In response to my reading of Gilroy's *The Black Atlantic* a
colleague (whose message and name I accidently zapped from my mail
list) asks how I can be so harsh after 70 pages and on what basis I
find Gilroy an elitist.
1. I actually wrote that Gilroy's project was elitist, by which I
meant his central sources were the published writings of a few
famous non-Continental Africans of the Atlantic. Understanding
the Black Atlantic through such a restricted set of documents is
indeed severely distorting.
2. Examinations of succeeding chapters and their documentation
revealed that Gilroy was not headed in any other direction in
the rest of the book.
3. Most of all, I am interested in others' (perhaps more positive
and sympathetic) readings of *The Black Atlantic*. Would anyone
like to comment?