First published in 1993, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness lobbed a polemical salvo into the cultural politics of late twentieth century black diasporic studies. Employing critical poetics, the Atlantic is configured as a transnational and transcultural formation, a turbulent crossways of Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Caribbean in the making of 19^th century modernity. Gilroy named racial slavery as integral to western world-making, yet diverse routes and roots of black experience produced critiques ­– as well as sustained claims ­– on modern world possibility. Music, bodies, commodities, art, and vernacular thought carried by the sea materialise evolving histories of black anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle in tandem with intellectual, literary, and musical currents. Beyond nationalist desire for cohesive racial purity, Gilroy argues, cultural hybridity is fundamental to black Atlantic life.

Nearly 30 years on, The Black Atlantic’s ground-breaking contributions continue to enrich social and cultural thought that scholars, activists, and artists rework under new political conditions. Enabled by evolving technologies of exchange, communication, and 21^st century global mobility, The Black Atlantic necessarily remains an evocative departure for re-reading archives of black vernacular expression and histories of political dissent.

Meaningfully engaged as a conceptual frame for Afterall’s Black Atlantic Museum project, the afterlife of Gilroy’s framework is, amongst countless other curatorial and artistic endeavours, alive in correlates of British contemporary art and visual culture.

In this interview Camille Crichlow speaks with Paul Gilroy, her PhD supervisor at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre at University College London, about restating The Black Atlantic in the present. How has The Black Atlantic been remobilized, appropriated, and repurposed for the demands of contemporary life, and what are its future lives?

Camille Crichlow: To start, I would like to know a bit more about the context from which you conceived and wrote The Black Atlantic.¹ What were the political, cultural, autobiographical questions and concerns that motivated you to embark on this project?

Paul Gilroy: Where to begin that story? I guess, about 30 years ago. I had this idea of a book in my head, but I knew that it would have to be a publication that would get me a job in an English department at some future point. I didn’t want to be confined by the kind of disciplinary tithes that had to be paid to sociology, which was the place I had managed to get a temporary job. I wanted to be able to engage in a number of different disciplinary perspectives, simultaneously. I had an idea about scale. This had been introduced not so much by talking to Cedric Robinson – although that was important – but actually by reading everything in the footnotes of Black Marxism. There is one layer of argumentation in the text but there’s a second one in the footnotes.² I was also reading Edward Said very carefully, and I had a really strong sense that the book I wanted to write could be modelled on Orientalism in some fundamental way.³ At that time, I was still playing quite a lot of music, so I was thinking a lot about it as a stimulus that was somewhat different but, in some way, complementary to theoretical arguments.

As I had done with There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, I felt there were arguments within the world of popular culture that I inhabited that could be translated productively into terms of academic and non-academic argument.⁴ Being an intellectual and being an academic pull you in different directions. In some ways, they conflict with one another. I suppose I have been most influenced by people I consider to be intellectuals but not necessarily academics. So, the book was going to have that flavour. It took a few years to write The Black Atlantic. I was very happy to deliver it to the publisher but it was rejected. As you can imagine, it was a bit of a blow, to work hard on something and then have it be rejected. So, I told some of my friends in the US that I was in this hole, and they helped me get out of it. The American publisher ended up changing the title of the book, but they would publish it. I’m so glad that Lindsay Waters, who was my editor at Harvard University Press, was someone who could see the value of the book and glimpsed a sense in which people might find it useful.

CC: When I first broached this conversation with you, you said that The Black Atlantic is more of a historical project than it is alive in the contemporary cultural context. Is the idea of the Black Atlantic, as you wrote about 30 years ago, still alive today? Is, for example, the transatlantic slave trade, as you conceived it, still a significant starting point for thinking about Black consciousness in our current, divisive, world?

PG: Yes, of course. The long history of the transatlantic slave trade is absolutely fundamental. But, in a way, the conceptual repertoire that The Black Atlantic creates is not adequate to the trials of the present moment. I think that it requires supplementation, or actually, renunciation. People speak of diaspora, but the technological environment, the political economy of information, the Third Industrial Revolution,⁵ if you want to call it that, was only in its very infant stages when I was writing. So, I think it was in the emergent moment of those technologies which have decisively and comprehensively transformed things.

