Bringing the “Black Atlantic” into Global History: The Project of Pan-Africanism

Abstract

Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking study on the “Black Atlantic” has revitalized scholarly interest in the connections between Africans, African-Americans and generally people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic.1 Gilroy argued that the Black Atlantic—the cultural web between diaspora Africans spread around Atlantic shores—has been crucial for modern sensibilities in the twentieth century.2 In this context he makes the further point that “historians should take the Atlantic as a unit of analysis in their discussion of the modern world to produce an explicitly transnational perspective… ”3 adding, “The history of the black Atlantic, continually criss-crossed by the movement of Black People—not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles toward emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship, is a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory.”4 Gilroy stresses the importance of the role of free travelers and of cultural exchanges among freed or free black populations in creating a shared Black Atlantic culture and shared black identities that transcend territorial boundaries.5 He describes the African diaspora primarily in terms of what he calls “discontinuous” cultural exchange among diverse African diaspora populations. Drawing examples mainly from the English speaking black populations of England, the United States, and the Carribean, he argues that the shared cultural features of African diaspora groups “generally result far less from shared cultural memories of Africa than from these groups’ mutually influential but culturally neutral responses to their exclusion from the benefits of the Enlightenment legacy of national citizenship and political equality in the West. ”6