66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant scholar's call for a better world, August 6, 2000
This review is from: Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Hardcover)
In this amazing, necessarily complex, and deeply scholarly work, Dr. Gilroy, a Yale Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, lays out his well-thought-out and wholly reasonable thesis: humanity ought not to be split into groups based on skin color, and in fact twentieth-century fascism, an astonishingly dangerous 'ism' whose power came wholly from the false divisions of groups within societies, and whose specter remains with us in its various modern forms (the Klan, modern Nazis, the Aryan Nation, and corresponding European and African racist groups) - would wither in a raceless world - to the nearly unimaginable benefit of humanity.
Dr. Gilroy has not written a polemic so much as a comprehensive and authoritative survey of his topic. He has a utopian vision, but he is in command of the facts. He cites sources, references, and examples from literally all walks of life - pop culture to world history to cultural studies to genomics. It's an incredible ride.
The book is divided into three sections, and the chapters are each able to stand alone as insightful and original essays. In his first section, the foundation is laid with an essay on modernity, which traces the beginnings of 'race thinking' to the eighteenth century in Europe.
The second section deals with the frightening realities of modern fascism, and its considerable threat to society. Tangentially but not unimportantly, Dr. Gilroy includes a discussion of power, war, and the language, imagery, and culture of fascism, including advertising and promotions of mass movements.
In the third section, "Black to the Future," the author addresses a panoply of issues including sexism, race and guilt, success, the world of Black culture, and the considerable implications of cosmopolitanism - a unified world - as opposed to separateness.
No brief review can adequately discuss this important and erudite author's contribution. The book is dense, well-organized, and easily could form the text for a college-level course on this interesting and riveting topic. It is also totally readable and useful - out of the classroom. There are nearly 100 pages of notes, and a comprehensive index.
A must-read for anyone with an interest in the multitude of topics he explores - or anyone looking for a set of good reasons to work to better the world. It has a wealth of information - and deserves more than five stars.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Widely misunderstood, August 7, 2003
Gilroy's polemical essay has received little attention and what attention there has been has been lukewarm or scathing. In it's most extreme forms this criticism either pigeonholes Gilroy as having re-invented the "reverse racism" argument and being a "race traitor" to the memory of his mother as a "confused" and "ambivalent" Black Briton, or by liberally denying the existance of "race" being colour-blind to the realities of racism. Both these rebuffs are symptoms rather than diagnoses of a moribund insecurity within Ethinic and critical "race" studies that Gilroy is bravely attempting to think beyond.
This is a fantastic book. It does not attempt to deny the horror of racism by doing away with all ideas of "racial" purity and racialised knoweledge. This is an old argument. It is perfectly possible, indeed desirable, to loose the idea and language of "race" in order to focus properly on the racism that constructs them. By inverting the categories of their oppression many hard-one battles have been fought and pride in community and solidarity have been established in response to racism. But it is the dangers involved in adopting ideas of "racial" and national sameness and particularity that Gilroy is highlighting here.
By re-working the notion of "generic fascism", Gilroy examines Black political and commercial cultures in a way that shows these cultures are not immune from the styles of sameness and unanimism that characterise fascist political practice. This is not unique to Black cultures, but a wider phenomenon linked to the post-70s emergence of identity politics, technological advance, and media-led multiculturalism. His point is that if fascism can find a home with the descendents of slaves it can find a home anywhere.
This focus on culture has been criticised for ignoring the actual political movements of fascism sui generis and of grass-roots Black political action. While this focus may well reflect the hegemony of cultural studies in the humanities, its focus on the cultures of fascism is far from the vague meanderings of a lot of that field and could quite easily be put in context with the re-evaluation of nationalism as an aesthetic project by Eagleton and others as someone far from postmodern excess. The repudiation of liberal multiculturalism as complicit in fascism's cultural manefestations has a long history, from Marcuse onwards.
As for grass-roots activism, Gilroys argument quite neatly parallels that of someone like Manning Marable who has argued for a new radicalism in Black American politics that neither adopts the liberal agenda (i.e. to be Jews, model minorities) nor the Black Nationalist alternative (i.e. to be Germans), but to focus on the grass-roots where the "camp-thinking" of these two alternatives is more fluid and ambivalent.
The "American" focus of this book, despite references to Rwanda, Marley, Fanon and Mandela as well as the lack of any explicit analysis of the way in which the structure of global capitalism might aid a renewed interest in "race" and "race"-thinking are perhaps the only criticisms worth making of this book. But Gilroy is trying make (mainly White) radicals take racism and the impact of "race"-thinking seriously so perhaps we can forgive him for this. He's also trying to warn against the immediate adoption of American standards of multiculturalism for the rest of the world (which might account for the difference in edition titles)
Finally, in a rebuff to the Kantians, Gilroy invents a concept of "planetary humanism" as something to aim towards after, and only after, coming to terms with the histories of colonialism, slavery, fascism and genocide so that we can understand our contemporary conditions and provide an answer to them.
This is a visionary book and well worth the purchase. Get the British edition back in print soon!
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