Читать книгу Revolutionary Feminisms - Brenna Bhandar - Страница 10
ОглавлениеProfessor Emerita of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, Avtar Brah has taught at the University of Leicester and the Open University. She specialises in the study of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and diaspora, where she explores the intersections within and across these axes of power in a variety of contexts. Her work has been influential within the academy, feminist movements and diasporic communities, from organising as one of the founding members of Southall Black Sisters to roles in campaigns against racist violence. Her political activism is deeply marked by a socialist, feminist and anti-imperialist, decolonial optic. She was centrally involved in the mobilisation of solidarity politics when Asian and Afro-Caribbean groups organised jointly under the common sign of Black as a political colour. She was active within the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent. For a period during the early 1980s, she took up a post as Head of Resources within the Women’s Committee Support Unit at the Greater London Council, which, as she recalls, was ‘a left project, sometimes dubbed as an experiment in “municipal socialism”’.
Her pioneering book Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1996) helped generate new perspectives in the study of diaspora as a concept and as a practice. Together with Annie Coombes, she edited Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture (2000). She worked with Mary Hickman and Máirtín Mac an Ghail in coediting two volumes: Thinking Identities: Racism, Ethnicity and Culture (1999), and Global Futures: Migration, Environment and Globalization (1999). For a number of years, she served as a member of the editorial collective of Critical Social Policy and the editorial board of Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is a member of the editorial collective of Feminist Review and of the international editorial board of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
BB/RZ Through several decades of meticulously grounded research, you have devised a methodological approach that reworks Althusser’s theory of interpellation, among other Marxian theories, to account not only for the effects of capitalist social relations, but also the psychic and symbolic relations of race, migration, class and gender. Stuart Hall stated that your method, arising at a distinct historical theoretical and political conjuncture, could be termed ‘the diasporic’. So the first question we want to ask is, could you tell us about this distinct conjuncture in terms of the historical moment, and the theoretical influences and the political landscape, during which you developed the diasporic as a method?
AB The concept of diaspora, or even the term ‘diaspora’, came into currency during, I think, the mid-to-late eighties and nineties in Britain. If we look back, one of the major political moments that comes to mind was the 1989 crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union as a Communist bloc. So that had a very significant global impact. In Britain at the time, of course, we had Thatcherism. That ideology and practice had a very significant impact on people of colour. Then, in the field of research and knowledge production in academia, for instance, and outside academia too, there were a lot of intellectual contestations around postmodernity and modernity, poststructuralism and structuralism. So there was a lot of both intellectual and political ferment going on. Looking specifically at the term ‘diaspora’, I’ll confine myself at this time to Britain, in the postwar period. Until the 1980s, really, the term used to describe people of colour was ‘immigrant’.
It wasn’t a straightforward descriptor; rather, it was a mode of marginalising and pathologising the communities. In fact, even British-born young people were called second-generation or third-generation immigrants. That still happens. It irritates me when I hear that. At the same time, the term ‘ethnic relations’, or ‘ethnic’, was also in currency. That was thought to be a slightly more polite way of referring to people of colour, although of course the term is not necessarily just applicable to people of colour, but any ethnic group. But in Britain that was used. Again, that particular term, although slightly more polite, still tended to pathologise minority ethnic groups. There was a tendency to talk about people of colour as a problem; the discourses were around problems.
In that kind of intellectual and political climate, people were beginning to think about ways to interrogate those terms. How could we actually talk about people whose historical trajectories touch on many continents and many countries? How could we talk about and think about those groups without pathologising them? And the term ‘diaspora’ emerged in that ferment. In part, it was thought to critique nationalisms or an undue focus on the nation-state. Again, we have to remember that this was a time when globalisation was a major feature of global economy and society. The concept of diaspora was intended to enable us to think beyond the nationstate and foreground communities that had links globally, so to speak. So the term emerges in that kind of political conjuncture. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic uses the term ‘diaspora’, and Stuart Hall used the concept as well.1
Then, the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ were also on the horizon; Hall coined the term ‘new ethnicities’, which is linked to ‘diaspora’ in the sense that new ethnicities were focused on generational shifts, on hybridisation, on politics of representation.2 Hall’s focus there was on the use of poststructuralist thought in relation to analysing ethnicity, again to wrench, he says, ethnicity from the older ways of pathologising communities, of marginalising communities. It is a non-essentialist concept which emphasises the place of history, language and culture. So that’s the kind of context in which the term ‘diaspora’ emerges. For many of us, it was a more positive way of conceptualising communities, and a way to deracialise them, because they were always thought of in a racialised mode at the time. So that’s the context in which the term emerges.
BB/RZ Do you want to tell us a little bit more about Thatcherism and how that impacted people of colour in this country?
AB Thatcherism, as you know, was linked to Powellism in the previous decade. Enoch Powell famously, or infamously, talked about young people, Black people, Asians, saying that they could be born in Britain but could never be of Britain. He talked about young ‘piccanninies’ and used all kinds of racialised language, and gave a speech focusing on ‘the rivers of blood’ that might flow in Britain, which expressed his predictions of the violence that might ensue. Margaret Thatcher built on and continued the same kind of discourse. She didn’t always use the same language, but it was a very similar discourse. In a 1978 TV interview, she talked about the British people being scared that Britain might be ‘swamped by people of a different culture’. That kind of language was creating many problems, giving respectability to racism. There was a lot of racial violence on the streets, which we tend to forget now, but there were many racial attacks; people had been murdered. I remember in Southall, for instance, Gurdip Chaggar was murdered in 1976 by young white people.3 So there was a lot of racist violence.
