Multiculture, double consciousness and the

war on terror
PAUL GILROY
ABSTRACT Gilroy explores the recent assertion that multiculturalism has failed
and situates that pronouncement in the different historical and political settings
provided by contemporary Britain and the United States. The positions on this
problem that have been articulated on the two sides of the North Atlantic are
contrasted. He then argues that the inability to process the loss of Britains empire
and the shame that has attended the exposure of Britains colonial crimes remain
active within the countrys embattled politics of race and nation. This pathology is
designated postcolonial melancholia and it is explained as an important link
between Britains colonial past, the countrys attempts to integrate its post-1945
immigrants and their descendants, and contemporary anxieties about American-
ization and the painful loss of autonomy involved in becoming a lickspittle for the
Bush regime. The popular interventions that have been made into colonial history by
revisionist writers like Niall Ferguson, Linda Colley and Saul David are seen in this
context and derided for their refusal to acknowledge the political significance of
racism as an independent issue that requires theoretical consideration beyond
economic reduction or the assertion of general theories of ideology. Gilroy uses the
responses to US incarceration offered by British returnees from Guantanamo Bay to
argue for a complex understanding of convivial culture and mutual habituation,
particularly among young people in the United Kingdom. He concludes with a plea
that researchers reject the unthinking assumption that the United States stands for
the future of racial politics and the related notion that all racially stratified and
divided societies are somehow en route to a destination defined by experience in the
US polity.
KEYWORDS African Americans, black Atlantic, black Europeans, double con-
sciousness, immigration, melancholia, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, post-imperial
Britain, race
T
here is no consensus over how the term multiculturalism should be
defined or employed in the human sciences. This heterogeneity has
awkward consequences. It undermines all attempts to build more analytical
and abstract discussions of the terms value and to enrich understanding of
the processes to which it refers. The problem is compounded because
multiculturalism has recently acquired numerous disciplinary accents and
inflections. It has been coloured by local histories and stretched by the
Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 4, 2005
ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online/05/040431-13
#
2005 Paul Gilroy
DOI: 10.1080/00313220500347899
various, incompatible claims that have been made upon it from South Africa
to North America. It is not always, as those particular examples would
certainly suggest, a euphemism for race and, even where that connection is
pronounced, its resonance in the aftermath of apartheid is necessarily
different from its significance in the corporate institutions of North America
where the idea of public good has been diminished to the point of
irrelevancy.
In assessing the conceptual issues that have inhibited critical thinking in
this area, we should note in particular that, for many political theorists, the
term multiculturalism suggests what should be called a mosaic plurality.
This is a highly specific conception of diversity in relation to unity that
derives from distinctive North American historical conditions. It promotes
and sometimes seeks to legitimate a form of analysis in which race and
ethnicity are elevated and reified, and in which difference gets contained
within symmetrical or at least similarly configured social and cultural units
that are arranged, in spite of any hierarchy they might compose, so as to form
a larger national unit. This particular view of ethnic difference and cultural
variation has been criticized at length by writers based elsewhere. It does not
conform to the ways in which I think culture can be best interpreted and is
not, then, an adequate or fruitful way of starting to think about the workings
of multiculture. However, a better starting point cannot be defined through
the proliferation of differences alone, or even by the idea that increased
exposure to the otherness of others and the strangeness of strangers should
provide the place from which theories of multiculture must depart. Those
propositions are haunted by patterns that arose from older conceptions of
plurality that were shaped by the brutal imperatives of colonial statecraft and
saturated by thinking about race. The unprocessed history of colonial rule
remains evident in the tension between differences understood in a
hierarchical or ranked pattern, and differences recognized laterally like the
slices of a circular cake that touch one anther only at its centre. The problems
involved, first, in working through that history, second, in understanding the
full force of race-thinking and, third, in conceiving difference without
hierarchy, go to the core of what I want to discuss below. Restoring a
historical dimension to reflections on multiculture inevitably directs attention
towards the fields of colonial history. From that vantage point, a distinctive
understanding of government can be extracted that has implications not only
for theories of law, state and the administration of power but for the concept
of culture itself and consequently for the idea of multiculture and the politics
and ethics of multiculturalism that eventually derive from it.
