Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race

210 Pages·2016·51.89 MB·English

by  Paul Gilroy

PENGUIN BOOKS
BETWEEN CAMPS
Paul G ilroy is Professor of Sociology and African-American srudies at
Yale Univcrsity. Until recently he was Professor of Sociology and Cul
tural Studies at Goldsmiths CoUege, University of London. He is the
aUlhor of ThmAin', No Btack in tlx UnionJad, Tht BudA/tantU and
SmallAclJ: TMught1 on tIN PofiticsofBlad Cul/um. Paul Gilroy is wide
ly recognized for his critical commentaries on black music and verna
cular culture and his work has been an inspir:a.tion to the resurgent
black arts movement in Britain. His work has been translated into ten
languages.
PAUL GILROY
BETWEEN CAMPS
NATIONS. CULTURES AND
THE ALLURE OF RACE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENCUIN BOOKS
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CONTENTS
INT'RODUCllON
I RACIAL OBSERVANCE, NATlQNAUSM, AND H!,!MANISM 9
M
The Crisis ofMRacc and Raciology n
,
Modernity and Infrahumanity 54
3 Identity, 8donging, and the Critique of Pure Sameness 97
11 fASCISM, EMBODIMENT, AND REVOLUTIONARY S;;ONSERVATlSH '35
4 Hitler Wore Khakis: Icons, Propaganda, and Aesthetic Politics '37
5 After the Love: Has Gone": Biopolitics and
M
the Decay of the Black Public Sphere '77
6 The Tyrannies of Un animism '0]
III IIbAt;K TO THE fUTU!\E '39
7 "All about the Benjamins"': Mulricultural Blackness
, ---Corporate, Commercial, and Oppositional '4'
"Race,'" Cosmopolitanism, and Catastrophe '79
9 'Third Stone from the Sun"': Planetary
Humanism and Strategic Universalism 3'7
NOTES 359
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 39'
""'''' 393
BETWEEN CAMPS
INTRODUCTION
At first thought it may seem sttan~ that the anti-Semite's ouclook
should be related to that of the Negrophobe. It was my philosophy
professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one
day: "Whenever you heu anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, be
cause he is talking about you. ~ And 1 found that he was univer$ally
right-by which I meant that I was answerable in my body and my
heart for what was done to my brother. Later I realized that he
meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro.
-FRANTZ FANON
The modem times that w. E. B.
Du Bois once identified as the century of the color line have now passed.
Racial hierarchy is still with us. Approaching that conundrum. this book
addresses some of the continuing tensions associated with the constitution
of political communities in racialized form. It considers patterns of
conflict connected to the consolidation of culture linl!S rather than color
lines and is concerned, in particular, with the operations of power, which,
thanks to ideas about ~race,~ have become entangled with those vain and
mistaken al1empts to delineate and subdivide humankind.
Bi!twI!et/ Camps should be read as a cautious contribution to another larger
task. t hat often seems impossible and misguided. This involves the slow
work of making black European mentalities equipped for the perils of the
.
twenty-fint cenrury. That grand-sounding but ultimately parochial obli preciated the portraits of my uncle and his wife in their wartime uniforms,
gonion is complemented by some conjuring with the transitional yearning which hung, enshrined, in one corner of their sitting room. I knew that ~e
for what we should probably call a "planetary humanism." Elements of had craved a bomber, but my sense of the romantic potential involved '"
that elusive mindset hllve been allied to nonracial, tnnsblack histories and that heroic history was more likely to have been supplied by Capt. W. E.
are imagined here from an assertively cosmopolitan point of view that Johns and his ilk. It remained uncomplicated by the details of the conflict
challenges the version of these themes currently being offered by occult itself. I didn't dare to ask these real veterans much about what their wars
ists, mystics, and conspiracy theorists. Perpetual peace is off the menu for had entailed. They did not usually speak about that time to children.
