Social Science Research Council

2007 DPDF Research Field:
Black Atlantic Studies

Black Atlantic Studies builds on important interdisciplinary research on Africa’s impact in Europe and the Americas and signals an emerging paradigm shift in African Diaspora studies. Inspired, but by no means defined, by Paul Gilroy’s innovative work in black cultural studies, the shift can be described as one from "roots" to "routes," recasting Africa from a "baseline" to a process, predicated on ethnic mixing and hybrid forms from the very beginning of the triangle trade. If European ports and capitals, Caribbean plantations, American shipyards and African cities become co-equal sites in an emerging trans-Atlantic field, so trade-union politics, plural societies, Pan-African movements and expressive musical and ritual hybrids have developed as hallmarks of a distinctive "counter-modernity." Black Atlantic Studies does not disavow the African Diaspora, but incorporates it within a triangulated field of "tranverse dynamics" and coextensive horizons.

As an interdisciplinary research field, Black Atlantic Studies combines analytic and interpretive methods ranging from demographic approaches to new slave trade databases to performance-centered phenomenological approaches to gender, race and memory. Ideologies of blackness and Africanity can be pursued in literary texts and historical archives, musical genres and modes of cultural production, and in a variety of political and nationalist projects. Multimedia documents that combine audiovisual clips and spatial dynamics will be encouraged, both as methods of collecting and organizing data and as innovative forms of scholarly presentation. If some projects involve intensive fieldwork on festival complexes and performance genres in bounded sites, others will track the circulation of expressive cultural forms between coasts and hinterlands, within Atlantic regions, and across socially differentiated regimes of value. The challenges of linking the localities of "place" to the translocal dimensions of Black Atlantic history and culture will establish a unifying methodological theme.