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PAUL GILROY INTERVIEW – 2

JUNE 2011
Paul Gilroy
Version of record first published: 04 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Paul Gilroy (2013): PAUL GILROY INTERVIEW – 2 JUNE 2011, Cultural
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 Paul Gilroy

PAUL GILROY INTERVIEW
2 JUNE 2011

[Hudson Vincent] I was hoping that we could begin with a discussion about the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. What drew you there to begin
with?

[Paul Gilroy] Well, I went to the Centre in 1978. I wanted to be with Stuart
really. I had heard him give a talk, and I’d liked the idea of interacting with
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him. There weren’t a lot of black academics around, certainly not many on the
left, certainly very few voices in the academic culture of that time that had
anything like the power of his imagination. So I wanted to be with him.
I was at that time seeking to resolve a relationship between my academic
interests and my political interests. I was a humanities kind of student, and I
had been awarded a scholarship on the basis of colluding with one of my
professors as an undergraduate who helped me to gain a scholarship to study a
problem that could be funded. It wasn’t a problem that didn’t interest me, but
I had never intended to write a Ph.D. about it. Through his guidance and his
wisdom, the fact he was so respected, I got the money. I don’t think it was
really anything more than that. I was very happy about that prospect, but at
that stage, of course, I thought well, what am I going to write about? I’d
wanted to write about aspects of masculinity in a particular period in fiction.
The construction of masculinity in radical fiction. I knew there had been
people in the Centre who were doing that work, like Andy Tolson. But I also
knew that wasn’t really where I was likely to end up, and, of course, the other
thing that drew me there was the fact that it was in Birmingham, and I knew
Birmingham, and Birmingham was not London. I have lived all my life in
London apart from being in the States. There was something interesting about
what was going on in Birmingham and the politics of that. It was exciting. So
there I was, I went to Birmingham, and I went to the Centre to be with Stuart
and to be a part of the ‘Handsworth Revolution.’
I also wanted to be educated. I think that I had faced a kind of crossroads
myself earlier in my undergraduate education. I had been told by my then
tutor, Donald Wood, who was a historian of the Caribbean, that I should read
C. L. R. James and Franz Fanon because those things would keep me in the
university and because I was about to leave and drop out and go back to playing
my music. That proved to be true and Donald, to whom I shall always be
grateful, was prescient in identifying the things that would hook me in. At that
stage, it wasn’t so much the idea of cultural studies as constituted. My ‘new
Cultural Studies, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.773670
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 2 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

left’ parents had Raymond Williams’s books around. I had read Williams
myself. That year, I think it was 1978, I’m sure it was in 1978 the British
Sociological Association had a conference on culture in Brighton in Sussex
University, where I was a student. I wouldn’t have normally gone to such a
thing, but I sneaked in without paying. There in front of me were Stuart,
Richard, Ros Coward, Paul Willis, who gave the best talk I’ve ever seen
anyone give without any notes, dressed like a Ted1. And Angela, who
obviously goes on to become a close, close friend. What had triggered me to
make the application was going into the bookshop, I used to spend a lot of time
in the bookshop in those days, and finding a copy of Resistance through Rituals
and thinking to myself, this is what people can do in universities now? I’m
thinking, oh, well, if you can do that, then maybe that’s what I should do?
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Perhaps that’s a way that more education could fit into my life. I had been
playing a lot of music and could have gone to do that more seriously, well,
seriously. I don’t know, but I could have tried to make a living out of it at that
point. I had sort of wanted to be a town planner or a primary school teacher,
or whatever. I just thought, well, if you can do these things in a university and
if there’s a way to reconcile aspects of politics with aspects of your intellectual
life, and there’s Stuart Hall there, and people like Paul, Richard and Angela,
then this might be a good place to go and look at. As I said, I had been a little
bit exposed to life in Birmingham, anyway. So these were the reasons that took
me there.
At that time, I was also a little bit friendly with some of the guys from
Steel Pulse who lived in Birmingham and were from there. That was the
moment when their record ‘Handsworth Revolution’ was just released, and
they were working on ‘Tribute to the Martyrs,’ so Birmingham seemed to be a
more interesting place. It was certainly interesting, but it wasn’t interesting in
the ways I’d anticipated.

[Hudson Vincent] I wonder if you saw a specific type or character of people

being attracted to the Centre while you were there.

