Introduction

Abstract

Since Paul Gilroy’s foundational work in The Black Atlantic (1993), scholars of the Atlantic world have questioned the assumption that historical processes and cultural formations are best understood on the scale of the nation-state. Gilroy argued that the nation had served as a framework for ideological reasons, and demonstrated that national culture was no less reified an explanatory rubric than race—indeed that these two concepts are fatally intertwined. By offering the Atlantic as an alternative locus of modernity, Gilroy’s book marked a key moment among scholars of the humanities, who in place of traditions and identities were increasingly giving ontological priority to systems and networks. What might have once seemed the continuity of tradition, argued Gilroy and his followers, is better regarded as the record of how diaspora came to be erased and ritual performances of substitution forgotten.¹