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, Gilroy complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism. He also exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture.