Ebook: Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy

An interdisciplinary consideration of Paul Gilroy’s contributions to cultural theory and understandings of modernity.

In the more than twenty years since the publication of his book The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has become a leading Afro-European intellectual whose work in the cultural studies of race has influenced a number of fields and made the study of black Atlantic literatures and cultures an enduring part of the humanities. The essays in this collection examine the full trajectory of Gilroy’s work, looking beyond The Black Atlantic to consider also his work in the intervening years, focusing in particular on his investigations of contemporary black life in the United States, histories of human rights, and the politics of memory and empire in contemporary Britain. With an essay by Gilroy himself extending his longstanding examination of fascism, racial thinking, and European philosophical thought, in addition to an interview with Gilroy, this volume features Gilroy’s own words alongside other scholars’ alternative conceptualizations and critical rereadings of his works.

“…a diverse approach that allows for a well-rounded examination of Gilroy’s rich, complex oeuvre.” — CHOICE

Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being in African American Literature, also published by SUNY Press. Jay Garcia is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University and author of Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century America.