Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes and Negritude - Arts & Humanities Assignment Help

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The black Atlantic as transnational web
 Since Paul Gilroy titled his 1993 book The Black Atlantic, the concept has  become highly influential, but while the term has been widely adopted, it has been challenged on a number of grounds. Scholars of modern African cultures critique Gilroy's omission of contemporary Africa as a place influenced by black culture from the Americas and offering new sources of influence and cultural exchange in turn. Others resist his Anglophone orientation, which privileges the United States and Great Britain while downplaying or ignoring the crucial roles of Spanish, French, and Portuguese influence and culture in the Americas and Africa. Most strenuously, he has been criticized for an "idealist humanism" (Chrisman 18) championing a European-inspired universality over anti-colonial Marxism or nationalism, and embracing a belief in "transnational black culture as nationalism's emancipatory opposite" (264).
Although any appropriation of Gilroy's term must contend with these critiques, I concur with Paul Jay in finding Gilroy's concept a fruitful framework for approaching the black cultural production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 The black Atlantic, in Jay's view, is a space between national borders where identity and culture evolve in syncretic patterns traceable in literature and other forms of cultural expression... .Technologies of travel and communication, crude as they were compared to our own time, converged with the three-way flow of people, knowledge, and commodities to produce early economic forms of globalization that had a profound effect on the production and transformation of personal and cultural identities.

Even South Africa—whose apartheid government took great pains to isolate its black residents from supposedly corrupting or revolutionary influences abroad—took part in this circuit of commercial and cultural exchange; its writers and artists borrowed from black Atlantic forms and tropes, and gave back its own variations with uniquely African inflections.
This was especially true of jazz, as musicians such as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, and Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim went into exile and made successful careers for themselves in the United States and Europe.

In the world of literature, to speak of a "black Atlantic" web of interconnections between South Africa and the United States is not, as one might suspect, to retrospectively impose order on random events. Rather, a group of black writers from both countries deliberately determinedly forged a network among themselves, sustained by newly accessible travel and communication technologies and carried out through a steady trade of airmail letters and postcards, books, magazines, records, paintings, photographs, and other material channels for cultural exchange. Central to this conversation on the American side was Langston Hughes, who had spent his career developing a network of writers and intellectuals of color throughout North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. Beginning in 1953 when he accepted an invitation to judge an African short story competition for Drum Magazine, he began cor responding with a group of South African writers, and thereby drew them into his black Atlantic network—putting them in touch, for example, with agents, publishers, radio show producers, and other key figures in Europe and North America.

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