Postcolonial Melancholia

Paul Gilroy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231509695
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of black people and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edifice of white supremacy." In Postcolonial Melancholia, he continues the conversation he began in the landmark study of race and nation 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine—and defend—multiculturalism within the context of the post-9/11 "politics of security."

This book adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief but to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. The melancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implications. Ultimately, Postcolonial Melancholia goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.

Part One The Planet

1	Race and the Right to Be Human

The horrors of the twentieth century brought “races” to political life far more vividly and naturalistically than imperial conquest and colonial administration had done. Our postcolonial environment reverberates with the catastrophes that resulted from the militarized agency and unprecedented victimization of racial and ethnic groups. It is not surprising that contemporary analysis of racism and its morbidities still belongs emphatically to that unhappy period. It should be obvious that critical analysis of racisms needs to be self-consciously and deliberately updated. Few new ways of thinking “race” and its relationship to economics, politics, and power have emerged since the era of national-liberation struggles to guide the continuing pursuit of a world free of racial hierarchies.

If we are seeking to revive that goal, to make it sound less banal, more attractive, and more political by showing where it touched and still transforms modern dreams of substantive democracy and authentic justice, then we will need to reconstruct the history of “race” in modernity. That task entails offering multiple genealogies of racial discourse that can explain how the brutal, dualistic opposition between black and white became entrenched and has retained its grip on a world in which racial and ethnic identities have been nowhere near as stable or fixed as their accompanying rhetoric would have us believe.

Those worthy goals introduce a conflict between the obligation to pay attention to local and conjunctural factors and the lingering desire for a totalizing theory that can explain the attachment to “race” and ethnicity under all conditions. The former is demanded by a subversive commitment to the relocalization of a networked world; the latter is animated by the troubling fantasy of controlling that world by reducing it to a set of elegant categories. This attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable claims of the abstract and the immediate involves returning in a systematic fashion to the interpretations of racism and racial hierarchy that were produced during the Cold War, to the alternative formulations that emerged from critical theorists and national liberation struggles as well as those that flowed from the confrontation with a variety of differing incarnations of Fascism, not all of which appealed openly or consistently to the metaphysics of “race.”

Along this path we will be obliged to consider the fate of left, libertarian, and cosmopolitan thought during the twentieth century and to ask why there have been so few successor projects capable of articulating anti-racist hope in anything other than its negative moment: that is, as a creative conjuring with the possibility of better worlds rather than embattled criticism of this comprehensively disenchanted one.

Though they were addressed to a very different context, Adorno’s challenging words on the relationship between nationality, ethnicity, and forms of intellectual freedom can usefully be borrowed here. They communicate something of the problem that arises from dissenting contemplation of the mystified, alienated arrangement to which racial truths and biocultural ontologies have supplied indices of realness and provided key markers in the formation of sensible social policy, mature political thought, and good scholarly habits. This is how Adorno described the relationship between critical theory and the racialization of knowledge itself: “The person who interprets instead of accepting what is given and classifying it is marked with the yellow star of one who squanders his intelligence in impotent speculation, reading things in where there is nothing to interpret.”¹ Transposed into our project, his observation points to the way in which racial politics has been obstructively invested with common sense. His words underline that the signs of “race” do not speak for themselves and highlight the fact that the difficult work of interpreting the system of meaning they create is always likely to appear illegitimate, “politically incorrect,” sometimes treasonable and usually speculative in the most dismissive sense of that term. Adorno also reminds us that, while the political order of “race” endures, the character of racial and ethnic groups is seen to be at stake in attempts to overthrow it. Racism involves a mode of exploitation and domination that is not merely compatible with the phenomena of racialized differences but has amplified and projected them in order to remain intelligible, habitable, and productive.

Race thinking and the distinctive political forms associated with it—biopower, ultranationalism, ethnic absolutism, and so on—have sanctioned gross brutality in many diverse settings. Social and political theory have been reluctant to address this recurrence. It is not usually seen as a specific interpretative, historical, or ethical problem; it is never approached as a result of what Frantz Fanon described as the “delerium” of race-friendly Manichaeism. It is more likely that this pattern is used to focus on very different matters: the question of a universal predisposition to evil or the convenient image of a never-ending conflict between civilization and savagery.

We are now in a position to understand that the raciology that has made this repetition possible is a result of modern political culture with special ties to its philosophies of power, government, and statecraft. Rather than simply compiling an inventory of catastrophic episodes in which the power of “race” or ethnicity has been made manifest, I think we should be prepared to explore the moral and conceptual challenges that those systems of thought place before us. In a sense, then, taking not the idea of “race” but the power of racisms more seriously means accepting that there may be a degree of tension between the professional obligations to recover and to remain faithful to the past and the moral and political imperative to act against the injustices of racial hierarchy as we encounter them today.

