Читать книгу Revolutionary Feminisms - Brenna Bhandar - Страница 8
ОглавлениеI use the term radical in its original meaning – getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.
Ella Baker, 19691
The feminisms that we explore in this book are rooted in various political contexts and situated within a variety of political traditions. In fact, they are too diverse to easily name under a single heading. ‘Black feminism’, ‘Indigenous feminism’, ‘socialist feminism’, ‘communism’, ‘Third World feminism’, ‘queer feminism’: all of these terms and others could be used to describe the political work and thought of the people we have interviewed. At the same time, despite the range of differences that mark each of the revolutionary scholars interviewed here, their scholarly works also share a number of qualities that create a common ground for their political thought and activism. Namely, each of them has devised anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist feminist frameworks of analysis. All of the individuals interviewed here, along with ourselves, may not agree on every detail – but we share the belief that freedom requires revolutionary transformation in the organisation of the economy, social relations, political structures, and psychic and symbolic worlds, and that this must take place across multiple scales – from intimate relations between individuals to those among individuals, communities and the state.
In this introduction, our aim is to map some of the feminist lineages that appear in the book, as a means of drawing out the common ground shared by the interviewees and identifying what we consider to be absolutely crucial for feminist politics in our current conjuncture. When we write ‘our’ current conjuncture, we mean an explicit location: a postimperial metropolis, in which the mainstream political scene has jolted (again) to the right, with a highly developed neoliberal economy and mode of governance unfolding hand in hand with an ever-emboldened racist nationalism. Although the global financial crisis of 2008 shook the very foundations of the economic system, capital quickly recalibrated to offload the crisis onto ordinary people through long-term austerity politics, intensifying its assault on public services and living standards. This is consistent with the longer-standing neoliberal capitalist project, in the making for several decades, that has entailed the restructuring of capital on a global scale, the rise of new centres of accumulation, the weakening of trade unions, and the flexibilisation of labour. As we explore below, this has disproportionately affected people of colour and women workers.
The conversations included in this book are part of feminist genealogies rooted in Black feminist engagements with communist politics in the United States and the UK; feminist engagements with Marxism and communism in Italy, India and beyond; Indigenous feminisms grappling with the specifically gendered aspects of racial, settler colonial capitalism; and diasporic and queer feminisms confronting the racial caste hierarchies of labour markets and borders in postcolonial and settler colonial states. Fundamentally, these feminisms are formed by – and formative of – diverse histories of radical thought and action. Going against the contemporary obsession with novelty and newness in academic and related media environments, our aim in this introduction is more or less the opposite: it is to explore the collective memory and histories of struggle that shape the very possibilities of radical change in our present and near future.
While based in the academy, the scholar-activists interviewed here have long-term engagements with social movements and have consistently worked to maintain archives of resistance – indeed, ones which are often excluded from mainstream accounts. We thank them for the time they so generously gave to this project, engaging with our questions and believing in the aims of the book. We opted early on, in the tradition of community building and collaboration, to develop this volume in conversation with them, rather than writing about their work. It was more in line with the praxis we discuss below to collectively think through earlier periods of resistance, past political trajectories and lessons learned, and to recognise how they continue to shape our present. As Angela Y. Davis eloquently noted in her 2016 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, ‘Legacies and Unfinished Activisms’:
Students are now recognising that the legacies of past struggles are not static. If these legacies mean anything at all, they are mandates to develop new strategies, new technologies of struggles. And these legacies, when they are taken up by new generations reveal unfulfilled promises of the past and therefore give rise to new activisms. As an activist of Steve Biko’s generation, I have to constantly remind myself that the struggles of our contemporary times should be thought of as productive contradictions because they constitute a rupture with past struggles, but at the same time they reside on a continuum with those struggles and they have been enabled by activisms of the past. They are unfinished activisms.
In the following discussions, we aim to collectively grapple with this continuum of ‘unfinished activisms’ – the continuities and discontinuities, complexities and contradictions of anti-racist and Indigenous feminist resistance.2 We assemble a small group of authors to critically engage with movement histories, to examine useful conceptual tools and forms of praxis for feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist movements. We hope this makes a contribution to contemporary struggles.
As we think through collective memory of struggle, we want to do more than make direct connections between oral histories, conventional archives, and the written work produced by feminists over the past several decades. We want to emphasise that our political inheritance exceeds and stretches far beyond what is typically understood as ‘history’ and lineage. It is transmitted to us through the stories we grow up listening to, in what we come to recognise, retrospectively, in ourselves and others as ways of surviving the daily onslaught of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism and ableist forces that structure our everyday – as well as the shared forms of leisure, pleasure and joy that are also a source of our collective resilience. We were struck by the interviewees’ detailed recollections of early life experiences and observations on domestic life as they reflected on their intellectual and political formations. For us, the making of this volume is itself the result of a diverse set of experiences – some lived directly, others inherited, some observed in others, and all of them felt (in the way that one’s emotional and psychic life tells us something about social and political cultures) – of migration, estrangement, displacement, settlement, exile and differentiated belongings.3 We should also add that we are keenly aware of the geopolitical limits of this project. Certainly the inclusion of Latin American and African feminists, for instance, would have greatly enriched the terrain covered in this volume. The interlocutors included here are based primarily in North America, the UK, and Europe, and while they are nowhere near representative of left, anti-racist feminisms as they exist globally, the ideas and analytic frameworks they have developed have undoubtedly had a very wide and influential reach.
Lee Maracle, a leading Indigenous feminist scholar from the Sto:lo First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, illuminates a complex notion of memory – one that is transgenerational, biophysical (i.e., carried in our bodies and psyches), transmitted through song and orality. Memory, for Maracle, is intensely bound up with language (written and oral, English and Salish). She writes:
Memory is powerful. It can twist us in knots, but the imagination can untwist the knots, unravel the memory, rework it into blankets that protect us, designs that promote, carry, and create new being. Re-membering is significant, holy in its duty, recollecting bits of engagement, social interaction, success and failure. The imagination can transform memory from depression to a simple incident … from perverse to natural or from failure to opportunity if you are moving toward the good life. It can inspire us to re-evaluate our intervention, alter our course, and create a new beginning.4
Memory, and the act of re-membering, as theorised by Maracle, rearticulates several concepts that are often held apart; the desire to resist, to survive, coalesces with an embodied will in a movement towards freedom. In stating that her ‘memory begins with an imagined world’ – that is, her vision of a world free from war, violence, poverty and racism – Lee begins to describe a method for decolonising our ways of thinking and seeing the world. This radical imagining of freedom finds common ground with the thought and praxis of feminists who have grasped the complexity, and indeed the enormity, of intergenerational political struggles for freedom from the oppression of globalised racial colonial capitalism. In what follows, we map out some of the diverse intellectual and political terrain that has given rise to the scholarly and political work explored in the interviews, with particular attention to the points of contact among these different feminisms.