But economically, as well, we were seeing not the emergence of neoliberalism (because it is much older than that), but neoliberalism becoming much more rampant, particularly in Thatcher’s policies. There were attacks, which are happening again now, on the trade unions. You will remember that 1984 was when the miners were on strike and Thatcher had basically said she was totally committed to destroying the miners. There were figures given in the media about the huge sums of money the government spent on campaigning against the miners and their union, and the government did succeed in the end – that was one of the very sad moments in labour history. The attacks on the unions had a major impact on people of colour, partly because people of colour held jobs in places of work affected by Thatcherite policies. There were high levels of unemployment among people of colour.
All of this was happening everywhere. In 1979 in Southall, Blair Peach, a teacher, was killed by injuries sustained to the head, at the hands of the police. This happened when the racist and fascist National Front came marching through Southall to hold an election rally against which the local people had gathered to protest. The police, in the form of the notorious Special Patrol Group, came in large numbers to ensure that the National Front rally took place. In the process many protestors were injured, arrested and taken to police stations all over London. Over 700 people, mainly Asians, were arrested, and 345 were charged. Clarence Baker, the manager of the Black reggae band Misty in Roots was so badly injured on the head that he spent considerable time in hospital. So there was a lot of that kind of political ferment going on, within which there was a great deal of contestation of, and challenges to, the racism people were experiencing. At the same time, in factories there were strikes. I was in Southall in the early 1980s, and I remember there was a strike of workers at the Chix bubblegum factory in Slough.4 We used to go and support those women – it was mostly women who were on strike. Such events were happening all the time. Mainly the term ‘diaspora’ itself emerged during this time to challenge racialised regimes which were connected to the very material, everyday lives of people because of unemployment and racist violence.
BB You also draw a connection between the fall of the Berlin Wall – and the demise of the Soviet bloc, the massive impact that had on left politics – and the contemporaneous racial violence against people of colour and anti-racist resistance.
AB Absolutely, that was a very major event of the period, globally too. We all went into depression, those of us who were involved in socialist projects. We were always critical of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless, globally there was a socialist presence, a project that we subscribed to. There was a huge amount of melancholia at the time. But also, internationally it’s quite important, because the Black struggles – and I’ll use the term ‘Black’ for the moment, including Asians – were always international struggles. The Left, particularly the Black Left, looked at imperialism always in relation to racism, whereas in other discourses they often talked about racism as if it occurred on its own. But the Black Left always looked at the links between colonialism and postcolonialism, and imperialism and new imperialisms.
That, of course, shifted after the demise of Soviet Communism because the ways in which global power relations had been constituted, changed. A new order, a new political order, was born now in which capitalism gained a much more pronounced ascendancy. Also, for a period, at least – although that has changed now – we found that the Soviet Union was no longer seen as a threat by the West. There was a period when the Iron Curtain was no longer seen as the Iron Curtain. So internationally, that meant the left project in Britain was affected by what happened, because it weakened the arguments for alternatives. That has changed now, of course, because Russia is again not in the good books of the West, but for a period it was not seen as a threat.
It was also the case that in, for example, the Black women’s groups that we had in those days, we always explored the ways in which our life trajectories as groups had been constituted over periods of time in and through histories of imperialism. And the ways in which our presence here in Britain was connected with colonialism, in the sense that during the postwar period, Britain recruited Black people, people of colour, from its colonies to come and do the work the white workers didn’t want to do, in the lowest rungs of the economy. So that was very important. Our presence here was connected with colonialism. Therefore, such issues were always crucial to emphasise. We always foregrounded those international struggles alongside our political struggles here in Britain.
BB/RZ Do you feel that goes missing nowadays, that grounding?
AB Yes, to some degree. Moreover, in those days we talked about capitalism. One of the biggest problems has been that there is not the same degree of focus today on the problems produced by capitalist social relations. Sometimes you find nowadays that people talk about the disadvantaged 99 per cent and all that, and it’s good that it’s happening, but I find it quite frustrating that people don’t really talk about capitalism. There are discussions about the wars in the Middle East, and so forth, but not enough emphasis on the histories of colonialism and imperialism, which resulted in the carving out of these different countries and created these different territorial lines, new countries and new nation-states which are now having all kinds of problems. Indeed, there is insufficient problematisation of the links between capitalism and imperialism. I know we’re jumping around here, but people talk about all these migrants coming from abroad, as if capitalism and imperialism has no effect in making other countries poor. In those days there was considerable discussion about the ways in which certain parts of the world became impoverished.
There was a focus on the global inequalities and inequities – people talked about them. There was a discourse around them in the media, even. But now that discourse has disappeared. There is much talk about all these so-called economic migrants coming here, but very little attention to why it is mainly people from the global South who become economic migrants to the rich global North. I find this gaping absence really problematic.
BB/RZ It’s quite common in the academy for people to take up a self-described stance as ‘being critical’ without considering capitalism or class in any serious fashion. What do you make of the identification of being critical, or the idea of critique, when it no longer addresses precisely the issues you were just talking about?
