Paul Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic" (Part 2/2)

Hey everyone, back again. Today we're going to finish off Paul Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic" starting on Chapter 5. But before jumping into it, if you want to follow me any further than here, you can find me on Instagram @Theory_And_FlossV. If you're new here, welcome. I'm David. I try to explain philosophical texts and ideas in a way that make them accessible to you. So if you haven't already, like, share, subscribe, tell your friends. I'd love to hear from you, so comment or leave a review if you happen to be listening to this in podcast form where you can leave reviews, which reminds me, if you found this on YouTube, you'll be able to find it in podcast form pretty much anywhere where you get podcasts or if you found me in podcast form, you'll be able to find me on YouTube as well where I sometimes release videos if you're into that at all. And then if you want to help me out monetarily, you can do that via Patreon or PayPal, but obviously no pressure. And yeah, yeah, so don't waste any more of your time with that stuff. Let's finish off Paul Gilroy's "Complicated the Black Atlantic." So if you haven't already, go check out Episode 1 because that is obviously you want to start there. But in any case, we're going to start here from Chapter 5 without the consolation of tears, Richard Wright, France, and the ambivalence of community. So Richard Wright is probably most famous for having written Native son and Black boy. And he was also, you know, his prolific writer. He wrote a lot. He wrote, he kept diaries, if I can call them diaries, he kept like journals of his travels all across the world. And writing was a big part of his life. So this idea about his movement or his movement speaks to Gilroy as being indicative or embodying this notion of the Black Atlantic, this notion that Black bodies are constantly in motion. Identities aren't fixed, especially not Black identities. And so Richard Wright really embodies that with his actual physical movement through space. The immediate value of Wright's texts like Native son and Black boy was that they revealed the fact that although slavery had ostensibly ended by that point, and Jim Crowley as well, there's still very much an effect. Richard Wright brought to the fore the fact that there were ongoing issues because of slavery. Many that could still be traced to that day. And they these came at a time when he was writing in them kind of early mid 20th century. These came at a time when the United States was really trying to whitewash its history of slavery to say that oh, it was in the past and therefore we should just forget about it. Wright's novels really show that that is not the case. It's not something that should be forgotten because the effects are still very much felt by many Black people and not all Black people, even up till today. But beyond these texts as I already mentioned, he kept quite a few travel logs and journals, which didn't gain quite as much attention even though they were published. Most of the attention kind of critical acclaim and popular acclaim. They were directed to Native son and Black boy. But Gilroy finds a lot of value in the travel logs because they describe various different encounters that Wright has with other Black people all around the world in which he recounts the fact that there is no one single Black identity. People are different anywhere that you go. And his writing this, him keeping these records allowed him to break away from the confinement of essentialism that was at the time and still very much to this day, something that permeates at least in Gilroy points out many conservative circles, even though I think that we can attribute the same kind of logic, steeping into many so-called liberal or left-leaning circles as well. But Wright received quite a bit of flack for some of his texts because his texts didn't always depict Black people in the best light because intergenerational trauma will most often, maybe not most often, but it may often culminate into aggressive personalities, especially among men. And so he depicts many men who are violent and they are violent towards women. Now this might have something to do as well and we're going to talk about this a little bit more as we go on here, but this might have something to do as well with how Richard Wright was treated by his mother if we want to attribute much value to that. But there are some certain, certainly some sexist images, some sexist ideas that come through into his texts. Again, we're going to complicate this a bit as we go on, but just to put it out there, he didn't receive as much praise as perhaps he would have expected because of the issue that he didn't always depict Black people in the best light. But that is part of the complexities of intergenerational trauma from an event, an ongoing systematic event like slavery that has ripple effects throughout history. Now when confronting the realities that might come out as a result of that, if you approach it, try to approach it neutrally, we're violence committed by in some of the stories committed by Black men against other people. If that is just viewed ostensibly neutrally, then it is viewed as being negative, which of course it's negative. But if it is de-contextualized from a history of ongoing oppression of intergenerational trauma, then it is completely taken out of its context and the history that really creates it is ignored. And it absolves the perpetrators, many of whom are dead, but there are still many that enjoy the benefits of these systems. They get to be absolved of any guilt of any responsibility in the matter. Now there's a lot to say about Richard Wright as a political figure as well because he spent a great deal of time occupying certain communist circles, but he quickly became, maybe not so quickly, but at some point he became disillusioned with Marxism, with communism because he felt that it was quite reductive. He wasn't received very