Paper short abstract:

The very conditions which made 'The Black Atlantic' possible as a paradigm-shifting text were precisely the conditions which were making 'race' obsolete as an effective proxy in the emancipatory process. In the absence of such an object, what is to be thought?

Paper long abstract:

I begin from the notion that Gilroy's Black Atlantic is best considered as an intervention in the cultural politics of new world black identifications. We can say that the very conditions which made "The Black Atlantic" possible as a paradigm-shifting text were also the conditions which had already made "race" obsolete as an effective proxy or rallying point in the emancipatory process. The de-naturalization of race, which was the accomplishment of the civil rights movement, has given way to a reconstruction or reconstitution of the political condition of being black - the pixelation of race, so to speak - a state of being rebuilt as/in codes. Jim Crow laws have given way to the laws of economic probability as definers of the parameters of life. Whitness too has been dismantled and reconstituted as ethnic identity - a reconstruction based around the narrative of the immigrant experience. We have seen the emergence of Ellis Island rather than the Mayflower as emblematic of the "White Atlantic" crossing. The two justices exemplify the present situation; progressivism dispossessed of its most prominent proxies. So, the questions will be: How do we come to understand/formulate the new terms through which the emancipatory project must now be continued? What are the new objects which can serve as proxies in the political process? What are the implications of this for the practice of Africanist anthropology?