by Herbert Harris
I met Paul Gilroy at a conference on racial identity at Yale in the early 1990s. I was finishing my training and eager for new ideas. He was soft-spoken and thoughtful, but his presentation was quietly electrifying. He seemed to be rethinking race, culture, and identity in a radically creative way. The presentation distilled many ideas he would soon publish in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, a book that has influenced the field for more than thirty years. A key argument is that, over centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and beyond, a transnational culture has emerged that isn’t solely African, American, Caribbean, or British, but a blend of all these. It arose from the history of slavery and colonialism, but what holds it together isn’t its shared history or ongoing oppression. Gilroy argues that this common culture, which he calls the Black Atlantic, is maintained through the continuous movement of people, ideas, and creative works across the ocean. Its fluidity, hybridity, art, music, and literature are its defining features.
As I revisited Gilroy’s ideas over the years, they grew more impressive in their explanatory and predictive power. The Black Atlantic feels more alive and enduring than many nations, cultures, and institutions. Yet the question remains: how did it attain that durability, and how did art and music play such a central role in its flourishing?
Living in multiple subjectivities would seem bound to produce conflict and fragmentation. The Black Atlantic is nothing if not a plurality. In collectives such as nations and cultures, the multiplicity of subjectivities would seem to put them at constant risk of coming apart. W.E.B. Du Bois introduced the concept of double consciousness to capture this tension. Gilroy embraced double consciousness and hybridity as constitutive features of the Black Atlantic, not as problems to be overcome but as sources of its vitality. What kind of psychology could make this possible? What enables hybrid identities to flourish rather than fragment?
The idea of intersubjectivity, a shared world constituted by mutual recognition, may provide an explanation. Read more »
The first time I became aware of Friedrich, many years ago, I was in Zurich to meet an elderly Jungian psychoanalyst—my head stuffed with theoretical questions and eerie dreams with soundtracks by Scriabin. Walking down the Bahnhofstrasse, I passed a bookstore window displaying a stunning art book with the elegant title Traum und Wahrheit (Dream and Truth) and a simple subtitle: Deutsche Romantik. I didn’t yet speak German, but I knew enough to be interested. The book was too heavy for my luggage. I bought it anyway and had it shipped.
What lured my eye to the cover as I passed by was a partial view from one of my now favorite Friedrich paintings, Das Große Gehege (The Great Enclosure)—a cool marshy landscape evoking real ones I would later see from train windows. How could just a corner of a painting have such power? It was the light, the late afternoon saturation of yellow, the black shadowed trees, and the hint of evening gloom already visible as gray on the horizon even though the sky above was still blue. I was captivated.
One of nature’s most endearing parlor tricks is the ripple effect. Drop a pebble into a lake and little waves will move out in concentric circles from the point of entry. It’s fun to watch, and lovely too, delivering a tiny aesthetic punch every time we see it. It’s also the well-worn metaphor for a certain kind of cause-and-effect, in which the effect part just keeps going and going. This metaphor is a perfect fit for one of the worst allisions in US maritime history, leading to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was hit by the container ship MV Dali on the morning of March 26, 2024.
Consider again the wooden desk. It was once part of a tree, like the ones outside your window. It became a bit of furniture though a long process of growth, cutting, shaping buying and selling until it got to you. You sit before it as it has a use – a use value – but it was made, not to give you a platform for your coffee or laptop, but in order to make a profit: it has an exchange value, and so had a price. It is a commodity, the product of an entire economic system, capitalism, that got it to you. Someone laboured to make it and someone else, probably, profited by its sale. It has a history, a backstory.
All of this is the case, but none of it simply appears to the senses. Capitalism itself isn’t a thing, but that doesn’t make it less real. The idea that all that there really is amounts to things you can bump into or drop on your foot is the ‘common sense’ that operates as the ideology of everyday life: “this is your world and these are the facts”. But really, nothing is like that: there are no isolated facts, but rather a complex, twisted web of mediations: connections and negations that transform over time.
A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind. 
They all want it: the ‘digital economy’ runs on it, extracting it, buying and selling our attention. We are solicited to click and scroll in order to satisfy fleeting interests, anticipations of brief pleasures, information to retain or forget. Information: streams of data, images, chat: not knowledge, which is something shaped to a human purpose. They gather it, we lose it, dispersed across platforms and screens through the day and far into the night. The nervous system, bombarded by stimuli, begins to experience the stressful day and night as one long flickering all-consuming series of virtual non events.