Paul Gilroy is Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University and author of Between Camps (published in the USA as Against Race) and The Black Atlantic.

Recent articles

In the first of a series tracing “the strange career of multiculturalism”, Paul Gilroy – leading thinker on race and racism, and currently chair of African American studies at Yale University – surveys the current debate in Britain, and calls for an end to its entrapment by “the problem of assimilation”.

As we remember the dead, we face a fundamental choice. We can feed our fears of the clash of civilisations. Or we can enter a new global era and build on our shared sense of the fragility, and diversity, of human life. Our grasp of the history of racism may play a crucial role.

Paul Gilroy’s work, “Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race”, challenges the way that categories of ‘race’ are routinely used and proposes an audacious new binding concept of ‘planetary humanism’. He elaborates the argument in an interview with Anthony Barnett, Bola Gibson and Caspar Melville of openDemocracy.

In a scintillating panorama, Paul Gilroy examines western multiculturalism after 11 September – from redemption at Hollywood’s Oscars to Ali G, slipping between sad joke and protean satire.

The would-be shoebomber Richard Reid, and several of the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, are the products of ‘multicultural’ Britain. The foremost scholar of the phenomenon sees their journey to militant Islam as emblematic of the untruths buried in a now-failing social model and an unresolved post-colonial European history.