While the role of and relationship to Africa inform many debates on defining black diasporic identities, Gilroy's book and the volumes that followed in its wake have also given rise to a new discussion on defining blackness in the West. Specifically, many scholars question the tendency to focus on Middle Passage blackness (see James Smethurst's 'Internationally Known': The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, 2011, and my essay Middle Passage Blackness and Its Diasporic Discontents, 2013). These articles, among others, also criticize those who define blackness as the product of Atlantic slavery and the struggle for civil rights - thus ignoring an increasing number  
of black people in the West who were either born and raised in Africa or born in the West to two black African parents who emigrated there long after the slave trade. The debate over these definitions of blackness largely boils down to which history one is using to define blackness - or whether one is using a history at all, as is the case in some discussions on post-blackness and Afrofuturism.