Gilroy Post Colonial melancholia

Gilroy’s book is based in two central ideas: a need to put racism (as a practice producing race) in the centre of the analysis again, and a need to keep thinking the effects of coloniality in contemporary politics. He points to the need to understand the colonial and imperial past, which is otherwise partially appropriated by nostalgia, and to maintain an “un-orthodox utopia of tolerance, peace and mutual regard” (2). He proposes a series of concepts: conviviality to address the “spontaneous” actions and gestures of anti-racist cohabitation that opens a possibility of a “multiculturalism” or cosmopolitanism form below, planetary to bring back a general humanism as a measure for thinking of the effects of coloniality. The title of the book refers to a state of nostalgia that would explain some of the sentiments of racism, nationalism that originate in a non-elaborated sense of loss of the empire. This melancholy permeates the British institutions and politics and offers a sense of community not found by other means. To revisit colonialism mean to revise the concepts of universal humanism that have proven to be thin declarations in the face f the barbarities that were still committed in the colonies. There is a tension in his work between the possibilities opened by internationalist humanist that have opened the space for a conviviality now spontaneously unfolded, and a “local” need of acknowledging the nation’s colonial past in order to “set an example” of conviviality to the world. “British colonial past should be made useful in shaping the type of multicultural relation emerging in it and also outside UK to challenge notions of imperial sovereignty” (3). It is this “dark” past that puts it in a privileged position to achieve a planetary consciousness, by combining localism and universality. This consciousness has its antecedents in a cosmopolitan humanism articulated against fascism, first, and racism, latter. For Gilroy these political ideas are not just anantiracism, but also set the political bases for cosmopolitan democracy here again race is central and not just a dimension. Gilroy points to the fact that race is also the antecedent of the ideas of ethnicity, that put the biological bases of difference aside, but reproduce a notion of absolute difference, now based on culture. Race is not just a last instance of ethnicity, but “It generates a field of ethics, knowledge and power that contributes its unique order of truths to the process that produce and regulate individual subjects.” (12) Racism sets apart what is human from what is not , in a movement that puts the non human in a space outside from law and civil rights, they occupy a space of death defined by the permanent state of exception of martial law, it constitutes an imperial sovereign power. This absolute difference, reproduced by politics of multiculturalism and by analysis of identity politics, is a base of justification of dehumanizing practices as the “war on terror”, and undoes the achievements of anti racist struggles. Racism is a product of modernity and particularly was originated along with the state as a way of setting aside those with whom there is no will to generate solidarity. The subtle differences are pointed as a mark of radical distinction, a logic that starts with the state and is projected to the colonies latter. The colonies, transversed of course by the logic of racism, are thus a central part of modernity, depositary of what modern state’s do not want to face, but also “laboratories” were new forms of social control are developed and then taken to the “centre”. If ethnicity is based in racism, the notions of development are economic theory’s derivation form coloniality, changing the explanation of a “natural” difference into an explanation of stages within linear progress. Finally Gilroy analyzes those spaces where he observes a “ordinary” cosmopolitanism being developed, especially in Britain. Here, in spite of the promise of this antiracist expressions he sees the danger of state’s and market interventions, or the opposite a direction of antiracism towards them. It is not very clear then how and under which circumstances melancholic racism or cosmopolitan conviviality would emerge and under which mechanism the state and capitalism do capture this energies into its side.