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GILROY: NEITHER BLACK NOR ATLANTIC

diasporic experience of the transnational, as Gilroy argues. 33 On the
contrary, the national essence is thought to have survived in spite of the
diaspora, in spite of the dispersal of the putative bearers of this essence
across many alien national lands. Therefore, Delany’s is no disembodied
‘Atlanticist radicalism’, to use Gilroy’s term. 34 He was a nationalist and
essentialist of the familiar nineteenth-century kind as Gilroy eventually
concedes. 35
Gilroy’s project is to undermine all nationalism, especially black
nationalism and to replace it with an undifferentiated internationalist
humanism. He asked rhetorically ‘whether nationalist perspectives are
an adequate means to understand the forms of resistance and accommo-
dation intrinsic to modern black political culture’. 36 It is precisely this
abstract universalism which leads him even to be critical of what he calls
the ‘pluralistic position which affirms blackness as an open signifier’ – a
37
possible allusion to some of the positions of Stuart Hall. This criticism
arises because Gilroy says that he found this latter position to be ‘insuf-
ficiently alive to the lingering power of specifically racialised forms of
power and subordination’. 38 Although somewhat obscure, the criticism
seems to be that the pluralist position of Hall in its acceptance of a ‘strate-
gic essentialism’ makes too many concessions to nationalism. It operates
at what Gilroy calls ‘the politics of fulfillment’ but does not rise to the
level of what he calls ‘the politics of transfiguration’ which represents
his ideal. 39
In passages of unparalleled romanticism, Gilroy attempts to elucidate
the difference between these two politics. The first – the politics of
fulfillment – while admirable, limits itself to a rationalistic critique of
racism and essentialism. It is the call for ‘bourgeois civil society to live
up to the promises of its own rhetoric. It creates a medium in which
demands for goals like non-racialised justice and rational organization
of the productive processes can be expressed.’ 40 This (‘semiotic’ and
‘pluralist’) politics, however progressive, champions only the rights of a
particular nationality and not of an abstractly ‘singular’ humanity as a
whole. This is why the concept of ‘diaspora’ is so important for Gilroy
as he argues that it is precisely this diasporic absence of rootedness in
any single nation–state which imparts to the black struggle a unique cosmo-
politanism. It is this diasporic quality which is thought to allow black
struggles to rise above parochialism to an undifferentiated, universal,
‘human’ level – to rise above the ‘binary opposition’ of essentialism and
pluralism. 41 The significance of the concept of diaspora for Gilroy is
revealed in the following, typically lyrical, passage: ‘This diasporic
multiplicity is a chaotic, living, disorganic formation. If it can be called

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