Against Race

Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line

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by Paul Gilroy

Harvard University Press

Due/Published October 2001, 416 pages, paper

ISBN 0674006690

New in paper (F01)

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.'

"Paul Gilroy, whose Black Atlantic broke through the nation-specific context of race politics, has written a powerful, albeit minoritarian defense of the position that racial thinking--not just racism--is a key obstacle to human freedom (an aspiration, he sadly notes, that has virtually disappeared from political discourse). In his analysis of the origins and uses of racial thinking Gilroy spares from his critique neither black pride nor black separatism, let alone racism's most virulent forms, fascism and colonialism...The result is that he has offered one of the most impressive refutations of race as an anthropological concept since the publication of Ashley Montagu's Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race more than fifty years ago...Gilroy's reach is dazzling, his analysis acute and insightful, but in the end he recognizes that, lacking a political constituency for his planetary humanism, his ideas remain not a program but a utopian hope...At the end of the day, Against Race remains the brilliant jeremiad of an out-of-step intellectual whose main weapon is criticism. There are few who do it better."--Stanley Aronowitz, The Nation

 "As with his past work, Paul Gilroy continues to disturb settled ways of thinking in a fundamentally creative way. Here, he challenges us to explore the dangers of race-thinking, whether 'race' be an imposed or an insurgent identity."--Mahmood Mamdani

Contents

 Introduction

I Racial Observance, Nationalism, and Humanism1. The Crisis of "Race" and Raciology
2. Modernity and Infrahumanity
3. Identity, Belonging, and the Critique of Pure Sameness

II Fascism, Embodiment, and Revolutionary Conservatism
4. Hitler Wore Khakis: Icons, Propaganda, and Aesthetic Politics
5. "After the Love Has Gone": Biopolitics and the Decay of the Black Public Sphere
6. The Tyrannies of Unanimism

III Black to the Future
7. "All about the Benjamins": Multicultural Blackness--Corporate, Commercial, and Oppositional
8. "Race," Cosmopolitanism, and Catastrophe
9. "Third Stone from the Sun": Planetary Humanism and Strategic Universalism

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index