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Contemporary Cultural Theory

Gilroy would retort: ‘how long is enough to become a genuine
Brit?’ (p. 49). At one point, Gilroy famously accused Williams
of an ‘apparent endorsement of the presuppositions of the new
racism’ (p. 50).
In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy proceeded to analyse the way black
intellectuals and writers have negotiated the tensions of being
simultaneously European and black. The result, he argued, had
been the ‘stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms’ and
‘structures of feeling’ of ‘the black Atlantic world’ (Gilroy, 1993,
p. 3). Here, the stress falls overwhelmingly on the inevitable
hybridity, modernity and sense of constant becoming of diaspora
cultures. He found this embodied quintessentially in black
vernacular art forms, especially in the various mutations of jazz,
of Hendrix, of soul and reggae, of the novels of Wright, Ellison,
Morrison, Walker and Baldwin. A culture such as this can only
be adequately appreciated and nurtured, he would conclude, by
a response to racism that ‘doesn’t reify the concept of race . . . that
doesn’t try to fix ethnicity absolutely but sees it instead as an
infinite process of identity construction’ (p. 223).
More recently, Gilroy has deliberately sought to counterpose
the notion of the diasporic to what he sees as the ‘race-thinking’
or ‘raciology’ (Gilroy, 2000, p. 12) that is present not only in
dominant white cultures, but also in some varieties of militant
black rap and hip-hop culture, in Afrocentrism and in the racial-
isation of commodified black cultural expression. His own
interests and hopes lay with the utopian possibilities of what he
termed ‘planetary humanism’ and ‘strategic universalism’,
rather than with ethnic cultural absolutisms based on race. The
adjectival qualification—planetary, as against European—invokes
earlier black thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire,
rather than the Enlightenment, but functions nonetheless as a
kind of calling to account in which humanism is required to live
up to its own unrealised promise. This resort to the ‘planetary’
is meant to sidestep the post-structuralist critique of liberal
humanism, but it is difficult to see why ‘planetary’ should turn
out to be any less abstract, universalising or essentialist a notion
than ‘human’. Gilroy is on much firmer ground in his concern
that the ‘biopolitics’ of contemporary black culture might

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