Introduction

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to extend the historical dimension of Paul Gilroy’s original conception of the black Atlantic. I argue that the literary interplay, and the creative potential and hybridity that Gilroy sees as definitive of the black Atlantic began with precolonial English characterizations of Africa, blacks, and the landscapes they occupied, and not with the advent of the Middle Passage, as Gilroy argues. The contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writers I discuss engage with concepts that first entered the English language through those characterizations, using them to create new, hybridized identities capable of surviving in the face of centuries-old racisms. In this way, I argue, they create a black Atlantic that is not only culturally hybrid, but that displays what I call a temporally synchronous hybridity—that is, a hybridity within which elements of the precolonial past are actively involved in shaping and understanding the contemporary realities of the Caribbean, and in the movement of the present into the future. This reconsideration of the history of the Anglophone black Atlantic is written as a response to several criticisms of Gilroy’s original conception of the black Atlantic which have all focused on the theory of its advent in the Middle Passage. I suggest that reading past the Middle Passage to the black Atlantic’s precolonial beginnings allows us to add a greater sense of historicity to Gilroy’s conception, thus further advancing the work he set out to do.

“When you think of it, water is everything. Or rather, Water ventures into everything and becomes everything. It has All tastes and moods imaginable; water is history And the end of the world is water also.”

(From The T.E. Lawrence Poems, by Gwendolyn MacEwen)