A diagnosis of contemporary forms of racism, race and nationalism: a conversation with Professor Paul Gilroy

ABSTRACT

Described as one of the most intellectually formidable cultural and social theorists of our time, Paul Gilroy has reshaped debates on racism, nationalism and multiculturalism. In April 2018, Prof. Paul Gilroy returned to Norway for the first time in over a decade for a series of public and academic events in Oslo and Bergen. Gilroy appeared at events held at the Houses of Literature in Oslo and Bergen, and the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, which took place between the 17th and 20th of April 2018 and marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of Gilroy’s seminal work for which he is arguably best known, his 1993 classic The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Harvard University Press]. This article is a transcript of a conversation held at the House of Literature in Oslo on the 17th of April 2018 between Professor Paul Gilroy (King's College London, UK) and Associate Researcher Sindre Bangstad (KIFO, Norway). It has been annotated for clarifications and contextualization in an effort to bring this conversation in line with Professor Gilroy’s work, legacy and thoughts on the current historical moment, in light of his own intellectual labour. As such this interview illuminates some of the ways in which Paul Gilroy offers a diagnosis of the contemporary political climate while also accounting for this moment in relationship to his own work throughout the years on the interconnectedness of race, racism, and nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Paul Gilroy
• nationalism
• racism
• diaspora
• Brexit

Introduction

A Professor of American and English Literature who has taught at King’s College London since 2012, Gilroy takes a wide-ranging approach to address areas of scholarly interests. His work includes post-colonial studies, post imperial melancholia and the emplotment of English victimage; the literature and cultural politics of European decolonization; African American intellectual and cultural history, literature and philosophy; the formation and reproduction of national identity, especially with regard to race and ‘identity’; and the literary and theoretical significance of port cities and pelagics.

Gilroy’s theories of race, racism and culture were influential in shaping the cultural and political movement of black British people during the 1990s. His highly influential publications include There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Gilroy 2013; published originally in 1987), a study of the discourse of ‘race’ and the practice of racism in British politics and society. The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (Gilroy 1993) revisits the idea of ‘double consciousness’ as a means of negotiating being ‘both European and black’ and marks a turning point in the study of diasporas. Hybridity and double consciousness were, in Gilroy’s later work, reexamined through his critical engagement with the concept of race and its invocation with nationalism and racism in Against Race (Gilroy 2000). On April 17 2018, Professor Paul Gilroy returned to Norway for the first time in over a decade for a series of public and academic events in Oslo and Bergen. Gilroy appeared at events held at the Houses of Literature in Oslo and Bergen, and the Universities of Oslo and Bergen between April 17th and April 20th. 2018 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gilroy’s 1993 classic The Black Atlantic. This article is a transcript of a conversation held at the House of Literature in Oslo on the 17th of April, 2018 between Professor Paul Gilroy and Associate Professor Sindre Bangstad.

This conversation was based on a wish to talk about, and contextualize, Gilroy’s work within a historical frame which sought to trace his scholarship from its inception within the field of Cultural Studies through to its position within today’s political milieu. As such the subsequent interview represents a unique way of looking at Gilroy’s scholarship through his own words as he engaged with the historical influences of his work, the road that his work has taken him, as well as what he considered to be its place within the current climate of both academia and contemporary politics more broadly.

SINDRE: So Paul, welcome to the House of Literature and to Oslo. We are very pleased to have you. From your writings I venture to guess that you are more preoccupied with routes rather than roots in James Clifford’s famous terms.¹ So, the little that I know of your background and your personal biography tells me that you were one of two children of the formidable British Guyanese novelist Beryl Gilroy, born in London’s East End in 1956. And taking your mentor Stuart Hall’s account of those particular times, as my background in his posthumous autobiography ‘Familiar Stranger’ (Hall 2017), this was a time of considerable hostility towards people of what became known as the Windrush generation.² Or in other words, people of British Caribbean descent in London’s East End. And this tragically enough is now being replayed in the form of the present Conservative government of the UK’s year-long practice of forcibly deporting people of British Caribbean background that may in some cases have spent their entire lives in the UK. So at the risk of annoying you, where does Paul Gilroy come from in terms of roots?

PAUL: Well it is interesting that you should say that, Sindre, because of course for so much of my early life that was a question that was put to me a lot, actually. ‘Where are you from? You can’t be from here!’ And I suppose in a way, the history of my responses, my evolving responses to that question can be retrospectively made into a narrative that explains my work. For somebody who is so interested in movement and migration and forced migration and the displacement of populations – I suppose I can also say that I live within a very small distance from where I was born and where I lived as a child. So, there is a certain irony in that. My mother was writer. My parents were not … they didn’t live together all the time. My mother was a migrant and she was trained as a teacher in the Caribbean, in Guyana. But when she came to England she couldn’t practice as a teacher. So, she worked as a maid to Lady Winifred Gore, she was a cook at The London Clinic making meals for the dying. She only gradually became a teacher again. She certainly taught me how to write and to love language. You understand these things as you age, you don’t understand them as a child. My father had been a conscientious objector in World War II. He had had a relationship with communist ideology that was complicated. He was the kind of a conscientious objector who undertook limited war work. So that meant that when the bombs were falling on London, because he had received a training in chemistry, he stayed above ground with monitoring equipment in case the German bombers launched a gas attack on London. So, although he wouldn’t fight, he would do things that were supportive of the vulnerable, civilian people in this moment of aerial warfare. He spoke German as well as English. It may have been his first language as a child. His family had anglicized their family name so as not to be seen as German. So retrospectively, I would say that I was the child of a household of intellectuals. There was a lot of mess in our house, a lot of books – a bit like the one I live in now actually. There were too many books. And – you know – there is a saying, isn't there? That if you have a writer in the family you don’t really have a family. I like to think that we have we have managed to find a way to cope with that problem because now we have four writers in our family and not two, but anyways. As a child, my mother’s typewriter was always an issue. It was a mysterious plaything, a fascinating toy. I recall the smell of the oil on its mechanism. My mother was a very unusual woman. She taught me to write. So we came from a household that was a mixed household in several senses. It would be ridiculed and held in contempt. Obviously, there was a lot of racism around. I remember once being on the bus and someone spat at my mother who got back on the bus and sorted the woman out while my father was standing there not really knowing what to do. We were a source of mystery and amusement to our neighbours. There used to be a horrible program on the British television, where they did a kind of US style minstrel show.³ I am sure you did not have anything like that here in Norway. Anyway, the TV people imported some of this American pathology from the 19th century and it lived on, it had a kind of weird half-life in English popular entertainment. It was called The Black and White Minstrel Show. Actors would put on minstrel makeup and dance around playing at being ‘negroes’. I remember when we finally had a house – we moved into the house – I remember the neighbours saying, ‘Oh, here come the black and white minstrels’. London didn’t just become a heteroglot cosmopolitan place recently. I mean in the flats where I grew up – you know – upstairs from us there where Jamaicans and Indians, my best friend as a young child was a boy whose mother was French and his father was Algerian and they had come to live in London to get away from the situation in France. The people who lived opposite were Jews, and there were Sikhs and Cypriots. I am really formed by that mix. I am formed by that version of a rich, urban culture in which local, white English life is only one element. In my work I have called it a convivial culture, which is not the same thing as a multicultural. It is a convivial culture. In other words, very complicated forms of interdependence exist where one set of habits flows into others and all of them are altered by that encounter. One of the reasons why I went back to live, we went back to live in London after living for years in the United States, was because I value that convivial culture very highly, and it is something along with the hatred, the loathing and nationalism that really – I think – distinguishes the approach that I have taken to thinking about race and the struggle against racial hierarchy.