[Paul Gilroy] I don’t know how much of this is common knowledge now, but,
of course, the students selected the other students, so that’s one thing you have
to note. You immediately notice some things that follow from that. But my
own experience was somewhat different in the sense that, first of all the line
between faculty and students was drawn at a particular place, it was rare and
unusual. It may not be fashionable to say this, and I’m sure people have a lot of
interest in not saying it, but I would say from my perspective both then and
now, there was a lot of democracy in those relationships, and I value that. I
valued it then, and I value it more now.
1
Teddy Boy
 PA U L G I L R O Y I N T E R V I E W 3

I was, and I probably remain a very sectarian leftist, laughably, of a certain

‘narcissism of small differences’ variety. So I didn’t really feel there was any
political consensus there. The mainstream of the culture of the place, if there was
a mainstream in political terms, was a sort of ‘broad left CP’ kind of consensus. It
was impossible for me to identify that as a political spine. Yes, they were people
on the left, but they were of all different types. For example, the Chileans were
one sort of stratum, they were refugee Chileans. Who knows what their political
aspirations were. I mean I used to sit in the library and talk to Victor Molina, and
he didn’t seem like any middle of the road leftist. I knew Guillermo Sunkel from
Brighton. The people I used to talk to and be friends with when I first went there,
Bob Lumley, who had been exposed to the Italian Autonomia and a version of
Marxism that emerged through a theory of the social factory, knew those things.
Bob Findlay, my dear, beloved friend Bob Finley, who had been kicked out of
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Essex as an agitator and found his way to the Centre. I don’t think he ever
finished his Ph.D. on Kafka. I don’t know if he ever finished anything that he did,
but he was dynamically vocal, and his presence endures now. He is one of the key
activists in this country around the rights of people with disabilities, and he is a
great poet actually. Bob had a history on the ultra left as being a member of the
IMG, International Marxist Group. At that time, I was in another group called
Big Flame, and, of course, Big Flame had a history in the Centre through people
like Iain Chambers and Robin Rusher. May he rest in peace, someone who would
come to be a close friend of mine later in my life, even though we didn’t overlap
at the Centre. So there was space for me to think and to do my work without
being distracted by that sort of CP mainstream. I don’t know how deliberate; it
was that people collaborated to make that space. I don’t think it was really
anything they were consciously bothered about. I’m sure someone like Greg
[McLennan], who I really respect and like, and is a good academic, is pretty
contemptuous of the idea that there would ever be any political body there,
anything you could all sign up to. On the other side, in terms of feminism, there
were several different versions of feminism that were trading there and
conflicting there. So I don’t think it’s easy to identify any consensus. I don’t think
that was really possible. And now, I’m glad actually, because it was difficult
enough managing the sort of interpersonal dynamics of people without
complicating that with their politics. It was already complicated enough if you
see what I mean. So some of the people I reacted badly to or reacted against’,
were people whom I thought had bad politics and who were also doing things that
I didn’t think were interesting. And I guess I still look at the world like that.

[Hudson Vincent] What was the general relationship between students and
faculty?

[Paul Gilroy] There was no general relationship between students and faculty.
That’s what I mean about the democratic nature. None of ‘the faculty’ as you
put it were interested in being a part of our group [Race and Politics] for good
 4 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

reasons and bad I imagine. Someone like Paul [Willis], I don’t know if he
would count as faculty then? He was a research fellow at that time, is that
faculty or is that student? I don’t know. He was very, I hate using these words,
but I have no others to use: he was nurturing intellectually. He had been there,
been through the place, and come out the other side but was still around and
still connected to groups that were working on other projects. I think another
example of that would be someone like John Clarke, who was present in the
place, was incredibly helpful and supportive to me and my work and making
me feel like I wasn’t crazy in wanting to write about the things I wanted to
write about. I don’t know if they would count as faculty or students. I guess I
would say that they are in some sort of intermediate category. Certainly, I
never really had anything other than care from those people, though they were
very busy and not very familiar in some cases with the range of obsessions that
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I was desperate for them to share. I think that was really difficult for them, and
I certainly find that in my own practices as a teacher, it’s hard sometimes to be
as deeply in the obsessions of the people that come to you for guidance as you
would like to be. I can see too that when it finally came to the issue of writing
my thesis, obviously the gear changed a bit, and a different sort of support, a
different kind of care and a different kind of pedagogy was appropriate. When
I went there initially, I was doing the master’s course even though I was
heading towards a Ph.D. rather than towards getting a master’s degree because
I had three years money. There was nothing in that experience which was
anything other than interesting, which is not to say that I agreed with all of it,
and I puzzled a lot about what I thought had been left out, but in terms of
learning, I used to look forward to [the courses on] Mondays.

