Black Atlantic

“Black Atlantic” is a term created by sociologist Paul Gilroy in his book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, which was published in 1993 by Verso. In this work, the author circumscribes the critical and cultural dynamic that still operates within the diasporic community formed by descendants of Africans in the Americas and the Caribbean. "Black Atlantic" is a terminology that has evolved into a concept that operates as an epistemological instrument for addressing and understanding this experience.

Throughout the 18th century, the industrial dimension taken by the slave trade inaugurated by the European colonization of America placed Africa and the Afro-descendant populations deported to the Americas, the Caribbean and the Mascarenes at the heart of practices of resistance and escape which gave birth to models emancipation thought specific to these experiences. Although being black differs in several ways depending on the country, the era, the social class or even gender and sexuality conditions, this common factor is powerful enough to nourish an abundant literature on "black condition" in well differentiated geographical areas. Particular political practices, such as marronnage, specific struggles such as the abolition of slavery or the first struggles for reproductive rights known as those for the “Freedom of Wombs” (possibility for women slaves to own their own children so that they are not considered to be the property of the master), the fight against acculturation, are among many examples of the central place occupied by Afro-descendants in emancipation movements. Those models ended up contaminating European philosophical models and have converged into other struggles with those of worker revolutions.

In this database, the journals indexed with the term "Black studies" bear witness to the fact that being black implies a relationship with the world that has been captured in a history with social, cultural and political specificities. It also implied the construction of resistance model which allowed itself new practices, particularly in the aesthetic field.