HYBRID IDENTITY AND RACE RELATIONS IN PAUL GILROY’S THE BLACK ATLANTIC: MODERNITY AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS AND DU BOIS’ THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK IN THE NEW WORLD STUDIES

Abstract

What appealed to us when we first encountered Paul Gilroy’s book was his radical critique of essentialisms about race, ethnicity and nationalism, as well as his attempt to reshape the genealogies of black political thought in ways which took its intersections with the Euro-American political thought into account. However, it was not as if nothing of this had ever been done before. An important synopsis has been provided by Gilroy’s many references to the work of the late C.L.R. James, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Eduard Glissant. The time of Gilroy’s writing of The Black Atlantic was, of course, a time of significant optimism about the prospect of solidarities across historical boundaries of race, class and nation—and it was after all written in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and, also in the years of the dismantling of the formal legal and political edifice of the apartheid regime in South Africa after 1990. But our interest here is to explore the politics of hybrid identity and race relations.