Anti-racist and Indigenous feminists have long analysed the international character of colonial and settler violence, carceral violence and police brutality.5 While it has become more common to speak of a ‘boomerang effect’ of military and security policies ‘returning’ to the West, there is hardly newness to this: there has always been fluidity and learning from such processes of exploitation, as well as resistance to them, across borders and empires. However, as Lisa Lowe has argued, these connections ‘between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ are often obscured by dominant understandings of the development of the liberal individual subject. Significantly, Lowe utilises the term ‘intimacies’ to grasp such links among a constellation of political economic, literary, philosophical and sociocultural meanings of interiority. She deploys the concept to investigate, ‘against the grain’, how the figure of the liberal individual, and attendant political formations of freedom and democracy, have been produced through imperial forces of worldmaking and according to logics (such as commodity fetishism) that work – structurally, affectively and psychically – to abstract from and mask the imperial ‘details’ of their formation.6
Grappling with the aftermath of decolonisation and continuing forms of neo-imperialism, many of the feminisms explored in this volume have been shaped by the violence of partitions, the ‘pitfalls’ of anti-colonial nationalism, and itineraries of migration and exile. Third World, postcolonial and diasporic feminisms speak to the complexities of life for migrant women who carry with them radical political traditions from their countries of origin, and who have long confronted religious fundamentalism, patriarchy and racism as these formations change over time, reflecting geopolitical, cultural specificities. However, the oft-repeated linear division of feminist thought into first, second and third waves elides the complex geographies and travelling theories within feminism itself. This division has the tendency to obscure the much longer histories of feminist praxis within communities of colour, and commonalities across struggles – underplaying the conceptual tools developed through specifically feminist anti-capitalist praxis. As postcolonial scholar Rashmi Varma notes, ‘dissident histories’ of feminism are ‘rooted in trajectories of anti-colonial struggle’ and have multiple ‘diasporic genealogies’.7 One of the motivations of this book is to acknowledge and learn from the political and intellectual labour of Black, Indigenous and socialist feminisms that have attempted to capture and theorise the complexity and multiplicity of lived experience.
Each of the feminists interviewed in this book has, at one time or another, sustained a serious engagement with anti-capitalist politics, whether as a communist, a critic of Marxist thought from the left, or an acute observer of the effects of poverty and socioeconomic inequality on racialised communities (locally and globally). As noted above, despite the diversity of political and intellectual formations of the interviewees, their feminisms share some contact points that we aim to emphasise as crucial for our contemporary political moment: the understanding that radical thought emerges in conjunction with social and political movements; that the individual is, at a fundamental level, constituted through relations with others and that this entails an ethical and political responsibility, which is the basis for solidarity8; and that radical feminist thought and praxis must necessarily be internationalist in its solidarities, alliances and outlook.
Black feminism as it emerged in the early twentieth century in the United States was not, of course, a homogenous enterprise. Differences among activists and intellectuals formed along lines of ideology and class, as Black Communist women ‘modified or rejected certain aspects of the politics of respectability because they were neither seeking legitimacy from whites for their institution building, nor were they women trying to reconstruct black images through proper etiquette or accomplished midwifery’.9 While it would take some decades for sexuality to make its way into Black left feminist discourse, it is clear that radical Black working-class women rejected the norms and ideals of white bourgeois feminine respectability and their middle-class sisters’ attempts to reform their behaviour.10 What is clear from this earlier period of radical Black feminism is that the brilliant and bold work of the likes of Angela Y. Davis, Barbara Ransby, June Jordan, Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective, just to name a few prominent Black feminists to emerge in the 1960s and ’70s, was most certainly situated in a lineage of Black left feminism and more specifically, Black feminist involvement in the Communist Party USA and internationalist, Third World socialist movements.11
Angela Y. Davis has often, and from early on, located her own political and scholarly work within this trajectory. For instance, in her autobiography, Davis recalls her vital connection to Claudia Jones, a militant anti-racist Communist activist. Born in Trinidad in 1915, Jones immigrated to the United States at an early age. Persecuted for her political activities, she was arrested and detained in prison no fewer than three times between 1948 and 1953; she was eventually convicted under the Smith Act and sentenced to a year in prison.12 When Jones was deported from the United States in 1955, she went to London, where she resided in exile until her death in 1964. During her time in London, she cofounded the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News, the West Indian Workers and Students’ Association, as well as the Carnival in West London. She was a trenchant critic of UK immigration policies and worked as part of an international solidarity movement for the end of apartheid in South Africa. Jones’s outlook was fundamentally feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and internationalist, as evident in her political activism, essays and poetry.13
Writing about the few books that were held in the prison library in New York where she was detained following months underground (which included ‘a book on the Chinese Revolution by Edgar Snow, the autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois and a book on communism written by an astonishingly objective little-known author’), Davis describes their ‘enigmatic presence’, and realisation that the pages of those books had likely been read by ‘Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones or one of the other Communist leaders who had been persecuted under the Smith Act during the McCarthy era’.14 While Davis writes about ‘feeling honoured to be following in the tradition of some of this country’s most outstanding heroines, Communist women leaders’, we find Davis’s words remarkable in another way: namely, in their articulation of a kind of connection and memory, a felt proximity provoked through the pages of a book and by the physical and emotional experience of confinement. As noted above, this connection, both imagined and real, is crucial for understanding the conditions under which revolutionary struggle, radical thought and praxis can and do emerge. While we use Davis’s words as an example of the vital need to recognise and remember such connections to our radical feminist lineages, this mode of remembering, recalling, of memory work, is a significant aspect of much critical race theory, from the work of Patricia J. Williams and Derrick Bell15 to the scholarship of Avery F. Gordon, whose book The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins finds company with other works that do not adhere to strict divisions and conventions of genre.
Among other shared concerns, US- and British-based Black feminisms both engage transgenerational and transcontinental perspectives. While we do not aim to provide a genealogy of the development of Black feminism in the UK,16 which, moreover, is not a homogenous group or school of feminism, we will note that it emerged in the wake of large-scale migration from the former British Empire in the postwar period. Confronting myriad forms of racism and sexism in the fields of employment and work, immigration law, healthcare, housing, education and social welfare, and of course, faced with endemic police violence, collective feminist struggles for justice arose in the crucible of decolonisation, anti-imperialism and resistance to state-based racism in the UK. The formation of a political identity of Blackness was based on shared experiences and political objectives among Asian, Afro- and Indo-Caribbean, and African descent.17 We want to explore the immense amounts of intellectual and emotional labour involved in the creation of such solidarities, a concrete history that serves, in our view, as a vital and exemplary instance of the kind of praxis required to deal with the current conjuncture of neoliberal, extractivist and militarised global capitalism.