The spirit in which we undertake this work is therefore critical, and, whether we like it or not, recognizing the power of racism makes us historians of the present with all the special responsibilities that entails. We must, for example, be especially careful not to project contemporary dynamics backward into circumstances with which they cannot possibly be congruent, nor should we imagine the world always to have been as starkly black and white as it sometimes looks these days. In this transitional period, we must deal with the fact that to engage racism seriously involves moving simultaneously onto historical and political ground. It cannot be otherwise. The urgency of this moment leaves no room for disinterested or inert contemplation of racial hierarchy and its injustices.

When the idea of “race” becomes a concept, it poses clear and incompatible alternatives. Once we comprehend racism’s alchemical power, we do have to choose. We can opt to reproduce the obligations of racial observance, negotiating them but basically accepting the idea of racial hierarchy and then, inescapably, reifying it. Or there is a second and far more difficult and rewarding alternative, in which for clearly defined moral and perhaps political reasons we try to break its spell and to detonate the historic lore that brings the virtual realities of “race” to such dismal and destructive life. This dilemma is acute because racist discourses have so often entailed strict rules about the historical character of the hierarchies they create. As Eric Wolf and countless others have shown, the acquisition of unassailable human status with all its subjective, judicial, and political benefits, has regularly involved arguments about the geo-and biopolitical boundaries of national states and the cultural character of the historical processes that support their existence. To be recognized as human was to be accorded an authentic kind of historic being. On the other hand, to be dismissed on raciological grounds as bestial or infrahuman was to be cast outside of both culture and historicality. The raciologists of Europe’s imperial period worked to give Hegel’s famous speculations a blunt facticity. The theatre of history was indeed the temperate zone. Recognizing the extent of this pattern, its enduring power, and the legacy of its claims upon academic historiography, geography, and philosophical anthropology is another necessary step toward appreciating how the idea of history as a narrative of racial hierarchy and racial conflict helped to undo modernity’s best promises.

A different history, composed of critical reflections on the idea of “race,” forms an essential part of the background to what I want to argue below. It has sometimes been judged to be disreputable but nonetheless creates a larger sense of intellectual work than the one that scholastic life provides. Recognizing this history demands the appreciation of interventionist and dissident work by numerous writers who, like the towering figures of W. E. B. DuBois and C. L. R. James, had intermittent, insecure, or ambivalent relations with institutions of higher learning. Bringing greater legitimacy to that tradition of oppositional reflection can deliver us into a novel space where, as part of a survey of the relationship between the modern world and the elaboration of racial categories, we cannot avoid consideration of the relationships between race thinking, historiography, historicality and the sometimes evasive, normative codes of white supremacism.

It should be clear from this declaration that I want to defend what has lately become a rather unfashionable orientation toward manifestations of “race” in the political field. I am disinclined to accept the power of racial divisions as anterior to politics or see them as an inescapable, natural force that conditions consciousness and action in ways that merely political considerations simply cannot match. These refusals help to prepare for the difficult task of making critical, historical, and philosophical encounters with racism productive. This, in turn, requires seeing “race” as moral as well as political and analyzing it as part of a cosmopolitan understanding of the damage that racisms are still doing to democracy.

The Souls of Cosmopolitan Folk

The centenary of DuBois’ great book The Souls of Black Folk arrived recently. It was celebrated anxiously, amidst great turbulence in geopolitical affairs. The opportunity to reflect upon that landmark publication again and to engage it in relation to our own circumstances seems especially valuable at the moment because it affords a chance to consider the distinctive worldliness of DuBois’ humanist thinking, which has something to offer our own predicament in the midst of globalization and the planetary consequences of resurgent U.S. imperial power. DuBois’ book was underpinned by a cosmopolitan imagination, which, in turn, shaped the way that he was able to make his experiences of displacement and relocation—inside as well as outside the U.S. national state—useful and appealing to readers who were remote from his immediate circumstances. I have made a detailed commentary on the book elsewhere. However, I want to return to a few of the problems that it raises again now in order to draw out DuBois’ clever balancing of local and global considerations. His skill in that delicate operation can still teach us something in a different century where the color line cannot be the problem that it was in the past and the relationship between the particular and the universal is being constantly reconsidered in the light of several important developments for which the term “globalization” supplies a rather inadequate shorthand. Our scope for action is bounded, on the one hand, by the advent of a translocal human-rights culture that has resonated in every corner of the planet. On the other hand, we confront the need to defend the international institutional order that was composed in the debris that DuBois would describe in 1947 as “the collapse of Europe.”² This must be done in order to prevent the recurrence of conflict and to consolidate governmental and judicial schemes above the level of national states.

Those processes are connected to the elaboration of economic, medical, and environmental problems that are beyond the control of national governments, to the technological and cultural revolution that has changed the relationship between information and power, to the collapse of official communism, and to the worldwide shift in gendered and generational relations that has expanded conceptions of citizenship and altered all settlements between women and men, parents and children, even the great majority who live within the realm of scarcity. This brief inventory endorses a view of the historical and economic machinery of globalization that has become orthodox. It needs to be amended because it has failed to appreciate the impact of decolonization, which provides another neglected strand in the unfolding of political antagonisms on a global scale.

