Postcolonial Melancholia [Paperback]

the essays presented here first appeared in 2002 as lectures, later to be expanded for this publication.

paul gilroy is foremost an academic, and his writing can be rough going. secondly, he is a critic of popular culture. his erudite prose does not drop when his critique includes television programs, soccer and hip-hop music within his conversation of politics.

as a black man with roots in great britian, his personal and national history of racism, unlike the history of racism for blacks in the usa, for whom racism began with and extended over centuries of slavery, begins with his country's history of racial discrimination from colonialism.

public policy makers within the government, gilroy argues, have a way of forgetting the colonial past when relating to issues involving british citizens who have been in the country for generations, and treating them as immigrants. reluctantly, what these officials perceive, what gilroy believes they label erroneously, as immigration problems are vaguely related to the colonial past, but not racism. were the government to accept the history of colonialism and the connection of racism to colonialism, the country could begin then to become free of a postcolonial melancholia.

gilroy chooses george orwell over sigmund freud in his discussion of cosmopolitan solidarity. cosmopolitan solidarity involves persons who witness to distant suffering, and by so doing come together as an answer to imperialism, racism, and the narcissism of minor differences. buffering his argument with the social psychology of the german psychoanalysts alexander and margarete mitscherlich, gilroy writes: `They warn that melancholic reactions are prompted by "the loss of a fantasy of omnipotence" and suggest that the racial and national fantasies that imperial and colonial power required were...predominantly narcissistic. From this perspective, before the British people can adjust to the horrors of their own modern history and start to build a new national identity from the debris of their broken narcissism, they will have to learn to appreciate the brutalities of colonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit, to understand the damage it did to their political culture at home and abroad...The multilayered trauma--economic and cultural as well as political and psychological--involved in accepting the loss of empire would therefore be compounded by a number of additional shocks. Among them are the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.'

central to paul gilroy's overall argument is at each illustration his provision of some sense of solution.

gilroy introduces the word `conviviality' in the introduction and expands on the concept in a later essay, The Negative Dialectics of Conviviality, without giving full space to his meaning and use of the term itself. hopefully, he'll have more to say on conviviality in future works.

readers may find of interest Cosmopolitanism, published some years later, by anthony appiah, another philosopher with black brit roots.