Postcolonial Melancholia.Postcolonial Melancholia MELANCHOLIA, med. jur. A name given by the ancients to a species of partial intellectual mania, now more generally known by the name of monomania. (q.v.) It bore this name because it was supposed to be always attended by dejection of mind and gloomy ideas. Vide Mania., by Paul Gilroy Columbia University Press Columbia University Press is an academic press based in New York City and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by James D. Jordan (2004-present) and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, , February 2005 $24.50, ISBN ISBN abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 0-231-13454-1 Paul Gilroy, a sociology professor at Yale University, is a bright man and prolific writer who doesn't write for the casual reader. If his poststructuralist vocabulary doesn't leave you spinning, his big ideas surely will. That said, everything about Postcolonial Melancholia, a collection of four Wellek Library Lectures in critical theory delivered at the University of California The University of California has a combined student body of more than 191,000 students, over 1,340,000 living alumni, and a combined systemwide and campus endowment of just over $7.3 billion (8th largest in the United States). , Irvine, is largely digestible, though only for the dedicated masticator mas·ti·cate v. mas·ti·cat·ed, mas·ti·cat·ing, mas·ti·cates v.tr. 1. To chew (food). 2. To grind and knead (rubber, for example) into a pulp. v.intr. To chew food. . This is the sort of book that makes wonderful sense in the telling, but can leave you wondering about just what you've been told. The thesis is that multicultural politics are best understood from the perspective and in the context of imperial and colonial history, Britain's postcolonial history in particular. Borrowing the Freudian concept of "melancholia," Gilroy attempts to exorcise the British attachment to global grandeur that, by this account, has metastasized into a social pathology directed at blacks, immigrants, and the very idea of multiculturalism. The lectures are divided into two parts that correspond to the distinction between global versus local or worldly versus parochial. Part One considers the history of "race" and the damage it has done to democracy throughout the world; Gilroy seeks to replace the tired triumphalism of "globalization" with "planetarity" since "planetary suggests both contingency and movement" on a "smaller scale than the global." Part Two revolves around the ordinary multicultural cohabitation A living arrangement in which an unmarried couple lives together in a long-term relationship that resembles a marriage. Couples cohabit, rather than marry, for a variety of reasons. They may want to test their compatibility before they commit to a legal union. that exists in any local British community, a process Gilroy calls "conviviality." Together, the whole book is informed by "unabashed humanism ... licensed by a critique of racial hierarchy and the infrahuman in·fra·hu·man adj. Of a lower order than humans; subhuman. in  fra·hu life forms it creates." This analysis holds an important lesson for the increasingly imperial United States: otherness is nothing to fear, especially in our age of terror. R. Owen Williams is a history Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. |
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