model that privileges hybridity. Gilroy's theme of double consciousness involves black Atlantic striving to be both European and black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency being absolutely transformed. Rather than encapsulating the African-American tradition within national borders, Gilroy recognizes the actual significance of European and African travels of many African-American writers. To prove his point, he re-reads the works of African-American intellectuals against the background of a trans-Atlantic context. Gilroy's concept of the black Atlantic fundamentally disrupts contemporary forms of cultural nationalism and reopens the field of African-American studies by enlarging the field's interpretive framework. Gilroy offers a corrective to traditional notions of culture as rooted in a particular nation or history, suggesting instead an analytic that foregrounds movement and exchange. In an effort to disabuse scholars of cultural studies and cultural historians in the UK and the US from assuming a "pure" racial, ethnic, and class-based politics/political history, Gilroy traces two legacies of political and cultural thought that emerge through cross-pollination. Gilroy critiques New Leftists for assuming a purely nationalist identity that in fact was influenced by various black histories and modes of exchange. Gilroy's initial claim seeks to trouble the assumptive logics of a "pure" western history (canon), offering instead a way to think these histories as mutually constituted and always already entangled. Gilroy uses the transatlantic slave trade to highlight the influence of "routes" on black identity. He uses the image of a ship to represent how authentic black culture is composed of cultural exchanges since the slave trade stifled blacks' ability to connect to a homeland. He claims that there was a cultural exchange as well as a commodity exchange that defines the transatlantic slave trade and thus black culture. In addition, he discusses how black people and black cultures were written out of European countries and cultures via the effort to equate white people with institutions and cultures, which causes whiteness to be conflated with Europe as a country and black people being ignored and excluded. This causes blackness and "Europeanness" to be viewed as separate entities lacking symbiosis. Whiteness and Europeanness even went so far as to create a culture such that blackness becomes a threat to the sanctity of these European cultures. An example of how Gilroy and his concepts in The Black Atlantic directly affected a specific field of African-American studies is its role