Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race

by Paul Gilroy

In this provocative book, now reissued with a new introduction, Paul Gilroy contends that race-thinking has distorted the finest promises of modern democracy. He compels us to see that fascism was the principal political innovation of the twentieth century - and that its power to seduce did not die in a bunker in Berlin. Between Camps addresses questions such * Why do we still divide humanity into different identity groups based on skin colour?
* Did all the good done by the Civil Rights Movement and the decolonization of the Third World have such little lasting effect? Gilroy examines the ways in which media and commodity culture have become pre-eminent in our lives in the years since the 1960s and especially in the 1980s with the rise of hip-hop and other militancies. With this trend, he contends, much that was valuable about black culture has been sacrificed in the service of corporate interests and new forms of cultural expression tied to visual technologies. He argues that the triumph of the image spells death to politics and reduces people to mere symbols. At its heart, Between Camps is a Utopian project calling for the renunciation of race. Gilroy champions a new humanism, global and cosmopolitan, and he offers a new political language and a new moral vision for what was once called 'anti-racism'.

Genres: Race, Cultural Studies

424 pages, Hardcover

First published March 19, 2001

About the author

Paul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is Professor of the Humanities and the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College, London.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

We so often today accept that race isn't real, that it has no basis in biology – yet it remains a powerful way of organising our understandings of the world. Gilroy argues that both race and nation are alluring ideas that we have not left behind us, and that their tendency to purity is a major part of the problem, along with the commodification of blackness. He has given us a politically charged, culturally engaged analysis of what the world could look like.