SINDRE: So, in terms of your sort of intellectual development, I cannot avoid the question of the impact of the work of the late and great British Jamaican cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall. Because, I mean in spite of, your stated ambivalence of what became of Cultural Studies, I think it is fair to describe you as a scholar that came out of that particular tradition of the new left, as inflected in the work by Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham in the UK in the 1970s. You did your PhD there in 1986, your first edited volume was The Empire Strikes Back, if I understand this correctly. You’ve also written a wonderful tribute to the late Stuart Hall in the form of this edited volume published by Verso in the 2000s Without guarantees: In honour of Stuart Hall, and you did a wonderful photographic volume, Black Britain: a photographic history published by Saqi Books in 2007 with Hall.⁴ So how would you now in retrospect describe the profound impact of Stuart Hall’s thinking on your own work?

PAUL: Well, Stuart was my teacher and he was a wonderful teacher. He was a fantastic teacher, and I’ve been blessed in my own life as a student, to have had some wonderful teachers – not only him – but he was a great teacher. An exhilarating teacher. So – you know – if you are a curious person, you can thrive with the support of intellectual guides. I mean I have always been very much affected by Fanon’s articulation of curiosity as something that is endowed with a revolutionary potential or possibility. Curiosity has a revolutionary force, and if you are a curious person and you can find a great teacher or a guide, you’re very, very fortunate. So, I owe Stuart a great deal, actually, because he was such a great teacher, such an illuminating teacher though he wasn’t a very good supervisor for my PhD.

SINDRE: If truth be told … 

PAUL: Yeah, and I will also say I think without paying any disrespect to his memory that we did not always agree about everything, and that there were very big generational differences. I mean, my mother came to Britain in 1952, he – I think – came in 1950 or something like that. So, you know … although they were of different ages they came into the same England, and their relationship with England is very marked by certain forms of ambivalence. My mother called Guyana home, but she never went back there. She – you know – she’d obviously partly come to escape from her own family. I think my relationship with England, with Europe, is not ambivalent in that way. Obviously, problems arise when you discover the power of the racial ordering of the place through the violence. That was something that people in my generation were still dealing with every day. Negotiating my way to and fro to school, to home, through the city, moving through. There is ambivalence there, but there is no other place to call home. A complex response develops that is related to the ‘double consciousness’ that Du Bois spoke about (see e.g. Du Bois and Marable 2015). I used to try to pretend that I belonged somewhere else, but I never succeeded. When I went back to the Caribbean at the age of twelve, I discovered that it was not my home and that I didn’t really belong there. I wasn’t yet – you know – psychologically and ontologically prepared to think that I didn't belong anywhere. So, I resolved at that pivotal point to seek an accommodation with London, with Britain. There were others in my generation like me, who decided that we had to fight for a measure of recognition in our belonging to that polity, to that culture. I won’t call it a civilisation but I hope you understand what I am saying; we resolved to fight for our belonging. Of course, the people who are being deported now, and who have been deported, are victims of that mentality which cannot grasp the connectedness of the postcolonial migrant to the machinery of British citizenship. I know our lying prime minister will stand there with a good PR smile on her face and say that she didn’t know anything about these horrible things. But let us remember that though she did not create this climate of hostility, she manipulated and orchestrated it as an explicit element of government policy. She created the policy that has had these awful results. Let me just put the Windrush Scandal⁵ to one side for a moment and say that when we were doing political work in our generation there was a difference between those of us who were born in the country and the other young people who had arrived in Britain as children. It is a subtle thing, but they had a memory of Caribbean life and the trauma of displacement and relocation. They had a different relationship to the patois and the languages of the Caribbean. You know that language is the house of being.⁶ There was a difference between those people who had an antecedent notion of home, who had a sense that their belonging was made more complex by its tropical formation. Obviously, I could meet my cousins and my grandmother and so on. I had contact with those people. I don’t know how many people here know about the history of that part of the Caribbean, but there was an enormous outflow of people from Guyana, to Canada, to the States. There was a huge movement.⁷ And soon, my mother’s family was widely dispersed. My maternal grandmother was one of eighteen children, so in our larger kin group there is a huge dispersal of people all over the world really. To other parts of Europe, and other parts of North America, and to other parts of the Caribbean. So what I am saying really, is that it was impossible for me to aspire to being Guyanese. That impossibility was made clear to me on my first encounters with that world. So, I wanted to fight to belong to Britain, and Stuart never had that. You ask about the difference in our perspectives and our relationship: he was a Jamaican! I don’t know if he would ever say he was English. He would say he had a relationship with it or whatever, but he would never say he was English. Whereas I have to say that. And I like the provocation. I like the provocation of saying it. He would go back to Jamaica, obviously he was very ambivalent about it, but he would return there regularly and frequently – when his health allowed for that possibility. Whereas actually I – you know – I wanted to fight for a different future for my country within Europe. And of course, as recent events testify, everything I fought for on that front is now being shredded in front of our eyes. Things that we thought we had disposed of, politically, have come up from the ground like zombies to consume our lives.⁸

SINDRE: And yet following up on that line. You know the Caribbean problem space in the formulation of the anthropologist David Scott.⁹ There is a consistent and continual line in your thinking which revolves around the life and work of Caribbean thinkers, right. I’m thinking here of the independent Marxist historian C.L.R. James,¹⁰ I'm thinking of Eduard Glissant,¹¹ I’m thinking of Franz Fanon, and also Stuart Hall for that matter. So, what is this Caribbean problem space to you and what does it mean?