[Hudson Vincent] I’ve become interested in how the Centre arranged itself in
terms of pedagogy and research. You’ve already spoken a bit on the
democratic nature of the space, but could you describe more specifically
how courses, seminars and research opportunities were set up for the students?

[Paul Gilroy] Well, they weren’t set up for the students. I don’t really believe
in the idea of research. I don’t like the way the term functions, and I don’t like
the way people think about it, and I don’t like notion of a research culture. To
me it’s a way of life, and for that reason, I suppose I was happy there because it
enabled my way of life to slip into other things or to blend into other ways of
life that were held in common. That is not to say that members weren’t
accountable for their time.
I think what you’re asking is something else. There was a course. I went to
a course on Monday in the morning and in the afternoon. I would spend a day
learning, listening to Richard, Michael and Stuart. I listened to my fellow
students as well which was also interesting because the year that I went there,
there were some extraordinary people in my group. And I’m sure that was
very typical, so I would listen to them. The rule was that you had to be in a
 PA U L G I L R O Y I N T E R V I E W 5

subgroup, in other words, you had to complicate what we might now call your
privatized or individualized mode of scholastic life with an element of
collectivity and collective work. Again, I found that to be a positive thing.
Although when it came to writing a book later, it’s not without its conflicts
and problems. I still can’t believe the problems we faced in writing a book,
working that intensely together over a two- to three-year period. I’m sure
other people fell in love and fought and did all those things and ended up
emerging at the other end of the tunnel sort of blinking in the daylight saying,
‘I will never ever write a book with other people ever again’. So I think that
sense of breaking down the hyper-individuated, scholastic, monastic view of
how you do your work, how you do your thinking, is part of what
distinguishes the centre as a model of pedagogy, scholarship and politics.
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[Hudson Vincent] So non-collaboration really wasn’t an option?

[Paul Gilroy] Yeah, there were a few people who just did their own work.
Obviously, my three years of watching it, I wouldn’t be able to give any
definitive answer. When you were trying to write your thesis, it’s actually
quite difficult to be involved with collective work. And, certainly, in my own
life, the years of collective labor, three or four years of that, culminated in a
book, and then after that, I wrote my own book. So I’m sure there were other
people who had similar experiences. At that time, I couldn’t even tell you how
many theses had been completed. I rather suspect that actually a lot of the
people, even those who went on to be academics, either finished their Ph.Ds.
later or published books in the short term and then came back to their theses
later. So it was not a sort of linear story; there were loops and feedbacks and
detours, and so on that were actually part of it; it’s not linear. But I’m sure
there are one or two people who just worked on their own projects.
I remember also that some people who were there registered as masters’
students but ended up writing Ph.D.-length theses for their master’s degree.
You can go look in the library and see them. Somebody like Bob Willis, a very
interesting person, who taught me a lot about counter-insurgency is a good
example. He had written a thesis on ideologies of counter-insurgency. I give
thanks for the hours I spent with him in the Muirhead Tower. Hearing him tell
me what to read about counter-insurgency theory and looking at the hawks
that were hunting over the landscape seen clearly from the top of the building.
So there are lots of options, and the idea of having a professional career as
an academic at the end of that was not something that people really
considered. At least, I don’t think they did. When my grant money ran out, I
thought it was very unlikely that I was ever going to get a job as an academic.
For about five years, there was no way I could get in. I got rejected
everywhere I went, even though I had published things and so on. The cuts and
the general political economy of higher education in this country at that time
was such that the luxury of imagining yourself as being en route to some career
 6 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

as an academic was not one we could entertain. Again, that shows up in the
attrition rate of theses; it shows up in the patterns of migration and where
people ended up teaching and who went to Chile and who went to Spain and
who went to other places to ply their trade, who went into secondary schools
and who gave up. I don’t know if Robin ever wrote his masters thesis. He was
collecting tickets at Waterloo Station.

[Hudson Vincent] What specific courses or working-groups got you interested

in the subject area you went on to write your thesis in? Or did you come in
with that specific interest?

