Page 65 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

In his argument, the onus seems to fall on the oppressed. Nor is the idea
one of the international unification of particular streams of national
struggle into one single Bandung-like flood. Such conceptions would be too
‘pluralist’ in Gilroy’s terms and nowhere are presented. Instead, what is
presented is the need to dissolve all national struggles into a direct struggle
for rights for all, without reference to the struggle for the particular needs
of any particular nation.
Gilroy does not grasp that the universal goals of a united humanity are
contained within the struggles of particular nations for national develop-
ment, not in opposition to them. He does not seem to grasp that the entire
point of national struggles is precisely to place all nations on an equal
footing as a part of humanity – so that one can speak honestly about
a really equal humanity which is not just another empty ideal in the head
of some demagogic politician. Gilroy does not grasp that the humanity of
which he speaks has to be created in reality, not simply asserted in books.
Without this struggle for national emancipation and development the
unification of humanity as is, in the present circumstances of gross global
inequalities between and within nations, can only lead to the disarming
of the oppressed and the domination of the weak by the strong. Pursuit
of the national, racial, class and gender struggles is the only route to the
unification of humanity on a really equal basis. This is the route to
humanism, not a departure from it. Since oppression is far from being
erstwhile and, in practice, all struggles necessarily have their national
peculiarities, the ‘politics of transfiguration’, as Gilroy presents it, would
not only lead to the abandonment of struggles for the rights of nations; it
would lead to the abandonment of the struggle to create a real and not
just imaginary humanity as well.
Gilroy presents little empirical evidence of the existence of this ‘poli-
tics of transfiguration’, said by him to be expressed in the black musical
tradition ‘on a lower frequency where it is played, danced, and acted, as
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well as sung and sung about’. He is of course aware that such claims are
reminiscent of those made by essentialists, in fact, seem indistinguishable
from them. He offers the following rhetorical clarification:

This subculture often appears to be the intuitive expression of some racial
essence but it is in fact an elementary historical acquisition produced from
the viscera of an alternative body of cultural and political expression that
considers the world critically from the point of view of its emancipatory
transformation. 47

This seems to be suggesting that it is the unique historical experience
of plantation slavery rather than the inherent qualities of black culture

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