the time being; nonetheless, racial difference provides a new and timely I read the piles of literature: that my parents had accumulated on the
test for the democratic character of all today's cosmopolitan imaginings. war, its C:l.USC$, conduct, and consequences. I did this., not to play better
I hllve had to recognize personal motivation for ruming to the rela wargames, but because 1 felt an obligation to know. Knowledge of ~t war
tionship between "nee-and fascism. I was born in 1956, the year of Brit and its horrors was central to an unspoken compact that we made Wlth the
ish folly in Suez and of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet tyranny. My adult world. The memory of the conflict was one of the first places where
first real geopolitical apprehensions came one fateful morning in 1962 the edge of childhood could be detected. Following these studies, often
when I sobbed into my comfl.akc:s because I thought the world would end conducted in secret, I felt confident in a brash, ten-year-old way that I un
in a nuclear fireball before I could get back home after school At that derstood what had happened. I remember being especially perplexed
point, I was, I thought, exactly as old as the cold war itscM. Britain's strict when, on one weekend historian's walk through the desolate and
rationing of food had ended by that time, but the shadows cast by the war bomb-damaged riverside areas of the old City of London, my father and I
and by the unfu16l1ed promise of a comprehensive welfare-state that fol encountered the encircled lightning-Rash insignia of the British Union of
lowed it, were enduring. Fascists painted carefully on a wall alongside th.e, by then, ttadition~ in
As children, we cou1d still sec: where the bombs had fallen. My own junction to Keep Britain White. Weren't fascists the ~ame as NaZIS, I
memory tells me that I was a militaristic child, but this must have been a asked him? What were they doing here? Were they still around? How
wider generational afHiction. I certainly spent much of my childhood re could Iky be English people? How could English people be Fascists? Wa:>
enacting the glories of the Second World War. The leafy fringes of north their exciting lightning-flash the same sort of thing as the hated but fasCi-
London provided the battlegrounds across which I marched my troops nating swastika? .
and ftew my imaginary Battle of Britain aircraft. We preferred these games My fathers attempts at comprehensive reassurance did not conVlnce
to alternative pastimes like cowboys and Indians because we savored the me. At that point, I felt a little disadvantaged when other children proudly
fact that we always had right on our side. Our faceless, unremittingly evil recounted their parents' wartime exploits. My father, a twenty-year-old
enemies were Hitler's Nazis and, inspired by what we read in comics like student when war was declared, had chosen another testing path. He said
Eag/~ and Swift as wclJ as the strOnger fare: to be found in places like the that no government could compel him to kill another human being and
barbershop, we harried and slaughtered them wherever they could be lo became a conscientious objector undertaking various types of decidedly
cated: in parks, gardens and wastelands, or the disused air-raid shelters unglamorous war-work that made him vulnerable to the hlltred ~d re
that were: unearthed all around us. This may seem to have been an eccen sentment of many. }-lis prinCipled stance was interpreted as cowardice, and
tric pursuit for a black boy, but it was entirely unproblematic. No white he was informally punished for it. He and I finally glimpsed a Gas
playmate ever questioned the right of us not-yet-postcolonials to play that Identification Officer's badge, like the one he had worn while checking
gun'. bomb-damaged buildings for evidence of chemical attack, in a dusty glass
I knew from an early age that West Indian and other colonial service case upstairs at the Imperial War Museum. At the time, I mistakenly felt
personnel had participated bn.vely in the anti-Nazi. war. I admired and ap- thar it compared poorly with the German helmets, daggers, and bullets
'I I'
NIJW60t I'II)H IHfJIbOOCtlOH
that were the most prestigious trophies in the symbolic economy of re heil- made their unanimist hopes explicit if not exactly clear. By then the
membrance. My mother, in any case younger, was equ.a.lly unsatisfactory as cosmopolitan bndscape of my London childhood had c:xpanded to include
a source ofw ar lore. The conflict had certainly been registered in what was substantial numbers of South African refugees and exiles whose stories of
then British Guiana. A1though the idea that a German victory would antin.cist activism brought new twists into my bewildered understanding
mean the reintroduction of slavery had been circulated there, along with of raciology.ln what sense,-we wondered, was Hendrik Verwoero a fascist?
