Retrieving the Human

Reading Paul Gilroy

Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Jay Garcia

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438452777
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the more than twenty years since the publication of his book The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has become a leading Afro-European intellectual whose work in the cultural studies of race has influenced a number of fields and made the study of black Atlantic literatures and cultures an enduring part of the humanities. The essays in this collection examine the full trajectory of Gilroy's work, looking beyond The Black Atlantic to consider also his work in the intervening years, focusing in particular on his investigations of contemporary black life in the United States, histories of human rights, and the politics of memory and empire in contemporary Britain. With an essay by Gilroy himself extending his longstanding examination of fascism, racial thinking, and European philosophical thought, in addition to an interview with Gilroy, this volume features Gilroy's own words alongside other scholars' alternative conceptualizations and critical rereadings of his works.

Part I

Theories in Motion

Roots and Routes

1

Traditions, Genealogies, and Influences

Gilroy’s Intellectual Roots and Routes

RICHARD H. KING

Paul Gilroy first came to intellectual prominence with the publication of The Black Atlantic (1993). Though always working against the grain of received opinion, Gilroy’s work has shown a general consistency of theme and concern, from its initial focus on British society and culture in ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’ (1987) and Small Acts (1993) to a much broader focus in The Black Atlantic (1993), a visionary exploration of the cultural connections linking the peoples of the African diaspora. With Between Camps (2000), Gilroy advocated a “planetary humanism” and “cosmopolitanism” to counter what he saw as a resurgence of racism and a new sort of generic fascism, ostensibly shorn of its disreputable historical associations. After Empire (2004) narrowed the focus to the cultural implications of the post-imperial status of Britain, while his most recent book, Darker than Blue (2010), moves back out to the black Atlantic to consider the crisscrossing claims of commercialism, cosmopolitanism, and citizenship within a broader cultural context.1

Yet the continuities in Gilroy’s work are definitely there. A suspicion of the viability or validity of nation, ethnicity, and race has been present from the beginning, as has his opposition to the idea that cultural configurations map neatly onto the boundaries of contemporary nation-states. Gilroy has always been very adept at using high theory to illuminate popular culture. In particular, he has focused on black popular music, roughly post-1960s vintage, as the main evidence for the existence of a shared culture among people of African descent in the Atlantic world. Finally, Gilroy’s predominant emphasis has fallen upon the workings of expressive culture rather than upon politics or economics, even though he has increasingly felt compelled to address the political implications and occasionally the economics of the cultural phenomena that he is exploring.

Since Gilroy’s work is so intellectually ambitious, I focus here on four particular clusters of problems in his intellectual biography. The first involves the British sources of Gilroy’s thought, in particular his relationship to cultural Marxism via the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Second, I want to explore the issues raised by his claim that the black Atlantic is a “counterculture of modernity,” particularly the idea of modernity as the working out of “racialized reason and terror” as experienced by members of the African diaspora (and the Jewish diaspora). Then, I analyze his treatment of race and racism, as reflected in the relationship between politics and culture, citizenship and cosmopolitanism, in Between Camps and much of his later work. Finally, though Gilroy has rightfully assumed a place beside W. E. B. Du Bois as a canonical figure in the black Atlantic intellectual tradition, an unresolved tension in his thought is the relationship between culture and politics. As Lucy Evans among others has observed, Gilroy has shown a “troubling tendency to privilege culture over politics.”2

The Anxiety of Influence

It is easy to minimize the impact of British cultural Marxism, particularly in the United States, on the 1960s and 1970s. Yet figures such as literary critics Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, historian E. P. Thompson, and sociologist Stuart Hall all exerted a powerful influence on trans-Atlantic debates about mass and popular culture, the making of “working-class culture” and “youth culture,” as well as the uses of high culture to define the nature of the nation.3 The debate about mass, popular, and high culture emerged among New York intellectuals in the late 1930s, as it did among such British intellectuals as George Orwell, but postwar studies such as Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961) rekindled and reoriented the debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Labour/left-wing credentials were more prominent among the British cultural Marxists, while those who spearheaded the debate in America, such as Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg, had a firmer commitment to avant-garde and high modernist artistic expression than their British counterparts. The British cultural critics tended to focus on culture rather than economics but were less hostile to popular culture and less theoretically oriented than the thinkers of the Frankfurt School in exile in America.4

Though Hoggart, Williams, Thompson, and Hall were far from agreement on everything, they did react against orthodox Marxism’s economic emphasis and devoted most of their attention to forms of working-class culture and consciousness. First, for example, at the end of his preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Thompson apologized for not having dealt with the Scottish and Welsh working classes. Since “class is a cultural as much as an economic formation,” he wrote, “I have been cautious as to generalising beyond English experience.”5 Second, a distinctly voluntarist bias marked their brand of Marxism. As Thompson emphasized in his attack on the French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, in “The Poverty of Theory” (1978), the proper emphasis of a history of the working class should fall upon agency, not structure; upon political action not impersonal social forces. Finally, this British tradition reversed the Marxist international orientation by underlining the national setting of the working classes. Thus, the British working class, as depicted in the work of these cultural Marxists, emerged as remarkably homogeneous in religious, racial, ethnic, and national terms, as witness Thompson’s exclusion of the Scotch and Welsh from his study. Put another way, there seemed to be a genuinely organic British/ English working-class culture to match a vital working-class political tradition.6

