HISTORIES FOR THE FUTURE
June 10, 2021
Professor of the Humanities Paul Gilroy, the founding director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College London, is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. He is the author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005), and Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010) alongside numerous key articles, essays, and critical interventions. Gilroy’s is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialized thought and representational practices in the modern world. Winner of the Holberg Prize (2019), which is given to a person who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, social science, the law, or theology, Professor Gilroy was described by the awarding committee as “one of the most challenging and inventive figures in contemporary scholarship.” Gilroy was one of the founding figures of a remapped global history that embedded the movement of racialized subjects and traded goods into accounts of the world as we know it. His work on racism in modern Britain has consistently countered romantic narratives of whiteness, Christianity, and ethnic homogeneity as uniquely constitutive of these islands and has written the long history of Black Britons into the cultural and social fabric of Britishness.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Thank you again for joining us, Paul. What I will try and do is take some, as it is impossible to take all, of your rich intellectual contributions over the years as a framework and methodology for discussing the present and future in Britain and Palestine. I grouped our concerns into three major questions, based on my understanding of the methodology one can carve out of your works, which is extremely useful in analyzing and facing racism in Britain and beyond, and settler colonialism in Palestine and beyond.
The methodology has three elements as I see it, almost a tool kit for the future scholar, especially the younger generation. You offer three new genealogies: of racism, the struggle against it, and the role of academia in sustaining racism and in opposing it.
The first two issues are the more crucial ones. You suggest that the best way to analyze contemporary racism (and by inference, fascism) and settler colonialism is by revising the genealogy of the brutality incurred in present-day racism and settler colonialism and the struggle against them. Through such a genealogy we might ask how racism produced “race” and settler colonialism produced what you call “infrahumanity,” or dehumanization. When we search for a new genealogy of the struggle against racism, we ask two questions. First, why was it never a central part of the Western struggle for human rights? And second, where it was part of such a struggle in recent years, what are its limitations? As you fear, it seems to be a superficial struggle and sometimes ineffective, if not inadvertently perpetuating racism and neofascism.
These questions are all interconnected. I do not think we can or should separate our discussion of the genealogy of racism from the search for human rights. Within this genealogical frame we should explore whether the struggle coexisted with racism, interacted with it; we should examine whether the selection of who was included or excluded from the journey in the search to protect human rights was based itself on racism, and what hybridities and fallacies both racism and the struggle against it produced. This fusion is needed for viewing the discourse on human rights after the Second World War, which was influenced by the Holocaust and is needed if we want to include Palestine in the conversation. It seems to me that while these rereadings included the Holocaust, but not genocides of Africans or Muslims in Southeast Asia, they also left out the Nakba—and because of that the journey and its rereading are incomplete and deficient to a certain degree.
So, my first question is about retelling the history of human rights discourses and approaches in the West and their relevance to Palestine. In the genealogy that you chart, the Treaty of Utrecht,1 the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man,2 and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights3 are all stations in a Western trajectory that selectively pushed forward an “enlightened” agenda, which allowed “nonenlightened” ideas to flourish outside the continent of Europe in its colonized spaces. This agenda created categories of humanity and infrahumanity “over there” and excluded, even in 1948, identifying racism as a major obstacle in our quest to protect human rights.
When you revisited this journey, you found that Africans and people of the Caribbean, within the West and outside of it, wished to be part of the conversation but in most cases were silenced or ignored. Such was the case of Antoine Frangulis, the representative of Haiti in the League of Nations, who in 1933 called for an international conference on human rights and racism in response to the Nazi anti-Jewish policies. But his voice was stifled by the American delegation, which did not wish to discuss the racist laws and practices in the USA together with the anti-Jewish laws of Germany at the time. This is very much as today, when President Biden does not want the ICC to investigate Israel, as it might investigate the US and its allies.
This was around the same time Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Martin Buber explaining that he would never support Zionism, as the Jewish settlers came not to live alongside the native Palestinian population but to replace them. His warning was also ignored. Thus, alongside the genocide of the Jews in Europe, the world also witnessed the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And we can add James Baldwin’s perceptive observation that the Palestinians would be victim of an antisemitic wish to see the Jews expelled from the West and serving British colonial interests in the East.
