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