Paul Gilroy

Cultural historian, critical race theorist, and counter-intuitive thinker who has shaped black diaspora studies. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987) locates racism at the center of British nationalism. Hybridity replaces the fantasy of a collective past as the core principle for black identity in The Black Atlantic (1993). Against Race (2002) traces the persistence of race-thinking in popular media after fascism. Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) explains why multiculturalism has outlived narratives of its end, exposing neoimperialism's ongoing contest with cultural difference. Darker than Blue (W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures, 2011) warns against commodity culture's disintegration of black moral life.