Now, there are two other factors which relate to this: the impact of the end of the Cold War on thinking about the world and what it meant to replace an East–West political geography with a North­–South political geography. I would say that the book emerges at a very early point in that transformation for me. I thought that I was writing a book in the tradition that belonged to a chapter in the life of a kind of Black Liberation movement that kicks off with W.E.B. Du Bois and his various transnational shenanigans. It kicks off with that, but it’s kind of winding down as the cold war comes to an end, as the opening of apartheid South Africa comes to an end, as a number of anti-colonial movements and struggles are resolved into a new phase – which is not to say that I buy the idea that decolonisation is completed, but it’s a new chapter in the process. It signalled in the currency of terms like ‘post-colonial’ and ‘neo-colonial’, which are terms that we require in order to make sense of this sort of breakpoint. I think those shifts are really big factors in limiting the value of the argument that I made.

I suppose that when I say that The Black Atlantic is a historical project, I mean that the forces and relations in the world of Black politics have been utterly changed and that the role of Black intellectuals has kind of collapsed. That layer of independent people found their peace with the institution of the university. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Harvard is the kind of totemic figure in that shift, but there are many others. When I started writing The Black Atlantic, I had interviewed C.L.R. James a couple of times. I was a little bit friendly with June Jordan. And these were people that – I know, it’s a very problematic term – I regarded as geniuses, but they were not people whose lives and whose political hopes and whose writing and energy, as critics and thinkers, were compatible with any kind of scholastic orientation, even if the university occasionally opened its doors to them. So, I had a very different model for the role of the intellectual that derived from those educative contacts. I was thinking about the history of organic intellectual activity that those examples involved.

While I was writing The Black Atlantic, I was working a lot as a journalist because I didn’t know whether I’d ever get an academic job. For example, the conversation with Toni Morrison that I relied on in the book was something I had been able to do because I went to interview her as a journalist. I interviewed James Baldwin, Gil Scott Heron, Bobby Womack, Taj Mahal, Marcus Miller, Rakim Allah. People I admired or was interested in. However disappointing they may have been, and however much they didn’t always exhibit understanding of their own practice in the world, they all changed my understanding of what it is to be an intellectual. Coming out of a kind of cultural studies environment, where the most interesting people in that world are the people that never went on to be academics, intensified my feeling that an expanded conception of intellectual and political work was something that had to be at the centre of what I was writing. I just don’t think those relationships exist in the same form now. We can quarrel about the form in which they do exist, but I think that was a unique moment in the cultural ecology of the Black Liberation movement. I don’t mind The Black Atlantic staying as a historically specific thing that the boundaries of which can be named and marked.

CC: The Black Atlantic has been widely debated, repurposed, and appropriated as a generative conceptual framework for different modes of academic, artistic, and activist work. Is there a younger generation of scholars, writers, artists, or activists who are mobilising The Black Atlantic in ways that you find exciting or generative in today’s historical context?

PG: I suppose, the balance of the movement has changed. It may be hard for people now to realise how much of an outlier this book was. I think in its life of nearly 30 years, it has found a number of different publics and constituencies. Are there younger people who are working within The Black Atlantic framework? I don’t think so. I think many of them have used the framework of The Black Atlantic as a kind of scratching post on which to sharpen up their own claws and develop alternative ways of looking at things. And that’s kind of inevitable. Looking back at it, I would like to think that it has supplied something like an open source piece of software, where the code is out in the open and if people want to amend that code, they’re absolutely free to do that. And actually, there’s a kind of joy in its mutability and its adaptations, as well as its growth. Certainly for me, there’s never been any proprietary claim around the idea of The Black Atlantic, because it wasn’t the original name for the book, and it wasn’t my idea. I wanted to call it Promised Lands: Modernity and Double Consciousness in The Black Atlantic.

The work that I find most stimulating from younger people has come from folks outside the US, really. It comes from younger writers in Europe, Brazil, in the Netherlands or in Scandinavia, occasionally from New Zealand and Australian territories and other colonial locations, but not the peculiar patterns of settler colonialism that we find in North America which are radically specific. I’ve been enriched by the work of some of the more marginal engagers, appropriators, misappropriators. Appropriation is the fundamental law of culture. I don’t feel threatened by the idea that people think I’m wrong or that they think they can do better. Let’s see if they can!

