Gilroy sets out to critique cultural studies, especially "English and African-American versions [which] share a nationalistic focus that is antithetical to the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the black Atlantic"
"cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective" (15)
"an outer-national, transcultural reconceptualisation" that might have a profound impact on "the political and cultural history of black Americans and that of blacks in Europe" (17)
it will require "reevaluating [...] pan-Africanism and Black Power as hemispheric if not global phenomena" (17)
see: Garvey and Garveyism; Haitian revolution's impact on African-American political thought; Frederick Douglass's "relationship to English and Scottish radicalisms"; and W. E. B. Du Bois' "childhood interest in Bismarck [and] his investment in modelling his dress and moustache on that of Kaiser Wilhelm II"