Crossing The Black Atlantic: Jon Sensbach, Paul Gilroy, and the Historiography of Colonial Black America

In his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk, African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois laid the foundation for modern racial theory through his conceptualization of double-consciousness. According to Du Bois, African American identity was based on “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” 7 . Despite Du Bois’ plea for “whites [to] recognize blacks as Americans, as people with an honorable, if tragic, place in the nation’s past,” and the efforts of 1970s social historians such as Eugene Genovese, John Blassingame, and Richard Dunn, who shifted scholarly focus towards marginalized and dispossessed groups including the first “New World” slaves, the black colonial experience continued to remain outside the mainstream historical profession until the early 1990s Sensbach 394 .