Paul Gilroy

Small acts : thoughts on the politics of black cultures

Small Acts charts the emergence of a distinctive cultural sensibility that accomplishes the difficult task of being simultaneously both black and English. Straddling the field of popular cultural forms, Paul Gilroy shows how the African diaspora born from slavery has given rise to a web of intimate social relationships in which African-American, Caribbean and now black English elements combine. Discussions of Spike Lee and Frank Bruno, record sleeves, photographs, film and literature from Beloved to Yardie are used to show how new and exciting possibilities have arisen from the transnational flows that create cultural links between the global African diaspora. Small Acts is a seminal work by an important young critic that changes the terms on which black culture will be understood and argued about.

Race ends here

How do we see ‘race’ and the symbols of racial difference? Is contemporary theorizing about race complicit in the reification of racial difference? These are the key questions that are addressed in this article, which uses them as the starting point for dealing with important theoretical and political dilemmas about race in the present environment. In particular, it seeks to explore some of the substantive problems that people conceptualize and act upon racial difference. Following on from this discussion, the article discusses some of the contradictions and limitations of anti-racist discourses and calls for a major rethinking of strategies for tackling racial thinking and practices.

Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a "Changing" Same

The basic labors of archaeological reconstruction and periodization aside, working on the contemporary forms of black expressive culture involves struggling with one problem in particular, and that is the puzzle of what analytic status should be given to variation within black communities and between black cultures. The tensions produced by attempts to compare or evaluate differing black cultural formations can be summed up in the following question: How are we to think critically about artistic products and aesthetic codes that, although they may be traced back to one distant location, have been somehow changed either by the passage of time or by their displacement, relocation, or dissemination through wider networks of communication and cultural exchange? This question serves as a receptacle for several even more awkward issues. These include the unity and differentiation of the creative black self, the vexed matter of black particularity, and the role of cultural expression in its formation and reproduction. These problems are especially acute because black thinkers have been largely unwilling or unable to appeal to the authoritative narratives of psychoanalysis as a means to ground the cross-cultural aspirations of their theories. With a few noble exceptions, critical accounts of the dynamics of black subordi-

Toward a Critique of Consumer Imperialism

For me, reading Achille Mbembe’s absorbing piece (“African Modes of SelfWriting,” Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239–73) conjured up the wellworn modernist image of the critical philosopher as an escapologist: Initially imprisoned and confined by a host of ingenious shackles and devices, he disappears from view before publicly shrugging them all off after some secret minutes of unseen but energetic activity. He stands now before an appreciative audience absolutely untrammeled, in this case, with only a few Derridean or Lacanian fig leaves to conceal the shame that attends his postcolonial renaissance. It is an impressive performance of the very autonomy to which his piece is addressed: a learned, provocative, and worthwhile essay that offers a wealth of subtle insights. They echo in and reverberate through my own thoughts, and there is much agreement between us, particularly on issues flowing from his courageous diagnosis of authoritarian political cultures and their claims upon the political and philosophical languages of Africa and its diasporas. In entering these difficult and contested areas, Mbembe touches on matters of the greatest importance for both Africa and those various diasporas. That necessary distinction splits authentic and differentiated “Africans” from “Negroes,” whose supposedly simpler modes of being in the world were invented in slavery but are, in reality, no less heterogeneous. This division is difficult to manage within an analysis that ducks the implications of seeing that African-descended people in the United States occupy economic and communicative locations very different