well in those circles because to be quite frank, many Marxist circles are concerningly white. They reflect certain white interests. There are some circles with that, some of the case, certain Black feminist approaches to Marxism definitely call attention to these issues and they are great alternatives. But at the time in the 40s, there were very few such circles, so Richard Wright would have had to occupy certain white men run communist circles which didn't always reflect his interest or the interest of other people with whom he identified. Now this didn't mean that he was received particularly well even by his fellow Black citizens in the United States because he drew quite heavily from existential and psychoanalytic philosophy. So some of his inspirations were Freud, Kierkegar, Saut, Nietzsche. These figures all played some role in his own philosophy, his own way to look at the world, which for some Black commentators was a sign of his departing from Black knowledge, from Black communities and becoming less authentic. Now we already troubled this in the first part and Gilroy troubled it in the first half. Because Gilroy asks, "Well what is an authentically Black identity? Why can't Richard Wright use these philosophers to think about his own life? Could they not offer something that would help him better understand his situation?" And it's not as though he just takes their words and plagiarizes them as his own. He is mutating those words in order to comply with his own experiences in the world, which there's a great deal of value to. Now both his existential and psychoanalytic leanings got him into some hot water in different ways. So his existential leanings certainly contributed to his being viewed as almost an apologist for slavery or saying almost like the hardships that Black people experience can't all be attributable to slavery and there is some degree of responsibility on the part of Black citizens to do their part. Now Gilroy complicates this and I have to put a huge asterisk here to say that this is a no way Gilroy's way of saying that he somehow doesn't associate with his own ancestors and their experiences of oppression and his own. He's no way saying that. Rather he's drawing attention to the fact that people were very quick to go after Richard Wright for not abiding by the scripts expected of him as a Black academic and a Black intellectual because he really sought to get at the complexities of the aftermath of slavery and ongoing Jim Crow laws and how that affects Black citizens and how even within those communities there are obviously going to be conflicts. Now for my own part as a 20-something year old white dude, I do want to say that something about Gilroy's really sticking to this point is a little bit unsettling to me and I don't know if this is just my white guilt coming in but he is almost saying the obvious here in that of course there are going to be conflicts within the Black community like obviously every community is going to have conflicts but he pays such attention to it. that I just don't understand what point he's trying to make. Because, and this isn't his fault really, but it's so easy to read this text and say, oh look, I have Poe Gilroy's approval that slavery is done. Black people just need to pull up their bootstraps and then just get over it and move on. Now, while I know for a fact that that's not what he's saying, I think that it's not nearly as clear as it could be that that's not what he's saying, if that makes any sense. So I try not to put my own two cents in too often, but it's just something I just found it unsettling and it kind of comes about through the course of the book here or throughout the entirety of the book that there are these moments in which Gilroy is almost giving ammunition to people prepared to, essentially lay the blame on Black people today and at the time they use writing it. But just putting that out there. So, right, as I already mentioned, spent a lot of his time as a communist, at least ascribing, subscribing to those views. But he began to move away from it when he began to recognize some of the fascist undertones to some of these Marxist and communist circles because what do you really do with communism when it comes to settling racial issues or issues between different races? If you were to set up this, you know, workers utopia between different workers of different races or genders, how do you reconcile that? Are workers just workers or should there be different consideration applied to or given to different workers of different heritage, different ethnicities, different genders and so on? But he also didn't like the fact that so many Marxists sought to politicize for their own reasons, everything that he wrote and said, including a lot of what other black artists and intellectuals writing and saying as a sign of the need of communism, of looking at a piece of black art and saying, oh well, it is devoid of a certain capacity because of the exploited of nature of capitalism against black bodies through the history of slavery and Jim Carole laws and so on. So therefore, this is why we need communism to which right thought that that was a complete reduction of the beauty of the kind of art that black communities were making. And so he wanted to go, you know, get his boots on the ground and really experience those communities and experience those people and what they'd gone through, not to have these people's lives and experiences filtered through the intellectual kind of gatekeepers of universities of higher ed that sought to, I guess, understand the world only through their very narrow intellectual lens. Now as I alluded to earlier, right wasn't, also, it wasn't received very well by many women and by just many people in general because of the violence that he depicts against women, black women in particular, that he depicts in his stories, I should say. Now to kind of counterbalance this, Gilroy provides this kind of long speech that right had given it at a conference in which he calls out