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BOOK REVIEW "There ain't no Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation" by Paul Gilroy (Hutchinson, 1987, #7.95) Questions of race and racism have come to occupy a central r?le in political debate in Britain in recent years. At one time definitions seemed straightforward: racism was the identification and utilisation of racial differences as justification for discriminatory practises, and anti-racism was opposition to this. Classical socialism was implicitly anti-racist, emphasising class position and relegating race to a problematic but superstructural mystification for dividing the working class. More recently positions have become confused. Anti-racism has become a program of affirmative actions to be realised by administrative means. Socialism has lost many of its 19th Century Progressivist assumptions of the superiority of some cultures to others. Its former belief in "colour-blind" meritocracy has been taken up by conservatives (such as those around The Salisbury Review); instead of biological essence, cultural differences (such as family relations) are considered as being to blame for any lingering inequalities. In discussion, the race "problem" and the often interchangeable one of "the Inner Cities" are the terms around which control over urban space are discussed. Another aspect of contemporary socialist thought has been the attempt to counter the Right's monopoly on Nation State patriotism by constructing an alternative patriotism around the idea of the plain English working man. Present in writings by E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, this idealised reference point, despite excluding ever-larger proportions of the population, is now that by which Kinnock opposes the Labour Party "rainbow coalitionists". In all this, the life experiences of those who actually experience "the black diaspora" are hardly present, except as the objects of the experts' discussions. It is this conjunction which forms the background for Dr. Gilroy's book. He wishes to "break the alternating current of racism between problem and victim status", an opportunity which he considers as lying in the possibility of representing a black presense outside these categories" (p12). Such a presense is to be located by historicising the concept of race as a cultural, active category: "culture does not develop along ethnically absolute lines, but in complex, dynamic patterns of syncretism in which new definitions of what it means to be black emerge from raw materials provided by black populations elsewhere in the diaspora" (p13). For example, Gilroy discusses the evolution of "race" as a policing problem, one largely missing until the definition of "mugging" in the middle 1970s (which crossed violent / non-violent lines by conflating robbery and theft), and now a synonym for the problem of control of space in the "inner cities". Urban disturbances since 1976 are seen as a race problem (whatever proportion of those arrested are "black"), and a spacial problem (in the insistence that there should be "No no-go areas"). Gilroy examines the inadequacies of anti-racism by contrasting the approaches of Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League and the Greater London Council anti-racism campaigns. He considers RAR to have displayed a breadth of analysis missing from the ANL: "RAR had allowed space for youth to rant against the perceived iniquities of 'Labour Party Capitalist Britain'. The popular front tactics introduced by the ANL closed it down." (p133) The ANL equated racism and fascism, representing the National Front as a "false nationalism" threatening the purity of parliamentary democracy; the antidote was to be a true patriotism, which actually closed off debate. Emphasis on the "institutional / bureaucratic model of anti-racist strategy", as practised by the GLC, "allows the concept of racism to ascend to rarified heights where, like a lost balloon, it becomes impossible to retrieve. This induces a strategic paralysis which is further encouraged by the allocation of a pre-eminent if not monopolistic r?le in the defeat of racism to the council's own agencies and activities... The would be anti-racist is abandoned in a political vacuum... The problem of what connects one anti-racist to the next is not recognised as a substantive political issue. Municipal anti-racism solved it by providing signs, badges and stickers..." (p144-5) So, rather than "revealing and restoring the historical dimensions of black life in this country" the emphasis on "institutionalised racism" "loses contact with both history and class politics. It becomes a policy issue" (p27) Where then is this historical dimension to be located? For Gilroy, this is the specific achievement of black expressive culture. While the Labour Party tries to recapture support by returning to the "normal" British working-man, international economic realities mean that "the need to develop international dialogues and means of organisation which can connect locality and immediacy across the international division of labour is perhaps more readily apparent to black populations who define themselves as part of a diaspora." (p68) He attempts to demonstrate this through an analysis of musical culture (specifically reggae and rap), both in the economic and social relations existing in these subcultures and in the lyrical content of the music. The core anti-capitalist themes in "black expressive culture" are identified as critiques of productivism and the State (eg in policing) and an assertion of a black history (eg in Rastafarian and other pan-African beliefs). This chapter is one of the most fascinating in the book, but it also leaves an uneasy feeling. In the lyrics and their reproduction in dance-hall, Gilroy finds a "whole dialogic process that unites performers and crowds" and becomes "the basis for an authentic public sphere" But surely the anti-work "liberatory rationality" of the lyrics must be disentangled from the structural location where the song is played: on one side of the work / leisure system. And if a DJ removes the label from a rare import record, is this a subversion of the commodity or just its appropriation as a rare object to be coveted? Some differentiation from the Rock subculture (U2, Genesis) is surely required in a description like "Spectators acquire the active r?le of participants in collective processes which are sometimes cathartic and which may symbolize or even create community." (p214) It is important to ask the anti-work lyrical content developed and what its significance is - anyone denying its importance would also have an obligation to explain just why it had developed. However, Gilroy does seem to accept rhetoric at face value, whether in lyrics or in citation from leaflets such as those by RAR or that for a concert / rally in support of the miners' strike. Leftist leaflets often use a "we" to elicit solidarity; they don't demonstrate it's existence. This book is probably intended for an academic audience: the nods in the directions of others in the same field are sometimes intrusive for the ordinary reader, and sometimes too much effort seems to be involved in reconciling black expressive culture to academia (such as in the description of Smiley Culture as an "organic intellectual"). More specifically, the space which Gilroy is trying to clear involves clearing away the cruder class analysis on one side and beating back the prophets of "the death of the social" on the other. In between, he finds historical, temporal and economic awareness: signs of a healthy expressive culture refusing mediation and creating urban spaces within which identity can be created and preserved. This would go beyond orthodox class analysis (which would treat all such elements as mere surface phenomena) and post-modernism (which would doubt their very possibility), and serve as an example of the "new social movements" which some see emerging in contemporary modern societies. From Edinburgh Review 78/9 1988