the imperial propaganda newsreds, the war was not central to her life prior While that question hung unanswered in my adolescent mind, the
to migration. outer-national energy of black power and the momentum of late-1960s
The world of my childhood included the: incomprehensible mystery of counterculture loudly and plausibly levded the charge offascism yet again,
the Nazi genocide. I rentrned to it compulsively like a painful wobbly this time against American imperialism and domestic policy.
tooth. It appeared to be the core of the war, and its survivor.;; were all Political battles over the significance of local neo-fascists and their
around us. Their tattoos intrigued me. Their children were our playmates ultranationalist ideology surfaced again in the mass antiracist movement of
and school friends. It was they who counseled our carless &mily against the 19705. It seems extraordinary now, but the opposition to them was
the pleasures of riding in Volkswagens and they who introduced us to the deeply clivided by disagreements over the place of~race" in their thi~king:
subtle delights of poppy-seed cake. It was clear, too, that some Jewish To make matters wone. the populism of what was after all an anti-Nw
families had opened their homes· to West Indian students who had been league, seemed to play down the routine racism of t~e British ~tate ~nd ,its
shut out from much commercially rented property by the color-bar. I institutional agencies: police, housing. and educanon. That ImagmatIve
struggled with the realization that their suffering was somehow connected intervention broke the potential bond between Europe's young people and
with the ideas of·race~ that bounded my own world with the threat ofv io a mass racist movement. The neo-fascists were relegated to the fringes.
lence. Michael Franks, my school friend who wore a prayer shawl under but they are now once again on the march across Europe. Outside its
his clothes in spire of the ridicule it brought upon him when we changed fortifications, authoritarian irrationalism, militarism, and genocide have
for P.E. class, was especially acure in diagnosing the casual anti-semitism become part of how desperate people answer the destructive: impact of
of some of our teachers who had, of coune, all distinguished themselves in globaliution on their lives.
the real manly business of war against the evil Germans. As.l.iving memory ditS out, the idea of just. anti-Nazi war is being re
I now know that these contTadictions were the lint puzzles from which covered, commemorated, and struggled over, but we must ask hard, un
this project stemmed. They were supplemented and refined when, as part comfortable questions about the forms this commemoration takes. Is the
of me new, global media constituency for black America's civil rights strug presence of nonwhites-West Indians, African Americans, and other co
gles, we saw that familiar swastika £lYing again: this time alongside the lonial combatants-being written out of the heroic narratives that are be
Confederate flags and burning crosses of affirmative but declining ing produced in this, the age of apologies and overdue reparari~ns? Be~ore
segregationism. This too was an interpretative challenge. What "theory" of that memory dies, we must inquire what impact the war agamst fascism
racial difference, of racial prejudice. could explain these transcWtunll pat and Nazi. race-thinking had upon the way that black inteUectuals under
te.ms ofidentification?The teddy boys who terrified me as a child and their stood themselves, their predicament, and the fate of West em culture and
successors, the skinheads who hounded me through my teenage years, did civilization. What role might their stories have ifw e could write a different
not invoke Hidus name or cause. To have done so then would have been history of this period, one in which they were allowed to dwell in the same
an unthinkable treason to the concentrated English identities they were frame as official anti-N:w heroism? This book is not yet that history, but I
celebrating and defending avinst alien encroachments. They spoke and hope that it will be a part of its precondition.