the conference organizers for not including any women, which is, Gilroy takes to be a sign of the impossibility then that therefore right is sexist by saying like, "Look, hey, he had this one moment where he called out "sexism so he can't be sexist." It's not a great argument that Gilroy puts forward, but it does dovetail with a broader argument he's trying to make and that although there are these sexist moments within rights work, they belong to a broader matrix of relations within the black community, post-slavery, post many of the instances that followed it that were marked by continued oppressions against black bodies and so they can't really be approached or reductively criticized as being like sexist. Now this is, that is how I think Gilroy would perhaps respond to a criticism, but this text that is the black Atlantic is suspiciously devoid of the art and voices of black women. Now at the very end he's gonna talk briefly about Tony Morrison, but this book is really focused on black male intellectuals and political figures in the United States in that long history. No mention of Harriet Tubman as far as I know or of any other black women or if there are there very fleeting comments while he makes reference to Patricia Hill Collins to say that she was wrong about her considering the experiences of black women as being something particular because he saw that Gilroy sees that as being too homogenous. She's just homogenizing the experiences of black women when I would hazard that she's actually doing quite the opposite, but in any case, this text is suspiciously devoid of the experiences of black women. Now this isn't to say that he had to do anything. This book is still brilliant in so many ways, but it does strike me as a little bit dissonant or it enters my mind a little bit dissonantly when there are these moments defending sexism or trying to complicate it. But this is really the nature of his argument that is he is pointing to the ways that many figures following the black Atlantic embody these contradictory personalities. They embody these contradictory identities. So what interests Gilroy about right or what about right interest Gilroy is that he embodies both an affirmation and a negation of the Western civilization that formed him. There are elements in within his thought that seem to embrace certain tenants of Western civilization whereas there are elements that certainly oppose it in his adamant rejection of racism, of continued systemic oppression and so on. And that puts us here into chapter six, not a story to pass on, living memory and the slave sublime. Now in so far as modernity is often characterized as a move away from tradition, as a move away from roots, as a move away from superstition, from religion and so on, what Gilroy wants to try and do is find a way to oppose modernity without harcening back to this idea of tradition. Because for him that would only be a regression. So how this manifested itself in the first half was in the way that Gilroy was criticizing these ideas about afro-centrism or criticizing black nationalism. 'Cause he sees those more as reactions to modernity rather than meaningful political challenges to it because for him the critique must come to some extent even though he has a point where he sort of disturbs this idea, but it must come from within that is, there is going to be no effective critique that actually derives from out of it because even this logic of tradition that ostensibly challenges modernity is itself part of that same project as we saw time and time again in the first half. Modernity loves to categorize. It loves to say, "These people are like this." Those people are like that. It operates through these binary frameworks profit up by certain scientific rationality that seeks to make things understandable. Much like the way that tradition would at least in the way that tradition is often offered as a solution to the problems of modernity. So obviously one of the big issues with afro-centrism or with black nationalism is that there is no one single African identity. It's not as though people in Africa just formed this homogenous mass. As I said in the last episode, people in Sierra Leone are going to be very different from people in the Democratic Republic of Congo or people in Morocco are going to be very different from people in Lassofo and so on. Now he goes so far as to say that afro-centrism is really just America-centrism or America-centrism, but packaged up in another way because it only reflects the interests of certain black Americans to have this space or to construct Africa in such a way so that it can be easily understandable, easily digestible, and provide a safe and clear alternative to the horrors because let's not forget, they are horrors that were going on to the horrors that are continually being exerted upon black bodies. Now, I don't entirely know about his argument here. I don't know how I feel about it, but I get a lot of my knowledge about the world from TikTok. But I remember listening to this one TikTok and I wish I could give, I think it was a dude, I give him credit for it, but, and I'm sure he didn't come up with this, but in any case, if someone knows who came up with this argument, let me know and I'm gonna, I'll put it, I'll credit it in the description, but for many black people, they don't actually know where their heritage is, they don't know where in Africa their ancestors came from, and so they don't have the opportunity to just particularize themselves or to trace a clear steady lineage that can then be traced to specific peoples in Africa, that was all taken from them. And so for me, it makes perfect sense that there is this looking upon us, of Africa with with exaltation or the starry-eyed exaltation as being a a delectable alternative to the situation that people find themselves in now and they they did throughout American history. Now what I would want to dissuade is someone hearing this and saying, "Oh David thinks that if people just found out what the real