Paul Gilroy's most important gift to cultural criticism is the deft manner in which he finds novel ways to explicate his great concern: the interweaving of ethics and aesthetics, through the example of the African American tradition. In Darker than Blue, Gilroy brilliantly examines some basic tensions within African American culture—in particular the changing relation, over the past half-century especially, between expressions of group consciousness and atomistic individualism. Gilroy is delightfully curious and rigorously analytical, making this book a pleasure to read and to argue with. It reaffirms his position as one of the leading cultural critics of our time.
   --Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

No one writes about black music with more warmth and authority, urgency and conscience, than Paul Gilroy. With sentences jagged as bumpers, Darker than Blue focuses Gilroy's planetary attention on consumption and mobility in ways that open afresh the cases of Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson and Charlie Christian. Suddenly they seem brand-new destination points on Gilroy's ethical compass.
   --W. T. Lhamon Jr., Author of Deliberate Speed and Raising Cain

Paul Gilroy holds the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics.

Read More by Paul Gilroy:

• The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
• Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line