Ontological turn absolves political responsibility- replaces politics with identity

(Yohann, , 8-5)

The rise of Afropessimism is a bleak sign for the likes of Gilroy, schooled on Stuart Hall’s argument that race is made politically meaningful through the struggle against capitalism, which is itself not eternal. Gilroy sees Afropessimism as part of an “ontological turn” – ontology is the study of being – in which race becomes an unassailable barrier between the self and the world, and anti-black violence an immutable fact. “What’s interesting to me is how resonant the Afropessimist outlook has proved to be,” Gilroy said. “I can’t help thinking that it’s got something to do with the fact that it absolves you of having to do anything at all. That really what you have to do is just be black. And there’s a sufficiency in that.” In sharp contrast, Gilroy wants to reinvigorate an old ideal: humanism. In some scholarly circles, calling oneself a humanist can sound not just antiquated, but suspect. It was, after all, the name of the woolly ideology of equality propagated by Europeans at the height of empire, who spoke of the liberty of man while denying it to millions. But to Gilroy, there is hope in the promise of a radical humanism, illuminating a post-racial world. This, he believes, is the humanism of figures who regularly appear in his work such as Du Bois, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison and the French-Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon. If thinkers who had lived through the 20th century’s abominations could hold on to the idea of a humanism worthy of the name, then so can we.