In trying to grasp the specificity of this situation, we are often tempted, just as DuBois was before us, to reach for the ideas of world history and world citizenship. These notions were imported into his political thought from their obvious German sources. Many contemporary commentators regard these “metanarratives” as deeply problematic, but his stubborn commitment to them provided more or less constant margins for his shifting political outlook even when his strategic affiliations shifted and his tactical commitments wavered and evolved. Those attachments were articulated in different ways with his socialism and his pan-Africanism. Indeed, his intimate relationship with these fundamental ideas extended far beyond the simple, reformist goals of securing the admission of Africa into world history and of the Negro into world citizenship.

The essays brought together in The Souls of Black Folk presented DuBois’ first, but in many ways his most compelling attempts to reconcile the contending attractions of people, race, and nation and to harness them into a higher service that can be defined as the figuration of a modern humanity shorn of its historic attachments to racism and equipped with a renewed concept of raceless democracy to match its aspirations toward social progress as well as its progressive political agenda. DuBois’ repeated specification of the twentieth century as the century of the color line makes vivid sense in the setting provided by his progressive impulses. Rather than arguing that we were forever to be trapped in racism’s hall of mirrors, he was elevating Jim Crow to a problem of world-historic proportions. He drew powerfully on a Hegelian conceptual architecture in which, for example, the coupled strivings of those warring ideals, that famous American Negro “twoness,” would eventually be sublated into a “better truer self.” Thus, for him, Negro folk song was not only “the sole American music,” it was also a “beautiful expression of human experience” (emphasis added). Once the nineteenth century had been understood as “the first century of human sympathy,” he could discover and promote the novel patterns of reciprocal human recognition that would create vital alternatives to the terminally alienated relations in which races encountered one another in a radically alienated manner as human and infrahuman. This would move society past the blockage where liberty, justice, and right were marked “For White People Only.”

Thinking again about his well-known formulations today, I want to suggest that DuBois was either ambivalent or a little disingenuous about whether the limits of African American political struggle could be adequately defined through the goal of making “it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American” without being abused, and indeed about whether the rather modest result involved in becoming “a co-worker in the kingdom of culture” was, in his view, really sufficient to redress the residual wrongs of recently ended racial slavery. The issue of his worldliness returns with these questions.

Those overly modest aims mask the broader political and philosophical dimensions of an argument that was certainly directed toward the unreceptive national state and its Jim Crow government but also aimed beyond those authorities to another constituency. He calls this object “The World.” His portentous conclusion to Souls says that the wilderness into which he immodestly feared his vibrant book might fall was “the world wilderness” and argues poetically that the problem with racial hierarchy was that it made “a mockery” and “a snare” of human brother-hood. These observations did not prevent him from upholding rather than rejecting what is today the unfashionable possibility that human brother-hood might be rescued from those temporary conditions. After all, “Negro blood” had a message for the wider world beyond the narrow American space where the various disabilities intrinsic to the country’s traditional racial order had unexpectedly gifted blacks with second sight and, through their sublime sufferings, furnished humanity as a whole with conceptions of freedom and democracy more elaborate and profound than anything previously known.

As one might anticipate, DuBois links disability and victimage with the possibility of acquiring richer varieties of consciousness. Their appearance in North America, Hegel’s land of the future, was also important to him. The connection between liberation from racial hierarchies and the future, the yet to come, allowed DuBois to dream forward and thus to remake the map of world civilizations in the interest of what we can call the worldly, or even the cosmopolitan Negro. But that was not the end of his argument, which is rather more complex than some of its recent canonical reconfigurations have allowed it to be. The world becomes a different place once the history of black resistance in the Western Hemisphere has been added to our understanding of it, and an acknowledgement of the protracted suffering of African-descended peoples outside of Africa has contributed to the overdue redefinition of its fluctuating moral conscience. DuBois’ Hegelian scheme allows this to be done not in the narrow interest of world history’s victims but, provocatively, in the contested name of humanity in general. Its advocates are marginal folk whose brutal history and traumatic experience are not usually foregrounded by this variety of universal rhetoric.

The reduction of human brotherhood to a mockery was achieved by the exclusionary force of racism. The snare DuBois speaks of seems to lie in underestimating how much has to be done in order to repair and rework facile notions of human fellowship and solidarity, whether they are religious or liberal. To imagine that these are easy or straightforward tasks is a major error that can be avoided only if the corrosive power of the broken world’s racial order can be addressed seriously and consistently. This racial order or nomos cannot be undone by fiat, by charity, or by goodwill and must enter comprehensively into the terms of political culture. It is only then, in the face of a whole, complex, planetary history of suffering, that the luxury and the risk of casual talk about humanity can be sanctioned.

To make better sense and use of this difficult stance today, we need to see where the local tradition of insight in which DuBois’ work stands began to resonate with gl...