In Gilroy’s book, the culture of the Black Atlantic is characterized as a field of tensions and exchange that blurs the possible origins, essences and nationalities of a large variety of manifestations and producers (from black modernities to hip-hop): black communities from the US, UK, Western Africa or the Caribbean. Black Atlantic culture, in turn, emerges as a “counterculture of modernity”, a symptom of the black subject’s “double consciousness”: What kind of Enlightenment for black people?; What modern tradition for those seen by many enlightened eyes as the embodiment of barbarism?; How to move those emancipatory elements inherent to the modern project beyond the limits fixed by their own Eurocentrism ?

First edition: The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.