The imperial mentalities that fuelled those small wars have been
recapitulated in the neo-imperial and unending war on terror, which has
decisively altered the ways that multicultural society is understood and
evaluated. From every part of the political spectrum, authoritative voices
have pronounced multiculturalism dead. In the United Kingdom, conclusive
proof of its demise was signalled by the appearance of British citizens, who
432 Patterns of Prejudice
were mostly the sons and grandsons of post-1945 immigrants, caged at
Guantanamo Bay. Their return to England has been an ambivalent affair that
captures the nation frozen between its anti-Americanism on the one hand
and its hatred of immigrants on the other. Whatever its complex sources, the
dangerous attraction to Islam evident among these young people triggered
the replacement of governmental multiculturalism by stern civilizationism.
A pseudo-Churchillian jaw is now set doggedly against the barbaric Muslim
world. Fearful, anxious views about corrosive immigration and failed
assimilation are again being expressed openly. Solidarity and diversity are
pitted against each other in a zero-sum game. The very idea of convivial
cohabitation across cultural, ethnic, religious and racial divisions has been
thrown into disrepute by the perceived breakdown of assimilation and the
crisis of national identity that now frames it.
The promising discussions of Britains multicultural character that
followed the publication of Bhikhu Parekhs 2000 report, The Future of
Multi-Ethnic Britain,
1
have been halted by the spread of the same civiliza-
tionist common sense. Both terror and racial conflict can now be explained
away as local manifestations of the global clash of cultures. This contentious
diagnosis has been projected ever more widely and authoritatively during
the last few years as Islamophobia has increasingly shaped public debate
and the figure of the traitor/terrorist has emerged to hold hands with the
other well-worn iconic representations of imminent racial chaos and
disorder: the street criminal, the scrounger and the illegal immigrant.
Postcolonial melancholia
The appearance of that cast of historic characters has coincided with Britain
becoming greatly concerned about the cultural content of its shifting national
identity. The malaise is strongest in England because, unlike the Scots, Irish
and Welsh who all have their invented ethnicities to fall back on, the English
have nothing but the lost glory of empire. Wherever they arise, these
anxieties about identity are not vague or general features of the psychology
of downwardly mobile nations. They are an unwelcome product of the
particular historical circumstances they belong to, and define the countrys
postcolonial phase.
Contemporary fears that globalization has emptied England of its distinc-
tiveness can also be traced back to Britains loss of empire and the
disappearance of the greatness that went along with it. The political and
economic consequences of that great change are obvious. However, despite
all the attention given to postcolonial studies, we remain insufficiently alert to
the resulting cultural and psychological dynamics. When its formerly
1 Runnymede Trust, Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, The Future of
Multi-Ethnic Britain. The Parekh Report (London: Profile Books 2000).
PAUL GILROY 433
colonial citizens arrived as a settler population prepared to take on the dirty
and dangerous tasks that the post-war locals no longer wanted to do, Britain
found itself oddly unable to mourn and work through its loss of empire. That
failure has conditioned its political and cultural life ever since. The country
found it hard to adjust to the presence of semi-strangers who, disarmingly,
knew British culture intimately as a result of their colonial education. Rather
than face up to the reduced geo-political stature embodied in the half-alien
presence of these postcolonials, Britain developed a melancholic attachment
to its vanished pre-eminence. The original settlers and their increasingly
demanding descendants supplied uncomfortable reminders of the history of
the empire, which still returns, spectrally, in complex forms that remain as
painful and guilt-inducing as they are fascinating.
Brits fret about their overly US-minded children dialing 911 instead of 999
when they want an ambulance, about their appetites for obesity-inducing
fast food and the mind-destroying pulse of hip hop. Of course, employing
postcolonial culture-talk as a means to fix and retain the impossibly
complete national self-understanding that our predicament demands will
not solve these problems. It can only stoke the underlying anxieties. Culture
can never be immobilized in the way that this pursuit of absolute identity
demands. To seek to fix culture is a problem because, if we arrest its unruly
motion, we ossify it.
These problems with identity have been fed by intermittent panics not just
over the usual crime and disorder associated with immigration, but also
about falling standards of punctuation that symbolize a generalized
dumbing down in media, education and public life. As a result, we end
up bullying asylum-seekers and refugees not so much to force their
assimilation but to tell ourselves that were sure were still who were
supposed to be.