[Paul Gilroy] Well, the Centre didn’t have a race group. We were inspired by
the people who had done Policing the Crisis, and I knew when I went there that I
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was going to write about racism, but I didn’t know exactly how or what.
Obviously, I didn’t want to repeat what was in Policing the Crisis. I wouldn’t
have been capable of doing that. That’s a magnificent and an extraordinary
thing. So when I got there, Bob Findlay was there already. The two of us
hatched the idea that we would start a new project, and that was going to be
the race and politics group. And Valerie Amos
this was Baroness Amos, now
the UN higher representative. She is somebody who became deeply involved in
the New Labour project, not least in its belligerent military activities
had
been there as a Master’s student and had written a very good, interesting thesis
on racial hierarchies in the nursing profession. So there were three of us. There
were one or two other students who had either been Masters’ students the
year before. Gradually, the group formed, and gradually, we began to read
together and think together and write for each other and the book project
grew very organically out of that. That worked for us. That model worked for
us. I guess in the sort of way it was supposed to work.

[Hudson Vincent] What was the relationship between academic work and
political engagement at the Centre?

[Paul Gilroy] Well, I think the same way you can’t generalize about which
particular direction of new left, feminist left, labour left, CP, ultra left,
autonomists, anarchists. You can’t generalize about that either. I mean, people
campaigned on different things. People were different ages and had different
sets of priorities. I didn’t have children till later. My partner wasn’t even in the
Centre, anyway. Obviously, our work was very much work about the politics
of racism in that moment in British society, in that city, and so on. Lucy Bland
and the group that she formed, the one that wrote the pamphlet together,
Women, Race, Nation, that was in a sense of fellow traveling. I think many
people had political lives. Some of them I didn’t care for, others I did.
In terms of the university and the politics of the university, I think there
was a certain shared politics. I remember the campaign against the raising of
 PA U L G I L R O Y I N T E R V I E W 7

student fees for overseas students who came, which must have been 1979 or
1980 maybe. I think there was a big split actually, but I can’t remember. The
minutes of the general meeting would reveal this. But I think there was a
certain split, whether that was tactical or ideological, I can’t really remember.
Of course, the left itself was split. There is going to be that fracture
everywhere, organizationally. And we were all watching the destruction of
Birmingham around us and the sorts of narrative that you will sort of be
familiar with from Policing the Crisis. Saltley Gates and the miners’ strikes and
all of that. That was being played out around us. When we started our race
group, Raghib Ahsan, who was never a student at the Centre, was in the
group. I think he’s still a Labour politician in Birmingham, but at that stage, he
was a Pakistani Trotskyist working at the shop floor of Rover. So it wasn’t an
issue thinking, oh, we have to go and get labour militants to pad our numbers
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and change the kind of book we wanted to write.

[Hudson Vincent] Do you see the Centre as fundamentally different from

traditional forms of education?

[Paul Gilroy] Well, I had been to Sussex University before I went to

Birmingham. Sussex University was a kind of educational experiment of its
own. I never went to lectures there. I used to have tutorials with one other
teacher. That was how I was educated. There were a few seminars. I went to
some seminars. I never used to go to lectures. Not traditional, well traditional
in the Oxford sense. Oxford was probably the other place that only did
tutorials at that time. So I was used to a high degree of autonomy in the way I
identified and pursued my intellectual goals. I was also used to a lot of support
from my teachers to foster that. That suited my temperament very well. I had
great teachers: Cora Kaplan, Gillian Rose and David Morse.
Was the Centre discontinuous with that? No, I don’t think it was. It
connected with it in an interesting way. Were those things typical? I don’t
know. Most British universities probably had a different balance with regard to
the teaching. Probably larger tutorial groups, there are probably five or four at
that stage would be a more characteristic number in seminars, and then the
larger lectures. So the Centre was already into a different mode of pedagogy,
but there were other experiments and other things that were done in other
places that were in harmony with it. The other thing, I know this is something
that Stuart has said things about in print, although I haven’t ever discussed it
with him. We say it’s hard to generalize about who was there, but very often
many of the people who were around those tables were people who were
creatures of an elite education, and I don’t just mean in an Oxford and
Cambridge kind of way. And that’s the sort of sociological problem that would
have to be aired in a more thorough-going way. I’ve never attempted to really
make sense of it, and I think it can’t be done in the abstract. To be honest, I
don’t know enough about the details of people’s lives to be able to assess it. I
 8 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

