specific formations. Each diaspora has its own history, such that you can have diasporas which emerge out of slavery. Then there are diasporas which emerge out of labour migrations. There are diasporas which emerge out of what is happening at the moment around us, refugees coming out of wars, war-torn countries, out of poverty.
So in all those different notions of diaspora, history is critical, because not all diasporas are the same, so we have to look at the history behind each formation of the diaspora. This term ‘intersectional’ – actually, I didn’t come to intersectionality through the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw. I was thinking about the ways in which questions of race, gender, class or sexuality constantly interact. This was during the process of writing Cartographies of Diaspora (1996). And I used the term ‘intersectionality’ in Cartographies. I came across Crenshaw’s work later. In a sense, maybe I have a slightly different take on intersectionality. I’m told that some people think that intersectionality only applies to dominated groups; whereas I think that intersectionality is about power regimes and how they intersect, and how they position different groups differently and differentially in relation to each other. One has to look at the regimes of domination if we are to understand the ways the dominated live their lives. But we also have to look at how the dominant groups dominate. Intersectionality for me, first and foremost, is about embodiment. How do we embody social relations? And this is as much about the social, political and cultural as it is about the psychic. It’s about subjectivity and it’s also about identity. So I talk about intersections throughout Cartographies, but I’m talking about all these different levels of them. I talk about difference, which is related to intersectionality very closely, again as social relation, but also as subjectivity, as identity and as experience.
The key thing is that these different axes – class, race, gender, sexuality, disability and so on – intersect both in our physical bodies and the social body. So intersectionality operates both at the social level and at the level of the physical body and the psyche. I greatly respect the debates that came afterwards and have learnt a lot from them as well, but my own take on intersectionality may have been slightly different from the way it at times appears to have become valorised now.
BB/RZ What do you think its valorisation has been about?
AB Well, intersectionality as a concept and a political practice emerges out of discussions around the experience of Black American women and workingclass Black American women. And this work is really important. Yet, there are other discourses where talk about intersectionality has become a mantra now. In reality, intersectionality demands a lot of hard work – analytically, politically, in every way. It’s not just about mentioning three or four words, and saying ‘yes, I’m doing intersectionality’ – it’s really looking at grounded analysis of these different axes. We can’t always do all the axes at the same time anyway. But it needs a lot of hard work.
BB One of the effects of its valorisation has been that it has allowed, to some extent, the continued universalisation of particular women’s experiences. For instance, in a given article there may be a couple of paragraphs that acknowledge, ‘that this issue is different for women of colour or different for working-class women of colour’. In this cynical sense, it can almost be used as an insurance policy to guard against the criticism that one is not integrating analysis of race or class.
RZ Academically, that can be the case. But then there’s also activist movements where it has been very much owned by people of colour. You have the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, and the insistence of the activists in BLM that this movement will be intersectional. The hard work you’re speaking of is partly on the academic level, but it’s required in the social movements too. When you say ‘it’s hard work to do’, what does that mean for an activist who would be starting today? How do you think that would play out?
AB Well, I have to go back to my roots in Southall Black Sisters.
RZ That’s what I was hoping you would do.
AB That was hard work, when I look back on it. I was a member of the Southall Black Sisters at its inception in 1979. Then in 1982, I left London for a job in Leicester and then in Milton Keynes, so I moved away from SBS during its second phase. But I know, firstly, that it was hard work in terms of the things we’ve been talking about, the interconnections that we had to make between our histories – our imperial histories, colonial histories – to make sense of what was happening to us as Black women in postwar Britain, in eighties and nineties Britain. It was also hard work in terms of dealing with patriarchal issues in relation to men with whom we were working, around questions of racism, for example, or questions about socialism. That was not easy at all, you know; it was hard work to raise patriarchal issues. We would be having a political meeting about socialism or about racism. Then to raise issues of gender was seen as failing to show solidarity with brothers, so to speak.
We were planning an anti-racist and anti-fascist march from Bradford to London. The march didn’t happen in the end, but we were planning one. We had a meeting with men and women in Bradford to discuss what we would do. We brought up the question of issues to do with gender, and that didn’t go down very well with a number of the men – not all of them, but with some of the people who were there. There were many reasons why the march didn’t happen, but some of the men tended to blame us for bringing up questions of patriarchal relations as the reason for why the march did not happen. So there was, at that level, the struggle with men on the left. There was, of course, struggle within our own communities themselves, where, as in Britain as a whole, living out patriarchal relations was an everyday experience for women.
We had to develop strategies, in a way, where we could work with people so they would listen to us and not just dismiss us as these difficult young women who were just coming up with these newfound ideas. That was quite difficult. For example, we once staged a feminist version of Ramlila, a play based on the Hindu epic of Ramayana. Some people might think, ‘Why do a religious thing?’ And some feminists I’m sure would say, ‘Why would you do that?’ But here we were in Southall, and we wanted to invite women and men, mostly women came actually, but we wanted to critique Sita’s position as a woman, and we used the figure of a ‘jester’, who provided a humorous though pointed commentary on the proceedings. Here was a feminist stance presented through an idiom that was culturally familiar to those present. We did that. It was quite a successful event. The women could identify, because they knew what it was like when you lived the life of an ‘obedient wife’. But then we were coming up with different ideas about possible alternatives. Together, we could make sense of it.
It’s even more difficult now, I’m sure, with all the Islamophobia. I think you have to be able to work with people in a way where you can facilitate the emergence of a shared common project. You have to address the contradictory ‘common sense’ that we all live with, that Gramsci speaks of.7 Unless you do that, then you’re not going to make much headway with constructing new political agendas. To do that, you have to begin with where people are at, but not stay there, and not get sucked into that. But rather, to jointly develop new discourses and practices for the creation of new political horizons, a new common sense. Those were rather difficult things to do in relation to our communities, but also in relation to ourselves. We were Asian women, we were women of African descent.
There was once a political meeting called – not by us, but by another anti-racist group in Southall – in a hall belonging to a temple. Just as a venue, not for religious reasons. I know that some SBS members didn’t want to go there because it was in a hall on the premises of a temple, a religious place, when we were secular. So there were difficult debates and issues like that. But this is what I mean. There isn’t a hard and fast rule for how you would actually go about this work; you have to do hard work at the ground level, if you’re an activist. It’s quite hard work. It takes its toll on you psychologically, as well.
BB/RZ
