ABSTRACT
In 1993, the scholar Paul Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. The book examines the cultural and political geography established centuries ago by the Atlantic slave trade, whose transatlantic journeys created the African diaspora of today, connecting West Africa, Europe (primarily Britain), North America, and the Caribbean. The relationships between places, peoples, and cultures that grew out of the “Black Atlantic” are multidirectional. People, ideas, and cultural forms have traveled back and forth from their origins in Africa to the Caribbean and to London, Toronto, or New York and then circulated and developed in various locations. Gilroy uses the trope of the ship to focus on the centrality of both the Middle Passage and travel in the creation of modernity in the transatlantic world, a world in which black people and ideas are central. One of Gilroy’s chapters focuses on black popular music as a public arena for expressions of human consciousness and debates on the nature of identity. The most recent genre he discusses, hiphop, exemplifies the relationships among local, transnational, and global cultural practices, in this case produced out of black marginalization, but circulating throughout the world as a complex expression of resistance against oppression.