PAUL: I was very privileged to know both James and Glissant just a little. What I learned from them – and from Stuart too … and it may be a Caribbean problem, though not a Caribbean ‘problem space’. What they showed me was that it was possible to be a black intellectual. Which is a kind of impossible condition. In the way that modern racism works, blackness is the body and whiteness is the mind, you know the way those Manichean pairings, those dualistic couples are organised. James of course was something of a hero to me. I interviewed him twice and exchanged letters with him. Going to talk to him, I was so excited I didn’t know what to say. He was sitting in bed watching cricket and he seemed to have reverted to many of his pre-1948 positions, which disappointed me, because I felt that what interested me was what happened after 1956. Here I have to make a personal detour. I’m called Paul because my father was friends with Paul Dienes, a Hungarian mathematician and intellectual who taught in London. My father left the Communist Party in 1956, and ‘56 was the moment of my birth and so on. One of the things with James is that 1956 and the Hungarian revolution was a watershed in his thinking about political agency, about the future of Marxism, about the nature of political organization. So, when I tried to get him to speak into my tape recorder, I thought, ‘well, okay, here is my moment’. I said, ‘Well this is the argument that you laid out when you were working with them, Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Boggs – the famous African American political organizer and writer who has written such a beautiful autobiography’. So, I said ‘Well, you put this in your book Facing Reality (James and Lee 2006), about the Hungarian revolution’, and he just sort of leaned back and said ‘Well, facing reality. That was the one thing that we were never prepared to do’. So, I think I learned in spite of that, that you could be a black intellectual, that it was a possible thing. You referred earlier to the Caribbean ‘problem space’. I used the word zombie before. Of course, the zombie is one of the key inhabitants of the Caribbean problem space. The zombie marches out of that world into our world, and zombies seem to have an interesting afterlife among us now, as a symbol of all kinds of things. And it is interesting because – of course – the zombie is a body without a consciousness. Most ghosts, most spirits, most poltergeists, you know, they are consciousness without a body, but the zombie has a body without a consciousness. Marina Warner, who won the Holberg Prize, has written very lucidly about the figure of a zombie as a haunting of the Caribbean in our problem space, the European problem space.¹² I really appreciate David Scott’s work and his stewardship of Stuart Hall's intellectual legacy. David is also a Jamaican and his work is very much in the spirit of Hayden White, so he will be guided by that.¹³ When thinking about the making of our modern world it is essential to understand – and there are obviously people in this room who know this story better than I do – that the Caribbean was a kind of experiment. It is an unprecedented historical experiment in the making of social and economic and political life. Anybody who wants to understand the history of our modernity has to know that history. James said as much in his beautiful essay Black Studies and the Contemporary Student (James 1969). He says that he loved black studies only as long as it was a way of teaching an alternative history of the world, of western civilisation. I think that is the distinctive burden of these black intellectuals, of Sylvia Wynter, of Aime Césaire, the other francophones; they are committed to making an alternative history of the modern world. If black studies are a vehicle for that, then you must all begin to practice it because in order to be an effective critic, of that modern world, to understand the history of capitalism, to understand the history of government and law and war and trade, you have to be familiar with the Caribbean story, with that experiment.

SINDRE: We would of course have also to include Franz Fanon among these.

PAUL: I will say two things about him, because I think it is worth speaking about him directly because his work is now so influential. American readings of his work are so dominant through the internet, I would humbly suggest that people need to go back to the work and read what is in the texts, and not try and turn it into soundbites that they can use in their political organising. For me Fanon, like Césaire actually, is a great humanist. A planetary humanist is what he is. Césaire says, ‘We must make a humanism made to the measure of the world’ (Césaire 1959),¹⁴ right? Not the humanism of white supremacy, not the humanism of the liberals and the Cold War, but a humanism made to the measure of the world. I would say there are two things about Fanon that his many American readers have largely failed to really grasp. Maybe more, but there are two that occur to me. One is that he was a doctor. He had a doctor’s mentality: he wanted to heal – actually. In Fanon every argument about violence, every single comment on violence is framed or qualified by an argument about healing. And the other thing, and this related to the use of medical metaphors in his work: I do not know if his medical and scientific writings have been published yet in your language. They’ve only just been published in English; they have been available in French for a couple of years.¹⁵ He was also a soldier. So in Fanon we have someone who combines the figures of the doctor and the soldier. The taker of life, and the saver of life. You can’t comprehend him without that pairing. I know he would hate it if I tried to elevate it into some kind of Manichaean couple, I’m not trying to do that. I think that there is a kind of agonistic pairing of the healer and the soldier in Fanon’s revolutionary imagination, and I think that should be the starting point for reading his development and understanding how his thought unfolds over time.

SINDRE: It is also fair to say – I think – in this context that, as David Macey points out in his fine biography of Fanon, that Fanon was very poorly served by quite a number of the English translations of his work, right?¹⁶ Right then, returning to your own work and … There is an enormous list, right, so we just have to nit-pick our way through some of it. I wanted to start off with what is arguably your breakthrough book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, which is arguably what made your name as a post-colonial intellectual, first published in 1987. And this book has now appeared in any number of reprints, and is published as a Routledge Classics title. It is fair to say – also – that it has served as a long-standing inspiration to a number of scholars interested in re-inserting black people and histories in the history of not only the UK, but numerous other European countries. In the face of a long history of nationalist denials about the heterogeneous nature and origins of our very own societies. This is even the case in Norway where intellectuals are now presenting a history of modern Norway as if – you know – we were all white and homogenous until the late 1960s – you know – when all these ‘terrible Muslims’ started coming. I could mention here that this work has inspired the work of David Olusoga in ‘Black Britain’, the BBC series as well as best-selling title, and Sadiah Qureshi’s fine work Peoples on Parade (Qureshi 2011). Rereading There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack – I am struck by the way in which you tried to link British nationalism and racism. Because we have a long-standing tradition, not only in the UK, but also very much so here in Norway, to sort of exceptionalize racism by making racism something that pertains to the extremist edges, right? ‘It’s not about us; it’s about them, the loonies on the far right’. Rather than talking about – and thinking about – racism as being part of mainstream society and intimately linked to nationalism and the ways in which many people see and experience the world. So, can you explain how you saw these linkages then, and how you see them now?