This new reading also raises intriguing questions about a Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which was drafted when most of the world was still colonized and was only, or perhaps primarily, triggered because Europeans perpetrated genocide against other Europeans. The genocide of Africans by Europeans did not produce in the West any need for such a declaration. Years later, when George Mosse attributed Nazi dehumanization to the blunt indifference toward inhumanity in the First World War, no one attributed it to the slave trade, the Belgian genocide in Congo, or the Italian genocide in Libya. And as you mention in your work, very few connected the Nazi horrors to the use of mustard gas by the Italians in Ethiopia.
And here is where I would like to introduce Palestine. Some of your protagonists, who are obvious heroes in creating a different genealogy, are survivors of the Holocaust who aligned their analyses of the horror they personally experienced with the evil of colonization. One such person is Jean Améry, who read [Frantz] Fanon while being tortured by the Nazis. And yet that same incredible person whom I admired was an ardent supporter of the state of Israel—after, it should be said, the Nakba, a crime against humanity perpetrated by a state pretending to represent the victims of the Holocaust.
Primo Levi, another inspirational hero in this respect, waited until 1982 to voice the first criticism of Israel and paid dearly by being shunned by the Italian and American Jewish communities. These Zionist Jews refused to accept a concept or a possibility of Jewish racism, even from Primo Levi. And when I—whose parents lost most of their family in the Holocaust—claim that racism is at the heart of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, which includes torture, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal policies, I could be branded if not sued as antisemitic or otherwise an incurable self-hating Jew. This is according to the new definition of Holocaust denial, which unfortunately my university adopted—the infamous IHRA definition.
I would like to include the racism of Zionism within this new reading and enter into your genealogy Hajo Meyer and Gabor Maté, whose experiences in the Holocaust led them to accuse Zionism of racism (in the name of their experience) and reject the exceptionalism granted to that form of racism by some of the most honorable fighters against racism elsewhere. Zionism is and was a brand of racism easily understood by the African member states in the UN when they helped to pass the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism. Can we say that the analysis and stances of both Améry and Levi were profoundly deficient for not including the Palestinian story in the struggle, and will we not err ourselves as well if we exclude Palestinian suffering at the hands of Zionist racism from the new genealogy? Do forgive me for this long preface, but I wanted to bring it all together, as this is also a personal experience and interest, and not just an intellectual quest for knowledge.
PAUL GILROY: Thank you for less a question and more of a survey, from which it is difficult to dissent. I don’t know how to begin to answer you, because it is so obviously the case that you’ve outlined. The core of your question seems to me: Why hasn’t the struggle against racism been part of the Western pursuit of human rights? And secondly, why hasn’t the Nakba—the suffering, the injustice, the structural and systematic inequalities, and the violence directed against Palestinians—been able to enter that story? There are a number of difficult answers to those questions that would detain us for the entire evening.
Why isn’t the struggle against racism part of the Western pursuit of human rights? I think it’s because of the way that “the human” in human rights has been configured. That’s my point of entry. You mentioned early on that I spoke about infrahumanism and planetary humanism—I think these are my own profoundly deficient attempts to complicate our understanding of the human in pursuit of human rights. And to suggest elements of an alternative genealogy. I think it isn’t any problem to see how the story of Palestinian expropriation, of colonial violence in Palestine, might be folded into that story very readily.
In his introduction to our talk, Malcolm Richards was kind enough to mention that I had been involved in producing a photographic history of Black life in Britain. One of the photographs in that book is from the Pan-African Conference of 1945, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. And as the speaker from the international Labor party approaches the rostrum to address this conference—which I believe is the first where non-US voices are dominant amongst the organizing group—there’s a placard on the wall behind him. The placard says, “Jews and Arabs unite against British imperialism.”
It was important to me to include that because when I first found the photograph, I was struck by how seldom I had seen that pronouncement made. And I was struck that in the immediate aftermath of World War II, such a statement was at the center of a pan-African meeting. Some years ago I had the pleasure of being involved in a project around the representations of the British Empire on film. Apart from seeing General Allenby’s forces marching into Jerusalem, we were able to look at the two different versions of the post-1945 victory parade that were enacted on celluloid for benefit of celebrants of the empire. The first version, for the consumption of domestic audiences in England, included no colonial troops. The second version included all the imperial and colonial forces, including a significant contingent of Palestinian soldiers in uniform marching down the mall.
