RETRIEVING THE HUMAN SUNY series, Philosophy and Race Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, editors RETRIEVING THE HUMAN Reading Paul Gilroy Edited by Rebecka Rutledge Fisher and Jay Garcia Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2014 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Jenn Bennett Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Retrieving the human : reading Paul Gilroy / edited by Rebecka Rutledge Fisher and Jay Garcia. pages cm. -- (SUNY series, philosophy and race) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5275-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gilroy, Paul 2. Race relations. 3. Racism. 4. Blacks—Social conditions. 5. Great Britain—Race relations. 6. United States—Race relations. I. Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge II. Garcia, Jay, 1972- HT1521.R458 2014 305.8—dc23 2013037615 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction REBECKA RUTLEDGE FISHER AND JAY GARCIA vii Part I. Theories in Motion: Roots and Routes 1. Traditions, Genealogies, and Influences: Gilroy’s Intellectual Roots and Routes RICHARD H. KING 3 2. Paul Gilroy and the Pitfalls of British Identity DENNIS DWORKIN 31 3. “Enough of This Scandal”: Reading Gilroy through Fanon, or Who Comes after “Race”? ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI 53 Part II. Retrieving the Human: Two Scholars in Dialogue 4. Multiculturalism and the Negative Dialectics of Conviviality PAUL GILROY 97 5. For a Dialogue with Paul Gilroy JONATHAN BOYARIN 115 Part III. Debating the Human in Everyday Spaces 6. Sedentary and Mobile Poetics: Paul Gilroy and the Aesthetics of Postcolonial Theory RANU SAMANTRAI 131 v vi Contents 7. Dynamic Nominalism in Alain Locke and Paul Gilroy JAY GARCIA 161 8. Black Humanitarianism TAVIA NYONG’O 187 9. A Dialogue on the Human: An Interview with Paul Gilroy EDITED BY REBECKA RUTLEDGE FISHER AND JAY GARCIA 207 Afterword. “The Right to Address the Future”: Utopian Thinking and Paul Gilroy JOHN MCGOWAN 227 List of Contributors 241 Index 00 Introduction Twenty years have elapsed since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, a work that returned to the archives of New World slavery and post-slavery, and countered prevailing understandings of modernity through a focus on “race,” transnational intellectuals, and music. Gilroy’s projects after The Black Atlantic have expanded upon his earlier theorizations of the com- plex networks of cultural and intellectual exchange he sees at work across black diasporic locales. The post–Black Atlantic corpus, as it were, is signifi- cant for many reasons, including its more explicit connection to the writings of Frantz Fanon, the intellectual genealogy of “human rights” it identifies and seeks to expand, and its reexamination of metropolitan cultures in which long-standing patterns of race hierarchy have mutated yet continue to figure in ongoing postcolonial predicaments and everyday encounters. Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy brings historical perspectives to bear on Gilroy’s corpus even as it considers the distinctive features of his current projects. Its premise emerged from a lecture given by Gilroy on the campus of the Univer- sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. Seven scholars from around the country were invited to write and speak on any aspect of Gilroy’s oeuvre with which they had become intellectually engaged or by which they had been influenced. Each was asked to use his or her own site of intellectual engage- ment with Gilroy’s writings as a point of departure. Richard King and Dennis Dworkin, in keeping with their perspectives as historians, undertook critical readings in Gilroy’s intellectual biogra- phy, examining each of his major works in succession. Their essays appear together, along with that of the postcolonial critic Anthony Alessandrini, in vii viii Introduction part 1, “Theories in Motion: Roots and Routes.” In King’s case, Gilroy’s intel- lectual roots and routes form the occasion for an essay on the stakes at work in Gilroy’s continuously evolving thought. In his essay “Traditions, Genealo- gies, and Influences: Gilroy’s Intellectual Roots and Routes,” King consid- ers Gilroy as a thinker whose vision of the “Black Atlantic” and the world stresses shifts, borrowings, and hybridities, and thus he sees the dominant influences on Gilroy’s thought as multiple and overlapping from the start. One can easily identify a Western Marxist–Frankfurt approach, King argues, but Gilroy also makes use of an anti-imperialist analysis derived from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and has recently drawn upon aspects of Freudian theory. As King points out, a further tension exists between Gil- roy’s debts to British cultural studies and the influence of African Ameri- can thought and culture, between cultural sociology and the history of ideas, between postcolonial