Black Atlantic 2023 compilation
I made this song compilation in 2023 of tracks mostly new to my that I was enjoying then, drawn from West Africa, UK, the Caribbean, and one from the US.
Named in honor of the term coined in 1983 by Yale professor Robert Thompson and promulgated in title of landmark 1993 book by Paul Gilroy. Also, of my own Black Atlantic ancestry, heritage, and life experiences.
"The term "Black Atlantic" was first used by Robert Farris Thompson (Yale) in his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy and was the subject of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, published in 1993.
"Gilroy argued that the Atlantic world has been deeply shaped by slavery and the slave trade. Between 1492 and 1820 about two-thirds of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were African, and this violently brutal migration played a key role in the development of a black consciousness in the Americas and Europe. Yet Gilroy argues that this black consciousness is ambivalent: it does not just reject white culture, but actively engages with it. Essentially it found a way of re-crossing the Atlantic creatively and, as a result, has had a central role in the formation of modernism."