Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Hegelian Aufhebung, and the culture of reparation

Abstract

This article argues that within Paul Gilroy’s notion of the ‘changing same’ and his more famous articulation of the ‘Black Atlantic’ there is a culture, an education, that can be retrieved by way of recent re-readings of the Hegelian Aufhebung by Gillian Rose and Nigel Tubbs. The piece begins with an exploration of these ideas in Gilroy’s work, noting in particular the ways in which they speak of both complicity in, and moving beyond, eternal repetitions and reproductions of existing power relations and existing notions of identity. This is then taken to Rose’s Hegelian critique of identity and of the postmodern critiques of identity. Finally, these two contributions are reworked as cultures in a logic of education found in Tubbs. This commends reading the changing same and the Black Atlantic as self-educating and re-forming experiences, expressing the deeper significance of current culture wars, including as a lived experience of the tensions constituting the challenge presented by the idea of reparation.