I call this unsavoury arrangement postcolonial or post-imperial melan-
cholia. It must be sharply distinguished from the older, simpler, melancholy
that was transmitted in Britains folk traditions and from the respectable
Victorian counterpart to the voice of the poor and marginal that was first
announced by an apprehensive Matthew Arnold standing down at Dover
beach listening to the articulate sound of the shifting shingle, watching the
alien lights twinkle on the nearby French coast. Post-imperial melancholia is
a neurotic development. It blocks the vitality of the culture, diverting it
instead into the arid pleasures of morbid militaria and other dead ends for
which culture and identity supply the watchwords.
Much of the time in Britain, it is impossible to get away from the painful
and exhilarating memories of empire and to move beyond the disabling
sense that the nation can only enjoy restorative solidarity and healing
community when it is at war. Winston Churchills godlike presence has
presided over these strange festivities, which have supplied the backdrop to
Tony Blairs adventures in Iraq and help to explain why his attachment to
the policies of George Bush has been so significant and unshakeable.
434 Patterns of Prejudice
It seems that, if we Britons are to be united and robust in the face of terror,
Islam, unwanted immigration and European meddling, we must become
fundamentally and decisively the same. So, we must now become absolutely
certain as to who we are, culturally speaking.
Imperial nostalgia and immigration
The disruptive and unwelcome presence of Britains many aliens is also
explained in racial terms. It has recently been described as the result of
illegitimate demands placed on the white working class, which was required
to bear the brunt of assimilating dubious incomers into the British way of
life, and was expected to protect that ideal community against the intrusion
of what Enoch Powell liked to call the alien wedge. Today, their continuing
antipathy towards immigrants, asylum-seekers and refugees cannot be
concealed, but the idea that it has anything to do with noxious, violent
racism or neo-fascist, ultra-nationalism remains a shocking revelation that
induces further discomfort and guilt. Additional confusion and disorienta-
tion arise from a situation in which melancholic and xenophobic Britain can
quietly concede that it doesnt much like aliens, Blacks, foreigners, Muslims
and other interlopers and wants to get rid of them, but then becomes
uncomfortable because it doesnt like the things it learns about itself when it
gives vent to feelings of hostility. Perhaps even the United States can learn
something from this destructive pattern.
Powells view of immigrants as an invasive wedge resonated loudly
because Britain was once out there, being great in a world it dominated. That
basic fact of global history is undeniable. However, grudging recognition of
that glorious past now provides a stimulus for additional forms of hostility.
They are precipitated by the realization that, even if todays unwanted
settlers*/for example, from Eastern Europe*/are not actually postcolonials,
they can still carry all the ambivalence of the vanished empire with them.
Even if they are white, they can be held hostage by the racialized
specification that they are immigrants. Even Poles and Kosovars can project
dangerous discomfort into the unhappy consciousness of their fearful and
anxious hosts and neighbours. Indeed, the latest incomers may be unwanted
and abused precisely because they are the unwitting stimulus for the pain
produced by memories of that vanished imperial and colonial past.
A definition of post-1945 immigration as a catastrophe underpins the
blustery concern for the plight of Britains poor whites lately offered up by
respected commentators like John Lloyd.
2
In his recent book, The Likes of Us,
3
Michael Collins even goes so far as to say that white trash is now the only
2 John Lloyd, Poor Whites, Prospect , June 2002, 44/8; Bob Rowthorn, In defence of
Fortress Europe, Prospect , February 2003, 24/31.
3 Michael Collins, The Likes of Us (London: Granta 2004).
PAUL GILROY 435
racial epithet currently acceptable in British society. This new concern is
important because it shows how readily the melancholic pattern dovetails
with some recent US exports. Like these commentators, our politicians have
been caught out by their inability to imagine any future for Britains racial
politics that is not deduced from US history. There is now some catching up
to do. For almost four decades, the United States has exemplified the only
racial future that the British punditocracy can imagine for the country.
