Black artists and intellectuals continue to grapple with Enlightenment style elitism by adopting and inserting themselves within the tropes of the mainstream, thereby subverting and stretching definitions of existence. Glover’s Danny is a quintessential hipster character of this millennial era: a la Hannah in Girls or Vincent Chase in Entourage. Each episode of Atlanta, much like Girls and Entourage, is framed as a day in the life tale through the visage of the main character. The main character is centered and the characters develop and respond in relation to this central flawed character. Danny isn’t quite a hipster. He’s “one of them hipster niggas,” as his waitress notes when he orders a PBR. Girls was “myopically Eurocentric” except in the episode where Glover, a real life hipster nigga, was featured .
Gilroy seems to state that while Black intellectuals and artists revel in a collective history and take their oppressors to task, there is a coexisting “myopically Erocentric” modernity (p 45). This Eurocentric modernity, with foundations in subordination of non-white culture and history, is constantly under threat of being dismantled if the academy acknowledges the salience of non-White stories.
It took me a moment to understand the distinction between post-Enlightenmen, modernism, and postmodernism. But the distinction became clear. “Oh, like Basquiat!” I exclaimed with sudden recognition. I then considered hip-hop as a deeply referential literary artform, like Jay quoting Hamlet in his autobiographical song, “Marcy Me”.
Black intellectuals relate to contemporary ideologies like tailors scrutinizing fabrics. They assess and criticize and manipulate, and hew rough fibers into finely fitted fair. Gilroy describes how “western ideologies flowed into social movements of an anti-colonial and decidedly anti-capitalist type” (44). Glover is deeply aware of western ideologies and interweaves them into his work.