know there were people who came from Sussex, there were one or two. And
there were certainly one or two after me, because a couple of people had been
my peers at university had turned up the following year or the year after. The
year I went, there was someone I had been at school with in the same room
doing their master’s degree with me. Although we never worked together, he
was always very interesting, I think he’s completely out of academics now, but
he was always held up to me at school as an example of the kind of student I
was supposed to be. So that was very funny to remake a relationship there in
Birmingham in different conditions.
I think that was the character of class relations in this country circa 1970
whatever. Obviously, those configurations are gone. They have been replaced
by other forms of hierarchy and other sorts of networks, which are worse than
what they were. If you look at the kind of economic life in the country during
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that time and look at the ratios of inequality at that time, this is a much more
an unequal society now than it was then. So those things were apparent then,
but they weren’t disabling. They weren’t insignificant either. In a way, the text
of cultural studies, if I can generalize about this, was some sort of intervention
in that field. So without wanting to implode, and the pressure to implode is
always there, I think during that time people were hunting for a different
political style as well as a new style of thought. Without wanting to implode,
recognizing the pressure to implode, it’s clear that these things were part of
that history. I’m trying to remember in our group, the race and politics group,
the seven or eight of us, how many of us had been to Oxford and Cambridge

only a couple.
People were refugees from that system of elite education. They were
traitors to it, many of them. I wish there were more traitors.

[Hudson Vincent] What do you see as the reasons for the emergence of cultural
studies at the Centre in 1964? What were the conditions of possibility that
brought it about at that specific time in Birmingham?

[Paul Gilroy] I don’t know. I mean obviously you can make a generalization
about Richard Hoggart’s project and its intersection with Stuart’s project. But
I’m a bit wary of the great men theory of political change and innovation. So I
just don’t have enough information to know. I mean the only other person I’ve
ever talked to about that time in 1964 is Lydia Curti. I’m sure there must be
other ways of thinking that through, but I’m not in a position to really say
anything helpful.

[Hudson Vincent] Do you have any thoughts on the causes of its closure in
2002?

[Paul Gilroy] Well, publicly, I took the position that the closure was a scandal.
Privately, I thought they’d been ‘taking the piss’ for years and that if you don’t
 PA U L G I L R O Y I N T E R V I E W 9

do your work, then it’s obvious that, in that kind of climate, they would come
after you. There was unfinished business and all kinds of local institutional
factors. I went there to give a talk maybe in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and
I was set upon by the students with such hostility that I vowed to never go back
there again to give a talk. I just told myself that if the student body operates
like that, then there’s something awry, and I don’t know what that something
is. However, publicly, there was a piece I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher
Education about it which gives a kind of left, political reading. You can probably
find it online in their archive. I don’t have a copy, otherwise, I’d send it to
you. But I do think there’s another story, and I think if you talk to some of the
people who worked there later, they’ll probably tell that story for you. Les
Back, Sadie Plant, these people, people that were there in the 1990s. Les
didn’t stick around there very long. Sadie didn’t stick around there very long.
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So there were obviously issues there. I don’t know what they were.

[Hudson Vincent] When you look at the landscape of academic work today, do
you think cultural studies exist in the same way that it did at that time? If not,
why and in what forms does it exist today?

[Paul Gilroy] Well, I don’t know if it exists today. That shelf in the bookshop
that we marveled at: it’s epiphany. That shelf is now gone, and I think it’s been
replaced by metres and metres and metres of shelf space entitled ‘Religion.’ I
don’t even know what programs or departments there are left. In this country,
I guess there’s the Goldsmiths College program still. But what they do and
what relationship it has to Birmingham would have to be examined carefully.
My guess is not much, although their warrant would be thought to be derived
from some fantasy version of Birmingham in multidisciplinarity, theory/praxis
reconciliation and all round openness. In terms of pedagogical style, I don’t
know. In terms of collective work, I don’t know. In terms of hierarchies
involved and patronage, how one writes a thesis in three years as opposed to
how one writes a thesis with a life-time registration or an open registration,
things have altered beyond recognition. When I went there, I think I was
registered under the ten-year rule, and it took me eight. The tempo of
scholastic life has been accelerated brutally. On its own, that accounts for some
of the pressures and changes that we’ve been speaking of.
I don’t know if this is true, and I don’t want it just to be a projection of my
own feelings. But I would think that most people, even if we didn’t agree
about things, found that space a useful means to accomplish intellectual work
with a level of seriousness and a degree of institutional protection. We did that
for a bit and then, when it didn’t work any more, we did it in other ways. I
would like to think that most people saw it that way. My late exposure to this
meant that I have only lately become a great defender of cultural studies,
because I felt it was just a disposable ladder, in the classic Wittgensteinian
formulation. But actually now, the hostility and the antipathy towards cultural
 10 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