PAUL: The context of that book – originally – was the emergence of what a number of us had begun to call a new racism.¹⁷ By calling it a new racism we were drawing attention to the fact that it was strongly culturalist in character, and that it articulated nationalism and racism very tightly together. Now, at that time – I don’t know if this has changed completely – but thirty years ago, it was very conventional to say that nationalism belongs to one area of scholarship and racism belongs … if it belonged to any … if it belongs at all to scholarship, it went somewhere else – either to psychology with the trope of prejudice or towards psychosocial studies. If it was recognised as being interesting, and usually racism wasn’t considered interesting at all. But wherever it was, it was not connected to the academic study of nationalism. This separation was there, for example in Benedict Anderson’s very influential book (Anderson 2004). He tries to separate the two things out very sharply, and I suppose I felt that the starting point for any critique of the racism that I was most familiar with was a very close connection with nationalism. That association was accomplished through a particular sense of what culture could be, which had acquired all the force of an earlier biologically-orientated racism. But the new racism didn’t announce itself as a biological racism. It made culture into the favoured battleground. It made culture something we had to quarrel with. We had to offer a better understanding of culture. We had an opportunity I suppose – coming out of a Cultural Studies conversation – to make a better theory of culture than the one that saw culture distributed in national buckets so that you were either in the bucket of your exclusive national culture, or somewhere else in some other bucket somewhere. We had a chance to show how culture moved, how it lived, how it reproduced, to understand its organicity, its fluidity, plasticity, mutability: the conflict that it hosted. We need not be defeated by what my friend Ulrich Beck used to call a ‘methodological nationalism’¹⁸ as well as a political nationalism. As a result, we had to update our understanding of how to combat racism in the field of ideas: in our disciplines, in our institutions, in our universities. We could only do this if we saw the new variety of racism that was strongly cultural in character – so cultural, so different supposedly – from a biological racism that it could hold up its hands and plead that it wasn’t racism at all. So, to try and show that, to show the history of how that had happened, that was the aim, the principal aim of that book. I'm very flattered that it is still something people find useful. Like many people I can’t re-read my own work. Most of the time, I can’t even remember what is in them, but I do remember that’s in there. I do remember that that is in there somewhere, there is an argument about nation and race and culture, that was very important to me, and … obviously, some people like the title of this book. They always liked it: There ain’t no black in the Union Jack. In a sense … the original edition had a photograph, a beautiful photograph taken by Jane Bown, of an older ‘Windrush generation’ man who had been in the army of the British in World War II, and he is standing at the Cenotaph at the ceremony held each year to remember the glorious dead who fell in battle. He is proudly holding a regimental banner, or, the banner of the West Indian Ex-Servicemen and Women’s Association. His chest is pinned with medals. I know that the left is a bit bad with irony sometimes, but the point is that combination of title and image was to suggest an ironic relationship between the ‘black’ and the ‘Union Jack’. It was an old racist chant heard at cricket matches in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

I’ve mentioned the left and that takes me to the other thing I want to say about this book. Many people on the left thirty years ago, just as many people on the left now in the wake of the vote against the EU membership, they look to places like Norway and they say ‘Oh, but the left has always been nationalist’, ‘it is perfectly possible to be a leftist and a nationalist’ and so on. There were many people in my intellectual and political environment who regardless of the connection with racism were saying that we had to find a wholesome patriotism, find a ‘clean’ nationalism which will mean that we can challenge the hegemony of those who rule, exploit and expropriate by articulating national feeling to the Right. I was never convinced by that argument, because it was an argument that could only be made if you did not take racism into account. Often the people making that argument were people who I respected, people who I looked up to. Raymond Williams, an extraordinary thinker. Edward Thomson, an extraordinary historian and a brave activist. But these were all, actually in this case, there are men only, who had been fighting in World War II (like Fanon). They had acquired a different kind of patriotism in that struggle.

SINDRE: A kind of ‘little Englander’ nationalism, right?

PAUL: That was the danger. There was always the danger that there would be a kind of overlap between the left nationalism and patriotism and the things that were being said on the right. Today we have many – they call it ‘Lexit’ – the people on the left who support leaving the EU.¹⁹ This division is in some ways a replay of some of these older problems. Nowadays the anti-racist part of it – people like the Socialist Workers Party and these groupings – they are forgetful. Their memories have been very badly affected in the intervening time, because they don’t remember that the racists we were fighting in the street in the 1970s and early 80s, these were people who had a political programme where the first aim was ‘get the blacks out, get the browns out’ and the second thing on the list was ‘Leave the EU’. So now, those people want to talk about Trump and what’s happening in America, but they won't talk about the actual issues involved in dealing with the political contradiction into which they have led people.

SINDRE: Fast forwarding to your 2000 co-edited volume ‘Without Guarantees’ (Gilroy et al. 2000), you have an interesting essay concerning Stuart Hall – again – titled ‘The Sugar you Stir’, in which you note that the … or you advance the idea that Stuart Hall’s work on race offers us, along with the current crisis of race and representation, this is a direct quote:

‘this current crisis of race and representation offers a welcome cue to free ourselves from the bonds of all raciology in what might be an ambitious new abolitionist project’. That was 2000, and some of us have noted with increasing concern – and I think you too – how raciological thinking seems to have returned with full force and in a myriad of variations since then. So what … how would you assess the state we are in now with regard to this ambitious new abolitionist project?

PAUL: Well, we all make mistakes, Sindre. Having been accused of being ‘a melancholic’ by Laura Chrisman in Race & Class (Chrisman 1997), I was trying to look on the bright side. If you’ve read my work as carefully as it sounds like you have, you will know that I am a distant follower in the footsteps of Giacomo Leopardi. I am a cosmic pessimist: ‘what is this acid spot in time that goes by the name of life?’. Has a strong Nordic resonance, I suspect. Let me say that I was looking for hope – actually – because I think that it is part of the responsibility of people who have the privilege to be teachers, or people who have the chance to communicate in the media, to seek resources of hope in the world. I mistakenly thought that a shift onto the molecular scale in thinking about racial difference – at that moment – offered a cue. I said it was a cue. A cue is a piece of language or sound that comes from drama and musicking. It comes from the dramaturgy, the world of performance. So a cue is the moment you hear something off-stage, and you come on the stage or in to the performance because it is your turn to participate. Now, you can miss your cue or you can come late, or not come at all. I think that that cue was missed. Do I still think there was a moment there? – and another contingent possibility? Yes, I do, I think that there was an opportunity. Some of the things that I was looking at then and thinking about in that very different moment two decades ago were a missed opportunity. I wrote those lines while living in the USA or just on the edge of moving there.²⁰ So that was another factor. Some of the things I was picking up on as hopeful possibilities were delusions, but some were things that maybe gave rise to the moment of Obama’s presidency. Things were changing and shifting around. So I won’t apologise for my mistake, I’ll own that one, and just say that it is a part of our responsibility to seek shards of hope, the fragments of hope in the world. That is responsible conduct. This is also something that Raymond Williams²¹ has written about, and others too – Ernst Bloch, another big influence on me. Someone who associates those possibilities of hope with certain elements of musical experience and things that can’t readily be translated into words, you know. So, the sense of hope, the feeling of possibility, the understanding of contingency of political culture and so on. It is good to be able to go into those more, less scholastic, more activist oriented parts of life – with a sense of hope. Because otherwise you can’t survive. You get overwhelmed quickly. And in those days we used to just be depressed. Now we are depressed and anxious.

