"Black Atlantic"

  • Black Atlantic: Paul Gilroy’s naming of an interlinked cultural zone that geographically accords with the Atlantic basin in the C18-19. It allows us to conceptualize the ways that a) national or regional restrictions artificially constrain the links within this zone; b) the ways Europe (especially) but also North America and Africa are not the locus of intellectual and cultural development (contra Enlightenment narratives); and c) the interdependence of Black and white people in this zone. “Gilroy suggests that blacks and whites throughout the Atlantic are unthinkable without each other. Black thought often resists or speaks in counterpoint to white, whereas white involvement in slave systems, racially defined societies, and charged racial debates make white dependent on the black” (source).
    • Olaudah Equiano is a useful figure for envisioning the Black Atlantic: he moved as a captive and as a free person between west Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and North America, and his writings and activism knit together this centerless zone of cultural production.

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Latitude: 32.995994702766
Longitude: -40.645980834961