Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections

The volume stems from a research project based at the University of Padua, which brings together an international community of European, American and African scholars from various disciplines, and investigates some of the points of intersection at which the cultures along the Atlantic rim meet, clash and blend with each other. Growing out of an awareness that there is no single ‘Atlantic’ culture and that the ocean has, in fact, given way to a network of discrete but related, and inherently polymorphous, socio-political contact zones, the essays in this book engage in critical dialogue with Paul Gilroy’s *The Black Atlantic* (1993). The volume is best described as a theoretical and methodological reassessment of postcolonial, postnational and diaspora theories based on Gilroy’s notion of a Black Atlantic which is at the heart of modernity. While The Black Atlantic is still a very influential work after more than ten years since its publication, most of the essays collected in this volume engage in revisionary dialogue with it and with other seminal works which have elaborated on the notion of a transnational black culture that is not marginal to modern epistemologies but rather right at its center. In the present volume the Atlantic is a heuristic tool, a discursive space of interesting new perspectives because it is crisscrossed and traveled in ways that speak of hybridizing exchanges among the cultures that define its borders, or of modes in which the cultures of Europe, Africa and the Americas respond to one another, collide or converge. This viewpoint has the advantage of allowing the tensions between the local/national and the global/transnational to come into sharper focus. In fact, it turns the circumatlantic zone into a signifier not simply of transnationality and movement, but also of the cultural, political, and literary need to define the local, a distinctive community or an individual identity, in historical contexts of displacement or of globalizing tensions.