On Wednesday 2 September Prof. Paul Gilroy (Department of English, King’s College London) will be presenting the 2015 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture, “Offshore Humanism”.

The lecture will interrogate the contemporary attractions of post-humanism and ask questions about what a “reparative humanism” might alternatively entail. Prof. Gilroy will use a brief engagement with the conference theme — “geographies of the Anthropocene” — to frame his remarks and try to explain why antiracist politics and ethics not only require consideration of nature and time but also promote a timely obligation to roam into humanism’s forbidden zones.

The lecture will take place in the University of Exeter Forum’s Alumni Auditorium in Session 4 (from 16:50 to 18:30), and be followed by a drinks reception sponsored by the journal’s publisher Wiley.

Our speaker is Professor of American and English Literature at King’s College London, having previously been Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths (1995-1999).

Prof. Gilroy’s research interests include postcolonial studies, particularly with regard to London, postimperial melancholia and the emplotment of English victimage; the literature and cultural politics of European decolonisation; African American intellectual and cultural history, literature and philosophy; the formation and reproduction of national identity, especially with regard to race and “identity”; and the literary and theoretical significance of port cities and pelagics. He has also published on art, music and social theory.

His many publications include “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Unwin Hyman, 1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993), After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Routledge, 2004) and Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010, Harvard University Press).

For more on the Lecture Series, see here.