thejt33 's review for:

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness by Paul Gilroy

4.0

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This book is a lot of nothing punctuated by brilliant insights. After an intial flurry of arguments in the opening chapter, he spends a lot of time summarizing what other people thought and every now and then sprinkles in his own argument. Then at the very end he doesn’t quite wrap it all up (there’s a lot here) but hits you with the “so-what” which I interpreted as being very similar to the argument I made in my Imperium in Imperio/Haitian Revolution/Climate Change paper, namely, there is such a thing as Black politics but it’s not bound to any essentialist notion of Blackness and for that reason has utility outside of an explicit discussion about racism as we try to deal with various global crises. I think Gilroy is perhaps too concerned with taking down Hoteps. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good Hotep takedown, but a lot of the book is that. Also, I think there’s a much more interesting discussion to have about Black nationalism (and to a lesser extent Afrocentrism) if you ignore the Hoteps. I think what I took away is that Black nationalism is bad if you’re a Hotep, which I knew. I would have liked some more critical thinking about whether Black nationalism could be good, particularly if, as Gilroy says, we de-essentialize race. Gilory is very dismissive of cultural nationalism despite other thinkers having taken it up much more rigorously and I think there’s