Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy University College, London | |
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Notable works | (1993) |
Paul Gilroy
Biography
Early life
Gilroy was born on 16 February 1956[4] in the East End of London to a Guyanese mother, novelist Beryl Gilroy, and an English father, Patrick, who was a scientist.[5][6] He has a sister, Darla. He was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at the University of Sussex in 1978. He moved to Birmingham University, where he completed his PhD in 1986.[7]
Career
Gilroy is a scholar of
Gilroy taught at
Gilroy worked for the
Gilroy is known as a path-breaking scholar and historian of the music of the black Atlantic
Gilroy holds
In Autumn 2009 he served as
In 2014 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[19] In the same year, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[20] He was elected an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in April 2018.[21]
In 2020, Gilroy became the founding director of University College London's Sarah Parker Remond Centre (formerly the Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation), named in honour of the transatlantic abolitionist and women's rights activist.[22]
Personal life
Gilroy is married to writer, photographer and academic Vron Ware. The couple live in north London, and have two children, Marcus and Cora.
The Black Atlantic
Summary
Gilroy's 1993 book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness marks a turning point in the study of diasporas.
Rather than encapsulating the African-American tradition within national borders, Gilroy recognizes the actual significance of European and African travels of many African-American writers. To prove his point, he re-reads the works of African-American intellectuals against the background of a trans-Atlantic context.[26] Gilroy's concept of the black Atlantic fundamentally disrupts contemporary forms of cultural nationalism and reopens the field of African-American studies by enlarging the field's interpretive framework.[26]
Gilroy offers a corrective to traditional notions of culture as rooted in a particular nation or history, suggesting instead an analytic that foregrounds movement and exchange. In an effort to disabuse scholars of cultural studies and cultural historians in the UK and the US from assuming a "pure" racial, ethnic, and class-based politics/political history, Gilroy traces two legacies of political and cultural thought that emerge through cross-pollination. Gilroy critiques New Leftists for assuming a purely nationalist identity that in fact was influenced by various black histories and modes of exchange. Gilroy's initial claim seeks to trouble the assumptive logics of a "pure" western history (canon), offering instead a way to think these histories as mutually constituted and always already entangled.[27]
Gilroy uses the
An example of how Gilroy and his concepts in The Black Atlantic directly affected a specific field of African-American studies is its role in defining and influencing the shift between the political black British movement of the 1960 and '70s to the 1980 and '90s.[29] Gilroy came to reject outright the working-class movements of the 1970s and '80s on the basis that the system and logic behind the movements were fundamentally flawed as a result of their roots in the way of thinking that not only ignored race but also the trans-Atlantic experience as an integral part of the black experience and history.[30] This argument is expanded upon in one of his previous co-authored books, The Empire Strikes Back (1983), which was supported by the (now closed) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of the University of Birmingham in the UK.
The Black Atlantic received an
The theoretical use of the ocean as a liminal space alternative to the authority of nation-states has been highly generative in diasporic studies, in spite of Gilroy's own desire to avoid such conflations.
Academic responses and criticisms
Among the academic responses to Gilroy's black Atlantic thesis are: Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke (2012), edited by Joseph Pivato, and George Elliott Clarke's "Must All Blackness Be American? Locating Canada in Borden's 'Tightrope Time,' or Nationalizing Gilroy's The Black Atlantic" (1996, Canadian Ethnic Studies 28.3).[36]
Additionally, scholar Tsiti Ella Jaji discusses Gilroy and his conceptualization of the black Atlantic as the "inspiration and provocation" for her 2014 book Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity.[37] While finding Gilroy's discussion of music in the black diaspora compelling and inspiring, Jaji has two main points of contention that provoked her to critique and to dissect his theories. Her first critique of Gilroy's theories are that they neglect continental Africa in this space of music production, creating an understanding of black diaspora that is exclusive of Africa.
