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
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Notes
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993 ).
Paul Gilroy, “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies ( New York: Routledge, 1992 ), p. 192.
J. Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorûbâ Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999): 73.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Pan-Africanism,” in Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia ofthe African and African-American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), p. 1485. For problems of definition see also
Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D.G. Kelley, “Imagining Home: Pan-Africanism Re-Visited,” in Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D.G. Kelley, eds., Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora ( London and New York: Verso, 1994 ), pp. 1–16.
Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, “Preface,” in Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, eds., Pan -African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 ( London and New York: Routledge, 2003 ).
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ).
See, for example, Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 );
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also the articles in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 58 (2001).
Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan -Africanism, and Communism ( London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998 );
Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France 1919–1939 ( Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985 );
Andreas Eckert, “Universitäten und die Politik des Exils. Afrikanische Studenten und anti-koloniale Politik in Europa, 1900–1960,” Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte7 (2004): 129–45.
See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1967), especially pp. 431–32, which include relevant references to Herder’s On the New German Literature: Fragments of 1767. Appiah, “Pan-Africanism,” p. 1485.
W.E.B Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” repr. in Eric J. Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 ), pp. 38–47.
The most comprehensive study on Du Bois is David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: H. Holt, 1993 ). See also
David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 ( New York: H. Holt, 2000 ).
Cyril E. Griffith, The African Dream: Martin Delany and the Emergence of Pan-African Thought (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1975 ).
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887, repr. Edinburgh: University Press, 1967 ).
Philip S. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000 ). For the general context see
Richard Rathbone, “West Africa: Modernity and Modernization,” in Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst and Heike Schmidt, eds., African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debates ( Oxford: James Currey, 2002 ), pp. 18–30.
Michael J. Echeruo, Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life ( London: Macmillan, 1978 ), p. 109.
Nnamdi Azikiwe, Liberia in World Politics (1934, repr. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970), p. 350. See also Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, p. 69”.
Edward Blyden, African Life and Customs (1908, repr. London: African Publication Society, 1969), p. 66. See also Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, p. 70.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House. Africa in the Philosophy of Culture ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 ), pp. 28–46.
Marion Berghahn, Images of Africa in Black American Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 93 and 121; Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, pp. 73–74.
Owen Charles Mathurin, Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-African Movement (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976). On the West Indian (intellectual) diaspora in Britain, of which Williams was a part, see now Bill Schwarz, ed., West Indian intellectuals in Britain ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003 ).
Hakim Adi, “West African Students in Britain, 1900–60: The Politics of Exile,” in David Killingray, ed., Africans in Britain ( London: Frank Cass, 1994 ), pp. 107–28.
J.E. Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Relations (1911, repr. London: Cass, 1969 ). See also
Adi, “West African Students in Britain,” Langley, Pan -Africanism; Robert W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought: Its Development in West Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Faber, 1968), esp. pp. 433–37;
Raymond Jenkins, “Gold Coasters Overseas, 1860–1919, with Specific Reference to Their Activities in Britain,” Immigrants and Minorities4 (1985): 5–52.
On the history of the NAACP see Manfred Berg, The Ticket to Freedom. The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration ( Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005 ).
The Resolution is reprinted in W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History ( New York: International Publishers, 1965 ), pp. 11–12.
Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” in Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920 ), p. 98.
See Thomas C. Holt, “Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World: Reflections on the Diasporan Framework,” in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999 ), pp. 40–41.
Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, eds., The 1945 Pan-African Congress Revisited ( London: New Beacon Books, 1995 ). On the continuing role of African-Americans in Pan-Africanist activities see
Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997 ).
Quotes from Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1 ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 ).
George Padmore, Pan -Africanism or Communism: The Coming Struggle for Africa ( London: D. Dobson, 1956 ), p. 323.
On Nkrumah see David Birmingham, Kwame Nkrumah: Father of African Nationalism ( Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998 ).
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© 2007 Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier
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Eckert, A. (2007). Bringing the “Black Atlantic” into Global History: The Project of Pan-Africanism. In: Conrad, S., Sachsenmaier, D. (eds) Competing Visions of World Order. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604285_9
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