Samuel Huntington, whose latest work, Who Are We?, presents the flood
of overly fertile immigrants from Latin America as the single most
immediate and serious challenge to Americas traditional identity,
4
had
articulated the scary linkage between immigration and multiculturalism
early on. This connection has now moved to the centre of respectable
reflection on how multiculture should be governed. More than a decade ago,
Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations had linked urgent geo-political problems
to the prospect of growing cultural diversity:
Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism
abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of western
culture. The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America. The
domestic multi-culturalists want to make America like the world. A multi-
cultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American.
A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible.
5
His elision of the United States and the West was significant but, as far as
Britain is concerned, it is misleading, too.
Our recent history has been telling us that the United States need not be
the inevitable destination of our distinctive history of racial politics.
However diverse it may have become, Britain has outgrown the 1960s
model that associated assimilation and immigration in government policy.
Two generations beyond that coupling, the anxieties that fuel contemporary
concern about the integrity of national culture and national identity have
different sources. Their origins can be shown to lie, not in immigration as
such, but in the broader effects of globalization, de-industrialization and
decolonization, in increased inequality and insecurity, in privatization and in
the regressive modernization that was begun under the Conservatives and
has been continued by New Labour under the banner of reform.
All those forces shaped the turmoil into which immigrants, aliens and,
more recently, asylum-seekers and refugees were thrown and for which they
were held responsible even though the large social and economic changes
4 Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to Americas National Identity (New
York: Simon and Schuster 2004); see also his The Hispanic challenge, Foreign Policy,
March/April 2004.
5 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New
York: Simon and Schuster 1996).
436 Patterns of Prejudice
involved were not of their making. The emergence of a better, richer and
more satisfying explanation is blocked by the way in which melancholia
dictates that immigration can only be experienced as invasive war. From that
point of view, successive waves of immigrants have merely accomplished
what the Nazis had never been able to do. They wrecked an unsuspecting
England from within.
This odd linkage helps to explain Britains apparently endless and
unhealthy fascination with the Second World War. When the national
football team plays, its belligerent supporters mime the action of bombers
en route to Germany. They bellow Elmer Bernsteins catchy theme-tune from
John Sturgess 1963 The Great Escape. That film wistfully dramatizes the
handover of the British imperial project to its inheritor, the United States,
represented by the leather-jacketed, gum-chewing, motorbike-riding, base-
ball-mitt-wearing rebel, played by Steve McQueen. With this sort of help, the
conflict with Nazi Germany is reimagined obsessively. Until recently, it was
thought to have been the last time in which, with characteristic pluck and
ingenuity, true Brits faced an enemy that was simply and uncomplicatedly
both alien and evil. The popular novelist Tony Parsons speaks for and to his
generation and his prime minister by arguing that, in order to be the right
sort of man, one must first have fought in a war.
Down in those famous, culture-conserving air-raid shelters where we sat
out the blitz, tea was being ritually brewed to restore national spirit and to
revitalize a sense of homogeneous community*/across class divisions. That
colonial elixir was nourishing while it lasted. Once it ran out, togetherness
and mutuality were replaced by chronic, nagging pain: something that helps
to explain why so many British people identify with the twinges felt by poor,
wounded Harry Potter.
After the war, traditional, white, working-class distaste for invading aliens
was amplified by another, deeper discomfort. It arose from facing up to
exactly what the brutal administration of the British empire had involved.
As the mechanisms of belated reparation and litigation start to move, we
discover some of the shameful things done in the name of crown and
country. And yet, people persist in denying that those crimes could have
anything to do with the bitter conflicts of the postcolonial present. Those
righteous cold wars and other low intensity conflicts in Kenya, Cyprus,
Korea, Aden, Malaya, Ireland and many, many other locations have slipped
out of official national memory.
If it returns at all, the empire comes back through a nostalgic filter. This
effect of melancholia is evident in the popularity of revisionist histories. Such
approaches to the glories of the past have become attractive and inspiring in
a geo-political situation in which the revival of empire has been explicitly
demanded by influential voices keen to link the present power of the United
States to the global dominance enjoyed by Britain in the past.
Widely read historical works, notably by Niall Ferguson, Linda Colley and
Saul David, do more than just airbrush and nuance the rationally applied
PAUL GILROY 437
barbarity of Britains colonial phase. Their implicit purpose is both more
sinister and more profound. They seize command of the role of victim that
has become such a prestigious item in the moral economy of multicultural
Britain. These authors would have us accept that the British are the primary
victims of their own colonial history. That awareness is the best precondition
for the revival of empire abroad and the rebirth of a homogeneous, imperial
spirit at home, two ambitions that are also integral to the Blair governments
conception of the countrys future.
