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Marta Werbanowska ENGG-259 8 February 2017

THE BLACK ATLANTIC AND ITS AFTERLIVES

J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship (1840)

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)

unfinished identities of modern Black Westerners, navigating (at least) two


great cultural assemblages: that of African roots and Atlantic/Western routes (1)
The Black Atlantic: distinctly modern, stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural
[social, and political] forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of,
blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and
remembering shaped by the transatlantic slave trade (Gilroy 3)
modern Black Atlantic culture(s): diasporic topography of loyalty and identity
(16), a desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the
constraints of ethnicity and national particularity (19)
the slave ship as the chronotope (central organizing symbol) of the Black Atlantic,
slave ships as modern machines that were themselves micro-systems of linguistic
and political hybridity (12) and the living means by which the points within that
Atlantic world [Europe, America, the Caribbean] were joined (16)
race as integral to the formation of Western discourses of modernity and
aesthetics (with Blackness configured as the Other), a fetish (9), the sublime (10)
Black intellectual discourse as the counterculture of modernity (5)
Marta Werbanowska ENGG-259 8 February 2017

o M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (2011)


Gregson v. Gilbert (1783, England)
Zong massacre in 1781, insurance claims

o Kevin Young, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (2011)


US v. The Schooner Amistad (1841, Boston) Amistad mutiny in 1839, freedom
suit

Elizabeth Alexander, The Negro Digs Up Her Past: Amistad (2005)

Whenever I teach fiction or poetry that could be called historical, I always ask my
students, why then? ... I wanted ... to explore the past in the face of the aggressive
ahistoricity that plagues and misnames this nation and is a tool for misleading the
people. ... Never have we had more material to work with, more archival sources and
resources with which to explore and then imagine the past. (463-4)

Wole Soyinka, Of Africa (2013)

The African slave trade happens to lack the consolation of being in a terminal past
unlike the Holocaust or Hiroshima, it lacks an identifiably limited duration [E]ven
when the event is over, or is at least formally declared ended, residual forms which
antedate the structured manifestation, the slave trade itself also survive and perpetuate
the basic phenomenon, which is slavery, enslavement, servitude. (56)

This crime is branded into collective memory That leaves us, and the necessity
of a truthful internal reckoning Concealment or denial [of history] encourages the
Marta Werbanowska ENGG-259 8 February 2017

tendency of repetition in those whom this benefits, and with ever increasing confidence in
impunity. (57, 73)

1. What discourses (other than poetic) do these poets participate in, explore? How do
they complicate the relationship between poetry, the law, and archives?
2. Youngs and NourbeSes works are radically different in terms of form. Can these
two texts be understood as exemplary of discourses of modernity and
countermodernity, the Africanesque and Enlightenment? What are the
implications/consequences of each of these formal choices?
3. Gilroy positions the slave ship as the Black Atlantics chronotope. From this point of
view, what is the function/wider interpretation of these two books of poetry so
heavily centered on particular, historical slave ships?
4. Both books were published in 2011. What do you make of these two specific
histories emerging at that particular historical moment?

[T]here might be something useful to be gained from setting these histories


closer to each other not so as to compare them, but as precious resources from
which we might learn something valuable about the way that modernity
operates, about the scope and status of rational human conduct, about the
claims of science, and perhaps most importantly about the ideologies of
humanism with which those brutal histories can be shown to have been
complicit. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (217)

Lourdes Martnez-Echazbal, Hybridity and Diasporization in the Black


Atlantic: The Case of Chombo (1997)

hybridity as an ideologeme, the basic unit of analysis of the multifaceted, polysemic,


ideological discourse of racial, cultural and national identity in Latin America and the
Caribbean (117)
hybridity as diasporaization, a form of disjunction that destabilizes hybridity both as
synthesis as embodied in the very process of naming the Diaspora formation [Gilroy] called
the Black Atlantic and as what I have referred to elsewhere as symbiosis epitomized in the
double consciousness of being both at the same time. (118)
critique/expansion of the Black Atlantic paradigm: (1) departure from binary thinking in
favor of polygeneous (not heterogeneous) mode of being, (2) inclusion of the South Atlantic
Marta Werbanowska ENGG-259 8 February 2017

(as opposed to Gilroys triangular and Anglocentric mapping of the North Black Atlantic), (3)
complication of the utopian sense of ethnic community (121)
Marta Werbanowska ENGG-259 8 February 2017

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