Postcolonial Melancholia (Wellek Library Lectures Series) by Paul Gilroy

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In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of black people and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edifice of white supremacy." In Postcolonial Melancholia, he continues the conversation he began in the landmark study of race and nation 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine — and defend — multiculturalism within the context of the post-9/11 "politics of security."

This book adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief but to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. The melancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implications. Ultimately, Postcolonial Melancholia goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.

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Postcolonial Melancholia

Columbia University Press

Introduction

Multicultural society seems to have been abandoned at birth. Judged unviable and left to fend for itself, its death by neglect is being loudly proclaimed on all sides. The corpse is now being laid to rest amid the multiple anxieties of the "war on terror." The murderous culprits responsible for its demise are institutional indifference and political resentment. They have been fed by the destruction of welfare states and the evacuation of public good, by privatization and marketization. The resurgent imperial power of the United States has made multiculturalism an aspect of the clash of integral and incompatible civilizations, thereby transmitting an additional negative energy into this delicate postcolonial process. Across Europe, parties that express popular opposition to immigration have triumphed at the polls. Xenophobia and nationalism are thriving. In Britain, difficulties arising from what is now seen as the unrealistic or unwelcome obligation to dwell peaceably with aliens and strangers somehow confirm the justice of these sorry developments. It now appears as though any desire to combine cultural diversity with a hospitable civic order (one that might, for example, be prepared to translateits own local terms into other languages or see immigration as a potential asset rather than an obvious defeat) must be subjected to ridicule and abuse.

Of course, the briefest look around confirms that multicultural society has not actually expired. The noisy announcement of its demise is itself a political gesture, an act of wishful thinking. It is aimed at abolishing any ambition toward plurality and at consolidating the growing sense that it is now illegitimate to believe that multiculture can and should be orchestrated by government in the public interest. In these circumstances, diversity becomes a dangerous feature of society. It brings only weakness, chaos, and confusion. Because unanimity is the best source of necessary strength and solidarity, it is homogeneity rather than diversity that provides the new rule.

Rather than lament the end of the various initiatives that have discredited the wholesome dream of multicultural society and reduced it to the dry dogma of a ready-mixed multiculturalism, this book offers an unorthodox defense of this twentieth-century utopia of tolerance, peace, and mutual regard. Toward that end, I argue that the political conflicts which characterize multicultural societies can take on a very different aspect if they are understood to exist firmly in a context supplied by imperial and colonial history. Though that history remains marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing only in the service of nostalgia and melancholia, it represents a store of unlikely connections and complex interpretative resources. The imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer-imperial countries.

The argument that follows warns against the revisionist accounts of imperial and colonial life that have proliferated in recent years. These popular works may salve the national conscience, but they compound the marginality of colonial history, spurn its substantive lessons, and obstruct the development of multiculturalism by making the formative experience of empire less profound and less potent in shaping the life of colonizing powers than it actually was. This popular, revisionist output is misleading and dangerous because it feeds the illusion that Britain has been or can be disconnected from its imperial past. The proponents of this view rightly appreciate that a new form of colonial domination is being instituted as part of a heavily militarized globalization process. They are correct also in seeing that familiarity with the conduct of European empires has much to teach the contemporary theorists of imperial geopolitics. However, they are wrong both when they fail to recognize that the ambiguities and defects of past colonial relations persist and when they fail to appreciate that those enduring consequences of empire can be implicated in creating and amplifying many current problems. Indeed, the evasive meanings of colonial history and its potential value to the multiculturalism of the future are pending inside the new global role of the United States as successor to the European empires that were defeated and transformed during the twentieth century. It is all the more worrying that when colonial history and memory do manage to interrupt the trancelike moods of contemporary consumer culture, they have usually been whitewashed in order to promote imperialist nostalgia or sanctified so that they endorse the novel forms of colonial rule currently being enforced by the economic and military means at the disposal of a unipolar global order.

These deluded patterns of historical reflection and self-understanding are not natural, automatic, or necessarily beneficial to either rulers or ruled. Instead of reinflating imperial myths and instrumentalizing imperial history, I contend that frank exposure to the grim and brutal details of my country's colonial past should be made useful: first, in shaping the character of its emergent multicultural relations, and second, beyond its borders, by being set to work as an explicit challenge to the revised conceptions of sovereignty that have been invented to accommodate the dreams of the new imperial order. The revisionist ways of approaching nationality, power, law, and the history of imperial domination are, of course, fully compatible with the novel geopolitical rules elaborated after September 11, 2001. They have also been designed to conform to the economic machinery of weightless capitalism and work best when the substance of colonial history and the wounds of imperial domination have been mystified or, better still, forgotten.

As the postcolonial and post-Cold War model of global authority takes shape and reconfigures relationships between the overdeveloped, the developing, and the developmentally arrested worlds, it is important to ask what critical perspectives might nurture the ability and the desire to live with difference on an increasingly divided but also convergent planet? We need to know what sorts of insight and reflection might actually help increasingly differentiated societies and anxious individuals to cope successfully with the challenges involved in dwelling comfortably in proximity to the unfamiliar without becoming fearful and hostile. We need to consider whether the scale upon which sameness and difference are calculated might be altered productively so that the strangeness of strangers goes out of focus and other dimensions of a basic sameness can be acknowledged and made significant. We also need to consider how a deliberate engagement with the twentieth century's histories of suffering might furnish resources for the peaceful accommodation of otherness in relation to fundamental commonality. In particular, we need to ask how an increased familiarity with the bloodstained workings of racism-and the distinctive achievements of the colonial governments it inspired and legitimated-might be made to yield lessons that could be applied more generally, in the demanding contemporary settings of multicultural social relations. This possibility should not imply the exaltation of victimage or the world-historic ranking of injustices that always seem to remain the unique property of their victims. Instead of those easy choices, I will suggest that multicultural ethics and politics could be premised upon an agonistic, planetary humanism capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other.