Jaji's second point is that Gilroy does not examine the role that gender plays in black music production. Jaji discusses how Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, while enriching the collective understanding of trans-Atlantic black cultural exchange, devalues the incorporation of gender into his analysis; she uses as an example chapter one of The Black Atlantic, in which Gilroy says: "Black survival depends upon forging a new means to build alliances above and beyond petty issues like language, religion, skin colour, and to a lesser extent gender."[38] Further, Gilroy does not include female voices in his discussion of music and trans-Atlantic black cultural exchange, which Jaji argues contributes to a gendered understanding of pan-Africanism that is largely male-dominated.[37]
An additional academic response to Gilroy's work is by scholar Julian Henriques. Gilroy concludes the first chapter of his book The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness with the quote: "social self-creation through labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes....Artistic expression...therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation" (Gilroy, 40).[27] This quote about the liberatory potential of art as a transatlantic cultural product exemplifies Gilroy's argument that for black people, forms of culture take on a heightened meaning in light of black persons being excluded from representation in the traditional political apparatus. As such, Gilroy argues that culture is the mode through which black persons should aspire to liberation.
In working to understand black culture, Gilroy asks readers to focus on routes of movement of black persons and black cultural production, as opposed to focusing on roots of origin. However, Henriques argues that Gilroy's focus on routes in themselves is limiting to one's understanding of the black diaspora. Henriques introduces the idea of "propagation of vibration", described as the diffusion of a spectrum of frequencies through a variety of media, in his essay, "Sonic Diaspora, Vibrations, and Rhythm: Thinking Through the Sounding of the Jamaican Dancehall Session" (Henriques, 221).[39]
This theory of the propagation of vibrations provides language to understand the diffusion of vibrations beyond the material (accessible) sonic and musical fields or the physical circulation of objects that can be tracked through Gilroy's routes. Henriques described vibrations as having corporeal (kinetic) and ethereal (meaning based) qualities that can be diffused similarly to the accessible fields, and argues that Gilroy's routes language does not encapsulate these frequencies of vibrations (224–226).[27]
Selected awards
- 2005: honorary doctorate from Goldsmiths College, University of London
- 2012: 50th Anniversary Fellowship of University of Sussex
- 2014: elected a Fellow of the British Academy
- 2016: honorary doctorate from the University of Liège
- 2017: honorary doctorate from University of Sussex
- 2018: elected an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 2019: The Holberg Prize (€600,000)[40]
- 2020 Fellow of King's College London[41]
- 2020 honorary doctorate University of Copenhagen[42]
- 2023 honorary doctorate from University of Oxford[43]
Bibliography
- 1982: (co-author) The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in '70s Britain, London: Hutchinson/Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
- 1987: There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, London: Hutchinson
- 1993: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso Books
- 1993: Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent's Tail
- 1995: (with Iain Chambers) Hendrix, hip-hop e l’interruzione del pensiero, Costa & Nolan.
- 2000: Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
- 2000: Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race, London: Allen Lane
- 2000: Without Guarantees: Essays in Honour of Stuart Hall (co-edited with Angela McRobbie and Lawrence Grossberg), London: Verso
- 2004: After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture, London: Routledge
- 2007: Black Britain - A Photographic History (with an introduction by Stuart Hall), London: Saqi
- 2009: (co-author) Kuroi Taiseiyo to Chishikijin no Genzai (The Black Atlantic and Intellectuals Today), Shoraisha
- 2010: Darker Than Blue: On The Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, Harvard University Press
References
- ^ Professor Paul Gilroy. UCL.AC.uk. Retrieved 29 March 2021.
- ^ Sandmo, Ole (13 March 2019). "2019 Holberg Prize and Nils Klim Prize Laureates Announced". Holbergprisen. Retrieved 14 March 2019.[dead link]
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 14 March 2019.
- ^ a b c Paul Gilroy Curriculum Vitae. Archived 12 December 2014 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Fraser, Peter D. (18 April 2001). "Obituary | Beryl Gilroy". The Guardian.
- ISBN 978-0-415-58397-8.
- ISBN 978-1-4214-0639-8.
- ISBN 978-0-415-33847-9.
- ^ "Meeting Stuart Hall": Reflections on cultural theorist Stuart Hall. By Sara Ahmed, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Vera Jocelyn, Patricia Noxolo, Pratibha Parmar, Ann Phoenix, Nirmal Puwar, Suzanne Scafe. Curated by Yasmin Gunaratnam for Media Diversified, openDemocracy, 20 February 2014.
- ^ "Paul Gilroy is designated as the Charlotte Marion Saden Professor" Archived 7 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine, Yale Bulletin & Calendar, Volume 32, Number 31, 4 June 2004.
