Against Race

Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line

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by Paul Gilroy

Harvard University Press

Due/Published April 2000, 416 pages, cloth

ISBN 067400096X

After all the 'progress' made since World War II in matters pertaining to race, why are we still conspiring to divide humanity into different identity groups based on skin color? Gilroy contends that race-thinking has distorted the finest promises of modern democracy. He argues that fascism was the principal political innovation of the twentieth century--and that its power to seduce surrounds us still. Aren't we in fact using the same devices the Nazis used in their movies and advertisements when we make spectacles of our identities and differences? Gilroy examines the ways in which media and commodity culture have become preeminent in our lives in the years since the 1960s and especially in the 1980s with the rise of hip-hop and other militancies. With this trend, he contends, much that was wonderful about black culture has been sacrificed in the service of corporate interests and new forms of cultural expression tied to visual technologies. He argues that the triumph of the image spells death to politics and reduces people to mere symbols. At its heart, Against Race is a utopian project calling for the renunciation of race. Gilroy champions a new humanism, global and cosmopolitan, and he offers a new political language and a new moral vision for what was once called 'anti-racism.'

Review

The strict racial hierarchies that were at the root of many of the past century’s fiercest battles and resulted in uprecedented destruction are still very much with us today. In his brilliant analysis of the operations of power, Gilroy discusses the consolidation of “culture lines that continue to delineate and subdivide humankind.” Growing up in post-war Britain, Gilroy noted the contradictory impulses in his country of a continuing hatred for Nazism even as ultra-nationalism, with many of the ideological and stylistic trappings of fascism, was beginning to spread. Elements of fascism that continue to haunt the present, Gilroy argues, is the tendency to make a spectacle of identity which in recent years has moved beyond fringe movements and become part of the contemporary mainstream consumerist global culture, in a variety of guises. For instance, in the predominantly black hip-hop culture marginality has become routine and consumer-friendly and perhaps more troubling often reinforces stereotypical notions of black difference. Gilroy’s work synthesizes a wide range of cultural texts, from the history of fascism to the ideas of Frederick Douglass and Emmanuel Levinas. He examines how the concepts of race, belonging, and identity have evolved and how they have been appropriated by various groups and the ethical implications of these actions. The book concludes with a hopeful message that cosmopolitanism can effectively respond to essentialist theories of racial difference once we “break the restraining hold of nationalist history and its frozen past upon our political imaginations.”