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ralowe 's review for:
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
by Paul Gilroy
i went to a dark place reading this. it always happens when i enter this strain of thought. it is helpful to think of this book as being in conversation with fred moten's *in the break* and saidiya hartman's *scenes of subjection.* thinking back, my impression is that moten is less pessimistic about the situation caused by the commodity than paul gilroy when thinking here about richard wright. at this moment i still kind of feel that frank wilderson takes gilroy's precedent too far, and i don't know if it's the lacan thing. wilderson gets a little totalizing and abstract with the implications of the supposed impossibility of black agency. what i kind of think is wilderson's notion of the incapacity for agency or consent to be in an attribute of blackness is rather gilroy's attempt to suggest that racial distinction and the color line does not exist at all; i mean that's what happens by the time he does *against race.* but all this requires a lot of assumptions of gilroy's influence on wilderson. what is a clear affinity between moten and gilroy is their attention to nationalism, gilroy being incredibly vigilant to any kind of nationalist encroachment, going hard with critiques of africentricity, whereas moten appears somewhat detached from any sort of categorization of black aesthetic activity within the mode of the nation. i'm wondering if this is the earliest instance of the meditation upon what moten would go on to describe as the notion of the impossibility of black maternity in toni morrison's adaptation of the case of margaret garner.