CC: Important work has developed around the Black Mediterranean. Do you see this work as an example of how conceptual tools from The Black Atlantic can be applied to different geographies?

PG: I like some of the things that have been done with the idea of the Black Mediterranean, because I feel that the relationship between an Atlantic political geography and a Mediterranean one is really a fundamental question. Ian Chambers has done amazing work on the history of the Mediterranean that has enabled me to understand the method involved in The Black Atlantic in a way I hadn’t seen when I was developing it, because I was not really interested in method. But I can appreciate it now. Retrospectively, that the method relates to the emergence of a view of oceanic or pelagic spaces as negative continents. It takes the rim, the Circum-Atlantic rim, as the edge of a negative continent and then looks at the correspondences and connections between those different locations. The history of the Mediterranean has been a really good instance of how productive that approach can be, in its opposition to the geopolitical realities of nation states.

The thing is, the Black Mediterranean is all very well, but post “brexit” – if I can use that word – what used to be called the English Channel is the Black Mediterranean. People arrive every day. Sometimes they’re helped, and sometimes they’re abused. Sometimes the nutcase, racist ultranationalist folks of Hastings will row out and try and to prevent the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s vessel from going out to get the people who are coming in on rubber boats. So that problem is not actually any longer out there in the Mediterranean where the perfidy of the EU is being re-enacted. It’s really here – it’s right in front of us here. I would like to see if The Black Atlantic is going to have any life in the future as a method or a model or an inspiration. And I don’t assume that it will. But if it is to have any effect, then it has to come back to that space, which is in some sense, notionally at least, our responsibility.

CC: Music and sonic cultural expression play a significant role in the development of your thinking in The Black Atlantic. How do aural cultures and orality inform epistemic frames through which to conduct historical and social analysis?

PG: The answer to that would be to say that I was very dubious about the way in which the intellectual environment I moved through was obsessed with textuality. It used the model of textuality, textual methods, the characteristics of text and so on, to create a whole set of interpretative frames. While I was finishing The Black Atlantic, I was teaching the sociology of literature, and my [teaching] partner was Peter Hulme, whose work I still admire greatly. Peter’s notions of the ‘expanded Caribbean’, his ability to focus on the textualisation of experience during that long history of Atlantic enslavement and plantation institutions inspired me to be daring enough to do that too. But I could also see its limits.

The other thing that was happening while this book was being written, which I haven’t talked about, was that I became incredibly friendly and close to bell hooks or Gloria Watkins, as I prefer to call her. Her love of African-American vernacular language underscored for me the way in which we take textuality at one pole, and take questions of performance and drama, complex real-time interaction and collaborative culture-making at the other pole. We put them in tension and test them against one another. Gloria was a great lover of music and someone that I argued with, to-and-fro, about the value of those recorded and fugitive archives that made the musical traditions of the Atlantic world. That was incredibly useful to me, and that’s why in the acknowledgments of The Black Atlantic, she gets mentioned twice –  once as bell and once as Gloria.

I would say that 90% of everything I’ve done involves attempts to translate oral culture into some other kind of language – into another rhetoric, another poetics. I’m a translator, or an interpreter. I don’t see myself adding a great deal. I’ve always wanted to find mechanisms for integrating the musical points of reference with the words on the page. It’s very important because each line of The Black Atlantic could have a musical citation attached to it.

CC:  In your view, how can music help to redefine or reshape the kind of inclusive humanism that has been a consistent critical thematic of your work for the past 40 years?

PG: I suppose I’d say that I can testify to the fact that the collaborative social and cultural relations established around the use of music, have, in certain situations offered a glimpse of alternative worlds. Not just a glimpse, because that’s to do with your experience of sight. I suppose I’d say intimations, bodily intimations of alternative possibilities. When your body is up against the bass bin then you’re encountering your somatic self in ways that perhaps you never knew. I can think about walking into a very bassy musical environment–below 50 hertz–for the first time and just thinking, ‘my goodness me, what is this’? This bass, the enfleshed course of this sonic environment is changing me physically in ways that I don’t even know how to begin to describe, let alone analyse. That’s a really useful reminder about the limits of textuality and the need to engage in a more phenomenological way with the power of organised sound. But also, to think about the formation of Black Atlantic tradition as something that hasn’t always been about volume. It’s always involved relations of that sort, which avoid capture in speech, which avoid capture in notation, which accentuate the kind of improvisational qualities in culture-making that involve forms of collaboration that are really complex. The performer isn’t on their own, enacting some sacred or profane script that they have prepared in advance, the performance is dialogically wired into much larger processes.

