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