and New World orientations. Finally, King maps with nuance a movement in Gilroy’s thought between high cultural theories and popular cultural sources. In his contribution to this volume, King explores the various strands of Gilroy’s intellectual history, how they interact with one another, and whether one seems to predominate above the others. He makes a convincing case for Gilroy as a thinker who is best described as part of a “diasporic” intellectual tradition that encompasses extraordinary figures. Of the diasporic thinkers pertinent to Gilroy’s work, the presence of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Richard Wright certainly makes itself felt. Even so, among all these thinkers, for King, Gilroy is arguably the most versatile and wide-ranging, for his thought is not to be exclusively identified with the European, African, North American, or Caribbean strands in modern social critique, but in fact navigates routes that transgress their limits. Dworkin, for his part, demonstrates how Gilroy’s sometimes renegade thought pushed at the boundaries of British cultural studies. In chapter 2, “Paul Gilroy and the Pitfalls of British Identity,” Dworkin situates Gilroy’s recent analysis of contemporary Britain in its intellectual and political set- ting, emphasizing the entanglement of British intellectual life and Gilroy’s work as a critic and intellectual. Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia, written in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks and the Anglo-American inva- sion of Iraq, challenges the growing ethnic absolutism and cultural national- ism in contemporary Britain and the West more broadly. Gilroy’s critique of contemporary Britain is a potent affirmation and defense of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism at a time when all of these are threat- ened by essentialist notions of national identity and unbridgeable cultural difference. Yet as Dworkin reminds us, Postcolonial Melancholia also builds Introduction ix upon Gilroy’s earlier engagements with “the Condition of England” question. Dworkin underscores the ways in which Gilroy’s more recent work resonates with arguments that Gilroy has been making since he was a graduate stu- dent at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Studies in the late 1970s, building on theoretical/political openings found in the Centre’s collectively authored Policing the Crisis (1978). These arguments have been important to cultural studies; they have simultaneously been significant within discourses of decline and identity in contemporary Britain. Gilroy’s concomitant atten- tion to “structure” and “agency,” his focus on modes of dominance and resis- tance, his privileging of history and counterhistory, and his exploration of the politics of representation all suggest vital connections with both British cultural studies and the discourse of decline. Drawing upon and traversing the cultural studies tradition, Gilroy’s recent work, Dworkin argues, addresses the political culture of contemporary Britain from distinctive transnational and multicultural perspectives. Other scholars examine the relationship between Gilroy and his intel- lectual models. Such is the impetus behind Anthony Alessandrini’s essay on the intellectual filiation at work between Gilroy and Frantz Fanon. In chapter 3, “‘Enough of This Scandal’: Reading Gilroy through Fanon, or Who Comes after Race?” Alessandrini demonstrates the ways in which Gilroy’s body of work has made its way along an interesting route in its engagement with humanism—that is, “humanism” both as concept and strategy. One of the more striking transitions from The Black Atlantic to Against Race and Postco- lonial Melancholia, Alessandrini points out, is the move from what might be seen as a highly critical but nevertheless sympathetic investigation of the leg- acies of the Enlightenment in the earlier work to the repeated invocations of “planetary humanism” and “strategic universalism” in his more recent books. This move, Alessandrini argues, is coterminous with Gilroy’s increasingly close and complex reading of Frantz Fanon. Fanon was not a key intellectual figure in the genealogy of The Black Atlantic that Gilroy set out in his earlier work. By the time of Against Race, however, Gilroy introduces Fanon in the early pages of the book as the figure “whose work frames these concerns.” Given that Gilroy’s double project is simultaneously to expose the complicity of humanist thinking (as well as other aspects of the Enlightenment proj- ect) with colonialism, slavery, and racialism, while at the same time working toward a transformed concept of humanism as part of an antiracist and anti- colonial political strategy, the link to Fanon, who made a similar sort of call for a “new humanism” almost fifty years ago, is perhaps to be expected, Ales- sandrini writes. The more interesting point comes out of an examination of