I’ve been blessed in my life to be able to watch Jimi Hendrix, Curtis Mayfield, and Bob Marley, sometimes in tiny little rooms. In each of those precious encounters, one thing they shared for me was the capacity to create and transform our understanding of time. James Baldwin has this phrase, ‘time becomes our friend’. Music subdues and conquers politicaltime, and time becomes our friend in those encounters. That’s what I want to hold on to. The idea of time becoming our friend. It is a difficult idea in contexts where nihilism and fatalism are so much the dominant notes that one hears in black cultural critique these days, but I really believe in that possibility of amicable time.

CC: Your thinking has expanded outwards from the Atlantic toward planetary humanism and possibilities of convivial care. How do you connect the Atlantic as both a historical landscape and a contact zone that offers us a better understanding of what you have called the ‘ongoing collective work’ of salvaging our common humanity’?⁶

PG: One of my favourite books when I was a child was Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us.⁷ She became a great hero of mine. She was a radical ecologist, a person who developed the deep ecological critique of toxic capitalist agriculture. She was a very complicated and interesting woman whose work made me understand the deep currency of ocean life, and the movement of tides and winds, to say nothing of the migration phenologies of birds and fish. These things are what made the trade in human beings possible, so I don’t see them as separate. Carson’s sensitive readings of the movement of animals and the costs of what we might now call the Anthropocene have allowed us to see that these things are all bound in with natural processes. The latter facilitated the expansion of Europe into the Atlantic basin, and the forms of commerce that made it economically viable to produce toxic things 6000 miles from where they were going to be consumed. They also made it possible to exhaust the soil of numerous islands in the process, while violating every rule that people had hitherto felt governed their relationship with nature. So, I think Rachel is another one of my ghosts who I hold hands with periodically. The person in the humanities who’s done the most to bring her spirit back would be Rob Nixon, with his notions of ‘slow violence’.⁸

I think historical materialism suffers through being insufficiently attentive to some of those connections. And I know the theoretical reasons for this, but I think, a strongly amended historical materialism of the kind that we are demanded to produce by the extent of the climate crisis that’s unfolding around us can actually integrate these things much more comprehensively than has been done before. It seems to me that, in a way, what Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Du Bois, and the others of the Black Atlantic tradition are actually trying to get us to do is to become human in a way that people haven’t previously been able to do. And for me the measure of that discrepancy is the racialisation of the component figures of humanity. So, I see those things as being intimately connected. Hopefully the work I will complete in the future will make those arguments more clearly and elaborately.

CC: You’ve written a lot about the heightened spectre of fascism, ultra-nationalism, extremism, and racialism in the 21st century. Returning to an earlier part of our discussion, do the conceptual tools that you developed in The Black Atlanticstill offer viable terms for resistance to racialisation and the global degradation of planetary life?

PG: Well, I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t see how I could. I think the answer that the intellectual cast of my scholastically-minded peers would give, might be different to the verdict that will be given from the shoreline as the water starts to encroach. So, I guess all I can say is that I stand with the folks on the shore. I think that a banal, quotidian understanding of what it is to be responsible to another human being may not be limited to somebody who looks like you (if you want to adopt a racialised instrument for examining their humanity). If you want a racialised world, then you’re going to have to say that those resemblances aren’t always decisive. But, if you want a world that challenges racialisation, challenges white supremacy and challenges the institutional mechanisms of imperialism and colonialism that are still alive among us, we have to say what we’re for. We have to offer people a different way of looking at things that isn’t just a critique. The critique is fine as far as it goes, but people need help. They need a hand and we have to be imaginative enough to be able to speak to that need.

CC: Thank you so much Paul. I think that’s a very good place to end.