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Chapter One establishes the book's theoretical and methodological context by siting it within recent developments in postcolonial studies, reception studies, and theories of tragedy. Taking as its methodological parameters the work of Gilroy and Bernal on the Black Atlantic and Black Athena, it introduces the construct of the ‘Black Aegean’ as the zone of cultural transmission among Africa, Ancient Greece, and contemporary Europe. Other issues in postcolonial studies, such as the nature of canonical counter-discourse, and the possible identity of the United States as a postcolonial society, are analysed. The chapter also enters into dialogue with recent writers on classical reception, and develops further the theory of classical reception by positing a version of reception that has learnt from deconstruction and so highlights its self-consciousness and recursivity. The final section of the chapter discusses theories of tragedy, supplementing Steiner with Soyinka.

The authors argue, that a focus on Black intellectualism dissolves binary oppositions—as Paul Gilroy, W.E.B. DuBois, and others have attempted to do in their explorations of “double consciousness” and other (intellectual) ways in which people of African descent have proactively negotiated their heritage, past, and present in the face of external conditions of hardship and change. Studies on Black Intellectualism create a space for understanding self-determined, conscious actions and creative choices, without ignoring historical and systemic obstacles of inequality, discrimination, violence, enslavement, misfortune or other circumstances that may victimize. New literature focusing on the intellectualism of the Black Atlantic and beyond can now go further to make more connections across time and space and to show how these inventive connections and collaborations are an inherent part of the process of facing uncertainty, movement and change By moving beyond traditional and formerly limiting geographical, historical, and conceptual categories of the “Black Atlantic,” we expand and liberate this discourse to make possible the study of how movement to “anywhere but here” helped individuals to arrive at where they needed to be spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally.

This chapter discusses how African-American authors participated in the probabilistic revolution. While early black Atlantic writers largely adhered to the providential outlook of Christian abolitionism, some later writers—most notably Douglass and the black intellectual James McCune Smith—deployed emerging sciences of chance to fight against slavery and racism. Douglass in his autobiographies and journalism moved away from providential rhetoric toward more empirical, quantitative antislavery arguments, aligning him with statistical sociology (Adolphe Quetelet), liberalism (John Stuart Mill), and pragmatism (the early Du Bois and, more surprisingly, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). This chapter ends with a discussion of how pragmatism as traditionally conceived has failed to grapple sufficiently with the challenge of racism.

Responding to the way the Southern parts of the Atlantic have historically been obscured in conceptions of the Atlantic world and through the critical oceanic studies concepts of fluidity, solvency, and drift, this chapter serves as a critical introduction to the South Atlantic. Beginning with a rereading of the Atlantic Charter, it poses the South Atlantic both as a material geographic region (something along the lines of a South Atlantic Rim) and as a set of largely unfulfilled visions—including those of anti-imperial solidarity and resistance generated through imaginative and political engagement from different parts of the Global South with the Atlantic world. It also reflects on the conditions under which something called the “Global South Atlantic” could come into being and the modes of historical, cultural, and literary comparison by which a multilingual and multinational region might be grasped.

This chapter reminds us that subjective judgements and personal knowledge of the Atlantic World, whether recorded in memoir, expressed in literature and other creative arts, or channelled into a particular brand of scholarship, have been important elements in generating understandings of the South’s relationship to places around the Atlantic. In offering a bold, multi-layered, temporally expansive interdisciplinary essay that circumnavigates the Atlantic World several times, Cartwright demonstrates how experiences, real and imagined, of the American South, of the Atlantic World, and of the connections between them, have always varied according to precisely whose perspective is being examined, privileged, or obscured.

This book explores Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham’s contributions to the page and screen to shed new light on their intellectual interventions as Black women artists in midcentury transatlantic culture. Cinematic and literary spaces were for Baker and Dunham sites of mediation and marginalization in which they frequently shared authorship with white men. Yet they are also rare visual and textual records of Black women dancers’ midcentury artistry and authorship. On the page, they voiced the challenges of navigating interwar global spaces as young Black women, and their narratives shed vital light on the origins and purpose of their art. On the screen, they claimed the right to stardom while at the same time retaining some artistic autonomy and even shaping their films’ aesthetics.

This chapter focuses on the rise and tragic fall of the Ghanaian-born Garveyite Princess Laura Kofey and her political, economic, and cultural activities on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in interwar Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. The chapter reveals the special place that the American South and its African American population occupied in Kofey’s plans for greater commercial ties between Africans and African Americans and, ultimately, for repatriation. By noting the regional, gender, class, religious, and racial dimensions of Kofey’s transatlantic experiences, the chapter adds nuance to our appreciation of how the Black Atlantic functioned and how diasporic identities were constructed.

This chapter discusses the geopolitical positionings of United States, Brazil, and France in relation to race/colonial issues. The United States and France are known as First World or Global North countries while. Brazil is considered an emerging “second tier” power from the Global South. With these diverse positionings, the three nations share similar historical substratum—their colonizing relation to the indigenous peoples as part of the Red Atlantic; their common shaping by the triangular slave trade as part of the Black Atlantic; and their shared pattern of racial hegemony in the “White Atlantic.” As such, the three represent distinct formations within intercolonial oceanic configurations, as they partake of a multiculturality that was “forged in the cauldron of the colonial process.”

