Race and Cosmopolitanism

Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line By Paul Gilroy Belknap Press, 2000

If one were to ask what has been the one driving force in Paul Gilroy's work in sociology and cultural studies since the 1980s, the most obvious answer would be that he has been at war against the absolutism of social and conceptual categories, most notably racialism and nationalism. Gilroy launched this struggle in his first book, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987), in which he developed one of the first critiques of Englishness as a mode of national belonging sanctioned by "homogenous national units" such as "a morbid celebration of England and Englishness from which blacks are systematically excluded" (12). In his better-known work The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy conceived the project of accounting for the black presence in the shaping of modernity as an antidote to "the continuing lure of ethnic absolutisms in cultural criticism produced both by blacks and whites" (3). Now Gilroy is at it again, this time confronting the politics of race head on. As the title of his book boldly declares, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line is a critique of all forms of identity and social formation grounded on the notion of race, a site in which Gilroy believes older forms of oppression and social exclusion, most notably fascism, have chosen to hibernate. But Gilroy is not simply interested in a critique of race for its own sake; his ambition is to evacuate this troublesome term from the site of social analysis and cultural formation, and his goals are to make what he considers to be unjustifiable categories such as race irrelevant and to supplant them with a more inclusive economy of identity. In this light, Against Race continues a project begun in the late 1980s, one that Gilroy described earlier in his career as part of "the long, micropolitical task of recoding the cultural core of national life" ("Art of Darkness" 60). This time, however, that project is extended beyond the confines of Britishness to encompass a new European identity and, ultimately, a global cosmopolitan culture.

Still, Against Race is a book caught between its particular concern with British cultural anxieties and its author's universal desire for a nonracialized polity. In other words, it is a book caught between the dream—or illusion—of cosmopolitanism and the reality of political interpellation, between Gilroy's insistence on our right to choose our sites of location and the frightful proposition that identities that are forced on us, and enforced by others, somehow seem to triumph in the end. In this essay I want to reflect broadly on the continuing tension between what is construed as individual agency and the apparatus of cultural formation. I want to argue that the discourse of race emerges out of the conflict between the struggle of individuals to express their free will within the bounds of historical circumstances and the claims of social institutions. More specifically, I want to use Against Race to think through some of the conceptual and political problems that arise when the critique of race and racialism and other forms of identity rooted in a particular polity, nation, or region is brought face to face with the desire for a cosmopolitan identity. In both cases, I begin with a premise, which I don't want to lose in my critique of Gilroy's work, that his book is one of the most intelligent yet problematic attempts to explore the paradox of the particular and the universal as it relates to matters of race and cultural belonging.

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Throughout Against Race, Gilroy is insistent that his concern with the problem of race in modern culture is the prelude for mapping out modes of social identity that transcend raciology and the structures that sustain and justify it. Yet it is apparent that in spite of his overall desire for a humanistic culture that might transcend nation and race, Gilroy's reflections are...