AB Well, it is a big problem, even in terms of resources. Of course, you have Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and books like that, which are important, but they’re not critiques of capitalism as such from a socialist perspective. Similarly, I was excited when I came across Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (2010). But then he clearly states that he’s not against capitalism. Whereas in the eighties and nineties, there were resources, there were books – for instance Susan George’s How the Other Half Dies (1976), which looks at global poverty and why people in certain parts of the world are actually dying. And they were quite easily accessible kinds of books, not heavy theory, but they contained a lot of theoretical insight and you could use those with students. There used to be lots of video programmes; Channel 4 for example, did some very interesting programmes around multinational corporations, which looked at how multinationals go overseas and the ways in which they extract surplus value, particularly in special economic zones.
These were actually very accessible, excellently made programmes, which took away the mystique about how these multinationals operate globally. I remember throughout my teaching years using some of those kinds of resources with students, alongside the more strictly academic ones. I’m not teaching anymore, so you would know better than me what kinds of resources are available today, but I have a sense those kinds of resources are not that easily accessible. Am I right, or are there resources like that?
BB There are resources like that to be used, but I think what has changed is the environment in which we are working; the landscape of higher education has changed a lot, and in some ways the space for doing that kind of teaching has shrunk.
AB Now why is that? Is that because they find those kinds of critiques threatening? What is the reason?
BB My view is shaped by my experience in the field that I’m in. Law is always a more conservative discipline. But there was, for a period of time, particularly in the seventies and eighties, a very left, vibrant, critical movement within legal studies here. That work was however, with a few very important exceptions, void of any serious engagement with issues of race, gender, colonialism, and empire. More recently, we have seen renewed engagement with law and racial capitalism, but today, academics are increasingly isolated in the academy, and scholarly work is affected by a lack of engagement with the world outside. Alternately, where engagement does take place, it is often confined by the parameters set by an audit culture and a marketised system of education.
BB/RZ Going back to the concept of diaspora, you have written that diaspora can be understood in four different ways – first, by looking at diaspora as an analytical concept, which I think you explained before; second, by looking at diaspora as a genealogical concept; and third, the diasporic as focused on both ‘routes’ and ‘roots’, which we think is really compelling. Fourth, there is the fact that diaspora itself is an intersectional concept. So we just want to ask if you could tease out a few more of these different ways of thinking about those words.
AB I think when I came to this term ‘diaspora’ and started using it, I was very acutely aware that we were talking about diaspora in many different ways. There are, of course, many discourses of diaspora, and James Clifford talks about this as well.5 There are different types of discourses of diaspora, which need to be distinguished from the actual lived experiences of diaspora. Then there is the concept of diaspora, as distinct from lived experience and histories of diaspora. I wanted to think through the question: How can we distinguish the concept from the experience of diaspora and the discourses of diaspora? That was how I came to the notion of thinking about diaspora as a concept in terms of genealogy. I used the Foucauldian term ‘genealogy’ because it simultaneously foregrounds discourse and knowledge and power, which is very important when we are thinking about diasporas and how they are constituted, how they have been lived.
Then there is the notion of power, and notions of how knowledge and power are always connected, how different kinds of discourses construct diasporas in different kinds of ways. I decided that I was going to think of the concept of diaspora as a genealogy, and as a genealogy which doesn’t hark back to final origins or pure essences, or present truth claims as given rather than constructed. I came up with the idea that we needed to think of diaspora as a concept in terms of an investigative technology, which looks at the historical, cultural, social and political processes in and through which diasporas are constituted. I also wanted to point to the ways in which different diasporas are positioned in relation to one another other, and not simply in relation to the dominant group in society.
Then, in terms of routes and roots – yes, that’s very important, of course. I think it was Paul Gilroy who in his book used this term, ‘routes and roots’,6 because in a way there is a contestation between routes and roots, so to speak, in thinking about diasporas. There’s movement, but there is also a sense of actually putting roots in a place to which one moves. To hold these two axes together simultaneously is critical. Diasporas are historically specific formations. Each diaspora has its own history, such that you can have diasporas which emerge out of slavery. Then there are diasporas which emerge out of labour migrations. There are diasporas which emerge out of what is happening at the moment around us, refugees coming out of wars, war-torn countries, out of poverty.
So in all those different notions of diaspora, history is critical, because not all diasporas are the same, so we have to look at the history behind each formation of the diaspora. This term ‘intersectional’ – actually, I didn’t come to intersectionality through the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw. I was thinking about the ways in which questions of race, gender, class or sexuality constantly interact. This was during the process of writing Cartographies of Diaspora (1996). And I used the term ‘intersectionality’ in Cartographies. I came across Crenshaw’s work later. In a sense, maybe I have a slightly different take on intersectionality. I’m told that some people think that intersectionality only applies to dominated groups; whereas I think that intersectionality is about power regimes and how they intersect, and how they position different groups differently and differentially in relation to each other. One has to look at the regimes of domination if we are to understand the ways the dominated live their lives. But we also have to look at how the dominant groups dominate. Intersectionality for me, first and foremost, is about embodiment. How do we embody social relations? And this is as much about the social, political and cultural as it is about the psychic. It’s about subjectivity and it’s also about identity. So I talk about intersections throughout Cartographies, but I’m talking about all these different levels of them. I talk about difference, which is related to intersectionality very closely, again as social relation, but also as subjectivity, as identity and as experience.
