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Welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm your host, Adam Schatz. Today we have a very special guest, Paul Gilroy, one of our foremost thinkers on questions of race, nation, and

belonging in the modern world.

Gilroy is the founding director of the Sarah Parker Redmond Center

for the study of racism and racialization at University College London.

A protege of the late Stuart Hall, Gilroy is probably best known as the author of the Black Atlantic,

published in 1993, a book that not only coined a new term but helped revolutionize the study

of the cultures of the black diaspora. In all of his work, he has celebrated the creativity

and inventiveness of the writers, artists, and musicians

of the Black Atlantic, while also warning against what he is called the lure of ethnic absolutism,

cultural nationalism, and other forms of essentialist thinking.

Last year, Gilroy received the Holberg Prize awarded to a person who's made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, social science, law, or theology.

After you've listened to this podcast, I urge you to go online and read, or better yet, listen to his Holberg lecture, never again, refusing race and salvaging the human,

a powerful reflection on the crisis of our contemporary politics and imagination.

Gilroy's writing on race and racism is distinguished, not only by the way it cuts across

sociology, history, aesthetics, and philosophy, but by its

...