heritage was then that would just solve their identities for them and that would be it. I absolutely do not think that but I also have no idea about the experience of not knowing your heritage or not knowing your lineage and I have no idea what that means for someone I've never experienced that and so there's just an element of me that completely understands without knowing or without really knowing the experience understands that that seems like a totally reasonable alternative. It seems like a totally reasonable response to that situation. So what is it that Gilroy wants then? He doesn't want tradition apparently against modernity and that makes a lot of sense. He doesn't want the for like fascist institutions to be erected to give a face to things and to make sense of the world and face of so-called postmodern rootlessness and and all that. So he advocates for what he calls the kind of anti-tradition to tradition which is the recognition of common threads between people who experience oppression and they experience it in different ways of course but a recognition of a certain common experience in that way that forms new communities which might have conflicts that might have various difficulties but you know within groups and between groups and he is more interested in reading, experiencing, listening to what these groups have to say, what they have to what food they have to make, what music they make, what art they might produce. He's much more interested in that than interested in certain intellectuals saying the solutions are x, y, and z. So he does not want a kind of political didacticism, a kind of people writing essays and saying this is what must happen. Now does he really demonize these approaches? Does that make sense? I think so. But where the value is for me and what Gilroy is saying here is his attributing so much value to the everyday and to giving voices and to listening to people who experience that world and aren't filtered aren't filtered through the very reductive medium of higher education. Then in kind of a sudden shift he begins to think about the possibility of there being alliances between different different Lee marginalized groups and he considers the possibility of alliances between Jewish people and between black people, which he obviously says there isn't this magical affiliation that can be drawn between people even though they've undergone similar experiences. Now he focuses most on the Holocaust not as much on the history of the slavery of Jewish people like all throughout history not so much on that even though he makes some reference to it. Instead he chooses to focus and comparing the Holocaust to slavery which is always it's a comparison that's very difficult to make. It's a tenuous argument. It's not one that I would ever certainly not one that I would ever want to make and he's also recognizes that he's on shaky ground here in that it's very difficult to talk about these two things as though they are the same where one was the systematic erasure or attempt to erase a people off the face of the earth while the other was using a people for the benefit of others notably slave owners in the United States and this isn't at all to say one is worse than the other like there's no way to quantify that. But in relation to the broader history of slavery that both groups have experienced there are some parallels like how for so many years Jewish people did not have a land to call home very much like people who had been enslaved from Africa don't know where their home is like being taken from their homes and not having a way to call any place home. Now despite this possible affiliation or any other affiliations that can be drawn between the two groups obviously there are issues there are definitely issues when it comes to many black people siding with siding sympathizing with the current ongoing plight of the Palestinian people for example so there aren't these magical alliances that can be unearthed here rather the point that I think Gilroy is trying to get at is that the complexities of oppression cannot be simply reduced to the experience of individual groups in relation to them as though oppression just works homogenously upon all groups. Now it might seem a little bit counterintuitive for him to then try to draw these alliances as though there's as though there's anything similar but recall how he is trying to understand the possibility of mutual threads of engagement in response to ongoing oppressions mounted against people and how communities can form out of that and how that might open the door for researchers for everyday people to understand the current machinations of modern racism and so he thinks that there there's a lot of benefit to the possibility of having open dialogue between marginalized groups and how they experienced racism how they experienced discrimination to better understand the functioning of racism where does it come from how does it work do we need to have the understanding of racism be filtered through universities through intellectuals with higher education degrees probably not might some of these people have certain knowledge that could be helpful sure but a lot more can be gleaned from the real experiences of people who have been repeatedly silenced by both the oppressors and by both you know intellectuals who try to speak on behalf of everyday people now of course there are other difficulties here when it comes to especially when it comes to drawing lines of affiliation between black people and Jewish people and so James Baldwin at one point said that of course like you kind of played the Jewish people experiences it immeasurable but he says that there is a certain degree of privilege associated with people who could be white passing who can look white who can walk down the road and it not be known that they are a target for oppression now that is obviously a very tenuous argument because a lot of Jewish people don't just walk down the road without being easily marked or identified there are certain