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This chapter looks at the impact of the Holocaust, and Levinas and Derrida's response to it, on the category of the human. Drawing on Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, Giorgio Agamben's work on the Holocaust is analysed in the light of Levinas and Derrida. The issues raised at the start of the book about identification are then considered. Drawing on a range of thinkers (Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Paul Gilroy) and testimonies, it is argued that it is the shifting patterns of identification that are crucial in relation to understanding both the Holocaust and its impact on the contemporary world, especially in relation to race. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Levinas and Derrida's thought offers a rigorously reflective and easily lost ‘postmodern humanism’.

In keeping with recent attention to the global dimensions of the First World War, this essay explores how Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Robert Service, Wilfred Owen, Mary Borden and other wartime poets seized on and developed the cosmopolitan potentialities of poetry, in the sense of grounded attachments that span specific cultural and national differences. While the anti-heroism of First World War poetry has been amply discussed, its overlapping but distinct capacity for imaginative solidarity across enemy lines, if often acknowledged, remains less fully explored. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Gilroy, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum and Sigmund Freud, but above all attending to the poetry, this chapter examines First World War poems that not only state but linguistically, formally, and thematically enact what Rosenberg called ‘cosmopolitan sympathies’ with the enemy other.

This chapter deliberates on Evans Chan’s critical vision in The Map of Sex and Love’s absurd connections while at the same time refracting theoretically through Paul Gilroy’s conception of “demotic cosmopolitanism.” The film, which shows a moment when three Hong Kong lives intersect, allows Chan to marry the local with the global, in ironic resistance to and contestation of unrelenting transnational capitalist strategies, to envision a world of codependence, connection, and conviviality. The film does not eschew political complicities and human failings, for it embraces the notion of shared responsibility and critique, to create a roadmap guiding us into an uncertain global future.

This chapter discusses the emergence of pop music as a distinctive musical genre intended for very wide audiences and often controlled by the giants of the music business. It describes how pop is characterized by the specific conditions of religious and cultural minorities that are closely linked to African American history, such as jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll, reggae, disco music, soul, and hip hop. It also mentions the British scholar of cultural studies named Paul Gilroy, who defined the production conditions of hip hop as transnational structures of circulation and intercultural exchange. The chapter examines the relationship between the hip hop world and the real world that changed since Gilroy's observations in the 1990s. It talks about the insistence on the diasporic context of the 'Black Atlantic' and its kinship with Jewish modernity that remains pivotal to any pursuit of the diaspora in popular culture.

This chapter first describes the changes the Gilroy Garlic Festival has undergone over the years. It then discusses why food festivals are so popular among community leaders seeking to distinguish their towns; how the festival creates and sustains a sense of community; and how the Gilroy Garlic Festival serves as a model for other festival organizers.

This chapter discusses place–food associations; the origins of people’s negative perceptions of garlic, which are rooted in culinary egocentrism from the colonial era and reinforced during the period of massive southern European migration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century; and garlic’s infiltration of mainstream American cookery.

This chapter analyzes major events at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which include the Gilroy Garlic Queen Pageant, garlic braiding classes, and the garlic topping contest. It argues that as place-based food festival royalty, the Garlic Queen personifies the locality’s food–place association. She and her court symbolize Gilroy and its garlic, further strengthening garlic’s role as the vehicle by which citizens of Gilroy affirm community values. The garlic braiding classes enact the classic festival inversion: what is in reality work is situated as play, and those who normally enjoy the fruits of others’ labors do the labor themselves. The garlic topping contest is a microcosm of the labor, power, and race relations of garlic production in Santa Clara County, and of worker–consumer relations in general.

This chapter analyzes the branding of Gilroy as a festive foodscape. While Gilroy business leaders initially sought to reverse its negative image, what they established was an ongoing campaign of selling place. Gilroy’s branded identity is sustained by the successful food-centered event and place marketing in the forms of auto-ethnographic texts and media coverage. But there are also multiple identities generated by the Festival and the foodscape place brand, one of which is Gilroy’s image as the Garlic Capital of the World. A second collective and multidimensional identity generated by the Garlic Festival is the community of Festival volunteers. A communal spirit is operating and being reinforced on multiple levels as volunteers simultaneously play numerous roles.

This chapter examines Morrison's challenge to the fabricated conception of classicism as a ‘pure’ boy of culture, as a European pedigree on which so many aspects of dominant American identity depend. It demonstrates the novelist's interest in the historical connectedness of Africa (both North and West) with Ancient Greece and Rome. It explores her affinities with Martin Bernal, Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, and Wole Soyinka; her anthologizing of African literature in the 1970s; her use of Egyptian traditions and of the Gnostic gospels in the Nag Hammadi library; her revisionary deployment of Ovid's Metamorphoses to restore Africa to both the classical tradition and to the American structures that depend on that tradition; and her adaptations of Aesop's fables. The key novels discussed her are Sula, Paradise, and Jazz.

This chapter discusses Paul Gilroy's claim that the notion of double consciousness in which the black subject “ever feels his twoness” was used by W. E. B. Du Bois to figure a diasporic and sometimes transatlantic black modernity expressing the ambivalent location of people of African descent simultaneously within and beyond what is known as “the West.” Certainly, Du Bois's articulation of dualism, largely drawing on the language of William James and early U.S. psychology, has remained a powerful trope available to a wide range of artists and intellectuals both inside and outside the United States down to the present. To understand why Du Bois's formulation of the concept had such force, however, one has to examine the relationship of his formulation to similar expressions of African American dualism, within the political and cultural context in which these various articulations appeared.

