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Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, by Paul Gilroy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. 416 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-674-00096-X. $16.95 paper. ISBN: 0-674-00669-0.
The theme of Against Race is that identity and identity politics, particularly that based on the concept of race, is a "tainted" logic inherited from the slave tradition and promulgated in modern and contemporary times to keep subordinate groups, white and black, apart. Collectively we are deprived of our humanity by the spurious doctrine that our species is divided genetically and socially by race. While condemning the use of "raciology" by some scientists, no less than ruling groups, interested in exacerbating racial divisions, Gilroy reserves some of the harshest jibes and analytic pages for those in diasporic black communities who would proudly embrace racial identity and, on this basis, gain a place in the mainstream. In Gilroy's view, by failing to grasp that race is a tool of oppression, they play into the hands of the prevailing power.
Now teaching sociology at Yale, Gilroy made his mark with the 1995 study, The Black Atlantic. With that book he became among the most prominent exponents of the idea that national frameworks were inadequate for understanding the significance of race and race relations in modern societies. Instead he proposed the concept of diaspora, which "opens up an historical and experiential rift between the locations of residence and the locations of belonging" (p. 124). In his earlier book, Gilroy claims that as a unifying concept to link black migration from Africa to Atlantic countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and Latin America, disapora overcomes the illusions inherent in hyphenation such as African-- American. It also replaces dubious notions such as "organicity" and genetic difference with historicity, showing that racial difference is neither rooted in human nature nor in "culture" but is the result of a long social process in which ideology as well as economic exploitation plays a crucial role.
While some of these themes are extended in the present analysis, Gilroy's renunciation of race is, perhaps, the most far-reaching since Ashley Montagu's 1948 classic, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Gilroy supplies his own, more contemporary, sources for an...