Now, obviously my work is unified by its distaste and opposition to nationalism in all forms. So I’m not being a crypto-nationalist to say that I’m attached to England profoundly. But I think that a large part of the answer to your question relates to the residual force and presence of the British Empire in the world. If you were to show the film with Palestinian soldiers in British colonial army uniforms from 1945 marching through London, there would be a great shock to see this. And I don’t think we can underestimate the deficit of historical knowledge, which is available to us, in drawing intellectual energy and attention to the kind of counter-genealogy you described.
That’s the first thing I’d say: history and the British Empire. And the second thing relates to the force of the colonial double standard, the colonial nomos. In my work, I’ve tried to take it back to seventeenth-century sources, which are fundamental to the development of political theory. In particular, I’ve tried to read the Second Treatise of Government4 with this question in mind. In the context of the colonial dynamics of the establishment of Israel and its legitimation, we see the colonial doctrine of improving the land—which requires improvement and where supposedly the Indigenous people sacrifice their title to that land, their relation to that land, and are opening themselves to expropriation from that land by their failure to improve it.
In Locke’s original arguments, this is already doubly coded— because it says to the emergent revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie, “You can take what you like in this colonial world.” And perhaps in the hub of empire, this is a revolutionary clarion call to the bourgeoisie as it emerges onto the stage of world history. But in the colonial zone, this is a license for murder, a license for horror, a license for violence. So it’s really trying to capture that double standard that is intrinsic to the, and I am quoting someone, “peculiarly English way of thinking”—about land, about identity, about property. This is something that comes out of the center of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century and is applied viciously and brutally to Ireland, the first colony of England.
I want to suggest that there are key ambiguities in these ways of thinking about land, property, belonging, and revolutionary transformation in the doctrine of improvement, which is affirmed and maintained by successes that warrant the colonial domination of the world and the expropriation of Indigenous peoples, wherever the life and machinery of the British Empire touches their experience. Those ambiguities are retained. I want to direct people toward that, too.
Now a third thing: there is something about the intellectual and political confrontation with racism itself that promotes a certain, at worst, agonistic relationship with the categories of humanity. This is what I’m trying to get at through the concept of “planetary humanism,” which is derived from a reading of [Aimé] Césaire in the late 1940s. Césaire speaks about a humanism “made the measure of the world”—not a European universalism alone, but something that we can now begin to recognize in the postglobalism engagement with our planetary lives that’s been underscored by the pandemic.
There is a new set of questions about what humanist discourses need to be in the future, in our assessments of risk, vulnerability, and sustainability. This is also something that comes across very strongly in the most exciting and urgent writing that has emerged in the face of the climate crisis. There are new ways of being human at stake. If we are scholars, if we are academics, then what we study and what we research corresponds to what we are in some way. I don’t know exactly how, but I know that that horizon is very important to me.
Specifically on the question of Palestine, I don’t know where to begin to narrate my own personal story, but I will say that I have always been greatly guided by Edward Said. I remember reading Orientalism in 1978 when it was first published and thinking about how one might begin to integrate a concern with the projection of the Orient as an object of knowledge and power into a larger framework of critical commentary on racial hierarchy, racialized forms of injustice, racialized forms of violence, and so on. I’m very indebted to Edward for opening that window for me. But he’s certainly not the only person and not the only experience of that.
