Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is,Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism. Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison. In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.

非洲中心主义。欧洲中心主义。加勒比研究。英国研究。对于蜷缩在自己阵营中的文化民族主义势力来说，这个大胆的钩子发出了解放的呼声。保罗-吉尔罗伊告诉我们，有一种文化不是专门的非洲文化、美国文化、加勒比文化或英国文化，而是同时拥有这些文化，一种黑人大西洋文化，其主题和技术超越了种族和国籍，产生了一些新的东西，而且直到现在还没有被注意到。黑人大西洋》挑战了文化研究的实践和假设，也使我们对现代主义的理解变得复杂和丰富。关于后现代主义的辩论给历史时期化问题蒙上了一层不合时宜的阴影。吉尔罗伊抨击了这一趋势，认为美洲和欧洲的黑人文化的发展是一种历史经验，可以被称为现代，因为有一些明确而具体的原因。对黑格尔来说，主人和奴隶的辩证关系是现代性的组成部分，吉尔罗伊考虑了这个想法对跨大西洋文化的影响。为了寻找一种反映这种文化的政治和历史的诗学，他带领我们进行了一次跨大西洋的音乐之旅，几个世纪以来，从十九世纪的Jubilee Singers到Jimi Hendrix再到Rap，这些音乐将种族信息和情感传递到世界各地。他还探讨了这种国际主义在黑人写作中的体现，从杜波依斯的 "双重意识 "到理查德-赖特的 "双重视野"，再到托尼-莫里森引人注目的声音。在最后的巡礼中，吉尔罗伊揭露了黑人和犹太人散居地概念的共同轮廓，以便为弥合当代文化中黑人和犹太人之间的裂痕建立理论基础，并进一步界定他书中的中心主题：黑人在大西洋黑人的共同文化中塑造了一种民族主义，如果不是一个国家的话。