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on January 22, 2008 at 11:10:08 pm
 

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 Remember the Zong!

 

Enter weekly resposes below.  Feel free to comment on others.  Use about 100 words.

The Black Atlantic is a dense account of how our contemporary society attempts to segregate different cultures and influences to ensure that each community has an untainted sense of identity.  I was impressed by how Paul Gilroy tried to mention each perspective in his book and also that he didn’t seem to denounce anything violently but simply propose alternatives.  It seems as if his goal in the book is to mesh all ideas about ethnicity together to convey one cohesive picture of our current society.  I also liked that language is not the only cultural medium that he dealt with; he also included some artistic facets, such as music.  Although I respected his approach to his topics of choice, I would not praise his writing style.  If global perspectives are what he is trying to alter, how can he possible reach his audience when he is so wordy?  I do respect that he seems learned and articulate, but I had a hard time paying attention to his long winded prose and found he took his merry time making a point.  It was a valuable read but not particularly an enjoyable one.       

Alyssa Dytko

 

I would also like to start by agreeing that the text is very dense and although it holds a great deal of information, at times it is hard to stay focused, simply because there is so much information.  I thought that one of the most powerful, or compelling, parts of the book is Gilroy's description of the choice of "death over slavery".  In Chapter 2, Gilroy tells of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky with her family and nine others.  As slave catchers cornered them in a  relative's house in Ohio, Margaret killed her three-year-old daughter and attempted to kill her other three children, hoping to prevent them from returning to a life of slavery.  In the eyes of history, popular history, slavery has always been pained with faded colors, not the whole truth, but just enough.  But what is just enough?  Who says what is just enough? 

Evan Gallagher

 

I believe that the quotes Gilroy placed in the beginning of the chapters and passages often conveyed his point more powerfully than the sections he had following.  Kool G Rap’s line of “my nationality is reality” made me want to pursue the song further. Nationality dictates not necessarily who a person is, but how the world perceives them.  It is easy to box people into a specific category of racial groups and associate certain characteristics with them. However, it is much harder to separate people from their physical and genealogical histories and to accept them as individuals who are free thinking.

Jackie Mitchell

The idea of the slave ship explored in Gilroy is fascinating, both as a location and a means or mode of transportation.  To think of the ship as having its own geography -- and within the boundaries of that tangible space, a set of rules, regulations, and ideas (in fact, a distinctive "microculture" and a system of "micropolitics") -- is to give it an entirely separate identity apart from the land masses where the commodity exchanges occurred.  The transatlantic shipping of slaves isn't just a matter of forcibly removing a group of human beings and placing them in a separate location, but rather an additional subjection of a new ideological and cultural "othering" before the stateside role of "slave" and everything associated with it even began!  As a separate moment in "time-space," it's worthwhile to explore the geneological ideas and connotations of the slave ship not as part of the slave journey, but as a solitary process.

Bryan D. Peach

 

 

 

J. M. W. Turner: "The Slave Ship," or "Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on."  1840, oil on canvas.

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