Page 51 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

schools of Marxism which ensued. The greater influence of Foucauldian
nihilism in Black Atlantic is probably due to these factors which are now
passé. Now, in 2005, we are clearly in a different moment in world history.
The present moment is defined by a new ‘New Imperialism’ – the resur-
gence of inter-imperialist conflicts between differing geo-political power
blocs and renewed efforts to re-divide the world along lines beneficial to
one bloc or the other and the inevitably intense nationalist resistance to this
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entire process. This open re-assertion of power politics in the global reality
makes the abstract culturalism of Black Atlantic and of Against Race appear
particularly odd.
In contrast, The Empire Strikes Back, especially in its opening essay
which discusses some of the economic and political bases of British
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racism in the 1970s crisis retains much of its relevance today. This
period, from 1960 to 1970, was also the period of the rise of elements of
a multicultural middle-class intelligentsia in Britain. This intelligentsia,
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of South Asian and Afro-Caribbean origin, despite the immense racial
obstacles faced, developed on a significant scale in the years prior to the
Thatcher government and its neo-liberal project in Britain. Although
relatively tiny, because it is concentrated in London, this stratum of
academics, artists, media persons and young professionals (which has
continued to grow even more rapidly under New Labour) constitutes an
influential force in contemporary British cultural life. Gilroy, of course,
is from this stratum and gives voice to a specific perspective within what
is a broad range of views. In this he differs in emphasis from Stuart Hall
whose social, political and intellectual formation had an altogether dif-
ferent foundation and ran along a different course. In Gilroy’s case, the
reservations Hall retained against wholesale departures from Marxism
are over time abandoned and it is the Foucauldian side of his work with
its focus on disembodied ‘discourses’ which blossoms.
This tendency was always present in the structural Marxism of his
early work with its typically exaggerated emphasis on the role of ideol-
ogy (read ‘discourse’), as for example in his chapter ‘Police and Thieves’
in The Empire Strikes Back. There, the issues of the narrow plebeian
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nationalism of E.P. Thompson and the racism of the British police are
presented primarily as ideological phenomena which presumably require
a mainly ideological (read ‘cultural’) politics to be overcome. In another
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essay in the same book, Gilroy, from the opening paragraph states that
his focus will be on ‘the cultural politics of “black” [sic] people in this
country’ and that this requires an approach which ‘involved giving due
weight to cultural factors, understood neither as purely autonomous nor
as epiphenomena of economic determinations’. Further, in this same work
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