- ^ "Academic Staff: Professor Paul Gilroy", King's College London.
- ^ "JBHE's Annual Citation Rankings of Black Scholars in the Social Sciences and the Humanities". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania: BRUCON Publishing. 2009.
- ^ "Honorary degrees of the University of London, conferred at Goldsmiths' College", Goldsmiths University of London.
- ^ "Paul Gilroy" Archived 1 April 2019 at the Wayback Machine, Université de Liège.
- ^ Tremlett, Rose (18 July 2017). "University of Sussex graduation brings record numbers to Brighton" (Press release). Brighton, England: University of Sussex.
- ^ "Welcome to Zhang Xihua and Paul Gilroy" (Press release). Copenhagen, Denmark: Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen. 7 November 2019.
- ^ "Prof. Paul Gilroy first Treaty of Utrecht Visiting Professor" (Press release). Utreccht, Netherlands: Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University. 27 August 2009.
- ^ "50th Fellowships". www.sussex.ac.uk. Brighton, England: University of Sussex.
- ^ Else, Holly (18 July 2014). "British Academy announces 42 new fellows". The Times Higher Education. Retrieved 18 July 2014.
- ^ "Paul Gilroy". The Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 26 April 2018.
- ^ "British Academy President and Fellows elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences". British Academy. 20 April 2018. Retrieved 30 June 2018.
- ^ UCL (11 March 2020). "UCL centre renamed in memory of transatlantic abolitionist". UCL News. University College London. Retrieved 6 July 2022.
- ^ African Diaspora". Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 11 (3). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press: 359.
- University of Indiana Press: 106.
- ^ a b Braziel, Jana Evans; Mannur, Anita (2006). Theorizing Diaspora. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. p. 49.
- ^ JSTOR 3042577.
- ^ a b c Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press.
- ^ Michel, Noémi (20 November 2018). "The Relationship between Blackness and Europeanness". Black Perspectives.
- .
- ^ Shukra (1997), p. 234.
- S2CID 143850871.
- S2CID 146350203.
- S2CID 145200933.
- Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies. 33 (2). Oxford, England: Taylor & Francis: 37–41.
- ISBN 978-0-674-03068-8.
- ^ Clarke, George Elliott (11 October 2012). "Must All Blackness Be American?: Locating Canada in Borden's 'Tightrope Time,' or Nationalizing Gilroy's The Black Atlantic". Canadian Writers. Athabasca, Alberta, Canada: Athabasca University.
- ^ OCLC 1039085133.
- OCLC 980586261.
- S2CID 14966354.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 12 March 2023.
- ^ https://www.kcl.ac.uk/about/assets/pdf/fellows-and-honorary-fellows-march-2022.pdf.
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(help) - ^ "Welcome to Zhang Xihua and Paul Gilroy". 7 November 2019.
- ^ "Honorary degrees awarded at Encaenia 2023 | University of Oxford". 21 June 2023.
Further reading
- McNeil, Daniel. Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023.
- Nishikawa, Kinohi. "Paul Gilroy", in Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr (eds), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. 5 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. 630–32.
External links
- Paul Gilroy - Bibliography. Compiled by Eddie Yeghiayan
- Paul Gilroy on Twitter
- Lecture on "Paul Gilroy speaks on the riots, August 2011, Tottenham, North London". The dream of safety, 16 August 2011
- Paul Gilroy on openDemocracy
- "Cosmopolitanism, Blackness, and Utopia – a conversation with Paul Gilroy". Interview by Prof. Tommie Shelby in Transition Magazine (2007)
- Interview: Paul Gilroy in Conversation (2007); Video: "Contemporary Racisms: David Theo Goldberg and Paul Gilroy" (2007), darkmatter Journal
- The Black Atlantic website
- The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education citation rankings.
- "Capturing Black Britain in Photos", NPR, February 26, 2008. Gilroy discusses his photographic history of Black Britain.
- Sam Coombes. "Insoluble Ambivalence(s): the Inside/Outside Position [sic] of Black Postcolonial communities as Articulated in the Work of Paul Gilroy and Edouard Glissant" (Podcast). The University of Edinburgh: Soundcloud. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
- "Professor Paul Gilroy", interview by Philip Dodd the BBC Radio 3 programme Free Thinking