Postcolonial Melancholia

Paul Gilroy presents an extended argument about the relationship between Britain's unresolved imperial past and its fraught multicultural present. The book is divided into two parts: the first addresses global and planetary questions of race, humanism, and cosmopolitanism, while the second turns to Britain's postcolonial condition.

Gilroy begins by defending multicultural society against widespread declarations of its failure, contending that the announcement of multiculturalism's death is itself a political gesture aimed at abolishing any ambition toward plurality. He argues that the political conflicts characterizing multicultural societies take on a different aspect when placed in the context of imperial and colonial history, which remains marginal and largely unacknowledged yet continues to shape political life in formerly imperial countries. He warns against revisionist accounts of empire that minimize its brutality and feed the illusion that Britain can be disconnected from its colonial past.

Two key concepts anchor the argument. The first is "conviviality," which describes the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of life in Britain's urban areas. Conviviality does not signal the absence of racism; it points to a setting in which interpersonal rituals of race have begun to mean different things. The second is "planetarity," which Gilroy prefers to "globalization" because it suggests contingency and movement on a smaller, less triumphal scale than imperial universals. Together these concepts frame a tension between the local and the global. Gilroy declares an "unabashed humanism" derived from moral opposition to racism, aimed at projecting a conception of the human that can interrupt the exclusionary humanisms of the past.

The Introduction argues that the idea of "race" supplies a foundational understanding of natural hierarchy on which many other social and political conflicts rely, and that recognizing the role of race should lead away from race itself and toward a confrontation with the enduring power of racisms. Gilroy connects his analysis to the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which emerged alongside the foundation of Apartheid South Africa, the establishment of Israel, and the partition of India. He discusses the political theorist Hannah Arendt's identification of European colonial brutality as an element that crystallized into totalitarianism, and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's turn from the victim toward the racist and anti-Semite as creators of their objects of hatred. In the post-September 11 context, old notions of racial difference quietly operate within a calculus assigning differential value to human lives. The legal predicament of detainees at Camp Delta, the U.S. military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, classified as "enemy combatants," exemplifies the exceptional governmental space familiar from colonial administration.

Chapter 1, "Race and the Right to Be Human," reconstructs a genealogy of anti-racist thought. Gilroy begins with the Black American scholar W. E. B. DuBois, whose The Souls of Black Folk (1903) balanced local American concerns with a cosmopolitan imagination aimed at the world's colored majority. He traces DuBois's development toward an explicitly internationalist vision, including his 1910 call for the First Universal Races Congress in London, premised on the idea that "humanity" should be "the heritage of all men in the world where most men are colored" (38). He then turns to the Black political leader Malcolm X, who argued that Black Americans should frame their struggle as a human rights issue before the United Nations rather than accept the limiting framework of domestic civil rights. The chapter's most sustained engagement is with the Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon, whose concept of "sociogeny," the social production of racial mentalities, insisted on making race historical rather than ontological. Fanon's analysis showed how colonial Manichaeism, the stark binary opposition of settler and native, created a frozen, militarized world, but traced how this dualism could yield to a wider consciousness.

Gilroy then argues that the colony must be recognized not merely as an extractive commercial operation but as a laboratory for governmental experiment that transformed the exercise of power at home. He provides historical examples: the vengeful aftermath of the 1857 Indian uprising, Lieutenant Governor George Arthur's genocidal campaign against indigenous Tasmanians, and British diplomat Roger Casement's 1903 report on governmental terror in the Belgian Congo. These episodes, Gilroy insists, must be owned so they can illuminate the empire's lasting impact on British national identity.

Chapter 2, "Cosmopolitanism Contested," critiques what Gilroy calls "armored cosmopolitanism," in which humanitarian language justifies imperial intervention. He traces this pattern from the Belgian king Léopold II's 1876 claim that colonialism aimed to "introduce civilization to Africa" and British imperial politician Joseph Chamberlain's 1897 defense of colonial violence as serving "the cause of civilization" (60-61), through to Prime Minister Tony Blair's justifications for military action after September 11. Against this tradition, Gilroy develops an alternative "vulgar" or "demotic" cosmopolitanism rooted in everyday encounters with difference, finding value in ordinary virtues like listening, discretion, and friendship. He engages with the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's concept of the "narcissism of minor differences" and examines the writer George Orwell's anti-imperial cosmopolitanism, tracing how Orwell's experience as a colonial policeman in Burma generated a humanistic outlook directed against imperial injustice.

Chapter 3, "Has It Come to This?" introduces the concept of "postimperial melancholia" to diagnose Britain's inability to mourn the loss of empire. Gilroy asks why World War II continues to define Britain's sense of itself and argues that this fixation reveals a longing for the nation's long-vanished homogeneity, usually signified by the recovery of endangered whiteness. Adapting the framework of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, German psychoanalysts who analyzed postwar West Germany's inability to mourn the death of Hitler, Gilroy argues that Britain has similarly failed to confront its fantasies of imperial power. Instead of working through its imperial history, the country diminished, denied, and actively forgot it. The immigrant body has come to represent the discomforting ambiguities of empire: Immigrants are feared precisely because they are unwitting bearers of the imperial past. The football terrace chant "Two world wars and one World Cup" encapsulates this melancholia, rendering war and sport interchangeable and producing an artificially whitened national community.

The final chapter, "The Negative Dialectics of Conviviality," examines cases of postcolonial alienation among young Black Britons. Gilroy discusses the September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and the would-be airplane bomber Richard Reid not as purely foreign threats but as products of British conditions shaped by racism and cultural displacement. He traces a cultural shift among young Black Britons from the peace-oriented rhetoric of Rastafari, a Caribbean spiritual movement that upheld the unity of humankind, to hip-hop's consumerism imported from the United States, and then to political Islam, which offered communitarian responses to the nihilism of consumer culture. He analyzes the fictional character Ali G, created by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, as a satirical figure whose undecidable racial identity generated what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls "proteophobia," a fear of the unclassifiable, because it confounded the racial categories that held contemporary Britain stable. He also examines the BBC comedy The Office as a microcosm of Blair's Britain, dramatizing the incomplete overcoming of obsessions with class, race, and tradition.

Gilroy concludes by insisting that racism rather than migration should be the central concept around which the history of postcolonial settlement revolves, because racism preceded the arrival of migrants and made their presence into a problem. He argues that Britain's convivial metropolitan cultures, in which many young people have moved beyond racial categories through shared participation in everyday urban life, represent the foundation for a multicultural democracy different from that of the United States. These local achievements should contribute to a planetary humanism open to understanding how race thinking configured the exclusionary humanisms of the past.