The Black Atlantic, By Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy is a professor of American and English literature whose major area of research interest is the Black Atlantic diasporic culture. As a scholar of Cultural Studies and Sociology, he has done significant studies on race, racism and culture which have been greatly influential in the recent times. Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (published in 1993) marks a landmark in the study of diasporas. In The Black Atlantic, which is a critique of cultural nationalism, he applies a cultural studies approach to provide a study of African intellectual history and its cultural construction.
By positing the Atlantic as a unit of analysis, Gilroy gives a transnational perception of race as opposed to the concept of race as a metaphor for essence. He discredits the concept of pure culture as he argues for a culture is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British but all of these at once. Gilroy imagines a black Atlantic culture
Hence, he discredits the definition of the black cultures based only on their national experiences. The Black Atlantic also offers interesting insights with the study of Black music. For Gilroy, music is important not only because of its popular status, but also because it unseats language and textuality as “preeminent expressions of human consciousness” (74). Music, for the black people, is a way of expressing the pain that they had to endure; in other words it helps them vent out the unsayable. Gilroy analyses the evolution of black music as to how it resists categorization but exemplifies the hybrid model of race. Therefore, by employing the themes of diaspora and hybridity, and putting forth the concept of the Black Atlantic, Gilroy calls for a redefinition of modernity and