Page 164 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 155

The cultural politics of difference

actually shore up the boundaries of racial particularity. As he
writes in the introductory chapter: ‘if ultranationalism, fratern-
alism, and militarism can take hold, unidentified, among the
descendants of slaves, they can enter anywhere. Past victim-
ization affords no protection against the allure of automatic,
prepolitical uniformity’ (p. 8).
It is easy to sympathise with Gilroy’s unease at the re-
racialisation of commodity culture in the name of black ‘freedom’.
But the ‘planetary’, conceived as a radical universalisation of the
diasporic, surely isn’t the solution, if only because the problem
lies with the commodity form itself and with its capacity for alien-
ation. Which returns us to Gilroy’s earlier critique of British
cultural studies. His accusation of racism had been directed at the
pages in Towards 2000, where Williams contrasted the ‘alienated
superficialities’ of ‘formal legal definitions’ of citizenship with the
more substantial reality of ‘deeply grounded and active social
identities’ (Williams, 1983, p. 195). Gilroy read Williams as in
effect replicating the racist distinction between ‘authentic and
inauthentic types of national belonging’ (Gilroy, 1992, p. 49). This
has been a widely influential reading, much repeated in later
cultural studies debates (cf. Hall, 1993, pp. 360–3; Hall & Chen,
1996, p. 394; Hall, 2000a; Bennett, 1998, p. 26). It is, however, a
misreading. The pages at issue were those where Williams devel-
oped his own critique of the legalism of mainstream liberal
anti-racism. At no point had he denied that ‘blacks can share a
significant “social identity” with their white neighbours’, as
Gilroy suggests (Gilroy, 1992, p. 50). Rather, Williams merely
insisted that the appeal to legality was in itself an inadequately
counter-hegemonic response to racism (cf. Jones, 2000). Indeed,
he quite specifically argued that the ‘real grounds of hope’ lay in
‘working and living together, with some real place and common
interests to identify with’ (Williams, 1983, p. 196).

Rooted settlement or diasporic hybridity?
Insofar as there was something substantial at issue here, as
distinct from mere misreading or misunderstanding, it hinged on
Williams’ critique of ‘alienated superficialities’, rather than on his

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