Page 63 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

a tradition at all, it is a tradition in ceaseless motion – a changing same
that strives towards a state of self-realization that continually retreats
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beyond its grasp.’ This view of black culture comes close to denying it
any specificity or any continuity with Africa whatsoever. Gilroy presents
the purported absence of strong national specifics as precisely the qual-
ity which is the most positive feature of the black experience. This must
give us pause. For it is these very ‘chaotic’ and ‘disorganic’ features of
black life which generations of black leaders have regarded as the bane
of black existence and a contributory factor to black subordination. Yet
these are here presented by Gilroy as the highest virtue. The question
therefore arises: which section of the black population experiences their
life in this wholly ‘chaotic’ and ‘disorganic’ manner? For whom does
Gilroy speak?
But to dwell on these, purely negative implications of Gilroy’s con-
ception of diaspora would be to miss a larger point. This point is that the
positive substance in Gilroy’s emphasis on diaspora is really a call to
eschew parochialism and ethnocentrism in the struggle for black eman-
cipation and development in an era of imperialism. It is Gilroy’s way of
insisting that the black struggle must see itself as a part of a larger, inter-
national struggle, and ally itself with, not cut itself off from, internation-
alism. In a sense, the concept of diaspora is an abstract recognition of
the fact that, in an age of imperialism, all progressive struggles – both
national and class ones – must proceed on the basis of international
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alliances or face certain defeat, for capital is clearly global. According to
Gilroy, the interests of black people, as well as of humanity as a whole,
require this broader viewpoint which must govern how even the most
justly held nationalist struggle is conducted. This is the positive content
in his diasporic concept. The problem is that Gilroy moves between
a position which calls for the black nationalist struggle to be waged within
a framework of international alliances 44 and another, more frequently
expressed position which calls for the black struggle to be dissolved into
an abstract internationalism in which a national agenda does not figure.
These are two entirely different political positions with radically differ-
ent consequences. Gilroy sensed the necessarily international character
of every national and class struggle in an era of imperialism and tried to
capture this in his concept of diaspora. But he did not grasp the reasons
why internationalism was strategically essential in our time. As a result,
his internationalism was formulated in an abstractly universalistic manner
which is highly problematic.
It is this broader, abstractly universalistic viewpoint which the concept
of a politics of transfiguration is said to address. Gilroy wrote:

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