In the past, western modernity described these utopian ambitions as cosmopolitan. Until recently, no shame would have automatically been attached to the simple ideals from which they derive, namely that human beings are ordinarily far more alike than they are unalike, that most of the time we can communicate with each other, and that the recognition of mutual worth, dignity, and essential similarity imposes restrictions on how we can behave if we wish to act justly. These currently rather unfashionable notions can be shown to belong to patterns of conversation and reflection that are traceable back into the dimmest historical recesses from which modern consciousness emerged. As far as the importance of empire to the modern period goes, we should remember that these ideas were entangled with and tested by the expansion of Europeans into new territories and compromised, if not wholly discredited, by the consolidation and management of the resulting imperial orders. Turned into thin ethical precepts, these insights were tried again and found wanting, most severely, by the genocidal barbarities and biopolitical atrocities of the twentieth century.

Today, any open stance toward otherness appears old-fashioned, new-agey, and quaintly ethnocentric. We have been made acutely aware of the limitations placed upon the twentieth century's cosmopolitan hopes by the inability to conceptualize multicultural and postcolonial relations as anything other than risk and jeopardy. The same aspirations have also been confounded by the problems involved in producing a worldly vision that is not simply one more imperialistic particularism dressed up in seductive universal garb.

It is more fruitful to interpret the easy refusal of cosmopolitan and humanistic desires as a failure of political imagination. That lapse is closely associated with the defeat of the Left and the retreat of the dissenting social movements with which its fate was intertwined. Those movements pursued forms of internationalism that went beyond any simple commitment to the interlocking system of national states and markets. Socialism and Feminism, for example, came into conflict with a merely national focus because they understood political solidarity to require translocal connections. In order for those movements to move, they had to break down the obviousness of the national state as a principle of political culture. In the process, they fostered a degree of disaffection from those who were close by but whose economic and political interests were at odds with their own. This estrangement was boldly articulated in both outlooks. Neither women nor workers were committed to a country. They turned away from the patriotism of national states because they had found larger loyalties. Their task was to fashion new networks of interconnectedness and solidarity that could resonate across boundaries, reach across distances, and evade other cultural and economic obstacles. That hope has faded away in the era of actually existing internationalism which has perversely created a political environment where cosmopolitan and translocal affiliations became suspect and are now virtually unthinkable outside of the limited codes of human-rights talk, medical emergency, and environmental catastrophe.

These restrictions on solidarity can be connected to a sense that the human sciences have become complacent, if they have not been actually undone by their reluctance to be made over as critical sciences of inhumanity. It is also linked to the limitations of philosophical anthropology as a vehicle for ethical and political reflection and to the wider constraints of a difficult moment in which, as I have said, the desire to dwell convivially with difference can appear naive, trifling, or misplaced in the face of deepening global inequalities and conflicts over resources, on one side, and a routine, almost banal multiculture on the other.

All of these difficulties can be examined through the refusal to consider the politics of race that colors all of them. Neither humanism nor antihumanism have been comfortable or enthusiastic when asked to address the destructive impact of race thinking and racial hierarchy upon their own ways of understanding history and society. The problems have multiplied where the idea of culture has been abused by being simplified, instrumentalized, or trivialized, and particularly through being coupled with notions of identity and belonging that are overly fixed or too easily naturalized as exclusively national phenomena. Recalibrating approaches to culture and identity so that they are less easily reified and consequently less amenable to these misappropriations seems a worthwhile short-term ambition that is compatible with the long-term aims of a reworked and politicized multiculturalism. Indeed, it is doubly welcome because it requires the renunciation of the cheap appeals to absolute national and ethnic difference that are currently fashionable.

The habitual resort to culture as unbridgeable division needs to be interpreted with care. It has often been a defensive gesture, employed by minorities and majorities alike when they wrongly imagine that the hollow certainties of "race" and ethnicity can provide a unique protection against various postmodern assaults on the coherence and integrity of the self. It seems we are now condemned to work upon ourselves in conformity with the iron laws of mechanical culture just to hold our imperiled and perennially unstable identities together. In that setting, racial difference and racial hierarchy can be made to appear with seeming spontaneity as a stabilizing force. They can supply vivid natural means to lock an increasingly inhospitable and lonely social world in place and to secure one's own position in turbulent environments. Acceptance that race, nationality, and ethnicity are invariant, relieves the anxieties that arise with a loss of certainty as to who one is and where one fits. The messy complexity of social life is thereby recast as a Manichaean fantasy in which bodies are only ordered and predictable units that obey the rules of a deep cultural biology scripted nowadays in the inaccessible interiority of the genome. The logics of nature and culture have converged, and it is above all the power of race that ensures they speak in the same deterministic tongue.

Continues...

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