This chapter considers how historically fraught Dominican-Haitian relations may be usefully approached through a Global South Atlantic framework. I analyze how the little-known performance piece and text “Sugar/Azúcal” (2003) by the Dominican writer and musician Rita Indiana Hernández (1977)—one of the most important creative and critical contemporary Dominican voices—articulates the complex South-South relation between the two nations of Hispaniola and Dominican racial beliefs through a Global South Atlantic lens. I argue that “Sugar/Azúcal” reveals some of the particularities of Atlantic history in the colonial and postcolonial South that places subjects and nations in a different, and in fact contradictory, relation to what has come to be known as Western modernity and the values attached to it. The particular ways in which the Global South Atlantic inhabits the insides and outsides of Western modernity, as Hernández’s performance piece reveals, produce distinct strategies of resistance and forms of politics that, as I show, differ from the critical-cultural strategies envisioned in Paul Gilroy’s seminal Black Atlantic.

In keeping with recent attention to the global dimensions of the First World War, this chapter explores how Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Robert Service, Wilfred Owen, Mary Borden, W. B. Yeats, and other wartime poets seized on and developed the cosmopolitan potentialities of poetry, in the sense of grounded attachments that span specific cultural and national differences. While the antiheroism of Great War poetry has been discussed extensively, its overlapping but distinct capacity for imaginative solidarity across enemy lines, if often acknowledged, remains less fully explored. Seamus Heaney’s First World War poetry is also examined in relation to the wartime poets. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Gilroy, Richard Rorty, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, and Sigmund Freud, but above all attending to British, American, Canadian, and Irish poetry, this chapter examines First World War poems that not only state but linguistically, formally, and thematically enact what Rosenberg called “cosmopolitan sympathies” with the enemy other.

Chapter 1 argues that articulations of Black Britain, in general and specifically in literary terms, have been imbricated with state-led attempts to redefine Britain and the Union in the light of a new racially-defined diversity: ‘elaborated Britishness’. The chapter traces a shift in Black politics towards inclusion in the British national project, symbolised by Stuart Hall’s urging to ‘put the Black in the Union Jack’, and matched by government efforts to naturalise a new narrative of Britishness premised on inclusivity. This has a pronounced correlation in the institutional and disciplinary formation of Black British literature, and the chapter reads a number of prominent works in the field for their ‘British nationalist’ character. The chapter culminates in an examination of one of the most significant recent works of Black scholarship, Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia. Reflecting on its unconscious British national character from a Scottish critical perspective, the chapter argues for an approach to Blackness informed by sub-national formations in Britain.

Elisabeth Bronfen introduces the issue of gender into her discussion of the political and aesthetic deployment of spectral apparitions. Focusing on Queen Margaret’s uncanniness as ‘woman and ruler’, who ‘embod[ies] the political unconscious of her world’, her reading of Shakespeare’s history plays ‘through the lens of contemporary popular culture’ allows her to locate the plays’ ‘Gothic sensibility’ in the ‘ambivalence about feminine political power read through subsequent recycling, resurfacing in contemporary cultural imagination’ such as Tony Gilroy’s film Michael Clayton (2007). At issue in her reading is the Gothic legacy of the monstrous female body as this gives voice both then and now to ‘dark positions in political power games’. At the same time, linking current films attesting to a cultural anxiety about female politicians and Shakespeare’s Gothic warrior queen in his early history plays, she also locates ‘the spectral power on which the mutual implication of dramatic violence on stage and political violence off stage thrives’, as another part of the cultural legacy of Gothic sensibility.

This chapter considers the fiction of Senegalese author Fatou Diome in relation to the categories of Afropean literature and the Global South Atlantic. As critics have noted, Diome's novels address the asymmetries of mobility that define today's global economy, while also attempting to envision alternative networks. Like many other contemporary authors, Diome critiques French immigration policies, but she also points to Senegal's failure to provide equal access to education, to support the needs of rural women, and to curb the operations of corporate fishing companies in Senegalese waters. These forces all contribute to forcing young African men into illegal immigration, sustaining poverty and debt, and prolonging Senegal's dependency on France. At the same time, however, Diome's work articulates a transnational Atlantic poetics that transcends national boundaries by incorporating references to North-American and Brazilian modernism and reclaiming the ocean as a source of creative exchange. This chapter examines two of Diome's novels, Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003) and Celles qui attendent (2011), to evaluate the writer's efforts to break free of the binary relationship between Senegal and France which defines Afropeanism more generally, in order to forge networks across the wider Global South Atlantic.

This chapter draws on Paul Gilroy’s notion of the “black Atlantic” as a means of examining the cultural hybridity of the Socrates Fortlow series, arguing that Walter Mosley’s “narratives tap into a similar sensibility regarding the centrality of black experience in the whole construction of modernity.” Mosley’s work blends and recontextualizes a wide variety of European, African, and American cultural signifiers in a manner that gives them a new potency. The chapter examines Socrates Fortlow’s allusive first name in terms of the way he both is and is not a modern-day analogue of the Greek philosopher whose name he bears. It argues that “Socratic methodology is adopted and adapted by Mosley and his protagonist so as to be answerable to the specific social and cultural traumas faced by Socrates Fortlow in 1990s Los Angeles.”