acted in the name of another belligerent nationalism, but it was only later, Even more important. what place should the history and memory of
in the 19705, that conditions changed and a new skinhead chant of~Sieg ~ conflicts with fascism have in forging the minimal ethical principles
I'
rHtAODUctlON
brate incommensurability and cheerlead for absolute identity. The
on which a meanjngful muhiculnmilism might be based~ Answering that
uescion takes us into an initial confrontation with the idea of~race~ and pruminent pb.ce of black cultures in ~e glittering. fes~vities th~t have
~lC: raciological theories to which it has given rise. been laid on to accompany recent phases m the globalizanon of capital and
Indirectly, then, this essay seeks to engage the pressures and demands the entrenchment of consumerism is not for me either a surprise or a
of muIticultura1social and political life, in which. I argue, the old, modem source of unalloyed joy. I argue that this apparent triumph clearly exhibits
idea of"race~ can have no ethically defensible place. If that line of argu_ pattems that originated in European fascism and that it remains tainted by
ment sounds overly familiar, I should note that it concludes. though it the same ambiguities, especially where Mrace- is invoked. 1 suggest, not
cannot complete, the critical consideration of nationalism and its modes of only thac these fonnations need to be recognized as having ~en .marked
belonging that \VU conducted in some of my earlier work.. This time it is by their frightful origins in the aestheticization and spcctaculanzanon ~t
intended to clarify and build upon the discussion ofintercultural histories replaced politics with easier. unanimist f.mtasies, but. also that they re~alO
that was offered before in a provisional fonn. These long-standing inter the power to destroy any possibility of human mutuality and cosmopolitan
ests have had to be combined with more urgent priorities. In particular, democracy.
they have been rransfonned by my apprehensions about the growing ab This interest in the latent and often unrecognized legacies of fascism's
sence of ethical considerations from what used to be tenned "antiracist" great cultural revolution is a major theme in what foUows. It is but one ex
thin~ng ,and action. Revitalizing ethical sensibilities in this area requires ample of how the argument below is directed toward a nu~~ of m~re
movlOg away from antiracism's wnishcd vocabulary while retaining many general political problems not usually associated with the cnocal theo~es
of the hopes to which it was tied. ofMrace." I oppose the fashionable reluctance to face the fundamental dif
This mixture of concerns is pan of the answer tentatively offered be ferences marked in Western history and culture by the emergence and en
low to the authorirnian and antidemocratic sentiments and styles that trenchment of biopolitical power as means and technique for managing
have recurred in twentieth-century u1rranationalism. I am prepared to ac the life of populations, states, and societies. I suggest that this damaging
cept that they have figured even in the b~litical cultures constituted refusal has been closely associated with an equally problematic resistance
where victimized people have set out in pursuit of redress. citizenship, and to any suggestion that there might be links between those charac~risti­
autonomy. Too often in this century those folk have found only' the shal ca11y modun devdapments and the fund2mental P?oriry in~t~ ,m the
lowest comfort and short-tenn distraction in the same repertory of power idea of "race.~ during the same period. By challengmg the dismISSive re
di;,
that p~uced the~ sofferings in the first place. My enduring distaste for sponses, which would disregard the full. ,constitutive force ~f raci~
the ethruc absolutlsms that have offered quick ethnic fixes and chea sions, I have tried to place a higher value upon the cosmopolitan hlstones
pseudo-solidarities as an inadequate salve for real pain, means that I do n! and transculrural experiences whereby enlightenment aspirations might
see contact with cultural difference solely as a fonn of loss. Its inevitable cvenrually mutate in the: direction of greater inclusivity and thus greater
in~raction5 are not approached here in tenns of the elemental jeopardy in authority. My fundamental point is that the promise of their completion
whl~ each sealed and discrete identity is supposedly placed by the de in happily non-Euroccntric fonns can be glimpsed only once we have
strucuve demands of illegitimate ~transethnic~ rdation, I borrow that criti worked through the histories of extremity associated with raciolOgfs bru
cal tenn from the work of the Maniniquean writer, Edouard Glissam. His tal reasonings.
crea~~ u~ of it b~ngs a concern with what has been relayed togetherwith This essay is divided into three overlapping sections. The first part
a cntlcaimterest.m relative and comparative approaches to history and deals with the key abstractions, Mrace,~ belonging. and identity. which or
culture and attennon to what has been related in both senses of that word. ganize the: argument as a whole. It has a utopian t~ne, but that sh~uld not
ki~ship and narration. Approaching the issue of relation in this spirit re~ disguise its practical purposes. It departs from the Idea that genetic deter
qwres a sharp departure from all cumntly fashionable obligations to cele- minism and the nano-political snuggles of the biotech era have rrans-