, inter-racial marriage, and other forms of 'self-obliteration'. Hisaccount of race presupposed the intermingling of two ethnically distinct culturalgroups. Gilroy's scenario for explaining the formation of racial identity shareswith Du Bois' account the idea of racial contact and cultural exchanges that havea history of intermingling. This implies a pre-hybrid state in which ethnic

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particularity functions as a foundation for a process of cultural hybridizationand in which the various elements of the cultural hybrid are understood to bemature stages of previous hybrids. Although music provides 'a model of theethnic essence of blackness', the identity that is socially reproduced by meansof it is neither 'a fixed essence' nor 'a vague and utterly contingent construction'(pp. 99,102). Black English culture is a plurality of cultures that eventually mayevolve toward something more singular. At the present stage of their culturalhybridization, however, they remain only 'a conglomeration of blackcommunities' that seek to arrive at 'a constellation of subject positions' (p. 82).Although reggae music temporarily provided the ethnically and racially diverseblack English with a universal connective culture, the yield so far has been onlya multiplicity of cultural hybrids. What Gilroy's insightful analysis suggests isthat the global circulation of rap music, with its 'joyously artificial reconstructionof the instability of lived, profane racial identity', may have had a similar affecton the cultures of the black Atlantic (p. 104).

Notes

1. This quote is from Gilroy's 1993 essay, p. 135.

2. Whether Du Bois was indebted to William James for his notion ofconsciousness has been much debated. See, for instance, Rampersad (1976:70-74); Lewis (1993: 95-96) and Judy (1993: 249-82).

3. By 'civilization' Du Bois indicates in his citation of the cultural achievementsof the English, German and Romance nations that he meant Europeancivilization primarily. He claims that other races are 'striving, each in itsown way, to develop for civilization its particular message or ideals' that 'themessages and ideal of the yellow race have not been completed', andthat 'the striving of the mighty Slavs has but begun', p. 487.

4. In his essay, 'The Negro Mind Reaches Out', Du Bois refers to Jews and'modern Negroes' as 'two international groups', Locke (1977).

5. The process of cultural mutation may very well be viewed as ongoing, andin that sense never completed, yet in some relativistic fashion we can stilldistinguish between various stages of a culture's development as early,mature and late.

6. See, for instance, the fascinating account of the blackmen mask tradition invarious parts of Mexico in Janet Brody Esser (1988).

7. The term 'black Indian' also can refer to a mixed-blood person who has anAfrican American cultural identity.

8. Gilroy leaves unclear whether there has been any Asian influence on blackEnglish culture. He discusses the fusion of traditional Punjabi and Bengalimusic with reggae, rap and soul. After pointing out 'their invention of anew mode of cultural production with an identity to match' he qualifies thisto mean only that Asians in Britain have 'novel political identities'. Therehas been 'no synthesis into a single black British culture', p. 82. Rather, the

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new black vernacular culture 'has circulated a new sense of what it meansto be British' (Gilroy, 1993, p. 61).

9. Gilroy instructively draws upon this analogy to address some of hisintellectual concerns regarding the so-called 'Black-Jewish controversy', seepp. 213-18.

10. Gilroy's account proposes to encompass all of the black Atlantic whichincludes presumably all of the areas that were a part of the slave trade.Most of his discussion focuses on the Anglophone regions with which heseems most familiar, and even then it is mostly directed toward the US andBritain.

11. See for instance, Mintz and Price (1992) and Abrahams (1992).

12. In his essay entitled, 'Wearing your Art on your Sleeve' some of Gilroy'sremarks suggest a possible extension to visual representation: 'The secretcodes of black style and fashion have operated as a silent anti-language thatconnected us to each other in spite of wide variations in culture and livedexperience', Gilroy (1961: 251).

13. After quoting Eric Clapton to point out that Jimi Hendrix performedminstrelsy it seems a bit odd for Gilroy to say that Hurston had a self-serving concern when she criticized the Jubilee singers.

14. With regard to the European elements in black music Locke maintained that'To say that one of these strands is more Negro than the other is entirely outof place'.

15. Locke noted the frequency of a reference to Jordan and claimed that this wasa 'primitive carry over of water symbolism of West African religions'.Alain Locke (1983b).

16. Locke's criticism of Gershwin's Porgy was that 'it is not yet certain how wellsuch musical oil and water can be made to mix' (Locke, 1983a, p. 112).

References

Abrahams, R.D. (1992) Singing the Master, New York: Penguin.Douglass, F. (1886) 'The Future of the Coloured Race', in H. Brotz (ed.) (1966)

Negro Social and Political Thought, p. 309.Du Bois, W.E.B. (1981) The Souls of Black Folk, Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett

Publications.- (1897) 'The Conservation of Races' in H. Brotz (ed.) (1966) Negro Social and

Political Thought 1850-1920, New York: Basic Books.- (1977) Black Reconstruction in America, New York: Atheneum.- (1920/1969) Darkwater, New York: Schocken, 1920/69.Esser, J.B. (ed.) (1988) Behind the Mask in Mexico, Santa Fe: Museum of New

Mexico Press.Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin.Gilroy, P. (1993) 'It Ain't Where You're From, It's Where You're At', Small Acts,

London: Serpent's Tail.

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Herskovits, M.J. (1968) The American Negro, Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.

Judy, R.A.T. (1993) 'The New Black Aesthetic and W.E.B. Du Bois, orHephaestus, Limping', The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 2 (Summer):249-82.

Lewis, D. (1993) W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, New York:Henry Holt & Co.

Locke, A.L. (ed.) (1977) The New Negro, New York: Atheneum.- (1983a) 'Towards A Critique of Negro Music', in J. Stewart (ed.) The Critical

Temper of Alain Locke, New York: Garland.- (1983b) 'Spirituals', in J. Stewart (ed.) The Critical Temper of Alain Locke, New

York: Garland.- (1983c) 'The Negro's Contribution to American Culture', in J. Stewart (ed.)

The Critical Temper of Alain Locke, New York: Garland.- (1936) The Negro and His Music, Washington DC: Associates in Negro Folk

Education, reprinted in The Negro and His Music and Negro Art: Past andPresent, Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer Company, 1991.

Malar, K. (1993) 'Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass Media', Ethno-musicology, 37 (3): 339-52.

Mintz, S.W. and R. Price (1992) The Birth of African-American Culture, Boston:Beacon Press.

Rampersad, A. (1976) The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press:76).

Sykes, R.B. (1989) Black Majority, Victoria, Australia: Hudson Publishing.Thompson, J.E. (1993) 'Divine Countenance: Art and Altars of the Black Atlantic

World', in P. Galembo (ed.), Divine Inspiration, Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press: 1-17.

Toll, R.C. (1974) Blacking Up: the Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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