In my own life, the invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s was a very important and formative experience for me in trying to think about this again. And here, my teacher was the African American poet and writer June Jordan. She was the person who instructed me, informed me, and educated me as to how that concern, that openness, that attachment to the struggles of Palestinian people could be interwoven, interlaced, or productively entangled with the kinds of things that were emerging in my own work at that point. Many people will understand her voice as a Black feminist voice that was ecumenical, universalist, strongly humanist in some ways, always modest. During that period, she wrote a very famous poem of apology to the Palestinian people—“Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”—and a whole sequence of poems when she went to Lebanon in the aftermath of those events.5 I could say a lot more about my practice in the classroom and who I’ve learned from. Edward used to talk about [Martin] Buber and the Buber family taking his own family’s house. I think this question of being drawn toward Buber and the I and Thou—seeing a fantastic resource for managing the responsibility that we bear in the face of the other—was for me rather undermined when I heard Edward Said speak about the Buber family. The case of [Emmanuel] Levinas is equally well known. The inability to distinguish the abstract alterity from the concrete alterity in Levinas’s beautiful biblical system. So important, so useful—and yet, so limited.
So I want to suggest that where you say that this work is “profoundly deficient,” I agree with you. But I think its deficiencies are instructive. I think its deficiencies are stimulating and urgent and provocative. Because I know how deficient my own work is, I don’t search for perfection. I embrace those deficiencies and hopefully allow myself to be stimulated by them further. In each of those cases, this has become useful to me in directing me to the place where that double standard is most intensely present. And it seems to me that that double standard is racism. That double standard is the colonial nomos. That double standard is its fundamental characteristic.
ILAN PAPPÉ: You just reminded me that one of the last conversations I had with Edward Said before he died was about the contradiction between what he wrote in general about nationalism, how he deconstructed it, and what he wrote on Palestinian nationalism. He said to me, “You know, I came to the conclusion that paradoxes can be left. They don’t have to be resolved. I don’t have to explain it.” There is something there to think about in line with what you said.
I would like to talk more about national liberation movements, which are still under the colonial yoke today—not a closed chapter from the past—and how much can we and should we humanize and transnationalize the culture of liberatory movements when they are in the midst of struggling against colonization. This has a lot to do with the way you offer us a fresh way of unpacking decolonization, which for you is incomplete if racism is not tackled head-on as a principal component in the analysis. You do this by rereading decolonization as the long story of individual agency of the colonized and the enslaved, and by blurring the relationship between the colonial worlds and their victims. Maybe the photograph you mentioned is one such instance. Here, ships did not just carry slaves, but also people who refused to be slaves and inhabited maritime routes that allow the exchange of culture (as well as people) in a way that created a hybrid and transnational culture, which is a far cry from the way it was later dogmatized and nationalized on the territorial basis.
This forced you, I feel, to be not just a historian, but also a DJ, a curator, and a collector—so that ordinary agency and human exchange would challenge the Manichaean view of human relationship and identities, as well as racist realties. You managed to reveal conviviality in the past as an inspirational model for the future. You archived knowledge in the quest to avoid the melancholy that some famous archaeologists of knowledge cast in their histories and genealogies of knowledge.
This corresponds to some new and exciting works that recently appeared on Palestine and the Arab world. One of them, The Ecumenical Frame by Ussama Makdisi, shows a past where collective identities were not insisted upon. This tallies with what you said about the Palestinians before imperial invasion. Today, these identities are what Orientalists and pundits in the West disparagingly call “sectarianism,” and to which they attribute the current violence and brutality in the Arab world.
According to Makdisi, collective identities were a vague way of life that enabled coexistence in a genuine way—without, of course, idealizing or romanticizing the nature of the Ottoman Empire within which they lived. But more often than not it was less present in their lives than the modern state is in ours. This frame was destroyed mainly by Western imperialism, and in Palestine by Zionism.
In particular I was thinking of your rereading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the way you revisited English folk songs and their transmutations under the influence of African and Caribbean music, and the recovery of various instances that told us that we might be writing a history of slavery but not of slaves. Rather, these are people who did all they could not to be slaves, not to give up conviviality, even if at times they had to find it in a supranatural world of spirits and saints. So, it is about agency, but also about possibilities of hybridity and ordinary human interactions, even under oppression. A genealogy that opened the way to a history of women and gender, and maybe in some ways was opened by feminist historiography. Take out the historical circumstances and you have a cultural model for the future, which is transnational, universal, convivial, and ordinary. And maybe even one that can become an antidote to racism and fascism.