If Black feminism as it emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States was internationalist in the trajectories that many women followed, Black feminism as it developed in the UK was diverse in its very composition, owing to the history of the British Empire. Women from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, in all their diasporic richness, found common ground as they struggled against a neo-imperialist and racist state formation in Britain. In the 1960s and ’70s, Black feminists in the UK were at the forefront of resistance to racist violence, both at the hands of the Far Right (who were encouraged by politicians such as Enoch Powell), the private and public sectors (in relation to unemployment and racist working conditions) and state racism (in relation to education, health services and social welfare policy). Some of the most poignant industrial action that took place during those decades saw women workers striking, after struggling for union recognition, over unfair and discriminatory working conditions at the Grunwick photo-processing factory, the Chix bubblegum factory in Slough, the Imperial Typewriters in Leicester and elsewhere.
The militancy of trade unionism, particularly among large groups of immigrant workers of colour, was deeply affected by Margaret Thatcher’s brutal assault on the miners and on industrial relations more generally. The compound effect of highly restrictive labour laws governing industrial action, coupled with a long history of trade unions’ failure to adequately represent the interests of racialised workers, can be seen in the Gate Gourmet strike of 2005. In that case, a workforce comprised of largely South Asian women workers arrived at their airport catering jobs one day to find employment agency workers in the workplace, in the midst of a long process of restructuring the company. Over the course of two days, over 670 workers would be fired, giving rise to weeks of strike action.18
Two male shop stewards of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), Pat Breslin and Mark Fisher, were sacked for organising a wildcat solidarity strike that saw British Airways baggage handlers stop work for two days, costing the airline between 30 and 40 million pounds. The Gate Gourmet workers, originally employed by British Airways until they contracted out their catering services to Gate Gourmet in the 1990s, were part of a South Asian (and largely Punjabi) community in Southall who have long ties as employees with British Airways and Heathrow Airport, and these baggage handlers, who were also TGWU members, were very upset by the treatment of their colleagues. Under labour legislation such solidarity actions are illegal, and the two TGWU stewards were fired for organising them. They were, however, eventually awarded very large compensatory settlement payments by TGWU and the airline, under conditions of confidentiality. The former shop stewards were ‘allegedly following union orders’19 (presumably, as they had been following union orders to take illegal action), and if they had successfully proven that, the ripple effects of liability for the union would have been potentially disastrous.20
The outcomes of the strike action by the Gate Gourmet workers left many of the women workers feeling betrayed by their union.21 The TGWU negotiated a settlement that enabled the company to achieve many of its desired objectives – such as the reinstatement of some of the striking workers, but on worse terms (less sick leave, less pay for overtime and other changes). Some workers took voluntary redundancy. But fifty-six of the women refused to accept voluntary redundancy or compensation and continued their struggle for several years. By 2009, all but a handful of workers had had their unfair dismissal claims rejected by the Reading Employment Tribunal.22 The strike is both a testament to the ongoing militancy of women of colour workers and a reflection of the particularly punitive consequences they face due to outsourcing, privatisation, and restrictive labour legislation.
In other employment sectors and institutions populated by relatively more privileged workers, such as the civil service, universities, or museums and galleries, sociologist Nirmal Puwar argues ‘we are witnessing an unflagging multicultural hunger within the drive for diversity’. ‘Alongside this shift’, she notes, ‘long-standing traditions seem to be alive and well, as the spiritual, authentic, exotic, religious, ceremonial, innocent and barbaric continue to be the dominant ways in which diverse bodies are received.’23 She shows, with great nuance, the complex and ambivalent status of the racialised body in spaces that have hitherto been closed to the presence of these ‘space invaders’. Our experiences in the workplace continue to be shaped by hyper-surveillance, rigid and reified categories of legitimate speech, and the steadfast grip of ‘somatic norms’ which render racialised bodies out of place vis-à-vis a universal subject who remains white and male.
As with today’s austerity policies and the cuts to councils and local governments that followed the 2008 financial crash, a disproportionate number of women and people of colour were affected by Thatcherite labour policies as they held jobs in sectors affected by budgetary cuts.24 And thus it is crucial to recognise, as Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel argue, the 2008 crisis intensified, rather than produced anew, the effects of a racialised social and economic order that has always operated to the disadvantage of women of colour workers.25 And while it is also imperative to recognise the vast differences in the conditions of work for working-class women of colour and middle-class professionals, the pressures of austerity and cuts to funding, along with the increasing precarity of work across practically all public sectors of employment, have certainly impacted even relatively privileged women of colour workers.
The concrete issues around which Black and anti-racist feminists organised from the 1960s onwards included housing, health, social welfare and immigration. The work done by organisations such as OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, founded in 1978) and Southall Black Sisters (founded in 1979), among many others26 would lay the groundwork for feminist resistance to austerity and discriminatory immigration policies that continue today (see, for instance, the work of Focus E15, or Sisters Uncut UK).
Of course, there were omissions, exclusions and difficulties in Black feminist movements in the UK. Sexuality was largely absent in the political positions and concerns they articulated. In a collective conversation titled ‘Becoming Visible: Black Lesbian Discussions’ published in the 1984 OWAAD issue of Feminist Review, four lesbian women (one of whom, Gail Lewis, features in this volume) discuss the intense difficulties and challenges they contended with in the process of coming out, both within Black feminist organisations such as OWAAD and in relation to family and community. Deeply entrenched homophobia and heterosexism, compounded by racist notions that white, liberal social and familial spaces were somehow more enlightened in relation to sexuality than Asian and Black communities, made coming out a very fraught process for Black lesbians.27
It was therefore a groundbreaking development when Black lesbian and queer feminists in the 1970s and ’80s managed to put sexuality on the agenda at major women’s conferences, including the OWAAD conference in 1983. In spite of such victories, as Roderick Ferguson reminds us in One Dimensional Queer, dominant queer histories have not ceased to fall prey to the erasure of their multiracial and coalitional character. Our interview in this volume with Gary Kinsman traces some of the ambiguities and contradictions of activism from the 1970s onwards that sought to bring together anti-racist, queer and anti-capitalist critique with resistance to militarism and many other forms of state violence. This early political work, and all of the labour it entailed, set the scene for the development and reception of a queer of colour critique. A queer of colour critique, as defined by Ferguson, seeks to place the figure who has been routinely marginalised in radical Western epistemologies – the queer of colour, the sex worker, the vagrant – as the central subject in our theoretical frameworks and political concerns. Methodologically, it means engaging ‘nonheteronormative racial formations as sites of ruptures, critiques, and alternatives’.28
This is especially pertinent for thinking through the task of cultivating critical, creative and oppositional positions in relation to contemporary nationalisms and global capital. Moreover, Ferguson argues that in reformulating culture and agency, and opposing nationalism and the state form, women of colour feminisms ‘helped to designate the imagination as a social practice under contemporary globalisation. In a moment in which national liberation movements and Western nation-states disfranchised women of colour and queer of colour subjects, culture, for those groups, became the obvious scene of alternate agency.’ Culture became the field from which to imaginatively work against the disfranchisements of nationalism and the debilities of global capital. 29 Many of the interviewees in this volume are poets, fiction writers or photographers, and have engaged other media (such as film) as part of their praxis, providing many rich examples of how cultural and artistic practices are central dimensions of radical thought.
