REVIEW:
Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Paul
Gilroy, 2003
--
Nilanjana Bhattacharjya
An assumed sense of common ethnic
heritage has proved one of the most effective means of mobilizing large numbers
of otherwise disparate people. In his latest book, Paul Gilroy asks us to
reevaluate the motivations beyond these shared affiliations. Paul Gilroy’s most
recent book, Against Race: Imagining Political Race Beyond the Color Line,
like his earlier work transcends the discipline of black cultural studies from
where he writes and proves essential reading for those interested culture’s
relationship to the politics of ethnicity. Departing from what he views
as disturbing developments in recent black political culture, Gilroy questions
the validity of solidarities defined on ethnic absolutism. Gilroy argues that the contemporary
valorizations of particularized ethnic affilations, particularly in today’s
globalized economy, often originate in European fascism, and that they,
contrary to popular belief, “retain the power to destroy an possibility of
human mutuality and cosmopolitan democracy.”
Gilroy throughout his text reveals the
rarely discussed links between the assertion of ethnic identity and fascism. He
observes, quite significantly, that any articulation of ethnic identity
necessarily predicates itself on the simultaneous articulation of ethnic
particularity. Even as an assumed common ethnic identity brings people together
based on a perceived “sameness,” Gilroy notes that it can only define itself
through specific terms, which are, inevitably, terms of exclusion. We must
therefore deemphasize those national, local, ethnic, and ‘racial’ identities by
creating, in Gilroy’s view, alternative transcultural alliances that transcend
those identities that reify those precise divisions we would wish to eliminate.
As he states, “Calculating the difference between identity and difference,
sameness and otherness, is an intrinsically political operation.”
He details the dangers associated with
bringing what he views to be “lazily imagined”
shared identities to politics, because we too often lapse into competing
against one another “over which peoples, nations, populations, or ethnic groups
have suffered the most; over whose identities have been most severely damaged;
and indeed over who might be thought of as the most de-racinated, nomadic, or
cosmopolitan and therefore more essentially “modern” or paradigmatically
“postmodern” peoples on our planet.”
We therefore cannot afford to mobilize on the platform of victim hood.
I should at this point mention that
Gilroy’s book focuses on how mainstream advertising and the media today thrive
on transforming our ethnic identities, mostly black identity, a spectacular
event that practices and perpetuates ideological devices identical to those
used by Nazi propaganda. Like his other books on the subject of black cultural
politics, however, his discussion proves exceedingly relevant for many of us.
As I read Against Race this past spring for the first time, I was struck
by how deeply some of Gilroy’s arguments resonate with the current political
climate, three years after its publication. Although the book is fascinating as
a whole, I will discuss within this review only those sections of the text that
I found most relevant to the current political climate.
One of the most compelling concepts
Gilroy presents is that of “the camp,” or the state formations resulting from
the process in which “the integrity of imperial nations was actively imagined
to derive from the primordial particularity of premodern tribes.”
He maintains that the term “camps” “emphasizes these formations “territorial,
hierarchical, and militaristic qualities rather than their organic features
that have been more widely identified as the antidote they supplied to
mechanized modernity and its dehumanizing effects.”
The following passage, in which Gilroy elaborates on “camps,” evokes in
startling ways the political environments of many locations, including the
United States, today:
Politics is reconceptualized and reconstituted
as a dualistic conflict between friends and enemies. At its worst, citizenship
degenerates into soldiery and the political imagination is entirely
militarized. The exaltation of war and spontaneity, the cults of fraternity,
youth, and violence, the explicitly antimodern sacrilization of the political
sphere, and its colonization by civil religion involving uniforms, flags, and
mass spectacles, all underline that camps are fundamentally martial phenomena.
They are armed and protected spaces that offer, at best, only a temporary break
in unforgiving motion toward the next demanding phase of active conflict.
As
American participants in the Iraq anti-war movement already know, one cannot be
a good citizen in the United States without ‘supporting our troops,’ a dilemma
that can be distinguished by only the faintest of lines from the degeneration
Gilroy describes above.
Gilroy goes on to explain these
camps often present immigration of certain groups as invasions of others who
threaten their kinship. As he does in many instances throughout the book,
Gilroy glides from this theoretical discussion of “camps” to a more material
discussion, of actual camps and their associated politics. Unlike many
contemporary discussions of Nazism, Gilroy does not introduce the mention of
the Nazi concentration camp at this point to isolate the specificity of that
historical event, but rather to situate the event and ‘camp-thinking’ within a
more extensive network of events that extend from 19th century
colonial violence to contemporary ethnic conflict in Rwanda. Gilroy views the
division between racism and forms of nationalism, regarded as ‘normal,’ to “the
exceptional state represented by genocidal fascisms, as tenuous.”
Gilroy extends the increasingly recognized linkages between civilization and
barbarity, as demonstrated by the colonial state, to reveal the ways in which
the violence associated with genocidal death camps, also recurs within the
space of the refugee camp, labor camp, concentration camp, and presumably,
detainee camp. Gilroy warns us that if genocide is not already underway, that
the ‘raciology’ or racialized thinking associated with the theoretical camp
brings us increasingly closer to actual genocide.
Gilroy rearticulates this connection
between racialized thinking and genocide throughout to convey the urgency of
his argument. The assertion of ethnic particularity is potentially dangerous,
in even its most benign forms, cannot be taken for granted. Even in its less
pronounced forms, it performs exclusion. As Gilroy writes, that “members of a
dominant social group in a racialized social hierarchy do not have to imagine
themselves to be superior, they need not only assert unbridgeable difference to
awaken the possibility of a fascistic solidarity.”
Against Race stands apart from many other
well-meaning books that criticize racist thinking, in that as he himself
explains, tries to go beyond critiques that recommend that we abandon all
claims to the ethnic particular, in favor of an idealized universal. Gilroy
criticizes these earlier attempts to denounce racist thinking as inadequate,
because as noble as a universalized ‘human’ identity may be, it proves
impossible to implement in practical terms. Gilroy proposes in his book
therefore an alternative that attempts to pvoe the origins of the idea of race,
and its inextricable confrontation with modernity, that will hopefully prove
more productive.
Gilroy’s book is a theoretical one that
does not offer as many practical recommendations and solutions as admonitions
about our current mindset’s dangerous potential. Gilroy offers the theoretical
concept of the diaspora to disrupt, and thus, resolve the unhealthy
relationships he observes between territoriality and the physical body. While
the diaspora is valuable to those who study dislocated and relocated
populations, it cannot be universally applied.
Gilroy’s book, although titled Against
Race, is actually against all forms of ethnic absolutist and other
culturally separatist forms of thinking that threaten our coexistence. Given
our widespread faith in ethnically defined political constituencies, Against
Race is sometimes uncomfortable to read, especially as it detailed the
unexpected alliances between, for example, white supremacist and black
nationalist organizations on the basis of their shared beliefs in ethnic
particularity. Nevertheless, in light
of the current political climate, in the States, but also in Sri Lanka and
other locations, Against Race offers a valuable opportunity reconsider
the most basic tenets of our political motivations and affiliations.
---
Nilanjana
Bhattacharjya is now completing her doctoral dissertation on 20th
century British and South Asian music and culture at Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York. She will be at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts next
fall as a Five College Fellow.
