Chapter 1, The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity Summary and Analysis

Chapter 1 lays the conceptual background for the rest of the book. Its focus is on the racial consciousness of Anglo-Africans, the black peoples brought mostly through slavery around the Anglo-American colonies and nations around the Atlantic Ocean. Paul Gilroy believes that modern racial and ethnic concepts are too homogeneous and oppositional, meaning that these social concepts tend to obscure and confuse that true racial realities that do not neatly fit into categories. We should no longer look at the history of race and ethnicity in the West as one of 'white' versus 'black' but focus instead on the conjunction of the two, the boundary, the bilingual and bifocal cultural forms. Ethnic absolutism has an allure that has captured both blacks and whites in cultural studies...