ABSTRACT
Like Hall, Gilroy explores the construction of racial ‘otherness’ as an underlying presence within print media reportage during the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that criminalised representations of black males regularly stigmatised the black community. By the 1990s, however, Gilroy shifts his attention to consider the mass media constructions of British identity in postindustrial Britain. He subsequently diagnoses the existence of a media induced ‘postcolonial melancholia’ as a representational response to the UK’s declining global position in the late 1990s. That decline, Gilroy suggests, is realised as a result of the loss of the post-war empire; a loss that the media cushions with stories that are infused with Union Jack waving nostalgia. For Gilroy, problematically, those stories are also underscored by racial misrepresentations and the amplification of multicultural disharmony in the UK.