The key thing is that these different axes – class, race, gender, sexuality, disability and so on – intersect both in our physical bodies and the social body. So intersectionality operates both at the social level and at the level of the physical body and the psyche. I greatly respect the debates that came afterwards and have learnt a lot from them as well, but my own take on intersectionality may have been slightly different from the way it at times appears to have become valorised now.
BB/RZ What do you think its valorisation has been about?
AB Well, intersectionality as a concept and a political practice emerges out of discussions around the experience of Black American women and workingclass Black American women. And this work is really important. Yet, there are other discourses where talk about intersectionality has become a mantra now. In reality, intersectionality demands a lot of hard work – analytically, politically, in every way. It’s not just about mentioning three or four words, and saying ‘yes, I’m doing intersectionality’ – it’s really looking at grounded analysis of these different axes. We can’t always do all the axes at the same time anyway. But it needs a lot of hard work.
BB One of the effects of its valorisation has been that it has allowed, to some extent, the continued universalisation of particular women’s experiences. For instance, in a given article there may be a couple of paragraphs that acknowledge, ‘that this issue is different for women of colour or different for working-class women of colour’. In this cynical sense, it can almost be used as an insurance policy to guard against the criticism that one is not integrating analysis of race or class.
RZ Academically, that can be the case. But then there’s also activist movements where it has been very much owned by people of colour. You have the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, and the insistence of the activists in BLM that this movement will be intersectional. The hard work you’re speaking of is partly on the academic level, but it’s required in the social movements too. When you say ‘it’s hard work to do’, what does that mean for an activist who would be starting today? How do you think that would play out?
AB Well, I have to go back to my roots in Southall Black Sisters.
RZ That’s what I was hoping you would do.
AB That was hard work, when I look back on it. I was a member of the Southall Black Sisters at its inception in 1979. Then in 1982, I left London for a job in Leicester and then in Milton Keynes, so I moved away from SBS during its second phase. But I know, firstly, that it was hard work in terms of the things we’ve been talking about, the interconnections that we had to make between our histories – our imperial histories, colonial histories – to make sense of what was happening to us as Black women in postwar Britain, in eighties and nineties Britain. It was also hard work in terms of dealing with patriarchal issues in relation to men with whom we were working, around questions of racism, for example, or questions about socialism. That was not easy at all, you know; it was hard work to raise patriarchal issues. We would be having a political meeting about socialism or about racism. Then to raise issues of gender was seen as failing to show solidarity with brothers, so to speak.
We were planning an anti-racist and anti-fascist march from Bradford to London. The march didn’t happen in the end, but we were planning one. We had a meeting with men and women in Bradford to discuss what we would do. We brought up the question of issues to do with gender, and that didn’t go down very well with a number of the men – not all of them, but with some of the people who were there. There were many reasons why the march didn’t happen, but some of the men tended to blame us for bringing up questions of patriarchal relations as the reason for why the march did not happen. So there was, at that level, the struggle with men on the left. There was, of course, struggle within our own communities themselves, where, as in Britain as a whole, living out patriarchal relations was an everyday experience for women.
We had to develop strategies, in a way, where we could work with people so they would listen to us and not just dismiss us as these difficult young women who were just coming up with these newfound ideas. That was quite difficult. For example, we once staged a feminist version of Ramlila, a play based on the Hindu epic of Ramayana. Some people might think, ‘Why do a religious thing?’ And some feminists I’m sure would say, ‘Why would you do that?’ But here we were in Southall, and we wanted to invite women and men, mostly women came actually, but we wanted to critique Sita’s position as a woman, and we used the figure of a ‘jester’, who provided a humorous though pointed commentary on the proceedings. Here was a feminist stance presented through an idiom that was culturally familiar to those present. We did that. It was quite a successful event. The women could identify, because they knew what it was like when you lived the life of an ‘obedient wife’. But then we were coming up with different ideas about possible alternatives. Together, we could make sense of it.
It’s even more difficult now, I’m sure, with all the Islamophobia. I think you have to be able to work with people in a way where you can facilitate the emergence of a shared common project. You have to address the contradictory ‘common sense’ that we all live with, that Gramsci speaks of.7 Unless you do that, then you’re not going to make much headway with constructing new political agendas. To do that, you have to begin with where people are at, but not stay there, and not get sucked into that. But rather, to jointly develop new discourses and practices for the creation of new political horizons, a new common sense. Those were rather difficult things to do in relation to our communities, but also in relation to ourselves. We were Asian women, we were women of African descent.
There was once a political meeting called – not by us, but by another anti-racist group in Southall – in a hall belonging to a temple. Just as a venue, not for religious reasons. I know that some SBS members didn’t want to go there because it was in a hall on the premises of a temple, a religious place, when we were secular. So there were difficult debates and issues like that. But this is what I mean. There isn’t a hard and fast rule for how you would actually go about this work; you have to do hard work at the ground level, if you’re an activist. It’s quite hard work. It takes its toll on you psychologically, as well.
BB/RZ We were also wondering how your own life experiences influence your theoretical and conceptual work around diaspora?
AB I was born in India, but I was five years old when I went to Africa. So I grew up in Uganda. I was in Uganda until I did my A levels. Then I went to America; I was in California, where I did my undergraduate degree, then Wisconsin, where I did my Master’s. This was about the time when Idi Amin was coming to power. I was in Britain, on my way back to Uganda, when the Idi Amin edict was issued8 – and even though I was a Ugandan citizen, I couldn’t go back. So I was stateless for about five years in Britain, until I became a citizen. (In those days, after five years you applied for naturalisation.) Hence, I’ve lived in all these different countries, and diaspora is very much part and parcel of my life experience. The things we’ve been talking about – SBS, other politics around racism, around class and so on – all those are very much part and parcel of my life.
