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.Thismode is never linear or progressive; instead it is untidy, a  living memoryof the changing same.Once again we see Gilroy return to the theme ofdeath.Fear and danger, and thus the presence of death, are ever pres-ent and shape the distinctive aesthetics which have been so central to thebook.In music and then in novels and in autobiography there is a des-peration, yearning and desire for redemption as well as mourning forloss, which produces the ineffable, the transcendent, the  slave sublime.Gilroy also asks, how can this be considered alongside memories of theHolocaust, how can the Jewish diaspora be understood in relation to thisrewriting of modernity? Here, too, rationality is complicit with racialterror, here too is salvation sought through dreams of a nation state.Itis this desire, however, which is in actuality a kind of death drive.Nothing is more iniquitous than a return to an imagined point of origin,the slaves dreams of return to Africa in death.is  their turn towardsdeath.If Zionism shares with black nationalisms all the dangers ofethnic absolutism, The Black Atlantic proposes a different way of remem-bering organised terror and suffering which looks outwards rather thaninwards and which searches for viability through a politics of movement,mixture, impurity and hybridity.Movement to MelancholiaThere is a strong, unmistakable line of connection between the twoearlier books and the more recent Between Camps (Gilroy, 2000), so muchso that all three become part of a sustained enquiry into, on the onehand, the historical processes which, in moving from racialisation asslavery and as brutal practices of decisive non-belonging in relation tothe categories of Modernity, leads then inexorably to a dangerous imag-ining of absolute difference, and thus separation by whatever means,which can be endorsed by racially subjugated persons themselves andwhich in turn gives rise to the spectre of global neo-nationalisms and Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 57Gilroy s Critique of Racialised Modernity 57militarisation.On the other hand there are transcultural possibilities forcountering such  camp mentalities.These have been carried in andthrough black musics and the transcendent aesthetics afforded by theirencoding of histories of suffering and hopes for  freedom ; these musicshave also connected with social movements which have sought to bringto an end differences brought about by racialising discourses and thuslook towards a future of being  black no more.The notion of black and not-black runs through Gilroy s work as anecessary paradox.Necessary because in the light of the resistance toopening out for critical examination the consequences of racial cate-gorisations, which in turn would look to the dissolution of suchcategories, not only is the status quo upheld, but ethnic absolutismbecomes all the more entrenched, with the effect that only by being strategically black , not as a mark of self but as an intellectual andpolitical positioning, a mode of inter-disciplinary enquiry, does it seempossible to envisage the end of race.With this in mind, the concludingcommentary on Between Camps traces those lines of thinking which,seemingly provocative, are also extraordinarily pertinent to an analysisof the world today and the possible catastrophes of neo-fascism (albeitin a very different mode from its 1930s predecessors), the accelerationof militarisation and its glamorisation in culture, and the  new dealwhich seeks to reconcile global capitalism with newly fortified  unitedstates.Earlier in this chapter I suggested that Gilroy s assessment of thedangers of new forms of fascism espoused by black people themselves,particularly around grouping such as the Nation of Islam, were per-haps insufficiently grounded in detailed attention to the political cultureof everyday life and the sensibilities and opinions by black people onboth sides of the Atlantic (if these are the two main constituenciesunder discussion) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]