Paul Gilroy

Works

• 1987There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation

  Study, grown out of his Birmingham doctorate, of racism in post-war Britain: “race” is made in politics and culture, British nationalism defines Black people as outside the nation, and Black expressive culture, from music to social movements, answers it.

• 1993The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

  Essays on Black intellectuals and music between Africa, the Americas and Europe – Douglass, Du Bois, Richard Wright, Jimi Hendrix – that take the slave ship as the image of a culture formed in movement: Black culture belongs to modernity, not to a lost origin, and its nationalist and Afrocentric versions repeat the logic of race.

Position

Gilroy is on the map as a central theorist of race, nation and diaspora in cultural studies and sociology. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987) analysed how post-war British racism worked through ideas of nation and culture rather than biology, presenting Black people as alien to an imagined homogeneous Britain, and how Black expressive culture and social movements answered it. The Black Atlantic (1993) argued that Black culture cannot be understood within national or ethnic boundaries: it took shape in the movement of people, ideas and music across the Atlantic – symbolised by the ship – and it belongs to the modernity that slavery made possible, while also criticising it. Reading Douglass’s account of his fight with the slave-breaker Covey against Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave, and Du Bois’s “double consciousness” as the figure of being at once inside and outside the West, he described a counterculture of modernity. Against European nationalism and against an Afrocentrism that seeks a pure African origin alike, he rejected “ethnic absolutism”. In Against Race (2000) he argued that the idea of race itself should be given up in favour of a planetary humanism, and in After Empire (2004; Postcolonial Melancholia in the US) he diagnosed Britain’s inability to mourn the loss of its empire. His concepts of the Black Atlantic and of postcolonial melancholia have been widely taken up; Laura Chrisman (2000) objected that the Black Atlantic centres the anglophone North Atlantic and gives too little weight to Africa and to anti-colonial nationalism.

Life & context

Paul Gilroy was born on 16 February 1956 in London; his mother, the Guyanese-born novelist and teacher Beryl Gilroy, was one of the first Black head teachers in London. He studied American studies at the University of Sussex and from 1978 belonged to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, where he co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back (1982) and completed his doctorate under Stuart Hall (1986). He taught at Goldsmiths College in London, at Yale (1999–2005), where he chaired African American studies, and at the London School of Economics, where he held the Anthony Giddens chair of social theory, before moving to King’s College London and in 2019 to University College London, where he founded the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. He received the Holberg Prize in 2019.

Further main works

• The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (with the CCCS, 1982)
• Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (1993)
• Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (2000; British edition Between Camps)
• After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004; US edition Postcolonial Melancholia, 2005)
• Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010)