Of course, another major difficulty with which Black feminists in both the UK and the United States have had to contend is the racism of mainstream or white feminist movements (whether liberal or socialist).30 Julia Sudbury, in her groundbreaking book ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation,31 utilises the term ‘womanist’ as a means of recognising how fraught the term ‘feminist’ was for some Black women activists in the 1990s. She writes:
Womanism is also symbolic of my accountability to a community of Black women activists for whom the term ‘feminism’ is associated with daily struggles against racist exclusion by white women’s organisations. The interviewee whose funding application for a Black women’s refuge had been undercut by the local [white] women’s refuge claiming to serve ‘all’ women. The organisation which had been allocated a white feminist project officer by the local authority only to discover that the latter was opposed to ‘Black separatism’ and consistently sought to undermine their work. The black women who have had to oppose white feminist calls for increased policing in primarily black neighbourhoods, in the name of ‘women’s safety’ … For many black women in 1990s Britain, ‘sisterhood’ with white feminists is a luxury which may be afforded at an abstract level, but when issues of funding and power are at stake, it would be naïve to assume that sisterly solidarity will determine white women’s actions.32
One may query how much has changed since the 1990s on this score. While the term ‘intersectionality’ rolls off the tongues of many white feminists with quotidian frequency, it is clear that the lack of meaningful solidarity between women of colour and white feminists has not been ameliorated.
Oftentimes, Marxist and socialist (feminist) events and spaces, even when well intentioned, involve groups of people who are poorly informed about histories of colonialism and issues of race, and, one surmises, deeply attached to their refusal to think through the ways race is central to capitalist social and political orders. Thus, for many women of colour feminists, to engage with them is an exercise in frustration, at best – and at worst, requires subjecting oneself to a kind of invisibility and erasure. While this project itself was initially motivated by a justifiable sense of plaintiveness, and fatigue, at the continual marginalisation of left, anti-racist feminist thought and praxis, that sense of complaint was fairly quickly overwhelmed by a satisfying sense of the peripherality of ‘white feminism’ to the thought and praxis explored in this volume.
Nonetheless, it remains crucial to note that the institutionalised power of white feminism remains an obstacle for those of us who centre race and colonialism in our work; many of us have experienced the nonrecognition of white feminist colleagues (particularly in academia) who refuse to even acknowledge our work as ‘feminist’.33 Recently, several feminist scholars have critiqued the way the discourse of intersectionality has been appropriated by white feminists without sufficiently acknowledging or engaging with the feminists of colour who developed the concept.34 In a not dissimilar fashion, we have also seen socialist feminists criticising the concept of intersectionality without taking the time, we would argue, to adequately study the diverse body of scholarship that evolved the concept and its associated forms of praxis, prematurely dismissing it as inadequate to challenge contemporary forms of capitalism.
Methodologies: Historical Materialism and its Feminist Instantiations
If there is a common thread among the feminists interviewed in this book, it is their long-standing and critical engagement with historical materialism. What is historical materialism? At its most elemental level, it can be understood as a form of critique that situates itself within social relations.35 Marx understood ‘social relations of production’ to be the totality of relationships that encompass our personal and family lives, our interactions in the workplace and with the state, and our associations with communities or groups of people.
Capitalist social relations, the form that has come to dominate the globe, have always been differentiated by forces generated by colonial history, imperialism, war economies, and the patriarchal, racial and heteronormative nature of those formations. More than ‘stretch’ Marxism to account for colonialism (as Frantz Fanon did), feminists have had to remake Marxist categories of analysis to more fully account for the centrality of race, gender and sexuality to capitalist social relations.
These critical feminist engagements with historical materialism have taken many different forms.36 One is the trajectory of work that emerged in the 1970s in Italy, shaped by the defeat of fascism and the aftermath of the Second World War. Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati and others undertook highly significant critical interventions into Marxist theory and practice by emphasising the centrality of women’s reproductive labour in the home to the reproduction of capitalist social relations – a massive absence in Marx’s and Marxist labour theories of value. Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (1981) embodies a form of immanent critique whereby the value of women’s labour is thought of in terms of Marx’s critique of capitalist social relations. Here, she shows how women’s housework is a process of value creation by demonstrating that it is a process of commodity production: it is only through the socially reproductive labour of women in the home that the individual male worker is able to reproduce himself as labour power, as use value for value.37 Fortunati’s work shows how women’s housework is fundamentally productive labour, in Marx’s own definitions of the term.
The difficult question of how to value such productive labour, given the temporality, duration and nature of reproductive housework – it is, after all, work that never ends – is one Fortunati took up at a theoretical level. At a political level, it was taken up by the Wages for Housework (WFH) campaign, also rooted in the idea that housework is productive, value-producing labour which both capital and the state rely upon to function. In terms of its ‘methodology’, the WFH campaign reflected a form of praxis influenced by a diverse range of critical engagements with Marxist thought and political work. The campaign occupied a very ambivalent, if not divisive, place in feminist organising. One of the critiques pertinent to our concerns in this volume is the early one rendered by Angela Y. Davis, namely, that WFH utterly failed to account for the histories of Black women’s servitude and domestic labour, both unpaid and paid.38 The same could be said for Fortunati’s work, published a decade after Davis’s critical work on Black women and reproductive labour.
In Italy during the 1960s and ’70s, the work of Mario Tronti and the concept of operaismo (workerism) rose to some prominence in Europe.39 In particular, the idea of the ‘social factory’ – which articulated the view that capitalist forms of production seen in the factory would increasingly extend outwards, eventually encompassing all of social life – was quite influential on the work of Silvia Federici and other Italian feminists. However, Federici’s intellectual work and political experiences took her in radically different directions from operaismo; as explored in her interview in this volume, her time in both the United States and Nigeria shaped her understanding of reproductive labour to account for global political economies of labour, and histories of colonisation and racism. Federici’s method was influenced in part by the work of Tronti, particularly with regard to the idea that radical change always begins with workers themselves rather than exogenous forces.40 This remains embedded in her theorisation of socially reproductive labour, which does not begin with the abstract but is resolutely grounded in the productive work and activities of people who are usually invisibilised within mainstream political economic work. Despite the critiques of WFH, the crucial need to recognise and value the productive work of women in the home (both paid and unpaid) remains an essential part of efforts to abolish racialised patriarchy, and gender as we currently know it.
