¹Department of English, Merrifield Hall, Room 110, 276 Centennial Drive, Stop 7209, Grand Forks, ND 58202-7209, USA. E-mail: eric_wolfe@und.nodak.edu

The central goal of Paul Gilroy's Postcolonial Melancholia – originally delivered in May 2002 as the Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine – is to mount an impassioned defense of the possibilities of multiculturalism. In a post-9/11 world, in which "security" concerns too often justify xenophobia and in which political conflicts are rewritten as part of the inevitable clash between incommensurate cultures, such a project is more important than ever. As he has in earlier works (Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, The Black Atlantic, and Against Race), Gilroy couples his appreciation of more fluid forms of identity and cultural expression with a powerful critique of patterns of thinking that remain, even if unintentionally, committed to essentialized views of racial difference.

The first section of Gilroy's book, "The Planet," traces the roots of our contemporary situation to the European colonial past. Fundamental to Gilroy's analysis in this section is his argument that the political practices of the modern nation-state have been forged out of the "investments in the idea of racial hierarchy" that characterized the colonial era (p 44). If today's politics are more likely to be organized around ideas of culture, rather than biology, the absolutism of these posited differences nonetheless demonstrates a continued – if unacknowledged – connection to racist patterns of thinking. We need, Gilroy argues, to confront this historical legacy more directly in order to diffuse the power it still holds over our ideas of nation, race, culture, and identity. Although he is attuned to the damage wrought in the name of race, he is equally insistent that race not be reified. If "race" is a product of racism rather than its cause, then a careful consideration of our colonial past should lead us "away from 'race' altogether" (p 9). Gilroy turns to anticolonial writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and George Orwell – and even Montesquieu – as examples of conscious cosmopolitan thinking that demonstrate the crucial ability to engage in a "principled and methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one's own culture and history" (p 67).

While the first section is global in scope, the book's second section, "Albion," turns to the local. Gilroy focuses on contemporary Britain, suggesting that the nation's contentious attitude toward its immigrant population and its desire to reinvent an imagined homogenous past is a form of postcolonial melancholia in which the seeming certainties of race are used to quell anxieties about the loss of national identity. Gilroy borrows his notion of melancholia as a form of social pathology from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's classic work The Inability to Mourn (1975), which argued that post-war Germany was unable to work through the trauma caused by the terrible crimes undertaken during the National Socialist era. Projecting its national guilt onto Hitler and other prominent Nazi leaders, German society engaged in a form of collective denial that prevented it from understanding and accepting responsibility for its past. Likewise, Gilroy argues, Britain is currently suffering from a melancholic condition caused by the denial of its violent, colonial past. Rather than deflecting guilt onto the body of a fallen sovereign, however, it is the bodies of Britain's immigrants that focus the anxieties associated with the nation's imperial past. Britain's melancholic identity is constructed "in opposition to the intrusive presence of the incoming strangers who, trapped inside our perverse local logic of race, nation, and ethnic absolutism not only represent the vanished empire but also refer consciousness to the unacknowledged pain of its loss and the unsettling shame of its bloody management" (p 101). Yet if Britain provides Gilroy's central example of postcolonial melancholia (a condition he suggests might also characterize other postimperial European nations), it also provides him with numerous instances of an "ordinary multiculturalism" that evades this pathology. The word Gilroy uses to describe this is "conviviality," which he defines as "the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain's urban areas and postcolonial cities elsewhere" (p xv). Gilroy is attracted to the notion of conviviality because it "introduces a measure of distance from the pivotal term 'identity'" (p xv). Rather than celebrating multiculturalism as the interaction between groups that are securely defined by specific racial or cultural identities, conviviality "makes a nonsense of closed, fixed, and reified identity and turns attention toward the always unpredictable mechanisms of identification" (p xv). Not surprisingly, then, Gilroy finds an avatar of this "ludic, cosmopolitan energy" in the performances of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen as the "shape-shifting" Ali G (p 132). Gilroy argues that criticisms of Ali G's racially ambiguous "gangsta" character – from both sides of the political spectrum – exemplify "anxiety about what he was and a radical uncertainty about what he might be" (pp 134–135). In contrast, Gilroy praises Ali G's "ability to confound the racial and ethnic categories that held contemporary Britain stable" (p 135). Like the cosmopolitan thinkers Gilroy praises in the first section of the book, the satiric effect of Ali G's performances estranges viewers from their entrenched notions of Britain and opens up different ways of imagining identities and cultures.

Despite the prominence given to the notion of "postcolonial melancholia," Gilroy's book finally represents something of a missed encounter with the possibilities offered by psychoanalytic theory. Gilroy ably adapts the arguments of the Mitscherlichs to his analysis of contemporary British culture, but – as readers of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society will know – a number of other recent theorists have also found that the notion of melancholia is a useful way to examine complex issues of identity, race, and even to forge a potentially transgressive social politics: for example, just to name a few, Judith Butler, Anne Anlin Cheng, and the essays collected by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian in Loss. Rather than simply opposing the "normality" of mourning to the "pathology" of melancholia, however, many of these theorists reread Freud closely to argue, as does Judith Butler, that any form of identification – and therefore identity itself – is melancholic in structure (1997). Apart from the seeming difference in interpretive emphasis, many of these theorists' arguments are entirely consistent with Gilroy's project. Eng and Kazanjian, for example, advocate a similar engagement with the traumas of history (2003), arguing that "melancholia's continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects" (p 4). And all of these writers demonstrate a nuanced appreciation of, to quote Gilroy again, "the mechanisms of identification." Engaging more fully with their thinking about the melancholic structures of identity would only deepen Gilroy's analysis.