studies make me want to be a bit more of a systematic advocate for those

things.

[Hudson Vincent] You’ve said that cultural studies has largely disappeared from
the contemporary, academic landscape, so if a student came up to you today,
with no prior knowledge of cultural studies, asking you what it is, how would
you respond?

[Paul Gilroy] I would say it’s a contingent means to accomplish the politics of
intellectual work. That there is a trajectory you can identify for it, and the
trajectory I have is one that was taught to me as the curriculum of its
formation: its relationship to anthropology, its relationship to literary
criticism, supplemented by a number of other things, a larger exposure to
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certain strands in continental philosophy, attention to the dynamics of what we

might call a worldly Marxism that involved a detour through colonial space
filtered through colonial habiti of one kind or another. Remember Orientalism
hadn’t been published until 1978, 1979 or something. It came late. I
remember the day Mohammed Ezroura arrived in Birmingham with a noisy
interest in Orientalism. So I think things have changed. But has the question or
the seriousness with which one has to approach the question of culture
changed? Well, no. I think a lot of the weaknesses of the left more broadly in
this time is its failure to be able to ask serious questions about culture, and I
think now with the technological changes, that that problem is in a sense
augmented by the pressures people seem to feel, to be either cheerleaders or
nay-sayers for technological innovations and transformations. It’s a polarized
field, so it’s hard not to be one or the other.
The other thing I suppose I’d say is that we should remember cultural
studies was conditioned by a certain set of possibilities within the field of
educational institutions. Now, given that, we have arrived at a neoliberal
moment in which the price of education is punitive debt, there are things in
the project of cultural studies that will need to be kept alive whenever people
start to think again about what a free education might be. I have absolutely no
doubt that that’s going to happen. I have no doubt.

[Hudson Vincent] A lot of literature I’ve read tries to situate cultural studies in
the ‘in-between’, presumably playing off its radical contextuality and place ‘in-
between’ the disciplines. Can you elaborate on why cultural studies demands
such an interdisciplinary approach? And how it might even be transdisciplinary
or antidisciplinary as a practice?

[Paul Gilroy] I would say multidisciplinary. I would never say trans. I would
never say inter. I know Americans have a problem with inter. Inter is
nowhere, in-between. It has to do actually with the way people think the idea
of between-ness in your version of English. You can only be between two
 PA U L G I L R O Y I N T E R V I E W 11

things. If you’re not between two things, you’re among things. And among is
kind of different than between for you, but for us we can be between more
than one thing, so we have to thank Mr. Webster for that problem.
So I always say multi-disciplinary. I always say that. There is a kind of curse
of left intellectuals that feel they have to know everything. Well, you don’t
have to accept that mission. So multidisciplinary is always multidisciplinary. I
remember hearing someone, maybe it was Arjun Appadurai, talking about
multidiscplinarity and social science work. He was saying it’s a bit like
passports. You collect as many passports as you can in life, and that’s the sort
of relationship he bears with these forms of knowledge which are fractured in
that way. So, yeah, multidisciplinarity, and let’s talk seriously about that.
I don’t feel I’m trained, and many of the people that were in Birmingham
were autodidacts of one sort or another who had arrived at peculiar
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combinations of things that dissolved the lines between formal disciplines in