If it is not clear by now, let us emphasise that the methods developed by the feminists interviewed in this volume prioritise as their points of departure the grounded, place- and site-specific, phenomenal (i.e., experiential), and embodied, lived realities of differently situated subjects. For instance, the ‘diasporic’ method41 developed by Avtar Brah emphasises the spatial dimension of the performance and embodiment of racial identification and subjectivisation, gender relations, and class-consciousness in particular sites of migration and movement. The spatial politics of migration and dislocation typify Brah’s method and find points of contact with other leading critical race feminists, such as Sherene Razack, who have established new pathways of thought in relation to the spatial politics of race, gender, class and colonialism.42
The spatial dynamics of capitalism – the mainstay of critical Marxist geography – have, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘everything to do with human-environment interactions … the social, and the scale and organisation of capitalist and anti-capitalist space’.43 Gilmore, part of a group of radical Black geographers, has expanded the bounds of her discipline in conjunction with decades of activism for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. In Golden Gulag, she analyses the spatial and financial abstractions that determined where and how prison expansion was planned in California in the 1990s; moreover, she brings these geographies into direct confrontation with the lived realities on the ground – the specific places, people and communities that bear the material consequences of the violence of abstraction. Her work is an object lesson in how to think about scale, and how to investigate the mutually constituting relationships between domestic spheres, local government, the state, and the global economy. Her work reflects an acute sensitivity to recent and longer histories of struggle against racial capitalism that are present in the urban and rural, and significantly, challenges this divide itself.
To begin with actual, existing social relations and not with the abstract requires an immense amount of intellectual labour. Our interviews with Himani Bannerji, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware explicitly illuminate how in the context of feminist organising and political work in the 1970s and ’80s, one was expected to do the work of informing oneself about a range of issues of geopolitical import that lay outside their own immediate range of concerns. This was what building solidarity required: taking the time to do the research, to read, engage with, listen to people whose experiences and conditions of work and life were sometimes radically different to your own. This was the essence of creating shared and common political ground for collective action. While debates continue to rage about the perils of appropriation – of ‘speaking for’ others from a position of privileged ignorance, of adopting a lazy cultural relativism in approaching the conditions of people who live according to norms, cultural practices and philosophies that are not liberal, Western or secular44 – these earlier feminist commitments to the expansion of one’s understanding of people in other parts of the world, or in other parts of the city one inhabits, for that matter, were undertaken with the aim of building solidarity.
Throughout, there was an emphasis on the challenges of building such solidarity within the existing hierarchies that characterise the differences between feminists. As Brah writes:
Is this not one of the most difficult things to do, positioned, as each and every one of us is, in some relationship of hierarchy, authority or dominance to another? How do we construct, both individually and collectively, non-logocentric political practices – theoretical paradigms, political activism, as well as modes of relating to another person – which galvanize identification, empathy and affinity, and not only ‘solidarity’?45
Brah breaks open the notion of political solidarity to include terms that could loosely be described as affective – empathy and affinity. Her provocation also posits the individual and collective character of the challenges that critical race scholars and Third World, Marxist feminists have been working through for decades: the challenges of creating political spaces and intellectual frames of analysis that account for the complex reality of power relations between and among women. The desire to construct non-logocentric political practices also reflects the desire to refuse (or at least, to make visible) symbolic and linguistic orders that constrain our political imaginaries, and the very real, concrete ways in which we make sense of the world around us.
Asserting voice and claiming space
The authors of the pathbreaking Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (first published in 1985) note, in their introduction, that what matters to them is the way Black women have challenged [their] state of triple bondage:
Black women in Britain today are faced with few positive self-images and little knowledge of our true potential. If we are to gain anything from our history and from our lives in this country which can be of practical use to us today, we must take stock of our experiences, assess our responses – and learn from them. This will be done by listening to the voices of the mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts who established our presence here. And by listening to our own voices.46
They proceed to frame their intervention into contemporary issues of racism, sexism and class exploitation with a history of labour relations, resistance and revolt. The history of slavery and indentureship, throughout the Caribbean in particular, and the modes of resistance employed by the colonised inform their understanding of contemporary Black politics in the UK. As they note, writing in relation to ‘the massive political upheaval throughout the 1930s’, in Jamaica, Saint Kitts, Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean, the militant strike actions of workers – ‘dockers, sugar workers, shop girls, street cleaners, domestic workers and casual labourers’ – would serve the workers well later on in England.47 The authors put the agency of the enslaved, and in the aftermath of slavery, the colonised, populations of the Caribbean at the forefront of their understanding of the prehistory of the large-scale migration to the UK after World War II. And, following that, they trace the more recent modes of resistance into present struggles in the UK in relation to employment and labour, health services and housing. They show how discriminatory practices are historically embedded in the state apparatus. The book is exemplary in the method it employs: it is historically grounded from the perspective of Afro-Caribbean women, women who are workers, mothers, carers and a part of transcontinental and intergenerational communities.
Among Black feminist organisers, an emphasis on finding and asserting the political voice of their communities was certainly prominent throughout the 1980s and ’90s. But this was not primarily rooted in a concern about impacting white-dominated spaces and discourses in pursuit of inclusion; it was a reflection of a demand to be seen and heard – both historically and in the present – as active agents and makers of their own lives.48 They were not merely the victims or objects of racist state practices who needed to assert their voices in order to be ‘heard’ and ‘listened to’ in an ordinary sense. The demand ‘to be listened to rather than examined or spoken for’ was about creating a space where Black women could collectively ‘define their own realities’, based on their experiences as active agents of change.49 These demands were never about some kind of liberal move towards reconciliation or mutual understanding, to be reached through dialogue with white people; rather, these were powerful assertions of autonomy.
It is a common misunderstanding that Black feminism stressed racial identity and fetishised difference to the detriment of structural change. This reading ignores the very nuanced writing and rich organising undertaken which insisted on grounding analysis in the lived reality of racism within and against capitalist social relations – studying how class itself is raced, while race is historically constructed and utilised to differentially insert communities into the economic system. The anti-racist critique was not a one-dimensional grievance around the inclusion of race, but an analytical intervention that detailed how a lack of attention to race produces a flawed analysis that does not adequately expose or help us to challenge the realities of capitalist exploitation. The interviewees in this book also point to the importance of rejecting culturalist essentialism and the commodification of racial identity into its most visible and ‘colourful’ aspects. In the Canadian context, Himani Bannerji has written powerfully about the co-optation of anti-racist organising into a liberal multiculturalism which reified static notions of culture and promoted diversity at the expense of social justice and economic equality. There are indeed stark differences between liberal notions of cultural diversity and those initially articulated by anti-racist feminisms, which ultimately aim to challenge institutionalised racism and dismantle structural oppression.
