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Chapter 1, The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity

• Paul Gilroy states that concepts of black culture have been hindered by homogeneity on one hand and oppositional thinking on the other.
• In an age after the age of the nation-state, nationalist concepts of culture are no longer appropriate.
• The black Atlantic should be understood as a complex unit of cultural analysis.
• Gilroy describes the lives of Martin Robison Delany and others who searched for black racial roots.
• But Gilroy argues that blackness can only be fully appreciated by a pluralistic conception that comprehends the various interactions where it is defined.

Chapter 2, Masters, Mistresses, Slaves and the Antinomies of Modernity

• In Gilroy's opinion, race has been omitted from discussions of modernity, but modernity would be inconceivable without the slave labor that helped create modern Western culture.
• If individuality is fragmented and decentralized, our conceptions of culture need to be...

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