My analysis has always been informed by my political activism, and vice versa. I think the two have gone together. So the concept of ‘diaspora space’, for example, emerged out of thinking through different life experiences and how to theorise about them, how to analyse them.
BB/RZ We wanted to follow up with the question of belonging and your work on belonging. The Indigenous Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson draws our attention to the fact that the conjoined twin of belonging is exclusion,9 which may sound obvious, but she points out how that often gets lost in the discourse on belonging. Lauren Berlant formulated this nicely: ‘Just because we are in the room together does not mean that we belong to the room or each other: belonging is a specific genre of affect, history, and political mediation that cannot be presumed and is, indeed, a relation whose evidence and terms are always being contested.’10 We were wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your understanding of the discourse of belonging and how that has been useful to your thinking on migration and diaspora?
AB I think, in fact, that what these two scholars say is very important. I do find the notion of belonging compelling, because without a sense of belonging, however contested and fractured it might be, you are vulnerable as an outsider – not just physically, but psychologically and psychically, as well. If we don’t feel any sense of belonging, we become quite dispersed, scattered beings. To have some sense of togetherness, of psychic coherence, means we have to have a sense of belonging – to our siblings, our families, our friends, our political allies, our ‘imagined communities’ as well as others that form our lifeworld. The point that Moreton-Robinson and Berlant are making is that the flip side of belonging is exclusion. Belonging only makes sense because there is exclusion. Histories of racism, class hierarchy and heteronormativity, for instance, tell us which groups, under what conditions, have belonged or been excluded.
Apart from being predicated against the socioeconomic, political and cultural landscape, belonging is also very much part of the affective domain. These different aspects need to be held together. But we always need to be aware – it’s like when Stuart Hall talks about the concept of ‘identity’, and he says that it’s a term without which he cannot do, but at the same time it’s a term that he’s continually interrogating. I think ‘belonging’ is such a term. You can’t do without it, but you have to always question how it is being evoked, always remain aware how it is being used and how a sense of belonging, or a sense of alienation, is being played out. Those two may go together. If you don’t feel a sense of belonging, you may become alienated. What kinds of social, political and cultural conditions favour alienation and anomie as opposed to a sense of belonging, a sense of well-being?
I would think of it that way, to be aware of those social issues alongside the sense that it gives you a feeling of being a part of something. A sense of affirmation.
BB/RZ I think you mentioned somewhere that a feeling of being at home is one way of describing what belonging is. Because for those of us who have moved around a lot or have come from families who were also immigrant families, migrant families, refugee families, it’s quite difficult to grasp what ‘belonging’ actually means. For many of us, the feeling of not belonging is what becomes familiar and even a primary psychic default position. What does belonging actually look like, and what does it mean?
AB It is a sense of feeling at home, isn’t it?
BB Yes, I think that’s why I recalled that. Because I thought, okay, that’s an interesting way to think about what it means to belong – feeling at home somewhere
RZ From a Palestinian perspective, for example, when home is a colonised space you are not allowed to return to – the struggle is to hold on to return, but also your rights and new belonging where you have ended up.
AB There’s always a tension. I remember thinking about this when I first came here. At first, you feel you’re in a new place; you don’t feel at home at all. But then there comes a time when you do begin to feel at home, but you may not necessarily be seen by the dominant group as belonging. That is why affect and the psyche are implicated in all of that. It’s also having that psychic strength to be able to say, ‘I now feel at home, and I’m going to contest you who say I’m not at home.’ To have that strength is very important. Political activism gives that collective strength, and our loved ones give us the personal strength. So it is a contest all the time. Because even now, I’ve been here twenty-odd years, more than that, but there are people who still think I’m an outsider. But I feel quite at home down here in London, and I challenge the processes that construct me as an outsider. But you’re absolutely right – it’s always contested, disputed, and how you feel does not necessarily reflect how others see you.
BB/RZ In Cartographies of Diaspora, you explore how the new Europe has been constituted juridically, legally, politically, economically and culturally, through race, class and gender. You make an intervention into the discourse of new racisms by showing how the racisms that emerged in Britain in the context of debates over the EU are informed by the New Right. This relates back to our earlier discussion about how terms like ‘nation’ and ‘people’ were used by Thatcher against trade unions and the working class and so-called welfare scroungers.
Alongside the austerity policies and politics that have saturated the UK and also the EU in the last decade, what differences do you perceive between the eighties and nineties, and this current moment? You mentioned Powellism and Thatcher and the language of the swarm, which came back, of course, in Cameron’s comments on refugees. We were wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about some of the similarities or differences you see between that earlier moment and what’s happening today?
