Paul Gilroy Theory introduction

1. Representation theories 2:
Paul Gilroy
Representation of race in the media

2. Gilroy
• Professor Paul Gilroy is a British historian, writer
and academic, who is Professor of American and
English Literature at King's College, London.
Gilroy is a scholar of Cultural Studies specialised
on the Black Atlantic diasporic culture and its
manifestations in British culture.
• He is the author of There Ain't no Black in the
Union Jack (1987), Small Acts (1993), The Black
Atlantic (1993), Between Camps (2000; also
published as Against Race in the United States),
and After Empire (2004; published
as Postcolonial Melancholia in the United States),
among other works.

3. Gilroy
• Gilroy was also co-author of The Empire
Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s
Britain (1982), a path-breaking, collectively
produced volume published under the
imprint of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at Birmingham University,
where he was a doctoral student working
with the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall.

4. Some notes of the work of Professor
Paul Gilroy
• Theories of representations of race, ethnicity and the post-colonial world.
• The concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ draws attention to continuities in the culture created by the African
diaspora across national boundaries, e.g. in newspaper representations of black popular culture.
• The concept of the ‘Post-colonial melancholia’ draws attention to the continuing role of colonial ideology – of
the superiority of white western culture – across a range of representations in newspapers.
Evidence that might support this theory includes:
• Examples of representations that reinforce a white version of Britishness and a view of the world that reflects
the British experience of empire and colonialism.
• Examples of representations celebrating a transnational Black culture (the Black Atlantic)