Repudiation vs. Remaking: Gilroy on the Postcolonial Racism Discourse

"Articulating anti-racist hope in anything other than its negative moment: that is, as a creative conjuring with the possibility of better worlds rather than embattled critcism of this comprehensively disenchanted one"
The central point of contention for Gilroy as he reflects on post-colonial manifestations of race is how we confront in the present day the extraordinary bias of history that has led to the racial dichotomy of colored/white. Gilroy sees two approaches available: simply refute the idea of the negative image of oneself that is termed the Other and the sort of c0-dependent racism it hinges upon, or, to embark upon a project of the "unmaking of racialized bodies". Both of these methods, however, rely on the sort of racial absolutism that Gilroy rejects and utilize it in a clinical and subordinating fashion in which an unknown de-racializing force (the people? but if so what segments of the people have access to the institutions that allow them a greater voice?) deconstructs the dichotomy of race perceptions.

"The work Fanon described as 'dis-alienation', by which he meant the unmaking of racialized bodies and their restoration to properly human modes of being in the world."
This passage encapsulates the danger of Gilroy's project, in which it can be characterized not as a de-racializing mission but as a sort of gentrification of the Other. The "unmaking" connotes a forceful contact and resetting of the racialized bodies, while the project of "restoring" them to "properly human modes of being" assumes a meta-Creator vantage over these bodies, and the criteria for what is a proper mode of being such as to confer humanness relies entirely upon a Hegelian system that delineates moral and social superiority along a developmental trajectory that inevitably leads to the glorification of western European sensibilities. Viewed in these terms, Gilroy has taken Fanon's work of dis-alienation and used it as a new ground for racial imperialism.

"The character of racial and ethnic groups is seen to be at stake in attempts to overthrow [the political order of race]"
The central dilemma of repudiation vs. remaking hinges in this quote upon the meaning of character: whether it is taken to stand for tradition, heritage, cultural disposition, etc or whether it implies a sort of anti-matter or negative character, in which the defining character of all racial and ethnic groups is precisely their lack of a singular ethnic character leading all of their members to be directly ushered into the "global humanity", but albeit as rootless individuals left to stand alone against the crush of global capitalism.

"He calls this object 'The World.'"
Although I struggle to place this quote firmly into a spot in the argument, it remains for me the single most important line of the text. It has a rather impacting brevity, and even though it is a citation of W.E.B. Dubois in a section that is summarizing one of Dubois' books I feel as if Gilroy is attempting to lead the reader to a broader application of the Dubois text to his thesis beyond what is provided in Gilroy's explicit analysis. For context: the above quote follows a section in which Gilroy writes that Dubois did not address The Souls of Black Folks exclusively to an American audience (and its form of racism) but that it had a greater intention of "worldliness" and was "also aimed beyond those authorities to another constituency". It is this object, the greater constituency, that Dubois then terms "The World". Dubois' intention of the usage of "The World" seems rather obvious under these terms, but as I continued to read the article this single line kept appearing as the conclusive subtext and it gradually assumed Gilroy's authorial voice for me, and so I shall treat it as such. Even though I still don't know what Gilroy would wish it to mean. The terms that are open to ambiguity are the nature of the "He" and "this object". The "He" seems to reference either the racial dichotomy-repudiating individual, the remade individual, or the individual whose time and place have not progressed in the least from the colonial paradigm. The "object" for each of these entities then becomes respectively either a)the new terms of a humanity that is defined by intersectionality rather than duality, b) oneself, as an individual bled of all racial categories but nonetheless still fabricated by a humanist intellectual project, or c) the same overtly and intractably racist colonial world in which the colored individual is defined access to the World and at this imposed distance from it names it as an object rather than a lived reality. Additionally, it seems that for the repudiating and remade individual, one must at a certain point transition from viewing "The World" as an object and instead transpose onself as a subject (complete with the whole humanness as prescribed by "The World") into this World. And, for a parting tangent, there's some nice Derrida-esque interpolation in the calling of the object and "The World"'s resumed response to this naming. Does this mean that the various forms of "The World", with its particular institutions and moral discourses and conceptions of what humanness and an emancipated self contains, itself a subject of the imagination?

Katrina Sabatier
(absent 8/4 when Gilroy was discussed)