# From place to space: defining blackness through shared geographies  
In fact, defining black identities in Europe has spawned a wholly separate subfield which argues that shared histories and geographies create shared communities that can legitimately be understood as nations in their own right. While the most influential theoretical work is The Black Atlantic (1992) by British professor Paul Gilroy, which argues that the 'Black Atlantic' is a black community-cum-nation composed of African American, black British and anglophone black Caribbean communities that are linked through their shared border of the Atlantic Ocean and its attendant history of enslavement and resistance. ${ }^{2}$  
While a vast number of cultural and scholarly projects inspired by The Black Atlantic have followed, and continue to follow, Gilroy's project has been critiqued from a range of viewpoints, shedding some light on the different ways black identities in the diaspora are understood and defined by artists, activists and scholars (and thus worthy of an expanded discussion in this article). In The Black Atlantic: Exploring Gilroy's Legacy, British scholar Lucy Evans neatly summarizes the three main types of critic: (1) those who seek to 'broaden the borders' of the Black Atlantic to include not only more black communities in nations that border the Atlantic, but also communities found nearer to the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean (see Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio); (2) those, such as Simon Gikandi and Natasha Barnes (both located in the United States of America, although Gikandi is an Africanist born and raised in Kenya), who voice concern over Gilroy's emphasis on the Atlantic slave trade as the sole foundational event linking and defining Black Atlantic cultures and consciousness (see their special issue of the journal Research in  
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