The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

Paul Gilroy, born in 1956 of Guyanese and British ancestry, is a Black British scholar of sociology and cultural studies. He received his bachelor’s degree at the University of Sussex, and he completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham. In addition, he has received numerous honorary doctorates and awards for his work. Gilroy has contributed to many academic disciplines with his theories on race, racism, and racialized being in the modern world, the concept of diaspora, and aesthetic practices among the African diaspora. He has played a key role in writing Black Britons into the historical, social, cultural, and political fabric of Great Britain. 

Gilroy is the author and co-author of numerous books, including The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, and Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture. Gilroy is also the Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College, London. He has taught at universities in Great Britain and the United States; at Yale University, he was the chair of the Department of African American Studies.