The life and writings of 19th-century Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, creator of the theory of double consciousness, demonstrate the ways that Black Atlantic political culture changed and developed post-emancipation. Gilroy uses Du Bois to explore issues of roots and rootedness in Black political culture.

Gilroy extends Du Bois’s implicit argument regarding the ambivalences of Black Atlantic cultures about modernity and their locations within it, starting with Du Bois’s interpretation of the complicity of modernity and reason with racial terror. However, the experience of racial terror is not, for Du Bois or Gilroy, sufficient to account for the richness and consistency of the struggles of Black people in the West. This raises important questions about where the self-identity of international movements arises and about their means of reproduction and transmission. Gilroy posits that the neat political structures of Euro-American modernity are insufficient to answer these questions, so one must look to Black expressive cultures rather than to formal political practices defined by nationality.

This mode of analysis is undergirded by the concept of diaspora, which requires a global perspective that challenges the idea of Black American exceptionalism in terms of Black suffering and self-emancipation.