Gilroy was also co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain (1982), a path-breaking, collectively produced volume published under the imprint of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, where he was a doctoral student working with the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall.

During that period, he was associated with the weekly listings magazine City Limits (where he was a contributing editor between 1982 and 1984) and The Wire (where he had a regular column from 1988 to 1991).

Gilroy's 1993 book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness marks a turning point in the study of diasporas.

[26] 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.

Gilroy critiques New Leftists for assuming a purely nationalist identity that in fact was influenced by various black histories and modes of exchange.

[30] This argument is expanded upon in one of his previous co-authored books, The Empire Strikes Back (1983), which was supported by the (now closed) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of the University of Birmingham in the UK.

The influence of the study is generally accepted to be profound, though academics continue to debate in exactly what form its greatest significance may lie.

[31] The theoretical use of the ocean as a liminal space alternative to the authority of nation-states has been highly generative in diasporic studies, in spite of Gilroy's own desire to avoid such conflations.

[32] The image of water and migration has been taken up as well by later scholars of the black diaspora, including Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Stephanie E. Smallwood, who expand Gilroy's theorizations by engaging questions of queerness, transnationality, and the middle passage.

Locating Canada in Borden's 'Tightrope Time,' or Nationalizing Gilroy's The Black Atlantic" (1996, Canadian Ethnic Studies 28.3).

[36] Additionally, scholar Tsiti Ella Jaji discusses Gilroy and his conceptualization of the black Atlantic as the "inspiration and provocation" for her 2014 book Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity.

[37] While finding Gilroy's discussion of music in the black diaspora compelling and inspiring, Jaji has two main points of contention that provoked her to critique and to dissect his theories.

"[38] Further, Gilroy does not include female voices in his discussion of music and trans-Atlantic black cultural exchange, which Jaji argues contributes to a gendered understanding of pan-Africanism that is largely male-dominated.

[27] This quote about the liberatory potential of art as a transatlantic cultural product exemplifies Gilroy's argument that for black people, forms of culture take on a heightened meaning in light of black persons being excluded from representation in the traditional political apparatus.