AB Well, I suppose the linguistic content can sometimes be very similar. Often, immigrant groups are represented as dirty, as inherently different, as other. There’s a recursivity about ways in which certain groups are described and othered. But what changes is the broader social context, and I think that has changed hugely, if you look back at the eighties. In economic terms the situation for some groups, such as the precariat class in the gig economy, has worsened. But also the global scene has changed so much with all the wars, ever since the war in Iraq and the Gulf in 1990. We’ve had several other wars since. The rise of the Islamic State as well, and the ways in which the securitisation discourses and practices have come to the fore since 9/11, for instance. All of these have actually changed the world enormously. So, the racism of which we speak has never been one racism. We talk about Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism, which is a very specific racism. Similarly, we talk about racism that is directed at asylum seekers and refugees; that is another one. And, of course, anti-Semitism, as well as the racism that is directed at the so-called economic migrants, or against people of colour; these are all distinct forms of racism.
Even the refugees are not accepted to any great degree in Britain. Turkey and Pakistan have taken millions of refugees, and here in Britain we have taken comparatively few. Indeed, we know that most of the refugees are in the Third World countries, or what we now call the global South. The global scene, in terms of these wars and what they have done to people’s lives, is just horrendous. I often think, here we sit, and politicians discourse about lofty ideals while we forget how people live in dire conditions in wartime zones.
Rather than resolving issues politically, countries, particularly countries in the West, are likely to be more and more involved in situations in which military intervention is regarded as justified.
BB I wanted to ask you, following up on the Brexit referendum, and these different forms of racism that you’re identifying, what is your diagnosis of the reemergence of the discourse around the Commonwealth?
AB Some people who are in favour of leaving the EU argue for the importance of the Commonwealth. They seem to assume for some reason that in the post-Brexit period, Britain will suddenly allow people from Africa and the Caribbean and India and Pakistan to enter the UK, that the doors will be open wide. The Brexit campaign has made them believe, somehow, that there is a competition between the East Europeans and people from the Commonwealth. That somehow if we didn’t have people from Eastern Europe, then we would get more people from the Commonwealth. That won’t happen.
BB It seems as though people who have been denied recognition as people who truly belong in the nation are trying to reinvigorate this discourse of empire, as if to say we have a place here that precedes that of the Eastern European migrants.
AB You are absolutely right about that – that’s true. In 2015, when Greece was in a very dire economic situation, I became very anti-EU. But on the other hand, the EU has the Social Charter,11 whereas some in Britain don’t even want to retain the Human Rights Act. I felt that because of the Social Charter, we probably needed to stay in the EU and argue for a better, more democratic EU than we have now. But the Brexit group managed to convince quite a few people that the interest of the Commonwealth would be better served if we leave. It just doesn’t make sense to me at all.
BB Can we switch tack for a moment? We wanted you to address the shift in political identification with respect to the use of the term ‘Black’.
AB There has been a splintering of the sense in which we used the term ‘Black’ from the 1970s onwards. Even in those days, in the mid 1970s, some people didn’t agree with us; they used to say, ‘Asians are not Black – they don’t look Black.’ But at the same time, there are some women today who also want to use the term ‘Black’ in the sense that we used it. When we constructed the term ‘Black’ to refer to a political colour rather than a shade of skin, it was in a context where we were working together against shared experiences of racism. There were immigration laws, for example, against which we, as Black communities mobilised across the board. So the term had a political purchase.
But nowadays, even the term ‘Asian’ has itself become fractured. When you use the term ‘Asian’, people don’t necessarily identify with that. People talk about being Muslims, or Hindus or Sikhs, so the religious identifications have become much more pronounced. The point is that unity has to be achieved through struggle and solidarity; it cannot be imposed. Because if a term doesn’t have a critical purchase, then it is probably more relevant to use a term that actually does have political resonance with a new generation of people today.
I’ve started using the American term, ‘women of colour’ or ‘people of colour’. Which is also problematic, because they used to use the term ‘coloured’ here in Britain, which was a racialised term. But people of colour has been constructed by ‘nonwhite’ groups in solidarity. And that is important.
RZ It’s interesting because religious affiliation has become much more common. This has taken place, like you’re saying, in many situations where it is your religious affiliation, even more specifically, your sect, that people are using. What do you think of that change that has happened?
AB That’s a very difficult one, isn’t it? It’s because it’s so caught up with global politics as well. We can’t talk about religion – we can talk about spiritualism. I’ve nothing against spiritualism – people can pursue their religious affiliation if they’re spiritually oriented. But religion is no longer seen as separate from the geopolitical order at the moment.
BB I think nowadays, rather than identifying people of colour by ethnicity, we are marginalised and racialised through –
AB Being called Muslim.
RZ Yes. There are certain types of racisms that have developed that are related to religion, and there are the tensions that come with building alliances along those lines. How do we nurture and build an anti-racist movement around these issues?
AB I think in terms of racism, it is quite clear. One needs to fight against Islamophobia, or any other anti-religious racism that is there. That is easier to deal with, in a way, because one takes a stand against any racism that goes around. But when I and my political allies organised in the old days, we were organising as secular groups. In a sense it was easier. But nowadays, people organise around religion; I don’t know what you do in universities now, because there are so many religious groups that are organising separately. So that the term ‘Asian’ doesn’t hold much sway – that’s what I meant earlier – because in the main, students don’t come together as Asians in universities. Rather, they come together as Sikhs or Hindus or Muslims or Arabs or other groups, Shias and Sunnis, and so on. I think I would still say we need to come together on broader platforms, on common political concerns. I personally wouldn’t organise around religion myself, unless I was oppressed on religious grounds. The key issue is one of oppression and exploitation. We know that the reality is that people do organise around religion. And given that there is an international onslaught on certain religious groups, it is understandable why they come together in the way they do. It is difficult to be sanctimonious. We must take politically thought-through positions. Because I don’t think we can have blueprints for all situations.
