There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation

413 Pages·2013·3.216 MB·English

by  Paul Gilroy

There Ain’t No Black in the
Union Jack
‘...illuminating and disturbing...’
Labour Weekly
‘...a stimulating and thought-provoking set of insights into
the position of “race” within British society ... a brilliant dis-
cursus on expressive black culture, a true successor to the
best “cultural studies” literature ... an altogether excellently
written book ... deserves to be widely read and discussed.’
Critical Social Policy
‘...a major contribution to the study of popular culture...’
Marxism Today
‘A fascinating analysis of the discourses that have accom-
panied black settlement in Britain ... An important addition
to the stock of critical works on race and culture.’
Chicago Tribune
‘Gilroy demonstrates effectively that cultural traditions are
not static, but develop, grow and indeed mutate, as they
influence and are influenced by other changing traditions
around them.’
David Edgar, Listener Review of Books
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Paul
Gilroy
There Ain’t No Black in the
Union Jack
The cultural politics of race and nation
With a new introduction by the author
London and New York
First published 1987 by Unwin Hyman Ltd
Published 1992 by Routledge
First published as Routledge Classic 2002
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1987 Paul Gilroy
Introduction to Routledge Classics Edition © 2002
Paul Gilroy
Typeset in Joanna by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–28981–8 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–28980–1 (hbk)
To Pat’s memory,
and to Marcus’s future
The Courtesies of order, of ruly forms pursued from a heart of rage and
terror or grief defame the truth of every human crisis. And that, indeed, is
the plan: To defuse and to deform the motivating truth of critical human
response to pain.... If you make and keep my life horrible, then when I
can tell the truth, it will be a horrible truth; it will not sound good or look
good, or God willing, feel good to you, either. There is nothing good about
the evils of a life forced into useless and impotent drift and privation. There
is very little that is attractive or soothing about being strangled to death,
whether it is the literal death of the body or the actual death of the soul that
lying, that the humiliation and the evil of self-denial guarantees. Extremity
demands, and justifies an extreme response. Violation invites, teaches
violence. Less than that, less than a scream or a fist, less than the absolute
cessation of normal events in the lock of abnormal duress is a lie and,
worse than that, it is a blasphemous ridicule of the self.
(June Jordan, Civil Wars)
There is no escaping what the future holds. We are going back, back to
something earlier, maybe better, maybe worse, maybe something more
terrifyingly human! These few hundred years of freedom, empire building,
voting, liberty, democracy – these will be regarded as the romantic centur-
ies in human history. There will be in that future no trial by jury, no writs of
habeas corpus, no freedom of speech, of religion – all that is being buried
and not by communists and fascists alone, but by their opponents as well.
All hands are shovelling clay onto the body of freedom before it even dies,
while it lies breathing its last....
(Richard Wright, The Outsider)
... the only agent on which we can premise future radical change emerges
from the melding of traditional groups into a public sphere, a body politic,
a community imbued with a sense of cultural and spiritual continuity and
renewal. This community, however, is constituted only in the ever-present
act of an ever-dynamic effort of public self-assertion that yields a sharp
sense of selfhood. Collectivity thus melds with individuality to produce
rounded human beings in a rounded society. Direct action assumes the
form of direct democracy: the participatory forms of freedom rest on face-
to-face assemblies, rotation of public functions, and, where possible,
consensus.
(Murray Bookchin, Were We Wrong?)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xi
1 ‘Race’, class and agency 1
2 ‘The whisper wakes, the shudder plays’:
‘Race’, nation and ethnic absolutism 41
3 Lesser breeds without the law 84
4 Two sides of anti-racism 146
5 Diaspora, utopia and the critique of capitalism 200
6 Conclusion: urban social movements, ‘race’
and community 303
Appendices to Chapter 6 342
Bibliography 345
Index 363
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have contributed to this book in different ways and
I would like to thank them all publicly. Convention dictates that I
bear the ultimate responsibility for it but all my friends, teachers
and associates named below have played a part in its develop-
ment and I am deeply grateful to all of them. If I was truthful, I’d
admit that all I have done is cobble their ideas together.
Richard Johnson and Stuart Hall supplied detailed critical
comments on early drafts and I am grateful for their precious
time and their pedagogic patience.
Mandy Rose, Trisha Bohn, Courtney Griffiths, Jan McKenley,
Joe Sim, Derrick McLintock, Dick Hebdige, Terry Daniels, Errol
Lawrence, Pratibha Parmar, Chetan Bhatt, John Solomos, Patrick
Wright and Beryl Gilroy gave comments on various parts of
it. All of them encouraged and challenged me in the most pro-
ductive way possible by their disagreements. You’re all broader
than broadway.
Lloyd Brown couldn’t have been more generous and his
encyclopaedic knowledge of black musics is second to none. I