This is not to say that the diverse bodies of critical race feminist work have not been subjected to critiques, particularly with a notable shift in the 1990s to more identity-driven and individualistic tendencies. Julia Sudbury, for instance, charts a movement away from the emphasis on collective organising by Black women and towards engagements with race and racism that seemed to reify racial identity in ways that worked against collective action across differences:
By the 1990s black women intellectuals who were at the forefront of national black women’s organising in the 1980s were beginning to feel a sense of disillusionment with the methods of that very movement. Experience of the more excessive and essentialising forms of identity politics, ‘guilt tripping’ of white women, aggressive comparisons of oppression in a hierarchy of ‘isms’ all led to a questioning of the assumptions underlying black women’s organisations.50
It is notable, therefore, that reissues of texts foundational to Black and critical race feminisms have become increasingly prevalent, and that many of these centre questions of solidarity and collective action. Importantly, their modes of praxis (discussed in more detail below) are rooted in critiques of individual leadership (a structure that often glorifies male leaders). The focus is on democratic grassroots organising that empowers every member to be able to do their part in movements, building from the ground up. As Angela Y. Davis notes in this volume, it has been heartening to see the reemergence, in the Black Lives Matter movement and contemporary Indigenous resistance to the intensification of dispossession through resource extraction, different models of collective organising that are not focused on the singular charisma of an individual (male) leader and that are coalitional in nature.
Indigenous Methodologies
It would be impossible to make generalisations about Indigenous methodologies of research, teaching and political activism, whether in the context of the Americas, Asia or more globally. We wish to briefly introduce two dimensions of Indigenous feminist methodologies emanating from Indigenous scholaractivists in what is now known as North America, and more specifically, Canada. The first is the notion of what some Indigenous scholars have termed ‘land-based pedagogy’.51 The second is the importance of language in recovering and centring Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies.
Indigenous feminists – including Patricia Monture-Angus, Lee Maracle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Audra Simpson, Bonita Lawrence, Theresa Nahanee, Emma LaRocque and, in Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, among many others – have emphasised the centrality of their relationship to land to the ontologies and epistemologies, and the survival, of First Nations. Indeed, land is their basis for learning about law, kinship, economy and social relations. In the words of Glen Coulthard, First Nations territories have ‘associated forms of knowledge’;52 reflecting upon this idea, it becomes clear that colonisation is not only about settler states’ desire for the land itself as a resource (or territory, in the sense of the Westphalian state form), but that the colonial dispossession of Indigenous land was and remains central to attempts to destroy First Nations communities. The genocidal intentions of settler states lie not only in the wide range of measures used to diminish, contain and destroy First Nations people, but in the suppression of Indigenous knowledge, ontologies and ways of living that are carried through and in the land. We understand this way of knowing to be radically relational, not simply with other human beings but with nonhuman life and land. This is a radically embodied practice of knowledge formation, for one needs to be on the land to learn.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a crucial point about children and parenting. In the Dechinta Bush University, which takes place on land of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, children are welcome and included in the programme. This goes beyond recognition of the socially reproductive labour that many Indigenous and other parents (mainly women) undertake: here, ‘children are co-learners and co-instructors’.53 The collective nature of parenting at Dechinta Bush University, as in many non-Anglo and non-bourgeois communities, is an antidote to the poverty of the nuclear family form and also creates a richer and more dynamic learning environment for all present. There is a contact point here with the direction taken by scholar-activists, such as Federici, who see the health and well-being of children and the elderly as key aspects of the challenges of social reproduction under capitalism.
As mentioned above, an emphasis on learning, reviving and using Indigenous languages has long been central to anti- and de-colonial movements, and this remains the case in contemporary First Nations scholarship and activism. Political scientist Noenoe K. Silva offers exemplary research on how the use of native language – in her case, Hawai’ian – can challenge imperial historiographies of dispossession.54 Taking up long-standing critiques of the colonial archive, as formulated by Gayatri Spivak and others, Silva’s commitment to completely reframing the history of Indigenous Hawai’ian political formations and resistance to colonisation is subtended by a close reading and analysis of sources in Hawai’ian. It becomes clear in her scholarship that the work of making native agency visible in the historical record, the work of recentring Indigenous Hawai’ian worldviews with a view to supporting Indigenous sovereignty movements, is intimately connected to, perhaps even dependent upon, her excavation and use of political concepts in Hawai’ian.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1986 essay collection, Decolonising the Mind, written from the locus of postcolonial East Africa, begins with a reflection on the issues facing African writers at the time of independence. At the forefront of his concerns was the primary place of language in the enunciation of an anti-colonial politics, and in the continuation of the epistemic violence of colonisation into the postcolonial moment:
Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom … In my view language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner.55
We can consider, on the one hand, how the question of language was and remains central in its relation to culture and cultural practices – and intimately bound to the way we see the world, and our shared priorities about how to live. On the other hand, as African and Caribbean writers have long argued, it is also true that people have made the language of their former colonial masters their own, bending, reshaping and appropriating it in ways that produce new dialects and alternate lexicons pertinent to their particular locations and lifeways.
Whatever one’s position, it is clear that First Nations are engaged in a long-standing and continuous struggle to revive and use Indigenous languages as a part of a larger, global, anti-colonial struggle that has no clear end in sight.
Radical Imaginaries and Praxis
While there has been a general taming of the mainstream feminist movement, through its professionalisation and institutionalisation at UN conferences and within nongovernmental organisations, along with forms of glass ceiling feminism, a common thread among those interviewed in this book is a commitment to a transformative feminist praxis and collective action that aims for systemic and radical change. The term ‘praxis’ itself implies an organic interconnectedness of theory and practice in challenging ongoing inequalities and confronting histories of colonial and imperial domination. In this sense, radical knowledge production, the development of new methodologies and political activism are not in reality separable, and they do not exist as distinct categories.
Here, we understand the term ‘radical’ in the sense that Ella Baker, a central figure in the civil rights movement in the US who played a pivotal role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, uses it: understanding and resisting the root causes of economic, social and cultural oppression embedded in racial capitalism. The aim of such praxis is not simply to reform aspects of the current system, but to radically transform the totality of social relations through oppositional and coalitional politics. It is steeped in the long histories of Indigenous, Black, and Third World resistance to colonialism and imperialism, and radical imaginaries for a better world that were forged in relation to and dialogue with each other.