BB/RZ Do you think there is any political currency left in thinking about secularism as a basis for a feminist politics, or maybe a reconstructed secularism?
AB I think there is a reconstructed secularism. Because some secularists are as fanatical as the religious groups can be, at times. But a reconstructed secularism, I think, is important. I’m always told by my Muslim friends, ‘You don’t realise what it means to be Muslim today, because of all this onslaught all the time.’ My response is that there is that experiential dimension there which needs to be addressed, but it’s such a tightrope – a very tight rope indeed. You have to look at everything as it happens and say, ‘which way do I go?’ I personally think that we need secular politics, but we have to be able to take on board the reality of, for instance, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism.
BB/RZ We wanted to follow up with the concept of critical multiculturalism. Given the fragmentation of politics, that the issue of religion and religious identification has entered into the political landscape in a way that is much greater than in the eighties or nineties, does the concept of a critical multiculturalism still have relevance today?
AB Yes. Well, one of the things that I think, given what you’ve just said, is that when people criticise multiculturalism, they often fail to make a distinction between multiculturalism as cultural diversity and multiculturalism as social policy. People were often critical of the latter, because in the eighties and nineties there were policies in local authorities which were informed by multiculturalism. I think some of those policies were problematic, but not all of those policies were wrong. After all, multiculturalism emerged out of struggle; it wasn’t something that was just given to us by the state. It was a struggle to say, in education – the discourse of multiculturalism was most widely prevalent in education, that’s where it was most strongly felt – that we didn’t want an education system which pays no attention to the histories of colonialism and imperialism, which pays no attention to cultural diversity, to the ways in which people from the former colonies were concentrated in certain geographical locations where there were high rates of unemployment and poor housing and poor social services. That we wanted a different kind of education system, or different kind of social policy that actually took into account the specific needs of different groups of people.
I think at that level it was a struggle, and it was relevant to argue for multicultural education. But then there was a debate between anti-racists and multiculturalists. That was because once multiculturalism started being practised in schools and elsewhere, it became obvious that sometimes the question of racism or class was not taken very seriously. Thus, multiculturalism came to be caricatured as being about ‘samosas, saris and steel drums’, or something like that.
So we started talking about anti-racism in education, as opposed to multicultural education. That debate went on for a decade or so. It has now gone away, because people started attacking multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is problematic if it does not address an anti-racist critique. But what do we have instead? Monoculturalism? No! We may not call it multiculturalism; people are using different terms, currently. Instead of ‘multiculturalism’, they’re trying to use the term ‘interculturalism’. Basically, they’re struggling with the same thing, which is, how do you address the hegemony of white British culture, even when we know that there is nothing called ‘white British culture’, in the singular, because British culture is heterogeneous.
But nonetheless, when people talk about the ‘British way of life’, or ‘British values’, which is a current discourse, they assume there is something British which is inherently different from the rest of the world, somehow unique, when often they’re talking about very universal values, really. So if we don’t have some kind of a politics and a discourse around cultural diversity, how do we contest the discourse of ‘British way of life’? In other words, you’re right that ‘multiculturalism’ as a term now is a problem, because it has been so discredited. But how do we deal with cultural diversity? I’m not sure what kind of term we can use, other than just ‘cultural diversity’. Or ‘interculturalism’ – to me that sounds quite similar to ‘multiculturalism’ anyway. Perhaps ‘anti-racist interculturalism’? And then there is that whole discourse about ‘integration’. That term is a big problem, which is connected with ‘multiculturalism’. ‘Integration’ meaning assimilation. That’s what they mean. I don’t want assimilation. I think we fought against assimilation.
So how do we construct a new term? I’m looking at you, as well. Can you think of something that can replace it, but without giving in to the assimilationists?
RZ Like you were saying, many of these things have to come out of practice. These formulations tend to come about through the struggle for something specific.
AB It’s true, it’s very true.
BB In a way, this is related to your emphasis on practice. In thinking about intersectionality, for instance, as an approach that can only have meaning in working it through both intellectually and politically. This notion is quite distinct from the idea of grasping certain identifications in a mode of strategic essentialism, which reflects a more tactical approach.
RZ Just to change course slightly – we very recently saw a film that you had directed as part of a project on the Darkmatter journal website.12 And it was stunningly beautiful.
AB I’m glad you liked it.
RZ It was remarkable, both as a historical record but also the method that you used. How did you decide to do that, methodologically?
AB Well, I was working at the Department of Extramural Studies at Birkbeck College. A large part of the courses we developed were in relation to the needs of the communities we were working with. We wanted to undertake a project in West London because I got some external funding to develop educational opportunities for people who had been out of work. We identified a range of needs and organised courses relevant to those needs. One of the things we thought we would do would be to work with older adults and look at the ways in which we could collate their life histories. Because we were interested in oral histories. We said that people are dying, literally, and our oral histories in this country are not being recorded.
We thought we would do a video project to document the lives of older people and their backgrounds, and how they had experienced life in Britain. But we also wanted to skill them; it’s very easy to make a film about people and interview them, but we wanted a participatory project in which older adults would learn the skills of making a film, and that’s what we did. We involved a video trainer, who actually taught older adults skills to make a video film. This was followed by the older adults making a film by themselves. A colleague and the trainer were present, but they were there to facilitate, not to direct. So that was all the work of the older adults, really.
