What appealed to me when I first encountered Paul Gilroy’s work from the 1980s and 1990s was his radical critique of essentialisms about “race,” ethnicity and nationalism, and his attempt to remodel the genealogies of black political thought in ways which took its intersections with Euro-American political thought into account. This year marks 25 years since the publication of Gilroy’s seminal work, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, for which he is best known, and the book in which he did much of this kind of work. It was not as if this had not been done before. A significant signpost here is provided by Gilroy’s many references to the work of the late C.L.R. James, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Eduard Glissant.

The time of Gilroy’s penning The Black Atlantic was of course a time of significant optimism about the prospect of solidarities across and transcendent of historical boundaries of race, class and nation — it was after all written in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and in the years of the dismantling of the formal legal and political edifice of Apartheid in South Africa after 1990.

As a consequence, The Black Atlantic has been accused of an unbridled enthusiasm for and celebration of hybridity and creolization, globalization and its flows easily rendered instrumental for neoliberalism. Yet, I honestly cannot find much concrete evidence to support these claims in The Black Atlantic. There is simply in Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic too much of a sensitivity to the burdens of a past of racialized terrors in the name of white supremacism and its traces in the present for that to qualify as an assessment characterized by fidelity to Gilroy’s own text.

Gilroy, right at the outset of the book, notes that terms such as creolization and hybridity are “rather unsatisfactory ways of naming the processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents.” As a case in point, Gilroy is in The Black Atlantic scathing of what he refers to as “the excesses of anti-political post-structuralism in general and deconstructive literary criticism in particular,” of the “easy postmodernism [which] attacks both rationality and universality through an obvious and banal relativism,” and of a “rhetorical anti-humanism which simply trivializes the potency of the negative.”

Furthermore, Gilroy explicitly cautions against a certain intellectual “distaste for uncomfortable questions of class and power” and against “ignoring the undiminished power of racism itself and forsaking the mass of black people who continue to comprehend their lived particularity through what it does to them.” Much like Stuart Hall — Gilroy’s mentor and colleague and the first reader of The Black Atlantic — Gilroy turns his back at the “Little Englander” Marxist version of the New Left as represented by E. P. Thompson and its undeclared nationalism and enthusiasms for “socialism in one country,” which as we know all too well by now, left previous little intellectual space to think analytically in terms of anything other than class.

Gilroy is clearly also opposed to deterministic Marxist notions of a progressive teleology, which often renders the experience of slavery and racialized terror incidental rather than central to black histories of subordination and oppression. It may be precisely this that has irked Gilroy’s deterministic Marxist readers well into the realms of misrepresentation.

Gilroy also stands at an ambivalent distance to what became of cultural studies: in The Black Atlantic, he speaks of the discipline’s “conspicuous problems with ethnocentrism and nationalism” and calls for a “critical evaluation of the ways in which notions of ethnicity have been mobilized, often by default rather than design, as part of the distinctive hermeneutics of cultural studies or with the unthinking assumption that cultures always flow into patterns congruent with the borders of essentially homogeneous nation states.” In other words, much as Hall noted in his posthumously published “W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures,” let us not be so naive as to think that replacing historical notions concerning race with ethnicity or culture does away with the persistence of epistemological and ontological nationalism.

“It is significant that prior to the consolidation of scientific racism in the 19th century, the term ‘race’ was used very much in the way that the world ‘culture’ is used today,” remarks Gilroy in the early pages of The Black Atlantic.