As most famously explored in his book The Black Atlantic (about the crisscrossing cultural traffic connecting Africa, the Caribbean, America, and Britain), diasporic identity has nothing to do with chosen exile or migration; Gilroy stresses the crucial dimension added by the forced nature of the dispersal. As traumatic as the Jewish diaspora or the Middle Passage was, Gilroy values the end result: a "dual consciousness" that comes from being neither totally assimilated to the new culture nor able to preserve the old folkways. In turn, diasporic peoples unavoidably transform the cultures they pass through; they unsettle wherever they settle.

VV Review of Against Race

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