Twenty years after the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), scholarship no longer simply posits the relationship between blackness and modernity as an irreconcilable problem. Though Gilroy posited The Black Atlantic as a ‘heuristic’ work, his ideas engendered debates in history, anthropology, and literary studies as well as political thought and philosophy—areas once perceived as the exclusive domain of an organic and hermetically sealed Western tradition. The Black Atlantic @ Twenty symposium (BA@20) aims to explore how Gilroy’s insistence that blackness figures as a constitutive element of modernity has effected a lasting transformation in knowledge production.

Author: Keith Miyake

Keith Miyake is a graduate of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work crosses the fields of political economic geography, environmental justice and environmental governance, critical race and ethnic studies, American studies, and Asian American studies. His dissertation examined the institutionalization of environmental and racial knowledges within the contemporary capitalist state. View all posts by Keith Miyake