The Black Atlantic... (1993)
Gilroy argues that nationalist and ethnic paradigms of cultural history fail to adequately and accurately encapsulate the cultural formation that has resulted from mass migrations of peoples of peoples across the Atlantic Ocean during the Atlantic slave trade and the intercultural and transnational cultural interactions that it necessitated. Gilroy names this formation the Black Atlantic, arguing that it encompasses African, American, Caribbean, and British cultures in such a way that transcends the boundaries of nation and ethnic identity and produces a new and distinctly modern cultural phenomenon. Gilroy challenges the assumptions of British and American cultural studies, both of which maintain investments in absolutist nationalist and ethnocentric approaches to cultural history and criticism, and posits an understanding of the Atlantic world as "one single, complex unit of analysis" that requires "an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective" of political, economic, and historical phenomena throughout the diaspora (15). Ultimately, Gilroy calls for a recognition of the Atlantic space as a cultural hybrid, born of intermixture and syncretism, that has defined the modern world as we know it.