where it was most strongly felt – that we didn’t want an education system which pays no attention to the histories of colonialism and imperialism, which pays no attention to cultural diversity, to the ways in which people from the former colonies were concentrated in certain geographical locations where there were high rates of unemployment and poor housing and poor social services. That we wanted a different kind of education system, or different kind of social policy that actually took into account the specific needs of different groups of people.
I think at that level it was a struggle, and it was relevant to argue for multicultural education. But then there was a debate between anti-racists and multiculturalists. That was because once multiculturalism started being practised in schools and elsewhere, it became obvious that sometimes the question of racism or class was not taken very seriously. Thus, multiculturalism came to be caricatured as being about ‘samosas, saris and steel drums’, or something like that.
So we started talking about anti-racism in education, as opposed to multicultural education. That debate went on for a decade or so. It has now gone away, because people started attacking multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is problematic if it does not address an anti-racist critique. But what do we have instead? Monoculturalism? No! We may not call it multiculturalism; people are using different terms, currently. Instead of ‘multiculturalism’, they’re trying to use the term ‘interculturalism’. Basically, they’re struggling with the same thing, which is, how do you address the hegemony of white British culture, even when we know that there is nothing called ‘white British culture’, in the singular, because British culture is heterogeneous.
But nonetheless, when people talk about the ‘British way of life’, or ‘British values’, which is a current discourse, they assume there is something British which is inherently different from the rest of the world, somehow unique, when often they’re talking about very universal values, really. So if we don’t have some kind of a politics and a discourse around cultural diversity, how do we contest the discourse of ‘British way of life’? In other words, you’re right that ‘multiculturalism’ as a term now is a problem, because it has been so discredited. But how do we deal with cultural diversity? I’m not sure what kind of term we can use, other than just ‘cultural diversity’. Or ‘interculturalism’ – to me that sounds quite similar to ‘multiculturalism’ anyway. Perhaps ‘anti-racist interculturalism’? And then there is that whole discourse about ‘integration’. That term is a big problem, which is connected with ‘multiculturalism’. ‘Integration’ meaning assimilation. That’s what they mean. I don’t want assimilation. I think we fought against assimilation.
So how do we construct a new term? I’m looking at you, as well. Can you think of something that can replace it, but without giving in to the assimilationists?
RZ Like you were saying, many of these things have to come out of practice. These formulations tend to come about through the struggle for something specific.
AB It’s true, it’s very true.
BB In a way, this is related to your emphasis on practice. In thinking about intersectionality, for instance, as an approach that can only have meaning in working it through both intellectually and politically. This notion is quite distinct from the idea of grasping certain identifications in a mode of strategic essentialism, which reflects a more tactical approach.
RZ Just to change course slightly – we very recently saw a film that you had directed as part of a project on the Darkmatter journal website.12 And it was stunningly beautiful.
AB I’m glad you liked it.
RZ It was remarkable, both as a historical record but also the method that you used. How did you decide to do that, methodologically?
AB Well, I was working at the Department of Extramural Studies at Birkbeck College. A large part of the courses we developed were in relation to the needs of the communities we were working with. We wanted to undertake a project in West London because I got some external funding to develop educational opportunities for people who had been out of work. We identified a range of needs and organised courses relevant to those needs. One of the things we thought we would do would be to work with older adults and look at the ways in which we could collate their life histories. Because we were interested in oral histories. We said that people are dying, literally, and our oral histories in this country are not being recorded.
We thought we would do a video project to document the lives of older people and their backgrounds, and how they had experienced life in Britain. But we also wanted to skill them; it’s very easy to make a film about people and interview them, but we wanted a participatory project in which older adults would learn the skills of making a film, and that’s what we did. We involved a video trainer, who actually taught older adults skills to make a video film. This was followed by the older adults making a film by themselves. A colleague and the trainer were present, but they were there to facilitate, not to direct. So that was all the work of the older adults, really.
RZ And did you feel the method changed the end product?
AB I think it did, yes. In some scenes, you find, for example, that they sit very formally. And in other shots they become quite spontaneous, especially at the end, where they start dancing. That’s where they really came into their own. But sometimes they were more formal, especially at the beginning, when each of them appears individually. Because traditionally, even when you had your photographs taken, you sat like that, that formal pose. I think it changed with time as the project progressed and, gradually, formality disappeared among the participants, and they loved it. They hadn’t had any opportunities like that to talk about themselves on film. What was very interesting was how they were very conscious about religious diversity among themselves. There were Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus among them. But they wanted to foreground a unity. We had nothing to do with that; that is what they decided. They talked about the partition of India, and they talked about how people tried to be unified, and how people used to live together in diasporas such as East Africa. So they were also trying to construct some kind of a solidarity among themselves, working across these differences.
BB/RZ Has cultural production been central in your activism and research?
AB That was the only film that we did, really. So in terms of cultural production, I haven’t really been involved in making videos or films, apart from this case. But culture itself, as a concept and as a practice, has been very central in my work. Even when I was doing my PhD, I was thinking about how to conceptualise culture in non-essentialist forms. That has always been a problem – well, not a problem, a challenge. It has been a challenge.
BB/RZ Going back to the question of the university: Can you tell us more specifically about your own experiences in the academy? How have you experienced the change in higher education from when you first started teaching to the period when you retired? It’s been a time of remarkable transformation in the higher education sector.
AB University life was challenging. I didn’t actually have my permanent job until 1985. In the early years after I finished my PhD, I couldn’t find a permanent job. I had a lot of temporary jobs, which come with their own problems. But politically it was a huge struggle, around knowledge production partly and these different ways of theorising. I was working around issues of race and ethnicity when I first started. In those days, you had discourses of ‘race relations’ and ‘ethnic relations’. People like John Rex, Michael Banton – these were the big professors at the time. It was quite hard to develop a critical and radical academic practice. I think everyone who was involved in this subject at the time would probably tell you that.
It