But Palestinians would ask: Can we skip the national liberation phase? Is this a scenario of a humanist culture that unfolds after you struggle for liberation, or should it be part of that struggle? You might find yourself muted in the face of your oppressor’s brutality if you dwell on the humanist transnational culture while struggling to be free or to exist. But if you neglect this quest, you might wake up to the Fanonian nightmare of replacing the French tormentor with the tormentor of the liberation movement.
I just wonder whether envisioning and working toward transnational humanist culture can be done as part of a reconciliation process or only after it happens. As I am not Palestinian, I attempted to express this in a dialogue with my compatriots—my Jewish compatriots—in Israel. It resulted in a dismal failure, but I am not giving up. In 2005, a headline in an Israeli newspaper accused me of stirring hatred and animosity in a lecture at Tel Aviv University by referring to the Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries as “Arab Jews.” I thought, maybe naively, that the fact that so many of the settlers come from a rich heritage of being not only Jews but also Arabs is a manifestation of how one can view culture as a vernacular, ordinary, and dynamic sphere of human activity. Rather than a signifier that, in case of the Jews who came from Arab countries, forced them to publicly denounce their Arabism, to de-Arabize themselves if they wanted to be part of the “whites” in the apartheid system that Israel built. As you can see from the reaction, in places where postcolonialism could only be a fantasy rather than an unfolding reality, colonialism and racism are still rife, even in the twenty-first century. And I wonder, could it be fought without identity politics as a transnational liberation movement rather than a national one?
How much should we strive to challenge a fantasy of purity, not only of the colonizer but also of the colonized? Is there a right timing for this, or is it imperative from the very start? I was once quite melancholic when despairing about our ability to arrest the quest for purity on both sides of the colonial and racist divide in Palestine and beyond, but I am much more sanguine based on what I hear from younger Palestinians, who are the majority in their society and seem to endorse a universalist quest that does not negate a liberatory vision. A different way of asking this is: What is decolonization really in the twenty-first century, and in particular in places such as Palestine, which are still under the colonialist yoke today?
PAUL GILROY: Thank you again for an impossible question, Ilan. I’ve made myself extremely unpopular by saying that all nationalisms are deeply problematic, and that governing and acting politically on the national principle will always carry ambiguities and problems with it. I follow Fanon in this, actually—at least I think I’m following him—because in those difficult gnomic sentences in Wretched of the Earth he identifies precisely this problem, which has occurred repeatedly.
Unfortunately I’m not familiar with Ussama Makdisi’s work, but I want to say something else which connects with this sense of conviviality as having been present in the great cosmopolitan cities of the Middle East. Certainly, when I first went to Cairo many years ago this was brought home to me very strongly by the experience of looking at the city and thinking that there were similar things to be said about Baghdad, Jerusalem, and other places. Where there was a very delicate cultural ecology which was not phobic in the face of otherness, where that contact was not always felt to be contaminating.
These examples are important for me because they were all destroyed by one version of nationalism or another. That is a terribly important history to bear in mind. The other thing that happened to me was that not long after The Black Atlantic was published in 1993, I came across a book by Ammiel Alcalay called After Jews and Arabs. And my attenuated brotherhood with Ammiel Alcalay arose from the fact that we realized that we had in effect written the same book, and that we didn’t know each other. We were shaped by different things. Edward [Said] was very generous in drawing attention to this overlap or intersection between the two books in his appreciative commentary on both of them. I learned a huge amount from reading Ammiel Alcalay, more than I had learned from my intermittent dialogue with Sephardim—Smadar Lavie, Ella Shohat—the people in my generation who were drawing attention to the problem that you described. But Ammiel’s book, I return to—I think it’s a book that merits continued study and it’s not perhaps as well known as it might have been. It’s not a book which is dated. In fact, the arguments that it makes about culture have an urgency about them again now.
Like June Jordan, Ammiel Alcalay is a great and thoughtful poet. He’s an extraordinary poet. So maybe there’s something about poets in this who are able to do things that political theorists, philosophers, and historians aren’t able to do. And that poetic payoff is something that we should try to study, because it seems to me that there’s something about the way that language is being used. There’s something about the way in which newness is being brought into the world in this very difficult and massively overdetermined area that suggests that poets are able to summon and conjure with words in ways that are extremely important.