SINDRE: Well, it is a contradictory development isn’t it? We’re speaking in front of a full house here, so all hope appears not to be lost yet. Now, arguably your most famous work is ‘The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness’ first published by Harvard University Press in 1993. Here you write about a black intellectual and artistic tradition characterised by Du Boisian double consciousness, which emerges – and here is a quote again – ‘in the contact zones between various cultures and histories and which desires to transcend both the structures of the nation-state and the constraints of ethnicity and nationality’ (Gilroy 1993). Interestingly enough here … you also here position yourself against certain essentialist claims relating to the alleged ‘racial authenticity’ of specifically black intellectual and artistic tradition, which tend to devalue hybrid forms and expressions. And so the responses from sections of the left – which identifies with such claims – have often been less than welcoming. I wanted you to talk about these responses to your work, and how you address them now twenty-odd years on.

PAUL: When I was writing Black Atlantic I thought I was writing a book that was a pan-Africanist book, in the sense of the politics of Du Bois, the politics of George Padmore,²² James²³ and the others, Claudia Jones²⁴ et cetera. I was trying to make a new kind of a pan-Africanist book. When he was living in England and writing ‘Black Marxism’ (Robinson 2000), Vron²⁵ and I had become a bit friendly with Cedric Robinson and his wife Elizabeth Robinson. He wrote an essay for our journal Emergency. I learned a lot from reading his book, ‘Black Marxism’, which has become very popular now. Although I often wonder how many people have actually read it all the way through. It is quite a difficult book to read and the footnotes are incredible. Those footnotes are another whole book. I say this not to criticise Cedric but because I have started to wonder about reading. I’ve become worried about reading now because I think that books are endangered. That is why I’m so happy there’s a big bookshop over there in this building, the Literature House. I know there are still bookshops in this city because I have seen them, but they are probably dwindling as they are elsewhere. I worry about putting books at the centre of our critical project, because books are disappearing. As I moved away from social science, human science towards teaching in literature, I realised that I wanted to be in a place where people were more enthusiastic about books than they are in social science. The people in social science were more – the students anyway – they were more enthusiastic about the answers they needed in order to secure their credentials. They were less inclined to go and read. Now in the literature department I can say ‘please go and read these books’, and an army of mostly young women will go and read them all and come back and talk to me about them. I think books are vehicles for our curiosity. Who can really read on their phone’s screen? That test was not what I had in mind when I was trying to think about this. Du Bois, you mentioned double consciousness before, Du Bois changed his mind a lot and developed through several styles of thought. He was a dialectician, he was a Hegelian, but he was also someone who wept at the sight of Cologne Cathedral. I don’t know if Cologne Cathedral is familiar to you. He was someone who had a visionary view of how the experience of African peoples within modernity pointed to a different future for this planet. Now obviously he lived into his nineties, so he changed his opinion a lot. The American government took away his passport for a number of years, and he did in later life, renounce his American citizenship – as I am sure you know. He became a citizen of Ghana and a member of the Communist Party, right, in the last phase of his life.²⁶ So he is a complex character, but he envisioned a sense in which the culture of freedom that emanates from the struggle of African people in the Atlantic world offers a definition of human freedom which is a gift of the slaves to everyone else on earth. He articulates an idea of freedom which is as powerful as the idea of freedom that comes from the French Revolution, or the idea of freedom that comes out of the German idealist tradition, or the idea of freedom that comes out of any other culture. In one of his novels that I write about in the book, ‘Dark Princess’,²⁷ he dramatizes a kind of worldwide fellowship of peoples of colour which will transform the planet through its anti-colonial activism. He was painting on a very big canvas, a canvas that is one of the ones we need to have in mind, but not the only one. He is a dialectician and he is a Hegelian in some way, he likes to believe that this culture of freedom has become a worldwide force. In a way, Du Bois was right – that culture of freedom has been exported across the planet and it still does transmit those very vivid possibilities of human freedom on a frequency that people can hear. Young people can still hear its echoes, they can pick up on it, they can tap into it. It is a source of energy there, in struggles all over the world, not just those struggles against the racial ordering of the world. So I guess the longevity of my book is partly explained by the way that I stumbled into those things. Du Bois was very interested in how his life as an intellectual connected the struggle of African American people to the intellectual life of Germany. With Richard Wright,²⁸ I felt that his writing was on the edge of a relationship between Francophonie, a certain Parisian intellectual life that he was fully part of with Présence Africaine ²⁹ and other things, as well as the Anglophone world of the communism he had left behind. I was trying to use those stories as a way of pushing towards a sense of what this treasure might mean for the future of Europe. Michael McEachrane³⁰ is this brilliant young Afro-Swedish young man who edited the volume Afro Nordic Dialogues (McEachrane 2014). There was a really nice essay in there from some people in Denmark who had picked up on something – a few fragmentary sentences – that I had found about Nella Larsen³¹ at a time when Nella Larsen’s time in Denmark was ridiculed and excoriated by African American critics who said: ‘She never even went to Denmark, she was making it all up, none of it is true’. There are probably 10,000 stories of that kind now. That archive leads me to think that we can change – well – some of you will be able to do this more than I’ll be able to do it now. You will still be able to change the future of Europe, even if the deck is stacked against you. You will be able to change the future of Europe by being archaeologists of this history. It is there, and there is still so much that we don’t even know. We can use that history, we can make a new genealogy, not just to find a different account of how the modern world became the modern world and how it was consolidated institutionally on our planet, but more modestly, we can tell a story about Europe's past and Europe’s future.

