Paul Gilroy is one the most incisive thinkers of his generation...One can only hope that his voice travels far and wide.
Independent
In debates in recent years around questions of race, nation and culture, Paul Gilroy has stood out as an independent, unorthodox and (often for that very reason) exciting new voice.
Times Higher Educational Supplement
Whilst others scarcely put a toe in the water, in The Black Atlantic Gilroy goes in deep and returns with riches.
Guardian
At that moment, in US scholarship, the emphasis was still on minimising the role of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the making of capitalism. So to have the <i>Black Atlantic</i> argue so powerfully for its constitutive role in the making of modernity was really important.
- Saidiya Hartman,
It was in this book that Gilroy laid out his concept of the 'black Atlantic', the idea that black culture is essentially a hybrid, a product of centuries of exchange, slavery and movement across the Atlantic. Exploring everything from the lives and work of African American philosophers such as WEB Du Bios, to black popular music, Gilroy demonstrates that black culture is both 'local' and 'global', and cannot be constrained within any single national culture. It flows across the black Atlantic of the book's title. The influence of Gilroy's work can be felt not only in modern scholarship but even in the work of the visual artist John Akomfrah.
- David Olusoga,
<i>The Black Atlantic</i>, still his most influential work, used the writings of enslaved people and their descendants to demonstrate their centrality to the making of the modern world.
Guardian
He's the foremost intellectual in the United Kingdom: not an if, not a but, not a maybe
- Steve McQueen,