Now, there’s something else I wanted to say about this, and it relates to the notion of “strategic essentialism.” The conventional argument among leftists of my generation and older would be that nationalisms, or more wholesome varieties of nationalism which are judged to be acceptable like “nationalitarianism,” create a hierarchy where some people—the dupes—need to be told that we are really all the same and interchangeable, but the elite actually understand the limitations of that. The reason I’m against the idea that nationalism can be scripted by the elite for the dupes, for the needed foot soldiers, is that hierarchy is terribly difficult to shift. Once nationalism is out and rampant and resurgent, it’s not something that can be instrumentalized in a way that that political model seems to imply. So I’ve always been very uncomfortable, and I look to Fanon as someone who is extremely useful in drawing our attention to that, for all his profound deficiencies in some areas.
One of the things that radicalized me in the early ’80s around these questions was reading in detail about the extent of nuclear cooperation that was established between the Israeli government and the South African then-apartheid regime. I think of 1948 as being the moment of apartheid, the moment of the founding of the state of Israel, and the moment of the founding of the state of Pakistan. I look at these things as being connected to one another and betraying certain fundamental tendencies in the way that politics, culture, and government are thought of in postcolonial circumstances. Now, I know that in making these comparisons or demanding an interweaving of history, I’m already trespassing into very dangerous territory.
I can remember some years ago going to hear the great political theorist and thinker Mahmood Mamdani giving the Eqbal Ahmad memorial lecture, and watching him being booed because he had dared to compare the state of Israel to the state of Liberia. I think of Faisal Devji’s work on the relationship between Pakistan and Israel as political projects that share a certain affinity in the historical moment in which they appear. Of course, we face wider problems now—the way that uniqueness enters these conversations is such that any attempt to compare things is already thought by many to be an illegitimate act, an act of betrayal, or an act of treason.
We need to be stern and strong in the face of those accusations and say that, if we’re going to learn more about the world and conduct ourselves better, then we have to understand how these different histories, which are already interconnected, are in relation. I make a version of this argument in thinking about the historical and empirical relationship between antisemitism and anti-Black racism over a very long period of time. 1948 is a cue or a missed opportunity to do exactly that—to see histories in relation.
It’s very easy for people in conversations like this to imagine that what we think really matters, in any way. I don’t know whether what we do matters and I don’t think we will know. It won’t be settled now; it will be something that maybe we’ll find out later if we’re lucky. And so, when you say that there are strong generational questions here and that you’ve detected amongst young Palestinians a change in perspective, a different sense of how universal and particular attachments and priorities can be thought together, this gives me a great deal of courage. Because it seems to me that we’re now into a relationship with planetarity that we weren’t into even very recently. How these issues will be played out in the context of the climate catastrophe, for example, or the massive displacements of people that will follow is not clear. And just as the intensity with which certain forms of national identity were held and refined and amplified, it may well be that other forms of identity, other kinds of attachments, new varieties of connectedness and association, new kinds of acting in concert will become apparent to us as these pressures grow and intensify. So I’m optimistic about that, if it’s possible to be optimistic about something that’s so terrifying.
What is decolonization today? My last point connects with South Africa. Given the affinities, connections, and collaborations between the apartheid South African state and the state of Israel at a certain point, my comparison wouldn’t necessarily be with Liberia as with Mamdani, or with Pakistan as with Devji. I’d want to look at South Africa. The concept of apartheid may be useful in our generation because we know what apartheid was. But in conversations with younger militants and activists, it seems to me that many don’t know what apartheid was in detail. We cannot assume that generational knowledge is something that we can rely on. But there are people in South Africa who have inspired me with their attempts to develop in the aftermath of that unresolved, blocked revolutionary transformation, which was so vicious, so violent, so brutal, and so incomplete. Here I think of the psychologist and sometime truth commissioner, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, her notion of “empathic repair” and her work with Eugene de Kock, [known as] “Prime Evil,” which is a bit like [Hannah] Arendt’s work with Eichmann. It’s her Eichmann in Jerusalem account of the mentality of this man who’s a murderer for the state in that context.
