The ruse of impurity: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and the politics of hybridity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Placing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) within a larger historical and transnational context, this essay interrogates Gilroy’s uncritical deployment of mestizaje and hybridity to theorize Black subject formation and Black cultural productions. In doing so, it shows that the exclusion of Afro-Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean has crucial consequences for the work’s conceptualization of the Black Atlantic and its broader racial politics. While Gilroy seeks to repudiate what he calls ‘the dangerous obsessions with ‘racial’ purity which are circulating inside and outside black politics,’ I argue that the obsession with hybridity that animates Gilroy’s work is no less dangerous. Contrary to Gilroy’s assumption, ‘creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity’ do not ‘exceed racial discourse,’ but are rather embedded in the history and logics of the Latin American eugenics movement. As it fails to contend with the material histories of racial mixture as a white supremacist technology, The Black Atlantic echoes some of these eugenicist logics, colluding with the anti-Black agenda that it seeks to contest. In the process, the book prefigures the racial disavowal of Gilroy's later work and leaves us with inadequate tools for understanding the workings of racial power.