ABSTRACT
With the popularity of Atlantic narratives of black modernity launched in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s 1993 publication, The Black Atlantic, a tendency emerged to see the American racial situation as essentially an extension of Great Britain’s.1 This is unfortunate. Every transatlantic black identity is both a circumlocution of the Atlantic and a burrowing into the particularities of a place where Africans settled and which they were forced to call home. Unlike Britain, the United States of America owes its very existence to the labor of black bodies, since, as Edmund Morgan noted in American Slavery, American Freedom, the American Revolution could not have succeeded without the goods traded to France during the war, goods produced by black bodies. African American slavery gave white American subjectivity its freedom and its identity.2 From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, America wrestled psychologically and politically with the consequences of this fact, specifi cally the existence of a large internal black population amid a white majority; and this struggle over the meaning of the American subject occurred long before the West Indian immigrations of the twentieth century caused dramatic changes in British identity.