She’s a psychologist and she’s read Fanon. But she’s not saying that unless we have that moment of violence that you spoke to, without that moment of national liberation, we can’t proceed. She’s saying that from a care with which we articulate the challenge of these difficult things in the everyday, we can find the possibility of what she calls “empathic repair.” That’s the horizon for me. I’m not saying it’s immediately within reach, but I want to act in the immediate space and circumstances we inhabit with that horizon in mind, with that horizon as a guide for our destination.
ILAN PAPPÉ: As you talk about the horizon, both you and I, and many of the people listening to us today, are working within academia. I think it would be fitting to revisit our own profession or way of life in our final question. You already hinted about your skepticism of whether we are as crucial as sometimes we think, but nonetheless we would like to do something.
You lamented several times about certain deficiencies that appeared in academia in Britain, and maybe in general under American influence, which affected the ability to engage with the questions of racism, fascism, and the quest for a better world. One facet that you think disappeared is the willingness to take risks in discussing these issues. This is replaced by an insistence to safeguard students in “safe zones of discussion,” protected by politically correct disciplinary boundaries and liberal discourses.
Now, I wonder if you have a proposed counter-pedagogy for this given the state of affairs we are in. And how does it relate to the impact of the “securitocracy,” which is your term, on freedom of speech and discussion? Let me enumerate a few examples: the Prevent program; the call by the Ministry of Education for schools in Britain to teach the history of Palestine out of respect to the two narratives (that of the colonizer and the colonized, akin to asking schools at the time of apartheid to teach with respect the dogma of racial discrimination); and recently the IHRA definition that equates the reference to Zionism as racism as an act of antisemitism, when in essence it usually is an act of anticolonialism and antiracism. This is more than taking a risk that someone would boo you, be offended, or disagree with you—this can cost you your position in the system, as we know from the experiences of our colleagues.
How do we, who are part of the system, deal with this? How do you and I, for example, who are in a relatively comfortable zone, deal with these threats and deficiencies?
PAUL GILROY: How do we deal with them? Well, you ask about the IHRA definition in particular. We could start with that and I think we can do much better than that. It seems to me that the IHRA definition was not necessarily produced to deal with antisemitism on campuses—it has other functions and other aims in mind. Those who are some of its most fervent supporters have a range of objects or aims involved. So I think we can do better than that. And I say that because I’m somebody who has always believed that the practice that we must develop as antiracists, whether it’s a pedagogic practice or a political one, has got to be able to show the connections between antisemitism, anti-Black racism, and other varieties of racism. That we have to be able to think these things and we have to know where racism produces racial hierarchy, where racism produces racial categories, where racism produces not just positions, but anthropologies, detail, a lexicon of racial life. It’s essential.
The reason I feel so strongly about this is because I think in our country, antiracism has always been very split, politically speaking. In the sense that there are those from within Black community who generally say our focus has to be on what the government’s doing—our focus has to be on the structural, the systematic, and the governmental. And there are others who say, well, actually, our focus has to be on the street and what the organized violent forces of ultranationalism, racism, and neofascism are doing.
And I’ve never believed that those two emphases, those two perspectives on the question of what antiracism adds up to, have to be separated from one another. I think that they are strongest, most useful, and most productive when done together. And I feel that that process can be extended. If we want to understand anti-Muslim racism, if we want to understand the production of the Muslim as a racial figure, then one of the best things we can do is look at the history of antisemitism. Because there are so many things unfolding around us right now which correspond to and connect with the things that were going on in Europe in the 1930s.
That history is a tremendous resource. Those who governmentally betray and cheapen the struggle against racism by diluting it and rearticulating it in performative denunciations are selling all of that short. That shouldn’t surprise us in any way! But I think we’ve got enough work in our archives, we’ve got enough research. Yourself and other historians in Israel have taught me so very much— Idith Zertal, for example, or the things that Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin have done. This has been tremendously enriching for me and I think the challenge is to develop arguments against the invocation of this exceptional identity in each historical setting that we find it. There are a lot of resources now that will enable us to do that. And let’s look to the rising generation, even if they have a deficit of historical knowledge, and try to tap into the power of their emergent cosmopolitics. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think they will be stumbling over the same blocks and obstacles that we stumbled over. I think they have a different altitude at which they move.