It was in the context of the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s that the Birmingham Centre, under the directorship of Anglo-Jamaican Stuart Hall since 1968, shifted its attention from the white English working class to a new, ethnically diverse working class increasingly made up of immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. It was under the influence of Hall, who was in the process of reformulating Marxism to accommodate race and ethnicity as “articulations” of, but still distinct from, class formations, that Paul Gilroy, who earned his PhD at Birmingham, began to write.7

What Gilroy came to challenge specifically was Raymond Williams’s notion of British working-class culture. Gilroy’s startling claim was that thinkers on the cultural left such as Williams sounded eerily similar to the new white racism and “ethnic absolutism” that had gathered momentum since the late 1960s. (This white particularism was often seen to have emerged in the wake of Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968.) Williams, for instance, contrasted a working class grounded in “actual and sustained relationships” with “merely formal” or “legal” forms of national identity.8 Thus Williams seemed to suggest that the new immigrants could hardly be considered authentic members of the working class, since they did not yet possess “a whole way of life” grounded in the “immediacy of lived experience.”9 In light of such evocations of cultural consensus, what Gilroy most feared was, as Baker et al. put it, the “naturalization of race, ethnicity and nation.”10 Since then, Gilroy has fought against ideas of race and culture grounded in biology and/or rigidly conceived cultural differences. Overall, whether race or ethnicity was emphasized, the upshot was all too often the same—a commitment to group purity and the politics of exclusion.

By now, a consensus seems to exist that Gilroy’s critique of the ontology of cultural experience advanced by Williams hit on something. Williams had his own problems with working out the relationship between his working-class Welsh identity and the national identity, particularly at Cambridge where he studied and later taught.11 It was as though there was no room for another new group to be accommodated within the national identity. Certainly, the rural, culturally Christian and white origins of the British working-class experience were different from the new immigrant population, who were themselves concentrated in the urban areas, particularly London. Nor with the honorable exception of George Orwell did any of the Marxistoriented cultural critics really deal with the relationship of the British working class to British imperialism or colonialism. This is not to say that they were champions of Imperial Britain, and in fact Thompson’s father had been an advocate of Indian independence. But it was difficult to find them making any economic or cultural connections between the working class at home and the colonial workforces that generated the productive capacity of British imperialism.12

On the other hand, Gilroy retained much from his precursors as well. Besides the cultural materialism, he also shared their emphasis upon the importance of culture; and he, like them, was drawn particularly to its popular forms of expression. Similarly Thompson’s characterization of class as something that emerged in and through political activity was echoed in Gilroy’s idea that race was defined by its role in political struggle rather than as a biological or cultural entity. And, like Thompson, the centrality of agency, particularly in cultural and social action, was important to his thought. Finally, Gilroy objected to the view, then and now, that black British culture was one in which “[r]acial subordination [was] the sole factor shaping the choices and actions of Britain’s black settlers and their children.”13

Clearly, Gilroy’s overall relationship to Marxism has been a complex one right from the start. While believing that capitalism by nature created conflict between labor and capital, Gilroy contended that it was race that “enable[d] political action” based on the “experience of subordination as well as exploitation” in Britain.14 Nor did he believe in what he later referred to in The Black Atlantic as “the assumptions of occidental progress which Marxism shared,”15 though he did briefly identify a utopian, visionary, and redemptive promise in black Atlantic culture.16 Moreover, Gilroy has always rejected Marxism’s “productivism,” the idea that the existential and even ontological foundations of the self and history are located in the activity of labor. The experience of slavery, which defined the slave merely as animal laborans and was the raison d’être of the black Atlantic, had discredited that particular anthropological conception of human beings once and for all.17 Thus, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, we might say that the work of creativity and culture, not “the labor metaphysic,” stands at the heart of Gilroy’s philosophical anthropology.18

More generally, though mentioned only in passing in The Black Atlantic, Gilroy also jettisoned the orthodox Marxist (and Weberian) notion of the incompatibility of slavery and capitalism. Up to a certain historical point, the latter clearly depended not only on what Max Weber referred to as “formally free labor,” but also on slave labor. Gilroy rejected the Marxist-derived notion that slavery was “pre-modern residue,”19 as historians of slavery in the 1960s and 1970s such as Eugene Genovese claimed. Of course, black Marxists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Oliver O. Cox had already linked the origins of modern capitalism with racial slavery, while Stuart Hall, as we have seen, was developing the idea of “articulation” to conceptualize the links b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Theories in Motion: Roots and Routes
• Part II. Retrieving the Human: Two Scholars in Dialogue
• Part III. Debating the Human in Everyday Spaces
• Afterword. “The Right to Address the Future”: Utopian Thinking and Paul Gilroy
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover