Black atlantic literature review

Black Atlantic Literature Review
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Black Atlantic Literature Review
Although the triangular relationships between the Americas, Europe, and Africa started about five hundred years ago, they were for centuries either ignored or misrepresented. The silence around the shocking history of colonization and slavery on the part of both victims and victimizers also led to see the inherently heterogeneous nature of the cultures and humanities shaped by the slave trade. This is with the exceptions of some people, particularly thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, who were provoked perhaps more visibly than others with the impact of the transatlantic affairs. The issue had not been thoroughly scrutinized and discussed until the publication in 1993 of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness in which Paul Gilroy introduced the concept of the Black Atlantic to express the African experience in its transnational and intercultural dimensions. Critics and reviewers have pointed out the excitement generated by this book and celebrated its arrival because it valorized a positive and new paradigm for examining black experiences in a progressively more united, but at the same time inharmonious global culture. Furthermore, the Black Atlantic has been seen as a necessary connection between the work of post-colonialist and African Americans and has thus stimulated determinations to bring down the margins separating the two groups. In addition to the Gilroy's work other authors have focused on cultural diversity, law, personhood, gender experiences, disenfranchised people, constructing community, slavery and other effects of the Atlantic trade. Hence, demonstrating the beneficial and adverse effects of slave trade and colonialism.
Cultural Dynamics
Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic describes a counter culture to European modernism and modernity, to the scheme of the clarification and its connected rationalism, historical advancement and logical reason. His philosophies dispute essentialist versions of racial nationalisms and ethnic identity, in courtesy of a united, though diverse, culture that joins different communities in North America, Africa, South America, Europe and the Caribbean. He suggests that the Atlantic be pickled as a sole, complex unit of analysis which could yield an explicitly intercultural and transnational outlooks (Gilroy, 1993). This perspective identifies the value of divergent and define regional or local progress within a culture while relating them to a met culture, which he describes as a rhizome or a network. In such inquiries what becomes vital are the metaphorical and real trips (both voluntary and enforce) that comprehend the systems across the Atlantic. In it, the slave journeys of the Middle Route take on a foundational and a pre-eminent position. They are the source of the racial injustices and dislocation experienced by black people during the Atlantic but are also the root of a fruitful syncretism which Gilroy aims to snatch from what was otherwise perpetuated as inferiority, harmful, and cultural exclusion (Barson, 2010).
Gilroy claims that many instances of connectedness can emerge from this network. Hence, build up a complex picture of cultur...