SINDRE: I wanted also to talk about this seminal book of yours, ‘Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Colour Line’ published in 2000 by Harvard University Press. It is here – I think – that you make your most trenchant critique of race thinking or raciology, and since I’m such a Norwegian Catholic reader, I’ll cite you again. Here you write on page forty and this is not to embarrass you by any means, ‘The only appropriate response to raciology is to demand liberation, not from white supremacy alone, but from all racializing and raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized thinking and racialized thinking about thinking’. Now, a counter argument here would be that though race is socially and culturally constructed and the social scientists among us have all sort of settled on that now, race is much too real in its effects and solidaric opposition to these effects have often taken the form of a subverting racial self-categorisation. You find that in the ambivalence of Du Bois, right, to the very concept of race. So can I ask you to restate the grounds for your finding this latter option and unsatisfactory solution on the part/path of those dominated in the very name of raciology?

PAUL: There are some people – rightly or wrongly – who want anti-racism to be a critical project only. They want to be able to say what is wrong with the world and to show how those wrongs might be challenged, undone. The emphasis falls on the practical work of disassembling those racial hierarchies when they are apparent in institutions, in interpersonal life, and so on. I think that is fine, and its noble and honourable and important work, and I wish it was not necessary – but it is necessary. However, I don’t think that is enough, and I think that we do that work better – we do it much better – if we have an idea of the world we want to make. And that might be difficult but it could not be avoided. I felt dishonest after a while if I could not answer the question which asked ‘Alright then, if you’re against racism, what kind of world do you want to make? Do you want to make a world where racial differences are just natural things, and racism comes along and messes them up?’. So you get rid of racism and then we all have natural difference and that is all fine. Well, I did not find that intellectually or politically satisfying. A lot of anti-racist work is of that type. It says: ‘Nature gives us racial differences, look around the room, some of the differences you see are racial; others are not’. It’s just racism makes those differences bad. I came to a different position gradually – and somewhat reluctantly – in which I see racism as a system assembling races in the world. It’s a more difficult idea to sell, I suppose you could say, but I think that racism generates or assembles races – can I put it that way? It is not something that grows from racial difference. It creates racial difference. The history, and the genealogies of racial systems of thought, seems to me to be interpreted better when we see its dynamic unfolding. That means we have to be able to say what kind of world we want to build and inhabit. I know that isn’t going to be the end and it isn’t going to be perfect, but I’m still convinced that we will be better off without the particular forms of violence, the particular forms of cruelty, the particular forms of error that arise from racial metaphysics and racial systems of thought. We are better off without all those things, even if we know there is still lots more work to do, we are better off without those specific things. I’m not sure you can have an anti-racism which is credible unless you are able to switch into a more constructive view of the world you want to build. You might have a black liberation project, you might have an equality and diversity project, you might have a McKinsey multiculturalism project – but you won’t have an anti-racist project unless you can say the kind of world you want to see arise. Someone like Du Bois is interesting because in his nineties he decided that he was going to revert to earlier ways of looking at the world and fight over what communism could be as a basis for rethinking a world without imperial and colonial and racial domination. Well, for me, communism isn’t that option, you know. I understand why he took that turn at that point, but that is not one for me. I think we have to be bolder, I think we have to be more imaginative than we often are. We’re not encouraged to be imaginative in this area, and it may well be that solving the practical and the immediate problems in our everyday relationship with racial violence, say, or racial institutions in the police force, or the way that death so often follows contact with the police, or the functioning of carceral systems. Out of those struggles can grow that different conception of what it is to be a human being that Césaire and Fanon spoke of. Remember, Fanon said: ‘Oh my body, make of me a man who asks questions’; and then he said: ‘we are going to make a new humanism’ which is – in his language, this is not my language – a formation that corresponds to ‘the real dialectic between the body and the world’. The real one, not the racial-corporeal schema. Do you remember that passage, in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’? (Fanon 2008; first published in 1952). He is talking about reaching out for his cigarettes and matches, moving through space. Well maybe – you know he was a smoker – he was one of these people you’ll see outside the building fervently pulling on a cigarette. There is something about that real dialectic. I know that some smart aleck will say, well there is a race politics to the use of tobacco, and of course, there is. There is a race politics to the production of tobacco – or was – and now there is a race politics to the consumption of tobacco. Look at the African American death rates with regards to the demographics of smoking. Who is still smoking, what are they smoking? What happens to them? Ok, let’s leave that on one side for a moment and let’s say that in Fanon’s imagination there is a difference between the racial corporeal schema: ‘look mother, a négre!’. There is a difference between seeing yourself being seen in that epidermal relationship and the difficult, alternative question of a real dialectic between the body and the world. Its real; it’s not the mirage of race. The real dialectic between the body and the world. It is interesting to me that he uses smoking to illustrate that reaching – phenomenologically – reaching for the cigarettes and the matches, moving through space to get to them, as an instance of what that real dialectic might be like.

SINDRE: One of the things that I love about your work is the titles. So in ‘Against Race’ there is a fabulous chapter entitled ‘Hitler wore khakis’, which of course plays on the raciological foundation shared by colonialism and fascism. And here you make the case for pursuing a generic definition of fascism. And the irony here: ‘although some contemporary enthusiasts for fascism conveniently opt to wear Nazi uniforms, many do not announce their nihilistic and ultranationalist commitments so boldly’. And you caution against overemphasizing the ideological coherence and consistence of fascists doctrines, but note – and here is the key – ‘the enduring appeal of Nazi and other militaristic and fascist styles remains a significant cultural phenomenon’ (Gilroy 2000). In other words, as fascism may be dead as a political project, ‘fascinating fascism’ – in the words of Susan Sontag (Sontag 1975) – certainly isn’t. In Norway we do of course have no better example of this than the child-murdering right-wing extremist terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. So what is this ‘generic fascism’ that we should be mindful of and worried about right now?

