This largely new collection of essays explores how the history of empire has impacted the intellectual life of the Atlantic world through treatments of key figures in Atlantic theory, including Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Léopold Senghor and Édouard Glissant. Out of these critical and comparative readings emerges a portrait of Atlantic theory as a distinct orientation toward complex relations of colonial power, memory of atrocity, negotiation of the aftermath of empire, and the creativity of the oppressed living under impossible conditions of violence.