Ella Baker famously emphasised the importance of education to develop every individual’s leadership capacity, allowing every person to be a full participant in their own liberation rather than an observer waiting for orders from the top of hierarchical structures. Every social movement and/or campaign mentioned in the following interviews utilised a variety of strategies, tactics, research, alliances and modes of outreach and internal education. They produced knowledge, debated methods and made their fair share of mistakes, as well, while holding a deep belief in the ability of ordinary people to both understand and translate daily conditions into radical demands for change. Each experience deserves a book in its own right, to excavate the modes of knowledge production and community building that took place, and continue to take place, in its respective geographic and historical contexts. As social movements scholar Aziz Choudry notes, oftentimes, ‘given the academic emphasis on whether an action, campaign, or movement can be judged a “success”, the intellectual work that takes place in movements frequently goes unseen, as do the politics, processes, sites, and locations of knowledge production and learning in activist settings’.56 In light of this, we use the space that remains here to simply highlight a few common threads among the forms of praxis that are relevant to ongoing struggles.
The praxis emerging from collectives like the Combahee River Collective, the Brixton Black Women’s Group, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, and Southall Black Sisters focused on the complex reality of the lived experience of class oppression and gendered racism within and beyond the workplace. This pushed against some strands within left politics that saw radical action as taking place only at the so-called point of production, thus fetishising the industrial male worker. Their understanding of the totality of social relations as located within the body, home, community and workplace, in turn, opened up important avenues for organising in multiple sites. For example, in the UK context, Asian and Black women’s collectives were at the forefront of a number of long industrial struggles, and they also organised against racist anti-immigration campaigns such as the infamous virginity tests, while at the same time tackling issues of domestic violence and actively organising against fascist violence targeting their communities.
This multi-scalar organising was vital to building coalitions between Black and South Asian feminists – coalitions that worked to tackle state-sponsored racism and sexism while openly discussing how communities and individuals are differentially racialised. This required very patient and conscientious work to study how class, race and gender operate in specific historical conjunctures. The analytic link they drew between class and race helped to articulate an inclusive and militant Black political identity. As we have noted, there were tensions and contradictions in this form of coalitional politics – yet it remains an important moment that foregrounded political unity.
This political identification was also reflected in novel forms of organising. Specifically, cultural production took on a vital role, as discussed above. Our interlocutors, in the following pages, invoked the potent work of poets and authors like June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand, among many others, in helping to shape their politics, while powerfully naming racism as a lived reality. As Bannerji has put it elsewhere, ‘the greatest gain, was meeting with young Black women, whose experience and politics matched with mine, whose poetry along with mine named our world’.57 Theatre, music, poetry, poster art and spaces of leisure, as well, helped to create a sense of common struggle and community, but also to address challenging subjects. For example, in her interview, Brah explains the importance of community theatre productions in tackling taboo topics like domestic violence.
There are important lessons to draw from this mode of organising, whereby campaigns were orchestrated not from above but in collaboration, utilising varied repertoires of oppositional practices while continuously reassessing the political situation, allowing for shifts in tactics and multiple entry points for campaigners, as well as room for mistakes. As Brah puts it, ‘we must take politically thought-through positions. Because I don’t think we can have blueprints for all situations’ (49). Thus, organising can develop with sensitivity to particular contexts, foregrounding community voices and needs. The prison abolition organisation Critical Resistance is a good example of a formation that has incorporated important aspects of this praxis, ensuring a multiplicity of tactics. Apart from more attention-grabbing legal cases against government departments, the group also produces a variety of media for outreach and builds grassroots coalitions whose aim is to stop prisons from being built in the first place.58 Some of the most crucial work is mundane and hidden from public view – from setting up regular meeting times and places to ensuring continuity and access to the organising space.
Finally, a critical aspect of the praxis we are discussing is its internationalist orientation, and the struggle to build feminisms that stretch across national borders and mobilise against multiple imperial interventions. As noted above, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism are foundational to Black, Indigenous and postcolonial feminism(s), and an internationalist stance continues to inflect their organising. Historically, its influence is evident in the profusion of statements and practical support for international solidarity campaigns against militarism and military occupations, including the anti-apartheid movement, solidarity with Palestine, and anti-imperialist opposition in Central America and Southern Africa. In more recent times, this has included a feminist response to the more overt racialisation of Arabs and Muslims under the guise of the War on Terror. The opposition to direct regional military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, long-term support for the state of Israel, and the internationalisation of racialised surveillance practices aimed at Arabs and Muslims have generated a rich body of feminist literature from within North Africa, West Asia, Europe and North America.59 In Europe and North America, anti-racist feminists have advanced an anti-imperialist analysis and worked tirelessly to build multiracial anti-war coalitions and, especially, to add Palestine to the agenda of the progressive feminist movement. They have argued for a feminist praxis that centres support for anti-colonial struggles and understands solidarity with Palestine as a feminist issue.60 More recently, this has included advancing the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which in turn has galvanised discussions within the feminist movement. As Palestinian scholar-activist Rabab Abdulhadi has asserted however, this work was underpinned by much-longer-standing solidarities, built through decades of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist organising in different contexts.61 In other words, there is nothing spontaneous about solidarity; it is historically rooted and comes about through consistent dialogue, learning/unlearning, and joint struggle.
It is common to present the contemporary moment as one of multiple crises and ongoing emergencies; as Lauren Berlant puts it, ‘politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure.’62 If we are to face this ‘infrastructural failure’, the reimagining and revitalisation of anti-capitalist and anti-racist feminist politics is crucial. It is no coincidence, then, that we are seeing social movements take on multiple issues and make the links between political, economic, environmental and social demands. Various movements, from Black Lives Matter, Idle No More and the Women’s Marches to the teachers’ strikes, the square occupations across southern Europe and the Arab uprisings, have brought with them critical questions about forms of organising and sustainability, as well as a growing interest in radical anti-colonial and anti-imperialist feminisms. This surge in interest has not been based on abstract theory but has originated overwhelmingly with people in movements who are interested in learning from past resistance.
As we confront the impending climate catastrophe, which is becoming more widely understood among different layers of the population, this broader movement desperately needs to centre feminist anti-racism in its analysis.63 As many anti-racist activists have pointed out, ignoring the fact that the climate emergency is racialised leads to very troubling conclusions, steeped in neocolonial formulations. With only 10 per cent of the world’s population responsible for 50 per cent of all global emissions,64 the class and racial hierarchies of the climate crisis are unmistakable, as well as the inequalities between the global North and South, or what feminist geographer Doreen Massey identified as the ‘power geographies’ of globalisation. From this perspective, there is urgent need to consider the interconnections of struggle and to link campaigns for environmental, economic and racial justice, rather than operate within self-constructed silos. The revolutionary feminisms explored in this volume have the potential to help us tackle the root causes of the climate crisis – how resources are used and distributed, and to what ends, within an economic system based on extractivism, militarism and the drive for profit. Taking this critical approach would necessarily include an analysis of the social sorting process codified in immigration policy, whereby those fleeing the impacts of climate change, war, poverty and gender violence are deemed a threat to be contained, while capital moves freely and so-called golden visas allow for the purchase and protection of citizenship.65
As anyone who has spent time in organising spaces knows well, collectively (re)imagining a process as all-encompassing as climate change is easier said than done, especially in such a fragmented landscape of resistance and given the hyper-atomisation of individuals within neoliberalism. From the intensely classed and racialised spaces we inhabit, to the decimation and privatisation of public services, finding the grounds to think and act collectively is challenging. Yet, from within this very material and political fragmentation there have emerged inspiring acts of resistance that we can build upon. The challenge, in part, is how to bring these often-disparate campaigns together and how to sustain them for the long term. Here, it is useful to draw from the lessons of political resistance emanating from earlier moments in time – not because they entail fully formulated programmes or answers, but because we navigate a collective repertoire of struggle; its lessons – be they positive, negative, difficult or, indeed, painful – are crucial if we are to make headway towards (re)building what sociologist Alan Sears has termed ‘infrastructures of dissent’.
