The modern world-system responsible for the expansion of Europe and consequent dispersal of black slave labourers throughout Europe and the new world was from its inception an international operation.…The social structures and processes erected over the productive and distributive relations of this system centred on slavery and plantation society and were reproduced in a variety of different forms across the Americas.…  Their contemporary residues, rendered more difficult to perceive by the recent migration of slave descendants into the centres of metropolitan civilization, also exhibit the tendency to transcend a narrowly national focus.  Analysis of black politics must, therefore, if it is to be adequate, move beyond the field of inquiry designated by…categories formed in the intersection of “race” and the nation state.…To put it another way, national units are not the most appropriate basis for studying this history for the African diaspora’s consciousness of itself has long been defined in and against constricting national boundaries.

--Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack

The transnational structures that brought the black Atlantic world into being have themselves developed; these structures now articulate its myriad cultural forms into a system of global communications.  This fundamental dislocation of black cultural forms is especially important in the recent history of black musics which, produced out of racial slavery, now dominate the popular cultures of the Western world.…

How are we to think critically about artistic products and aesthetic codes that, although they may be traced back to one distant location, have been somehow changed either by the passage of time or by their displacement, relocation, or dissemination through wider networks of communication and cultural exchange?

--Paul Gilroy, “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a Changing Same”