British conviviality and American double consciousness
Largely undetected by either governments or media, Britains immigrants
and their descendants can be revealed to have generated more positive
possibilities. Alongside the usual tales of crime and racial conflict, there are
other varieties of interaction that have developed more organically. They
have created, not a mosaic pluralism along US lines, in which each self-
sustaining and carefully segregated element is located so as to enhance a
larger picture, but an unruly, untidy and convivial mode of interaction in
which differences have to be actively negotiated. Civic life has been
endowed with a vibrant multiculture that we do not always value, use
wisely or celebrate as we should. I say conviviality rather than multi-
culturalism for, in Britain at least, there has been no such ideology for at
least two decades. Convivial culture sprouted spontaneously and unappre-
ciated from the detritus of the failed social experiment of the mid-1960s.
In pointing to the political and cultural force of conviviality as an
alternative to Britains postcolonial melancholia, I am not saying that Britains
racial hierarchies and inequalities have been dealt with. Racism is still at
work, souring things, distorting economic relations and debasing public life.
However, we must also face up to the fact that racism is no longer what it was
when Enoch Powells bleak prophecy of racial war was first offered.
Years of tokenism have had significant effects. Sport, pop, advertising and
the House of Lords are all superficially integrated. Reality television has, for
example, unwittingly done a great deal to situate racial difference among
other contending varieties of diversity. Under that sort of scrutiny, racial and
ethnic differences get rendered unremarkable. Instead of adding to the
premium of race, viewers discover that, in consumer culture, the things that
really divide us are much more profound: taste, lifestyle, leisure preferences,
cleaning, gardening and childcare. By making racial differences appear
ordinary and banal, even boring, Britains urban conviviality has promoted
everyday virtues that enrich our cities, drive our cultural industries and
enhance our struggling democracy so that it resists operating in colour-
coded forms.
Once exposure to otherness can involve more than jeopardy, conviviality
has taken hold. It inspires us to applaud immigrant demands for a more
438 Patterns of Prejudice
mature polity that, even if it is not entirely free of racism, might be better
equipped to deal with racial inequalities as a matter of politics without
lapsing into unproductive guilt and narcissistic anguish. From this healthier
position, we might even be able to identify the results of ordinary
multicultures demands for recognition in various areas of policy: health,
education and criminal justice as well as the arts and cultural planning.
The supposedly unbridgeable gulf between civilizations can be easily
spanned. The same hopeful verdict came across strongly in the tales told by
homecoming British detainees about their detention at Guantanamo Bay.
Though, as I have said, these men were presented in the media as having
reverted to alien type, as symbols of the failure of multicultural society, their
return home prompted an important revelation. In articulating their
strongest desires for freedom and relief from the camp regime, they say
that what they really craved was a packet of Scottish Highland shortbread
biscuits! National identity can be assembled from trivial components.
Jamal al-Harith was born thirty-seven years ago in Manchester as Ronald
Fiddler to a family with Jamaican origins. He was held in the Guantanamo
camps for two years before being released and sent back to Britain last
March. He is now one of several returnees who are attempting to sue the US
government. He recounted his postcolonial life story in the Daily Mirror and
on Manchesters local radio and, in doing so, offered a welcome rebuke to all
the mechanistic and over-simple conceptions of cultural difference that are
currently in circulation.
His critique lost nothing by being left largely implicit. In the midst of a
shocking account of the stupidity, horror and hopelessness of his long
ordeal, he explained how much that famous shortbread had mattered: We
were all obsessed with Scottish Highland Shortbread. We wanted some so
much. It is there, in the message of that traditional ethnic hunger, lodged in
those battered and humiliated British bodies, that the problem of assimila-
tion specified in the 1960s should be laid to rest forever. It would seem that,
if we want to find a way out of the impasse of multiculturalism, the fissures,
folds and leaks within civilizations deserve more attention than the much-
vaunted clashes between them.