PAUL: Well, the argument about generic fascism occupies a complicated shelf in the library, and I suppose one very interesting short text that was produced for a non-specialist reader that many people will have seen, I’m sure, was the text of Umberto Eco ‘Ur-Fascism’ (Eco 1995). I became very interested in looking generationally across the field of European writers, thinking about those writers in different countries who were children during the period of Fascist domination. Eco writes about being one, obviously Foucault is another, who watches the Vichy regime³² and whose understanding of power is very much informed by watching the forms of complicity, the forms of violence, slow and fast, that obtain where people go along with the fascist governments that envelop them. I think the title of that piece actually came from the Gap advertisements³³ of that time. I don’t know if you remember, they used to have these black and white photographs of celebrities from days gone by. Muhammed Ali wore khakis or whatever. I suppose because the argument was very much that fascism had numerous afterlives in the world around us. I think at that time I had been very influenced to go back to smoking – if I may for one moment, I’m sorry if anybody is waiting to pop outside for a cigarette – maybe I’ll say just one more thing about that. I’ve been quite influenced by Robert Proctor, the historian of science. He wrote very brilliant, very interesting books. He is not really interested in racism, which is a great shame. But he wrote one very brilliant, beautiful book called ‘The Nazi War on Cancer’ (Proctor 2000) which looked at the development of Nazi health and safety legislation during the period. There is a beautiful illustration in that book where the animals of the Third Reich leaping up off the dissecting tables in the medical schools. They are jumping up as Goering walks through. They are leaping up off the dissecting tables and giving the Hitler salute as he walks through the laboratory. So I suppose by reading about the history of the Nazi approach to smoking, I began to think about the way in which that modernity was in fact familiar and confronting the issue of the visual, the dominance of visual culture, of icons rather than words in this. I tried to link it to an argument about the way that icons function independently of language. At that time at work I was teaching Heidegger a lot, and I had been reading all the biographies of Heidegger, and I got very interested by the fact that – when he was rector – he wore a gold swastika badge pinned on his lapel. I was thinking about how to interpret that gesture within a certain philosophical and communicative or meta-communicative language. Now, I don’t know about you as a random group of people or not, but I didn’t read ‘Mein Kampf’ until I was well into my thirties. It was certainly no part of my liberal British education to read ‘Mein Kampf’, and I studied fascism at school and in university, but nobody ever said: ‘go and read “Mein Kampf”’. So when I finally got round to reading ‘Mein Kampf’ in the preparation for writing this book, to discover the argument of the icon – the development of the swastika as an icon – how the proliferation of the icon as a visual form of culture, was related to the muting of other kinds of communication in written and spoken form. I suppose we could go on beyond the iconisation about cultural meaning into an argument about things like memes and so on today, but that is perhaps for another day. The point is more that there was a real sense – and Susan Sontag catches this in her very famous and beautiful essay too – that there is a shift toward a visual culture: pageants, rituals, towers of flame, the aesthetics of stone and the representation of the body in the fascist culture. I sat with my then very young daughter and watched Leni Riefenstahl’s movies,³⁴ all of them, one after another. She turned to me and said ‘Daddy why is that woman running barefoot up a mountain’, you know. ‘Why is that cat looking down from the window sill at all those uniformed people marching and doing drill?’. And I began to see that these incredible innovations of Riefenstahl lived on in the culture of advertising, lived on in the corporate visual culture that was swirling all around us, bombarding us, intruding into my life from the side of the bus, from the television. Everywhere I looked, there was a corporate message that was coming at me, that was connected in some way to that communicative revolution. Of course, I had not yet discovered Eddie Bernays,³⁵ or read Bernays struggling with the way Goebbels had used his book on propaganda. Suddenly the light came on! There is so much more work being done to render the Nazi, above all, as the exceptional figure – outside of ordinary experience. Primo Levi was so astute when he said that ‘It is not just the Nazis you have to worry about, it is their imitators as well’. It’s towards the end of his last book ‘The Drowned and the Saved’ (Levi 1989), the one he wrote before his suicide. I think to see the mimetic, compelling power of that culture in its visual form, alongside the resurgence and recurrence of a fascist polity, now informs that even more strongly than I noted nearly twenty years ago. The alt-right and their allies don’t announce themselves as fascists. Now its alt-right, it’s a picture of a frog or something. It is not a swastika – it is an ironic frog now. So our understanding of how to make these political forms of meaning needs to be amended to take of all of those changes into account. I think I was onto something there that I hope I will be able to develop in some of the things I'm writing at the moment. I’m sorry I went on so long, by the way.

SINDRE: Thank you very much, we need to let the smokers out!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paul Gilroy, Professor, PhD; Paul Gilroy joined King's College in September 2012 having previously been Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (2005–2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999–2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths College (1995–1999). Professor Gilroy’s areas of scholarly interest encompass post-colonial studies, particularly with regard to London, postimperial melancholia and the emplotment of English victimage; the literature and cultural politics of European decolonization; African American intellectual and cultural history, literature and philosophy; the formation and reproduction of national identity, especially with regard to race and ‘identity’; and the literary and theoretical significance of port cities and pelagics. Gilroy has also published on art, music and social theory.

Tony Sandset is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, at the Faculty of Medicine, Institute for Health and Society. His current research focuses on knowledge translation within the field of HIV care and prevention. Specifically, his focus is on how medical knowledge from randomized controlled trials is mediated, how evidence is generated in HIV prevention and how new medical technologies informs subjectivities, desire, and sexuality. Another of his research areas pertains to the intersection between race, gender, class and HIV care and prevention. Relating race, class and gender to how medical knowledge is disseminated and translated from research to clinical and community usage is of particular interest here. He is the author of Color that matters – a comparative approach to mixed race identity and Nordic exceptionalism. 1st ed. (Routledge, 2018) and has forthcoming a book titled ‘Ending AIDS’ in the age of biopharmaceuticals: the individual, the state, and the politics of prevention (Routledge, 2020).

Sindre Bangstad is a social anthropologist, and works as an associate researcher at KIFO (Institute For Church, Religion And Worldview Research) in Oslo, Norway. He has undertaken ethnographic fieldwork among Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa and Oslo, Norway. Since 2009, Bangstad has been the lead organizer of a series in public anthropology at the House of Literature in Oslo of which this event with Paul Gilroy formed part. Bangstad is the author of eight books, including Anders Breivik and the rise of Islamophobia (Zed Books/University of Chicago Press, 2014), The politics of mediated presence: exploring the voices of muslims in Norway’s mediated public spheres (Scandinavian Academic Press, 2015) and Anthropology of our times: an edited anthology in public anthropology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Gard Ringen Høibjerg is a PhD candidate at Inland University of Applied Science in Lillehammer, Norway, at the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences. His current research focuses on refugee integration in rural municipalities in Norway with emphasis on the everyday interactions of those settled as refugees and the public services. He has previously conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Spanish enclave Melilla.

ORCID

Gard Ringen Høibjerg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4000-4327

Notes

1. See the by now rather famous play on words by Clifford James (Clifford 1997).

2. The Windrush Generation is a term used to categorize the people who arrived from the Caribbean to the UK in the period 1948–1973. The generation was named after the ship SS Empire Windrush that brought the first group of people from the Caribbean to the UK in 1948. The ship had previously been German during the Second World War, sailing under the name Monte Rosa, and was damaged following an attack by saboteurs in the Oslofjord. The arrival of Caribbean subjects was facilitated through the British Nationality Act 1948, which stated that all citizens of the Commonwealth were British citizens, and the arrivals helped rebuild post-war Britain. Caribbean migration came to a halt following the Immigration Act 1971, which nevertheless confirmed the status of those already present and settled in the UK as citizens. However, the UK failed to properly fit those who had arrived with documents that ascertained their status as British citizens, thus leading to a history of second class citizenry for those who arrived. For more, see e.g. The Home Affairs Committee (2018).

