Crossing The Black Atlantic: Jon Sensbach, Paul Gilroy, and the Historiography of Colonial Black America

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 29 (2009): 53-62 Crossing The Black Atlantic: Jon Sensbach, Paul Gilroy, and the Historiography of Colonial Black America Tanfer Emin Tunç In his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk, African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois laid the foundation for modern racial theory through his conceptualization of double-consciousness. According to Du Bois, African American identity was based on “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (7). Despite Du Bois’ plea for “whites [to] recognize blacks as Americans, as people with an honorable, if tragic, place in the nation’s past,” and the efforts of 1970s social historians such as Eugene Genovese, John Blassingame, and Richard Dunn, who shifted scholarly focus towards marginalized and dispossessed groups including the first “New World” slaves, the black colonial experience continued to remain outside the mainstream historical profession until the early 1990s (Sensbach 394).1 In an attempt to fill the scholarly void that existed in black colonial studies, The William and Mary Quarterly, one of the leading journals of early American history and culture, devoted its April 1993 issue to the “Past and Future” of colonial American studies. According to Jon Sensbach, whose article on early African American history was featured in this pivotal issue, American scholars were experiencing “historical amnesia” with respect to Du Bois’ message that “blacks were Americans too”; as a result, in Sensbach’s opinion, their history was in dire need of recuperation (395). While Sensbach did acknowledge that 1 Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976); John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972). Tanfer Emin Tunç black historians from the first half of the twentieth century such as Luther Porter Jackson and John Hope Franklin had made attempts at “illuminating corners of our multiracial past,” in his opinion, it was only in the 1970s that the entire profession came “to the simple but dramatic realization that, contrary to previous contentions . . . colonial records contain plentiful evidence of African Americans” (396).2 As Sensbach stated, “the lessons [from this discovery] were at least twofold. First, black Americans emerged from long-buried documents as important in their own terms, as people whose lives and struggles mattered intrinsically and could point the way to a fuller understanding of the development of African American culture. Second, their stories had the potential to alter fundamentally our conception of early American history [and the roles that the first Africans assumed within the colonies]” (396). While this “discovery” ignited interest in black history, and motivated historians to examine the role that African Americans played during the colonial era, especially with respect to slavery and interracial relations, as Sensbach conveyed, “much unfinished business remained” (397). He called for historians to participate in the “cross-cultural investigation of the African presence in early America,” especially African American participation in the colonial Atlantic world (397). He also encouraged historians to engage in a “renewed focus on the master-slave relationship . . . slave resistance, accommodation, and African American cultural formation and change” (400). Sensbach also maintained that historians needed to “incorporate more aggressively the burgeoning knowledge of Africans in early America into the broader stream of historical scholarship” (404). As he noted, “if, as Du Bois would have it, we are to study the lives of black Americans—and by extension all of American history—[we must do so] carefully and honestly” (405). The year 1993 is significant in the historiography of colonial black America not only because it marks Sensbach’s “call to action,” but because it also was the year in which post-colonial theorist Paul Gilroy published his groundbreaking work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy complicates Du Bois’ definition of diasporic African identity by claiming that “nationality, ethnicity, authenticity, cultural integrity and modernity” also construct racial identities and discourses. As Gilroy illustrates, one such discourse is “the theorization of ‘black and white,’” or the processes which produce creolization, miscegenation, amalgamation, metissage, mestizaje, 2 Luther Porter Jackson, “Virginia Negro Soldiers and Seamen in the American Revolution.” The Journal of Negro History 27.3 (1942): 247-287; and John Hope Franklin, Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947). 54 Crossing The Black Atlantic hybridity, and the “mulatto.” While, as Gilroy elucidates, these terms have been used by scholars to describe race-mixing, in his opinion, they are “unsatisfactory [for they do not] consider the process of cultural mutation” (Gilroy 2). Thus Gilroy responds to the challenge posed by this intersection of race, culture, nationality and ethnicity by positing a new conceptual framework into the postcolonial lexicon: the “black Atlantic.” This theoretical contribution would not only revolutionize the way in which scholars conceive of race in the colonial world, but, alongside Sensbach’s “call to action,” would influence historians’ inquiries into early black America for what has become almost two decades. Negotiating the Waters of the Black Atlantic: Hybridity and African Diasporic Identity Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Gilroy contends that blacks experience a doubleconsciousness which is derived from the antagonism between “thinking, being, and seeing”: “being black encompasses the personal experience of white domination and the group valuation of an independent, long-standing Afrocentric consciousness” (52). Gilroy complicates the boundaries of black identity by positing that “there is a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once; a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked” (2). In Gilroy’s opinion, what creates this black Atlantic and what holds blacks together in various, but also continuously evolving subcultures, is the experience of slavery and the lack of a distinct homeland (i.e., the African diaspora). Thus, Gilroy offers the concept of the “black Atlant (...truncated)