Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy (SUNY Series, Philosophy and Race (Hardcover))

An interdisciplinary consideration of Paul Gilroy’s contributions to cultural theory and understandings of modernity. In the more than twenty years since the publication of his book The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has become a leading Afro-European intellectual whose work in the cultural studies of race has influenced a number of fields and made the study of black Atlantic literatures and cultures an enduring part of the humanities. The essays in this collection examine the full trajectory of Gilroy’s work, looking beyond The Black Atlantic to consider also his work in the intervening years, focusing in particular on his investigations of contemporary black life in the United States, histories of human rights, and the politics of memory and empire in contemporary Britain. With an essay by Gilroy himself extending his longstanding examination of fascism, racial thinking, and European philosophical thought, in addition to an interview with Gilroy, this volume features Gilroy’s own words alongside other scholars’ alternative conceptualizations and critical rereadings of his works. “...a diverse approach that allows for a well-rounded examination of Gilroy’s rich, complex oeuvre.” — CHOICE Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being in African American Literature, also published by SUNY Press. Jay Garcia is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University and author of Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century America. Introduction Rebecka Rutledge Fisher and Jay Garcia Part I. Theories in Motion: Roots and Routes 1. Traditions, Genealogies, and Influences: Gilroy’s Intellectual Roots and Routes Richard H. King 2. Paul Gilroy and the Pitfalls of British Identity Dennis Dworkin 3. “Enough of This Scandal”: Reading Gilroy through Fanon, or Who Comes after “Race”? Anthony Alessandrini Part II. Retrieving the Human: Two Scholars in Dialogue 4. Multiculturalism and the Negative Dialectics of Conviviality Paul Gilroy 5. For a Dialogue with Paul Gilroy Jonathan Boyarin Part III. Debating the Human in Everyday Spaces 6. Sedentary and Mobile Poetics: Paul Gilroy and the Aesthetics of Postcolonial Theory Ranu Samantrai 7. Dynamic Nominalism in Alain Locke and Paul Gilroy Jay Garcia 8. Black Humanitarianism Tavia Nyong’o 9. A Dialogue on the Human: An Interview with Paul Gilroy Edited by Rebecka Rutledge Fisher and Jay Garcia Afterword. “The Right to Address the Future”: Utopian Thinking and Paul Gilroy John McGowan List of Contributors Index