Gilroy There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack

  
Gilroy There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack 3,6/5 919 votes

'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack' book. Read 12 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Gilroy demonstrates the enormous complexit. 32 years after his seminal text, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, was first published, Paul Gilroy is joined by Derek Owusu and Jeffrey Boakye as they explore contemporary and historical black culture, and the black stories that still need to be told. A brilliant and explosive exploration of racial discourses, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack provided a powerful new direction for race relations in Britain. Still dynamite today and as relevant as ever, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new introduction by the author.

Paul joined UCL as Professor of the Humanities in August 2019 and, as Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation, is responsible for establishing a vibrant new interdisciplinary research centre that harnesses scholarship from across UCL in the critical study of race as well as the history, theory and politics of racism and its effects. The Centre will be outward facing and aims to become a hub for radical scholarship and engaged thinking, drawing in scholars, activists, policy makers and students from across UCL’s faculties, from London, the UK and internationally. In addition to the Director, the Centre will be staffed initially by an administrator and two lecturers and will attract doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows as well as establishing a new MA programme for students interested in exploring processes of racialization, racialized experience and racism in global, trans-historical and multi/interdisciplinary ways.

Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. Author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker Than Blue (2010) alongside numerous key articles, essays and critical interventions, Gilroy’s is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialized thought and representational practices in the modern world. He has transformed thinking across disciplines, from Ethnic Studies, British and American Literature, African American Studies, Black British Studies, Trans-Atlantic History and Critical Race Theory to Post-Colonial theory. He has contributed to and shaped thinking on Afro-Modernity, aesthetic practices, diasporic poetics and practices, sound and image worlds.

Winner of the Holberg Prize (2019), which is given to a person who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, social science, the law or theology, Professor Gilroy was described by the awarding committee as ‘one of the most challenging and inventive figures in contemporary scholarship’. He has transformed the canon of political and cultural history, making us aware of how the African diaspora – spurred into motion, largely, by racial slavery – was an extra-national, socio-political and cultural phenomenon which challenged essentialist conceptions of country, community and identity, and what is more, was constitutive of modernity. Gilroy was one of the founding figures of a remapped global history that embedded the movement of racialized subjects and traded goods into accounts of the world as we know it. His work on racism in modern Britain has consistently countered romantic narratives of whiteness, Christianity and ethnic homogeneity as uniquely constitutive of these islands and has written the long history of Black Britons into the cultural and social fabric of Britishness. Using philosophy, sociology, musicology, literature, history and critical theory, he has breathed new life into the humanist tradition, extending it to include scholarly and political discourses on race and anti-racist polemic.

Gilroy There Ain

Photo credit: Lola Paprocka

Rate this book
'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nationby
Ain 237 ratings, 4.06 average rating, 12 reviews
'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack' Quotes Showing 1-2 of 2
“It is possible and necessary to approach Britain's colonial history by more satisfactory methodological routes. Its racial subjects need a more complex genealogy than those debates allow. Industrial decline has been intertwined with technological change, with immigration and settlement, with ideological racism and spatial segregation along economic and cultural lines. We need to grasp how their coming together took place in a desperate setting which nonetheless allowed black communities over several generations to be recognised as political actors: they were irreducible to their class positions because racism entered into the multi-modal processes in which classes were being constituted. It helps to appreciate that this historical predicament was overdetermined by Britain's painful loss of Empire and, that the country's communities of the strange and alien are still sometimes at risk of being engulfed by the profound cultural and psychological consequences of decline which is evident on many levels: economic and material as well as cultural and psychological.”
―
Union
“Things had been different when Garveyism and Ethiopianism rather than afro-centrism and occultism set the tone. To contain modernity, to appreciate its colonial constitution and to criticise its reliance on racialised governmental codes all required finding an autonomous space outside it. A desire to exist elsewhere supplied the governing impulse. It was captured in compelling forms in the period's best songs of longing and flight, like Bunny Wailer's anthem ‘Dreamland’ 5. However, there is no longer any uncontaminated, pastoral or romantic location to which opposition and dissent might fly, and so, a new culture of consolation has been fashioned in which being against this tainted modernity has come to mean being before it. Comparable investments in the restorative power of the pseudo-archaic occur elsewhere. They help to make Harry Potter's world attractive and are routine features of much ‘new age’ thinking. They govern the quest for a repudiation of modernity that is shared by the various versions of Islam which have largely eclipsed Ethiopianism as the principal spiritual resource and wellspring of critique among young black Europeans. Their desire to find an exit from consumerism's triumphant phantasmagoria reveals them to be bereft, adrift without the guidance they would have absorbed, more indirectly than formally, from the national liberation movements of the cold war period and the struggles for both civil and human rights with which they were connected. Instead, an America-centred, consumer-oriented culture of blackness has become prominent. In this post-colonial setting, it conditions the dreams of many young Britons, irrespective of their ancestral origins or physical appearance. This brash and celebratory imperial formation is barely embarrassed by the geo-political fault-line that re-divides the world, opposing the overdeveloped north to the suffering south. That barrier provides the defining element in a new topography of global power which is making heavy demands upon the overwhelmingly national character of civil society and ideal of national citizenship. It is clear that the versions of black politics that belonged to the west/rest polarity will not adapt easily to this new configuration.”
―

Gilroy There Ain't No Black In The Union Jackon Jack Summary


Gilroy There Ain't No Black In The Union Jackk

All Quotes
Quotes By Paul Gilroy