3. According to the BBC the minstrel show named The Black and White Minstrel Show ran from 1958 to 1978. The BBC itself states that the show ‘was arguably the BBC’s most glaring failure to understand the damage it could do when it traded in out-dated stereotypes’. This was not just a niche show; rather, as the BBC notes: ‘In the two decades of its existence, it’s hard to dispute the sheer popularity of The Black and White Minstrel Show – in numerical terms at least. In the 1960s, it was getting audiences of 16 million. Its stage-show spin-offs were breaking box-office records. At one point, it was even something of a critical success: in 1961, it won the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux’. See the BBC’s own report on the show here; https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/people-nation-empire/make-yourself-at-home/minstrels. For an academic take on the show see, Bourne (2005).

4. For concise biographies which charts out the legacy and biography of Stuart Hall see, Procter (2004), Gilroy et al. (2000), Grossberg (1986), and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (2004). Finally, for Gilroy’s photographic volume see, Gilroy (2007).

5. The ‘Windrush Scandal’ is a direct reference to the 2018 political scandal in the UK wherein people from the Caribbean diaspora – the Windrush generation – were being detained, denied civil rights, threatened with deportation and in 63 cases actually ended up being deported. In addition to this, an unknown number of people lost their jobs and were the victim of losing their homes as well as being denied medical care. The scandal was uncovered by a collaborative effort made by MP’s from the West Indies as well as activist and in part by a series of exposés in The Guardian which highlighted the magnitude of the scandal and its horrific consequences for an alleged 53,000 people from the Windrush generation who were born British subjects but who never the less were facing the potential of deportation. For a brief look into the scandal see; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/windrush-home-office-set-them-up-fail-mps-affairs-select-committee-a8428041.html, https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/winning-windrush-battle, Craggs (2018), Wardle and Obermuller (2018), and Worthy (2018).

6. Martin Heidegger ‘Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell’ (Letter on ‘Humanism’, 1946).

7. On the history of the history of migration in the West Indies see for instance; Chamberlain (2002) and Levine (1987).

8. Paul Gilroy’s allusion here seem to be towards that of the increase in ethno-nationalism, the ‘alt-right’ movement, and the immigrant hostile tendencies that were seen in and around the aftermath of Brexit and the ways in which nationalistic discourses influenced the ways in which Brexit was framed. This should also be seen in connection to the broader political climate in Europe with the rise of right-wing populism which draws heavily on ethno-nationalistic discourses of xenophobia. In addition to this one cannot forget the climate in the US with the ascendency of Donald Trump as President and the subsequent protectionism, nationalistic and ‘America first’ mantra of his policies. For some recent analysis of these trends within the political economy of Europe, England and the US see the following works; Mirrlees (2018), Grossberg (2018), Gray (2018), Smismans (2018), Virdee and Mcgeever (2018), Burnett (2017), Inglehart and Norris (2016), and Moffitt (2016).

9. For the term ‘Caribbean problem space’ in relation to the work of the late Stuart Hall, see Scott (2017).

10. See C.L.R. James’ most influential writing, including his Black Jacobins; James (2001, 2013, 2017). For some biographies of CLR James, see; Hall et al. (1996) and Buhle (1986).

11. For the work of Glissant see; Glissant (1997). For a full list of Glissants work and the works which has been translated to English see the following webpage; http://edouardglissant.fr/bibliographie.html#Text9.

12. On the zombie and its connection to the Caribbean, immigration and Europe see; Gilroy (2012) and Mcintosh (2008). Also see the work of Marina Warner in the Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/nov/02/film.society and some of her work; Warner (2006, 2010).

13. Hayden White’s work is well known by now but see, White (1980, 2009, 2014).

14. See also an important reading of Cesaire in Jackson (2013).

15. See Fanon (2018).

16. See David Macey’s work on Fanon, Macey (2000, 2012).

17. The coinage of the term ‘new racism’ has been attributed to the British Marxist scholar Martin Barker, writing in the context of the Powellian racism mobilized by Thatcherism. See Barker (1981).

18. See Beck’s work on the concept of methodological nationalism, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2008) and Beck (2007).

19. On ‘Lexit’ see, Guinan and Hanna (2017) and Worth (2017).

20. Gilroy moved to the US to take up the position as Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale from 1999 to 2005, before he moved back to the UK where he held the position of Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics from 2005 to 2012. He currently works as a Professor of American and English Literature at King’s College London.

21. Raymond Williams (1921–1988) is widely considered as one of the founding figures of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline.

22. George Padmore (1903–1959) was a Trinidad-born intellectual who amongst other achievements was a key figure in the organisation of the fifth Pan African Conference in Manchester (1945). Shepperson and Drake (2008).

23. C.L.R. James.

24. Claudia Jones (1915–1964) was a Trinidadian-born journalist and activist who established West Indian Gazette.

25. Vron Ware, Paul Gilroy’s partner for many years, and an academic at Kingston University in London.

26. While in Ghana, W.E.B. Du Bois was unable to renew his US passport at the US embassy in Ghana as legislation prohibited members of the Communist Party to have a passport. As a result, Du Bois chose to become a citizen of Ghana where he died on 27 August 1963. Horne (2009).

27. ‘Dark Princess’ was first published in 1928.

28. Richard Wright (1908–1960) was an American author whose best-selling book, Black Boy (1945), gave an autobiographic account of his life.

29. Présence Afraicaine is a French literary magazine that was established in 1947.

30. Michael McEachrane is currently a Visiting Fellow at Lund University.

31. Nella Larsen (1891–1964) was an American novelist of Danish origin.

32. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) grew up in France under the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime of the Second World War.

33. In 1993 Gap ran an advertisement campaign called ‘Who Wore Khakis?’ with pictures of a number of celebrities.

34. Leni Riefensthal (1902–2003) was a German filmmaker whose films were highly successful during the Nazi regime of the Second World War. ‘Triumph of the Will’ (1935) depicts a large Nazi gathering in Nuremberg in 1934, and remains among her most famous works due to its innovative stylistic approaches.

35. Eddie Bernays authored books on propaganda such as Bernays (1928).