This introductory chapter explores the key themes of Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, and introduces the structure of the work, the essays in question, and contemporary debates to which the collection is responding. Drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy, the authors argue that the essays in the volume demonstrate the productive results that issue from re-examining historical relationships between modern classicism and the construction of race and racial hierarchies, as well as the making and remaking of various forms of classicism by intellectuals, writers, and artists circulating in the diasporic world of the Black Atlantic. These explorations provide grounds for challenging racialized visions of the classics as a white European heritage that have re-emerged in contemporary politics, and for reimagining the role of classical humanism in anti-racist struggles.

This chapter turns to Canada – long an important migration destination from the Caribbean–as an overlooked site of postwar literary production. Employing the example of the Barbadian-born Austin Clarke, an author firmly canonized and even celebrated in Canada, it explores the generative links Clarke’s own career exemplifies between the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, and Britain–a multifaceted transnationalism in conversation with his Windrush peers but equally influenced by the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and racial politics in Canada. Employing theories of the Black Atlantic and diaspora, the chapter holds Clarke up as an exemplar of literary and political processes that resist containment within an anti-colonial national frame by gesturing outwards, toward a differentially rooted (and routed), insistently global politics of blackness.

This chapter focuses on the story of Loyalist James Moncrief and his slaves as they fled the South into the Caribbean in the wake of British defeat in the American Revolution. Highlighting the personal dilemmas faced by southern Loyalists and their slaves in the midst of a transatlantic power struggle, it shows how migration and settlement, in many ways the key tropes of Atlantic-particularly Black Atlantic-Studies, were experienced differently in different locales by different peoples in the Atlantic World, while still managing to affirm the value of viewing the region holistically as a distinctive zone of contact.

This chapter on the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Levi Jenkins Coppin describes how ideas of race and racial, as well as regional, identity were generated and circulated around the Atlantic World at the turn of the twentieth century. It uses the writings and photographs of Coppin, a southerner who became the first AME Bishop of Cape Town in South Africa, to demonstrate how conceptions of the Atlantic World and its constituent parts, including the American South, and its peoples were at some level created by acts of imagination as well as symbolic constructs enacted through textual and visual representations and misrepresentations, as well as through commercial, demographic, military, and legal encounters and exchanges. It also uses Coppin’s attempts to work through notions of diasporic black identities to complicate how we think about the Black Atlantic and its manifestations in Africa and the United States.US South

This chapter introduces the book. It argues that music making in interwar Paris was a form of cultural politics. It contextualizes the subject with a short overview of French colonial history, describes the groups involved in making Afro-diasporic music in interwar Paris, analyzes how their music making was political, and considers what it means to feel “at home” through music. It argues that the cultural politics of Black music making in Paris included challenging prevailing ideas about race and racial hierarchies. It shows how various groups of Africans, Antilleans, and African Americans in interwar Paris were brought together by music while their music making also revealed differences and factions among Black networks and communities both in Paris and globally.

The introduction begins by addressing the omission of food preparation and casual conversation from analyses of Black Atlantic religions. The author contends that the transnational expansion of these traditions compels scholars to look beyond valorized genres of ritual action to see the importance of cooking for gods and ancestors and talking about them. In fact, these very acts develop the faculties, sentiments, and expertise indispensable for these religions’ social viability and demographic spread. Placing Lucumí (popularly called Santería) within the historical context of the transatlantic slave trade as the worship of Yorùbá spirits called orishas, the introduction turns to the Chicago-based religious community called Ilé Laroye, led for almost thirty years by African American Lucumí diviner and praise singer, Spiritist medium, and Palo Monte initiate Ashabi Mosley. It identifies the kitchen of Ilé Laroye as the micro-site of the book’s “sensuous ethnography” and explains the research methods employed in the service of its comparative methodological approach. After considering the ethics of the ethnographic enterprise, the affect-laden circumstances of data collection, and the book’s reliance on field notes and vignettes, the author reflects on her positionality with regard to race/ethnicity, gender, and class. A chapter overview and note on transcription follow.

This essay examines the contradiction of classics for all, evident in but not exclusive to the not-for-profit enterprise by the same name (Classics for All) that seeks to promote the Greek and Latin classics in schools across the United Kingdom. Embodying a form like the classics can mean not slavish mastery, but an improvisational artistry that alters the form so that it bends to one’s will. Issues of access, however, problematize the simple assertion of classics for all. The realities that necessitated the Black Lives Matter movement, in contrast to a more hopeful, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Du Boisan notion of the removal of the Veil of segregation, run counter to classics for all. There have been sufficient signs within the twenty-first century of the rejection of a broad, democratic, multicultural movement toward American wholeness symbolized in the election of President Barack Hussein Obama. Nevertheless, economic disparities that separate black and white in the United States remain, and the post-Obama era evidences significant backlash across the “Black Atlantic” world. The classics is caught up in this backlash.