Gilroy, Paul (1956—)
Black British Cultural Studies scholar renowned for his work on the politics of race in Britain and America. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies working under the direction of Hall, Stuart, and has held jobs in both the UK and the US. His first major book, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987) grew out of his PhD. He argued that black people growing up in Britain, as he did, are British and in being so have redefined the meaning of that word. Putting it simply and bluntly, British culture would not be what it is in the absence of black immigrants and imported black culture, e.g. black musical forms such as jazz, ska, and rock. Thus one has to look at the various forms of nationalism that exist (as exemplified, say, in the different political party platforms operative at a particular moment in history) rather than the idea of the nation itself in order to understand racism. In effect, he argued it is more useful to think about the complexities of being both black and British than it is to try to delineate the ways by which one can only be either black or British. In doing so he rejects the absolutist position that correlates race and racism to skin colour alone. He prefers to see the connection in more dynamic and dialectical terms, as arising from the intersection of multiple historical and political currents. Gilroy’s interest in the ‘doubleness’ of being both black and British (or black and American) is explored in more detail and given a more rigorous conceptual form in his subsequent and undoubtedly most important book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Organized around the image of ships sailing across the Atlantic (it is in this regard an early contribution to what would become known as mobility studies), The Black Atlantic is an exercise in counter-history, excavating the obscured or occluded contributions of black people to modernity. Following the work of James, C. L. R. (among others), Gilroy emphasizes that European modernity could not have existed without the labour of black slaves---it was their sweat in the cane fields and cotton fields of America that created the wealth that underpinned Europe’s rise as a power. Drawing on Du Bois, W. E. B.’s concept of double-consciousness---the difficulty of being simultaneously inside a culture and excluded from it---Gilroy asks whether or not the mobility of black people across the Atlantic affects how one should understand this concept and wonders whether it is ever going to be possible to reconcile the two disjoined consciousnesses. Gilroy also argues against the idea that cultural formations can be understood as being congruent with national borders---cultures of domination and liberation are both, he argues, transnational, particularly so in the case of black people, forced to move from one continent to another. Gilroy’s subsequent books have extended this analysis by delving deeper into the affective and political economies of this structural in-betweenness, focusing particularly on what Gilroy diagnoses as melancholia in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004) and Postcolonial Melancholia (2005). He argues that Britain has never been able to come to terms with the loss of its empire following World War II, nor can it reconcile its ambivalence towards the violence that underpinned the acquisition and maintenance of its empire. On the one hand, as a nation it is obviously deeply embarrassed (if not ashamed) of the amply documented massacres and cruelties committed in the name of empire---Mike Davis provides a particularly horrifying picture of British callousness in his account of the Bengal famines in his Late Victorian Holocausts (2002)---but it is also unashamedly proud of it too. As such, it is impossible, Gilroy argues, for Britain to give up its false image of itself as a great power and confront the truth of its decline. He was awarded the 2019 Holberg Prize. Further Reading: P. Williams Paul Gilroy (2012).