Against the grain of much contemporary thought that embraces ethnocentrism, Paul Gilroy has issued a stirring challenge to recognize the modern world as a cultural hybrid. The Black Atlantic is a wonderful chapter in the global intellectual history of the next century... Drawing on work in many disciplines, Gilroy provides a vivid alternative to competing positions in the current culture wars. He briefly outlines an intellectual rapprochement between Zionism and black nationalism, for example, and some of his most polemical ...
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Against the grain of much contemporary thought that embraces ethnocentrism, Paul Gilroy has issued a stirring challenge to recognize the modern world as a cultural hybrid. The Black Atlantic is a wonderful chapter in the global intellectual history of the next century... Drawing on work in many disciplines, Gilroy provides a vivid alternative to competing positions in the current culture wars. He briefly outlines an intellectual rapprochement between Zionism and black nationalism, for example, and some of his most polemical remarks are reserved for those Afrocentrists who proclaim a linear inheritance from Africa but wish to ignore the intervening cultural hybridization produced by slavery... Present anxiety about the supposed disuniting and fraying of America's national culture, or about its forced concentration into an assimilating mold, might be significantly allayed if readers would pay serious attention to the invigorating claims of The Black Atlantic.
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