a way that released latent or trapped energy. That was exhilarating. I’ve
realized as I’ve lived longer that there are only two kinds of people: the ones
that take energy away from you and the ones that give you energy. I got a lot
of energy from that place. And the idea of disciplinary integrity was something
that was sacrificed happily by me as a result of that exposure. Hazel Downing,
now Hazel Chowcat, explained microprocessor technology to us and wrote her
thesis, in the late 1970s. She said ‘look this is what’s going to happen’, and she
was right. And she said ‘read Braverman’. Well, I wouldn’t have read
Braverman before. I wouldn’t have thought about doing that.
So I don’t want to say that autodidactism is enough, and I don’t want to say
that a generic commitment to making the world better is enough. I don’t think
either of them are, but those things were in great, great abundance in
Birmingham. Together, they do make you impatient with people whose
political imaginations and academic and scholastic imaginations are so
diminished that they can’t see what that kind of conversation might result
from their alignment.
I mean I teach in Sociology. I go into my classroom, and if I say to people,
I don’t know what’s a good example. There are a lot of American students
here, so if I want to make a point about the law of the sea, and I start talking
about Moby Dick, no one will know what I’m talking about. There’s
something that’s happened to education as a result of a certain set of
reconceptualizations around what it is to be a person trained in a discipline. So
when we said multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, 30 years ago, it was a
different kind of claim than it is now because I think that many people have
retreated into protective carapace of disciplinarity as a way of stabilizing
themselves in a very turbulent institutional situation.

[Hudson Vincent] I’d like to move to a problematic I’ve been particularly

interested in recently, namely, the conjuncture of the contemporary public
university system. I think one can see a number of crises and contradictions
 12 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

emerging, including the hegemonic power of the sciences, the depoliticization

of the academy, the disengagement of students from their education, the
corporitization of the university, as well as its growing functionalist ethos. Do
you agree with this analysis, and if so, what has been your own experience with
these conflicts?

[Paul Gilroy] Yes, this is what we live in. I’ve been living it pretty much
continually since that moment in 1978 or 1979 when we were sitting around
in the Centre at a general meeting, discussing how to respond to the fact that
the government was introducing a differential system of fees for overseas
students. I feel like that has been a condition of my life as a teacher and an
educator. It was true when I couldn’t get a job in the university, even though
I’d done these things and written things. I don’t want to whine, but it might as
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well be on the record. I had applied to every single institution (except this one,
of course, and it wasn’t even possible to apply here) in the London area and
been rejected by all of them, in a number of disciplines. So it assumed one
form then and it assumes another one when one is required to manage that
change and require to sign up to a view of intellectual life with no public value
only corporate and private value.
We talk a lot about US military power, and we talk a lot about US
economic power, but we don’t always talk about US intellectual power in the
world. The people who are beating us up here, are people who think that the
benchmark of what counts as the probity of an academic life is defined by a
very narrow slice of ‘top’ US journals and the forms of intellectual prestige
they confer upon their audience. That’s a big problem actually. Obviously, it’s
bound up in the British case with a whole set of assumptions about the proper
management of institutions like these which are entirely inappropriate.
Without those problems, someone like myself would have never acquired a job
in a university. Actually, in a way, it’s that crisis that opens the door or the window
to the likes of me, and without that, I would never have been in a university. So I’m
grateful for that crisis. It gave me the chance to be in here with you.

[Hudson Vincent] Do you think these problems are becoming more dire,
especially for young academics?

[Paul Gilroy] Absolutely. People come to me, and they say I want to do a
Ph.D., and I say why? Why do you want to do that? Where do you think that’s
going to take you? If you want to write a book, write the book. But why saddle
yourself with all of that. If they still want to, obviously, I’m happy to work
with them, but we do it without illusions. Because whether or not they’d want
to work in the kinds of places that they will be offered the chance to work by
the time they get to the end of that ‘training’ and on the basis that they’ll be
offered those jobs is really moot. It’s really in the hands of a larger struggle
which is unfolding around at vertiginous speed.
 PA U L G I L R O Y I N T E R V I E W 13

[Hudson Vincent] Have you seen any effective responses to these crises?

[Paul Gilroy] Yeah, I have. For example, a lot of young people in this country
through the process of the winter produced a book called Fight Back, which you
can download for free. The editor is a man called Dan Hancox. If you want to
get a handle on what that looked like and what sort of issues that raises and
how it bespeaks a different politics of higher education and free education, I
would say that the book Fight Back is a really good place to start. It’s interesting
to me that they let you download it for free, and then a month later, they
released a Kindle edition for one pound ninety-nine, and then six to eight
weeks later, they put the book in the bookshop. So they’re already thinking
along different lines. So that’s a good place to kick off that conversation.
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Notes on interviewee
Paul Gilroy is the author of Small Acts and various other works. He has taught
at several universities.