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The central goal of Paul Gilroy's Postcolonial Melancholia - originally delivered in May 2002 as the Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine - is to mount an impassioned defense of the possibilities of multiculturalism. In a post-9/11 world, in which “security” concerns too often justify xenophobia and in which political conflicts are rewritten as part of the inevitable clash between incommensurate cultures, such a project is more important than ever. As he has in earlier works (Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, The Black Atlantic, and Against Race), Gilroy couples his appreciation of more fluid forms of identity and cultural expression with a powerful critique of patterns of thinking that remain, even if unintentionally, committed to essentialized views of racial difference.
The first section of Gilroy's book, “The Planet,” traces the roots of our contemporary situation to the European colonial past. Fundamental to Gilroy's analysis in this section is his argument that the political practices of the modern nation-state have been forged out of the “investments in the idea of racial hierarchy” that characterized the colonial era (p 44). If today's politics are more likely to be organized around ideas of culture, rather than biology, the absolutism of these posited differences nonetheless demonstrates a continued - if unacknowledged - connection to racist patterns of thinking. We need, Gilroy argues, to confront this historical legacy more directly in order to diffuse the power it still holds over our ideas of nation, race, culture, and identity. Although he is attuned to the damage wrought in the name of race, he is equally insistent that race not be reified. If “race” is a product of racism rather than its cause, then a careful consideration of our colonial past should lead us “away from ‘race’ altogether” (p 9). Gilroy turns to anticolonial writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and George Orwell - and even Montesquieu