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