It is tempting, in trying to make sense of the predicament of these
detainees and the arguments about multiculturalism that are implicit within
it, to reach for the problematic of double consciousness. This important idea
was, of course, elaborated by W. E. B. DuBois, who drew the original idea
from Hegel and refined it during his life-changing time as a student in
Germany. It was shaped I think by his sociological reading of the problem of
assimilation as it arose there during the nineteenth century. In his hands, the
concept was tailored both to specific US conditions and to a deeply Hegelian
view that presented black American consciousness of freedom as a world-
historic force: a precious gift to the whole world from the descendants of
modern slaves.
PAUL GILROY 439
Much of what DuBois foresaw has proved to be accurate. Black Americans
did indeed give an eager world new conceptions of freedom. They have been
widely exported and have altered the moral landscape of our planet in
significant ways. I would like to draw attention to that process and in some
circumstances even to celebrate it. However, Ive also been wondering lately
whether we might now leave this double-consciousness problem where we
found it*/in the nineteenth century*/and specifically exclude it from the
ways that we approach issues of multiculturalism today. For various
reasons, it doesnt seem very helpful to try and transplant or reinvigorate
that old idea so that being a black European is thought to be analogous to
what being an American and a Negro meant when DuBois was writing The
Souls of Black Folk.
Another way of posing this problem is to ask what DuBois might say to
the timely, iconic figures of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell? They dont
seem either to be gifted with second sight or disabled by an inner
doubleness. Condoleezza Rice is often presented as the living embodiment
of that DuBoisian double consciousness and as an incarnation of the
successful civil rights movement. Right now, African Americans face a
different kind of historic choice about where they belong and what they
intend to be. Many of them regard the war on terror just as DuBois viewed
the First World War: as a welcome means finally to acquire or operationalize
their long-delayed membership of the national community and to experience
the full benefits of formal citizenship that had long been compromised by the
effects of racial hierarchy. Their historic decisions will have important effects
far beyond their own shores. However, seeing race politics in this way risks
reducing the contemporary debate over multiculturalism to a US family
quarrel and a US family romance. The tempo of these deliberations is now
urgent.
6
African Americans are moving away from a sense of black politics
that was defined through an East/West opposition and flow into a new
geometry of power that is defined instead by the axis of geo-political conflict
that runs from North to South. They may not want, for example, to go on
identifying themselves with Africa, a place almost exclusively associated
with chaos, violence and suffering. What sense, on the other hand, are they
now to make of themselves as patriotic Americans whose new mission in the
world is oriented by the rectitude of Dr Rice and her ilk?
Would-be black Europeans face parallel and equally historic choices. We
need to think about whether, as DuBois implied, that precious gift of
African-American freedom struggles to the future is something we can or
want to use. To put this question more carefully, we should ask how this
legacy could now be used. Are we, for example, in the name of progress, to
embrace the export of US racial systems either as political technologies for
solving race problems governmentally or as an organizational technique for
6 Cf. Destinys Child, Soldier, Sony Urban Music/Columbia 2005.
440 Patterns of Prejudice
generating social and cultural movements that could defeat the racism that
delimits our options? To try and reheat the old African-American recipes
may have costs that we should reckon with. My considered answer to these
questions is now no. I think it has become important to recognize that US
history in the field of racial politics need not represent the future of Europes
minorities. Though we may commemorate the political and cultural
achievements of African Americans and find them inspiring, the idea that
we are somehow tightly bound to that particular set of strategic choices is
absurd. We do not need African-American history*/however world-historic
and triumphant it may sound*/in order to specify the altogether different
worlds of blackness to which we are to be committed in the twenty-first
century.
Many black Europeans, like Europeans more generally, have a deep and
symptomatic ambivalence about the United States and its abiding racial
order. They may dislike its current political leadership, but there is also often
something fascinating and exciting about what appears to be its hyper-
modern style, its brisk experiential tempo and the exhilarating cultural
habits that get fastened on to as indices of freedom, especially in the
phantasmagoria of consumer culture. As far as race politics is concerned,
perhaps the era in which the United States has been presented as our future
is coming to a close. We must therefore think about dislodging America from
its position as our inevitable destination. We need to understand what is
involved in displacing it from the place that Hegel put it in long ago.
7
Does
the United States still represent the future of everybody else on earth when it
comes to race? That peculiar racial future, its modes of assimilation, its
undiminished segregation and its intermittent liberation need not be ours. I
think we can, and must now, be more imaginative than that.
