Laureation Address: Professor Paul Gilroy BA PhD FRSL FKC FBA
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Dr Lorna Burns, School of English
Tuesday 3 December 2024
Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the Degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa, Professor Paul Gilroy.
Since the publication, in 1987, of his landmark study, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy has reshaped the critical discourse of racism, nationalism, and modernity. In its innovative analysis of the cultural politics of race in 1980s Britian, There Ain’t No Black was groundbreaking because it dispelled the notion that racism and nationalism were mutually exclusive.
His next major publication followed in 1993: The Black Atlantic, a study of literature, philosophy, music, and critical theory that reflected on the double consciousness of being both European and Black. In 1994 The Black Atlantic received an American Book Award for ‘outstanding literary achievement’.
To this day, his work continues to explore the political and cultural landscape of contemporary Britain, for instance in Against Race, Between Camps, and After Empire. Challenging cynical critiques of multiculturalism and exposing the atavism of culturalist nationalism, Gilroy advocates a world in which living with alterity is no longer a source of anxiety or fear. His most recent work, Darker Than Blue, rearticulates this utopian vision of a radically decolonised global society.
Paul Gilroy is Professor of the Humanities at University College London and Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. He has held professorships in American and English Literature, Social Theory, Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths, King’s College, the London School of Economics, and Yale. He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary doctorates from Goldsmiths, and the Universities of Liege, Sussex, Copenhagen, and Oxford.
In 2019, Professor Gilroy was awarded Norway’s Holberg Prize in recognition of his outstanding contribution to research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In his laureate’s lecture, Gilroy argued that in order ‘to be serious about the struggle against racial orders […] you have to adapt your understanding of what it is to be a human being and why that is worth fighting over’. At the heart of his work is an urgent call for a renewed humanism, grounded in the acknowledgement of our common humanity.
Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to cultural and critical theory, to postcolonial studies and the sociology of race, and to the history of the Black Atlantic, I invite you to confer the Degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa on Professor Paul Gilroy.