An infrastructure of dissent, Sears writes, is ‘the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilising together’. He stresses the importance of the role of theatres, bookstores, choirs, education and sports as integral to movements, rather than external elements. This view of the totality of political and cultural mobilisation is one which today’s social movements are working hard to recapture and revitalise. If they are to succeed, it will be by realising a radical political imaginary which centres the thought of anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, queer liberation, Indigenous and anti-colonial movements.
References
Abdulhadi, Rabab, Nadine Naber, and Evelyn al-Sultany, eds., Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011.
AFP. ‘World’s Richest 10% Produce Half of Global Carbon Emissions, Says Oxfam’. Guardian, 2 December 2015. theguardian.com.
American Studies Association Conference 2014. ‘Black Radicalism, Insurgency in Israel/Palestine and the Idea of Solidarity’. youtube.com/watch?v=-WI5ePHl63Go&frags=pl%2Cwn.
Bannerji, Himani. Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995.
Bell, Derrick. And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Berlant, Lauren. ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34:3 (2016), 393–419.
Bhandar, Brenna. ‘Some Reflections on BDS and Feminist Political Solidarity’. feminists@law 4:1 (2014), 1–14.
Bilge, Sirma. ‘Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies’. Du Bois Review 10:2 (2013), 405–24.
Brah, Avtar. ‘The Scent of Memory: Strangers, Our Own, and Others’. Feminist Review 61:1 (1999), 4–26.
Braz, Rose, Bo Brown, Craig Gilmore et al. ‘The History of Critical Resistance’. Social Justice 27:3 (2000), 6–10.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Bryan, Beverley, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe. Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. London: Virago Press, 1985. Reprint, London and New York: Verso, 2018.
Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Butler, Judith. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Butler, Judith. The Force of Non-Violence: the Ethical in the Political. London: Verso: 2020
Carmen, Gail, Shaila et al. ‘Becoming Visible: Black Lesbian Discussions’. Feminist Review 17 (July 1984), 53–72.
Choudry, Aziz. Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.
Collins, Patricia Hill. ‘Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought’. Social Problems 33:6 (Autumn 1986), S14–S32.
Davis, Angela Y. ‘The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective’. In Women, Race and Class, edited by Angela Y. Davis, 222–45. London: Women’s Press, 1981.
Davies, Carole Boyce, ed. Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011.
Emejulu, Akwugo, and Leah Bassel. ‘Women of Colour’s Anti-Austerity Activism: They Cut, We Bleed’. In The Violence of Austerity, edited by Vickie Cooper and David Whyte, 117–22. London: Pluto Press, 2017.
Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Colour Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Fortunati, Leopoldina. The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Trans. Hilary Creek. New York: Autonomedia, 1995.
Gore, David F., Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodart, eds. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Hencke, David. ‘£600,000 for Shop Stewards Fired over Gate Gourmet Strike’. Guardian, 17 September 2006. theguardian.com.
hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry & Holt, 1995.
Kapoor, Nisha. Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st-Century State Extremism. London and New York: Verso, 2018.
Lloyd, David. ‘It is our belief that Palestine is a Feminist Issue’. feminists@law 4:1 (2014).
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Mahmood, Saba. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Maracle, Lee. Memory Serves: Oratories. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2016.
McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Mirza, Heidi Safia. Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1997.
Naber, Nadine. ‘A Call for Consistency: Palestinian Resistance and Radical US Women of Color’. In Color of Violence, The Incite! Anthology, 74–9. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
———. Arab America: Gender Politics and Activism. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
Nada, Elia. ‘Justice Is Indivisible: Palestine as a Feminist Issue’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 6:1 (2017), 45–63.
Nash, Jennifer C. Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Pimlott, Daniel, and Suneal Housley. ‘FT Briefing: Gate Gourmet Dispute’. Financial Times, 23 August 2005. ft.com.
Puwar, Nirmal. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. London: Berg Publishers, 2004.
Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Razack, Sherene. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in the Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
———. ‘Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George’. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15:2 (August 2000), 91–130.
———, ed. Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2002.
Ritskes, Eric. ‘Leanne Simpson and Glen Coulthard on Dechinta Bush University, Indigenous Land-Based Education and Embodied Resurgence’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society (2014).
Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso, 2007.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. ‘Palestinian Feminist Critique and the Physics of Power: Feminists Between Thought and Practice’. feminists@law 4:1 (2014).
Sharif, Rana. ‘Bodies, Buses and Permits: Palestinians Navigating Care’. feminists@law 4:1 (2014).
Sherwood, Marika, ed. Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999.
Souvlis, George, and Ankica Čakardić. ‘Feminism and Social Reproduction: An Interview with Silvia Federici’. Salvage [2017]. salvage.zone.
Striking Women. ‘The Gate Gourmet Dispute’. striking-women.org.
Sudbury, Julia. ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation. London: Routledge, 1998.
Swaby, Nydia. ‘Disparate in Voice, Sympathetic in Direction: Gendered Political Blackness and the Politics of Solidarity’. Feminist Review 108 (2014), 11–25.
Tabar, Linda, and Chandni Desai. ‘Decolonization Is a Global Project: From Palestine to the Americas’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 6:1 (2017), i–xix.
Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: East African Educational Publishers, 1986.
Tronti, Mario. Workers and Capital. Translated by David Broder. London and New York: Verso, 2019.
University of Leeds. ‘Gate Gourmet – Chronology of Events’. University of Leeds official website, leeds.ac.uk.
Varma, Rashmi. ‘Anti-Imperialism’. In The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory, edited by Robin Truth Goodman. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Ware, Vron, and Les Back. Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Wildcat, Matthew, Mandee McDonald, Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox et al. ‘Learning from the Land: Indigenous Land-Based Pedagogy and Decolonization’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 3:3 (2014), i–xv.
Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