Past and future tales of the black Atlantic
One last meditation on the history of the black Atlantic can assist us. First, it
can separate the national story of the African-American movement out of
slavery from the other tales black Europeans need to tell. There are precious
narratives of liberation from white supremacy to be gleaned from elsewhere
along with vibrant stories of pan-thinking and transculture. There are
accounts of the movements against slavery and colonialism that were not
centred in the US racial nomos. How might the histories of South Africa,
India or Brazil contribute to this deprovincializing reassessment and
reconstruction? How can an anti-racist political imaginary build commu-
nicative networks that could facilitate a different variety of worldly
7 America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the
burden of the Worlds History shall reveal itself.. . .: G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of
History, trans. from the German by J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), 86.
PAUL GILROY 441
conversation on these matters? Second, the transnational scale of the black
Atlantic breaks the pattern in which North American contingencies become
widely understood as intrinsic to the general workings of racial division. At
this point, we encounter another substantive problem: is the United States
still to be seen as the global centre of racial politics, the unique source of the
codes and meanings that bring race to life elsewhere, or is it to be nothing
more than one more postcolonial location where race-lore, ethnic absolutism
and segregation govern the operations of a fractured economy and a broken
polity? How are we to weigh US histories of race in relation to examples
drawn from other places where racism and racial hierarchy work a little
differently? Does that version of racialized politics somehow encapsulate the
future for everybody else on earth? Of course, people in the United States are
far more likely than Europeans to have accepted race as part of the
functioning of their political culture. I can even agree that Europeans have
much to learn from that acceptance of race, providing, of course, that it
involves an acknowledgement of the damage done by racism and does not
become a blank resignation to the effects of racial hierarchy. But my essential
point remains: accepting the salience of the social and political processes that
the United States knows and sees as a natural phenomenon called race does
absolutely nothing to address the multiple mystifications wrought by racism
either in US political culture or elsewhere. Third, the fluidity of the black
Atlantic and its resistance against the disciplinary power of all national
states promotes alternative conceptions of culture that break the ties of geo-
piety and territorial sovereignty in ways that are consistent with the unruly
history of the African diaspora in the western hemisphere.
All this matters greatly in the context of the war on terror and the clash
of civilizations that promoted it. These circumstances will doubtless require
the wholehearted commitment of racial minorities in the United States to
their countrys schemes for imperial domination. However, the tradition of
dissident thinking on which the black Atlantic has rested until now asks
something more of African Americans than that they continue peering
anxiously at the divided world through the cracks in their newly fortified
national state. They may even be asked to comprehend race, culture and
their distinctive political logics differently as a result of the demands of a
planetary perspective. Their traditional outlook is already being reconfi-
gured by the desire for security as well as by the quiet militarization of social
life in their country. Unipolarity and the overarching military power of the
United States have placed them disproportionately in the firing line.
American Blacks will certainly have to respond to their presidents political
redivision of the world while remembering that any equivocations will be
interpreted by press, government and their patriotic agents as a form of
treason.
DuBois lived a long and complex life. He changed his ideological
commitments and political tactics repeatedly. At the end of his days, his
commitments to peace and internationalism led him into extensive conflict
442 Patterns of Prejudice
with the US government over the Korean War, the Marshall Plan, NATO and
a number of other domestic issues. Perhaps we can read those parts of his
life as a final comment upon or even repudiation of the idea of double
consciousness. We should recall that he spent much of his last decade
without a passport, that he eventually joined the Communist Party at the age
of ninety-three, that he renounced his US citizenship and embarked on a life
in exile as a citizen of Ghana. He had found in those treacherous choices a
means to activate his long-held and rather Germanic attachments to world
citizenship and to world history. What, we are now obliged to ask, are the
contemporary analogues of those uncomfortable gestures? How does an
emphatically non-national account of the development of diaspora multi-
culture help us to fulfil that discomforting agenda, which has remained
pending in black politics since the Cold War?
Paul Gilroy is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the
London School of Economics. He is the author, most recently, of After Empire:
Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Routledge 2004) and Postcolonial Melan-
cholia (Columbia University Press 2005).
PAUL GILROY 443