CONCEPT
The Black Atlantic
Paul Gilroy’s foundational concept for the cultural formation constituted by the continuous, involuntary, and transformative circulation of people, ideas, and practices across the Atlantic world—a theory of routes over roots that reframes whose intelligence AI amplifies and whose it extracts.
The Black Atlantic, as
Paul Gilroy defined it in his 1993 book of the same name, is not a place. It is a pattern of movement—the cultural formation constituted by the continuous, involuntary, and transformative circulation of people, ideas, and creative practices across the Atlantic Ocean, from Africa to the Americas, from the Americas to Europe, and back again in every lateral direction the diaspora has traveled. Its master symbol is the ship: a vessel of horror—the Middle Passage, the hold packed with human beings classified as cargo—and simultaneously a vessel of creation, because the people inside it carried musical forms, spiritual practices, systems of knowledge, and ways of being in the world that would be recombined, under conditions of unimaginable violence, into cultural formations that no single origin could have predicted. The defining feature of Black Atlantic culture is not its origin, which is multiple, but its routes, which are continuous. This opposition—routes,