The 'black Atlantic' and African modernity in South Africa

Abstract

There can be little doubt that Paul Gilroy's is an extraordinary text that interweaves in an exemplary fashion philosophical, cultural, and political perspectives that illuminate its epistemologically delimited historical zone of the world in late modernity. book exhibits deep knowledge within its constricted conceptual space of what it postulates as the Black Atlantic. Adding luster to the growing reputation of the book among postcolonial intellectuals in the metropolitan centers of the West is the brilliant literary style, if not conceptual style, in which it is realized. Gilroy is simply one of the outstanding masters of the English language today. Together with Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory, BlackAtlantic is a great pleasure to read and reread: both books now and then, in totally unexpected moments, leave the profane world of prose in emulation of sublime poetry. In this, both books affiliate themselves with Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism and Fredric Jameson's two volumes of Ideologies of Theory. All four books seem to argue that the permission for entrance into critical postmodernity is emulation of the brilliant literary style of the master text, Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero. However, these impressive affiliations of cannot hide the fact that it is a profoundly flawed book because of its exclusionary epistemic cultural politics. Gilroy defines the Black Atlantic as essentially a dialogical intellectual system of discourse between the United States and Europe about the nature of modernity concerning cultural and national identities, the very fact that cultural and political formations of whatever kind are historical products of hybridization and syncretism. With such a conceptualization, Gilroy excludes Africa and America (I am aware that Abdias do Nascimento prefers the designation South America, since Latin denies the Africanity of that continentsee his The African Experience in Brazil) from the historical parameters of the Black Atlantic. This exclusionary process is not to be understood in the sense that a book cannot be expected to say everything, but rather it reflects Gilroy's political understanding of the dynamic structure of the world within the maelstrom of modernity. It is ironic that one would have to marshall the same arguments that Gilroy himself rightly has made against the great Raymond Williams, that by excluding the black settlers from the making of contemporary Englishness, he had unduly constricted its truly rich horizons. So likewise, by excluding Africa, Gilroy has in effect narrowed the Africanness or Africanity of the Black Atlantic.l Granted a book cannot say everything, it should at least attempt to conceptualize everything within the purview of the historical logic of its object or subject. cannot or refuses and fails to conceptually