RZ And did you feel the method changed the end product?
AB I think it did, yes. In some scenes, you find, for example, that they sit very formally. And in other shots they become quite spontaneous, especially at the end, where they start dancing. That’s where they really came into their own. But sometimes they were more formal, especially at the beginning, when each of them appears individually. Because traditionally, even when you had your photographs taken, you sat like that, that formal pose. I think it changed with time as the project progressed and, gradually, formality disappeared among the participants, and they loved it. They hadn’t had any opportunities like that to talk about themselves on film. What was very interesting was how they were very conscious about religious diversity among themselves. There were Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus among them. But they wanted to foreground a unity. We had nothing to do with that; that is what they decided. They talked about the partition of India, and they talked about how people tried to be unified, and how people used to live together in diasporas such as East Africa. So they were also trying to construct some kind of a solidarity among themselves, working across these differences.
BB/RZ Has cultural production been central in your activism and research?
AB That was the only film that we did, really. So in terms of cultural production, I haven’t really been involved in making videos or films, apart from this case. But culture itself, as a concept and as a practice, has been very central in my work. Even when I was doing my PhD, I was thinking about how to conceptualise culture in non-essentialist forms. That has always been a problem – well, not a problem, a challenge. It has been a challenge.
BB/RZ Going back to the question of the university: Can you tell us more specifically about your own experiences in the academy? How have you experienced the change in higher education from when you first started teaching to the period when you retired? It’s been a time of remarkable transformation in the higher education sector.
AB University life was challenging. I didn’t actually have my permanent job until 1985. In the early years after I finished my PhD, I couldn’t find a permanent job. I had a lot of temporary jobs, which come with their own problems. But politically it was a huge struggle, around knowledge production partly and these different ways of theorising. I was working around issues of race and ethnicity when I first started. In those days, you had discourses of ‘race relations’ and ‘ethnic relations’. People like John Rex, Michael Banton – these were the big professors at the time. It was quite hard to develop a critical and radical academic practice. I think everyone who was involved in this subject at the time would probably tell you that.
It was difficult whoever you were, but if you were a person of colour then it was more of a struggle. I took some pretty unpopular positions. I didn’t get much support from my immediate professors in my early years. I turned to the work of scholars such as Stuart Hall for inspiration. And later, when I got to know him at the Open University, he was very supportive. In the early years, I was employed mainly on research projects. I wasn’t teaching, because they were temporary jobs. Then, of course, in the latter half, I decided I was going to leave academia, so I worked with the Greater London Council. That was a quite positive experience, I must say. I was in the Women’s Support Unit and I had quite a senior position there, and we took up all kinds of issues we discussed earlier, such as intersectionality. We didn’t use that term, but we were trying to involve different categories of women.
That was a positive experience, because we were doing new things. We were able to fund women’s projects, and through that we were involving the women’s groups themselves in telling us what they needed and what they wanted. So I enjoyed that period of my working life. Then I got this job at Birkbeck College. At the time, we weren’t part of Birkbeck. It was an extramural studies department within the University of London. I found this work quite creative, actually, because for the first time I was working with a group of women that I got on very well with. There was Jane Hoy, Mary Kennedy and Nell Keddie. We had a lot of autonomy in developing courses, and we could liaise with communities, find out what they wanted, and then we could offer those educational experiences. These were courses at the certificate and diploma levels. Later on, once we merged with Birkbeck College, we developed a Master’s programme as well. But initially it was the certificate- and diploma-level courses.
We developed childcare courses, we had courses around antisemitism, and we had courses about Palestine. We organised all kinds of courses that we felt were important to communities – Caribbean studies, Irish studies and Asian studies, under the rubric of ‘community studies’, as a generic term. So that was really very good, very creative and generative. Then John Solomos (a sociologist) and I developed the Master’s programme in race and ethnicity in the politics department. That was one of the first Master’s programmes on the subject.
BB When was that?
AB That would have been around 1988, I think. So that too was a creative part of my experience, I must say. And it also meant we could include our own imprint. We developed a lesbian studies programme in the extramural studies department, which, again, might have been one of the first ones in Britain at the time. But on the other hand, my partner always says I was lucky that I was at extramural studies, that it might have been more difficult in other, more conventional departments. And he might be right about that. On the whole, I found academia quite difficult as a person of colour, although as I said, there were moments and stages when it was quite life-affirming as well. But it’s changed so much since I’ve left, I think; in the last four or five years, things have changed so much. Some of the courses we were developing then might not have the same purchase today. Things have changed a great deal. The neoliberal university is now a serious problem.
Selected Writings
Brah, Avtar. ‘“Race” and “Culture” in the Gendering of Labour Markets: South Asian Young Muslim Women and the Labour Market’. New Community 19:3 (1993), 441–58.
———. ‘Re-framing Europe: En-gendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe’. Feminist Review 45:1 (1993), 9–29.
———. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996).
———. ‘The Scent of Memory: Strangers, Our Own, and Others’. Feminist Review 61:1 (1999), 4–26.
———. ‘Global Mobilities, Local Predicaments: Globalization and the Critical Imagination’. Feminist Review 70:1 (2002), 30–45.
Brah, Avtar, and Ann Phoenix. ‘Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality’. Journal of International Women’s Studies 5:3 (2004), 75–86.
