PAUL GILROY

Paul Gilroy, an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar, explores the construction of racial ‘otherness’ as an underlying presence within print media communication during the 1970s and 80s, and argues that criminalised representations of black males regularly pour scorn on the black community.

When it comes to the 1990s, Gilroy diagnoses the existence of a media induced ‘post-colonial melancholia’ as a representational response to the UK’s declining global position in the late 1990s – a decline as a result of the loss of the post-war Empire (which the media quietens down with stories infused with Union Jack waving nostalgia. For Gilroy, those stories are also underscored by racial misrepresentations and the amplification of multicultural disharmony in the UK.