cultural icons that are associated with Jewishness that are then used against Jewish people so although their skin color might not be one way in many ways their cultural iconography icons are in themselves a part of their identity so it's wrong on the one hand to say that you know black people are experiencing discrimination in a way because their skin is somehow more real than culture in terms of Jewish people's experiences but on the other hand he certainly has a point in the way that there is no possibility to hide for black people being black means that your life is always going to be seen as that now Gilroy doesn't provide this kind of this argument or problematize this quite as much but I think it's important to always take these very difficult comparisons with a grain of salt and to really wrestle with them to I guess the goal is not just to be unproblematic but to not reproduce harms or violence is against any population and now finally in the last pages of the book he considers Tony Morrison's text beloved her book her text her book beloved as a book that really captures the traumatic aftermath of slavery and the way that intergenerational trauma works and this comes out in other texts as well like the blueest eye for example where the ongoing effects of racism and slavery are in leave indelible marks upon black bodies upon black people's minds as well and it can't just be undone overnight it can't be undone over centuries perhaps even a millennia and this is why the project of reconciliation is one that will never end or as Angela Davis says freedom is a constant struggle there is no end and I think that it is quite operational and is quite effective or would be quite effective if we understood that there might not be an end to this the possibility or the trauma that has been inflicted does that mean that nothing should be done absolutely not it means in fact that we should be trying harder we should be allocating more and more resources to make those lives as easy or as close to being better as they can't because they The issue was saying that there can be an end, would then imply that there can be like certain criteria laid out, upon which point we can say, we can wipe our hands of the issue, society at large can wipe its hands of the issue and say, we are done with this. The trauma has been dealt with, and that is it. I fear that that point might never come. And so we must always be prepared to rectify the situation as best as possible through reconciliation. Now, one of the other guiding threads between the Holocaust and between slavery was just the way that they both abide by certain logics of modernity. They were not exterior elements to modernity. In fact, they were both potentiated by a modernity. So in the case of the Holocaust, there was an entire statistical apparatus, a quantitative calculus that was put in place in order to make it run as smoothly and efficiently as possible to move millions of bodies with apparently no one really knowing about it, to move those bodies to make them, to disappear them, to liquidate them, which demanded the, I guess, a very deliberate utilization of certain logics of knowledge about stats and quantitative stuff and all that organization, that modernity kind of allowed for. And we get this really well. It's explained really well in Theodore Dornow and Max Horkheimer's, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which I've covered on this text, this text, this channel, if you wanna check that out. But they really make the case that modernity is something that has a very long history in it. It is often, it predates itself in some ways. And many of its logics aren't quite as neat or easily attributable to a certain century as having emerged in a certain century. Likewise, many of the things that it said to do away with, like barbarism, which is perhaps a regrettable term, barbarism or evil in favor of humanism or ethics. In fact, these things continued. And so they culminated into things like slavery, into things like the Holocaust, into eugenics orchestrated against people within Africa, the measuring of people's bodies in Rwanda, for example, and so on, like the example, there are innumerable, innumerable examples of the violence is patentuated by logics of modernity, which further complicates and it really speaks to the issue at hand for Gilroy in that people within modernity and modernity itself is contradictory. It is dialectical, which is one of the ways that he describes it. It contains many of the elements that ostensibly oppose it and it contains them within itself. And this might be one of the ways why it is so effective at keeping itself going. It has kind of vaccinated itself against its own enemies, where if there was something that would actually oppose modernity, it is so effective in that it has been able to inoculate itself against it by integrating some of that negative aspect, some of that thing that might oppose it, some of its antithesis within itself that keep it going. Now, I've kind of gone on a little bit of my own. Rampage here, I'll leave you off with how he leaves off his text where he says, or he concludes with, it may be easier to appreciate the utility of a response to racism that doesn't reify the concept of race and to prize the wisdom generated by developing a series of answers to the power of ethnic absolutism that doesn't try to fix ethnicity absolutely, but sees it instead as an infinite process of identity construction, which is really, I think, a good way to encapsulate the essence, if I can say that, of this text of this book. And yeah, if you listen this far, I'd love to hear your opinions about it. It's a very difficult text, one that's, it's difficult to wrestle with because he makes some very strong and controversial arguments that I'd be really curious what other people have to say about it. But yeah, if there's anything I excluded, I'd love to hear about it. You just like what I did, leave a comment, pump that algorithm, and yeah, catch you next time. Take care.