[Week 3] The Black Atlantic as Diasporic Nexus and Meta-Archive
The Black Atlantic as a paradigm illustrates the transnational interplay between resonant cultural practices and tropes in its formulation as a “changing same”: the jazz aesthetic of African-Americans and the reggae poetics of Jamaica or the calypso stylization of Trinidad, for example. Gilroy frames such overlaps and resonances as “encapsulat[ing] the playful diasporic intimacy that has been a marked feature of transnational black Atlantic creativity” (16).
Yet Gilroy’s construction of the Black Atlantic, so concerned with such overlaps and also with active intra-diasporic interactions (such as in his reference to the transnational development of the Black Britain song “Keep on Moving,” which “was notable for having ben produced in England by the children of Caribbean settlers and then re-mixed in a (Jamaican) dub format in the United States by Teddy Riley, an African-American”) does seem to ignore the remaining significance of the local, if not the national (16). Cultural output by subjects of African descent vary wildly across Latin America and the Caribbean, across regions of the United States, and across sub-Saharan Africa itself. They even have their own complex diasporas – Trinidadians in Canada, Jamaicans in New York and Florida, each again in London – that relate back to a national or regional identity. The Black Atlantic becomes a nexus of diasporas in a proliferation of Venn diagrams that concentric circles that Gilroy perhaps does not fully acknowledge.
That said, perhaps an archival project that draws on literature or music the geographically maps those Venn diagrams and concentric circles would find the points of contact that reveal the meta-diasporic dynamics of the Black Atlantic paradigm.
Work Cited
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993