I didn’t get much support from my immediate professors in my early years. I turned to the work of scholars such as Stuart Hall for inspiration. And later, when I got to know him at the Open University, he was very supportive. In the early years, I was employed mainly on research projects. I wasn’t teaching, because they were temporary jobs. Then, of course, in the latter half, I decided I was going to leave academia, so I worked with the Greater London Council. That was a quite positive experience, I must say. I was in the Women’s Support Unit and I had quite a senior position there, and we took up all kinds of issues we discussed earlier, such as intersectionality. We didn’t use that term, but we were trying to involve different categories of women.
That was a positive experience, because we were doing new things. We were able to fund women’s projects, and through that we were involving the women’s groups themselves in telling us what they needed and what they wanted. So I enjoyed that period of my working life. Then I got this job at Birkbeck College. At the time, we weren’t part of Birkbeck. It was an extramural studies department within the University of London. I found this work quite creative, actually, because for the first time I was working with a group of women that I got on very well with. There was Jane Hoy, Mary Kennedy and Nell Keddie. We had a lot of autonomy in developing courses, and we could liaise with communities, find out what they wanted, and then we could offer those educational experiences. These were courses at the certificate and diploma levels. Later on, once we merged with Birkbeck College, we developed a Master’s programme as well. But initially it was the certificate- and diploma-level courses.
We developed childcare courses, we had courses around antisemitism, and we had courses about Palestine. We organised all kinds of courses that we felt were important to communities – Caribbean studies, Irish studies and Asian studies, under the rubric of ‘community studies’, as a generic term. So that was really very good, very creative and generative. Then John Solomos (a sociologist) and I developed the Master’s programme in race and ethnicity in the politics department. That was one of the first Master’s programmes on the subject.
BB When was that?
AB That would have been around 1988, I think. So that too was a creative part of my experience, I must say. And it also meant we could include our own imprint. We developed a lesbian studies programme in the extramural studies department, which, again, might have been one of the first ones in Britain at the time. But on the other hand, my partner always says I was lucky that I was at extramural studies, that it might have been more difficult in other, more conventional departments. And he might be right about that. On the whole, I found academia quite difficult as a person of colour, although as I said, there were moments and stages when it was quite life-affirming as well. But it’s changed so much since I’ve left, I think; in the last four or five years, things have changed so much. Some of the courses we were developing then might not have the same purchase today. Things have changed a great deal. The neoliberal university is now a serious problem.
Selected Writings
Brah, Avtar. ‘“Race” and “Culture” in the Gendering of Labour Markets: South Asian Young Muslim Women and the Labour Market’. New Community 19:3 (1993), 441–58.
———. ‘Re-framing Europe: En-gendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe’. Feminist Review 45:1 (1993), 9–29.
———. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996).
———. ‘The Scent of Memory: Strangers, Our Own, and Others’. Feminist Review 61:1 (1999), 4–26.
———. ‘Global Mobilities, Local Predicaments: Globalization and the Critical Imagination’. Feminist Review 70:1 (2002), 30–45.
Brah, Avtar, and Ann Phoenix. ‘Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality’. Journal of International Women’s Studies 5:3 (2004), 75–86.
A psychotherapist and long-standing member of Brixton Black Women’s Group and a cofounder of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Gail Lewis has written extensively on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and gendered, racialised experience. She is a former faculty member of the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and has taught at the Open University and Lancaster University. According to Lewis, her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of Black feminist and anti-racist struggle and emerges from a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. Among her political and intellectual concerns, she notes, are the formation of and resistance to gendered and racialised social formation, including the lived experience of inequality within organisations, as well as bringing psychoanalytic and sociological understandings of subjectivity into creative dialogue in an effort to generate what she calls a ‘practice against the grain’.
Lewis has been a member of the editorial collectives of the European Journal of Women’s Studies and Feminist Review. She is the author of Expanding the Social Policy Imaginary (2000) and Citizenship: Personal Lives and Social Policy (2004), among other volumes, and has published articles in numerous journals, including Race & Class, Cultural Studies, Feminist Review and Feminist Theory.
BB/RZ Throughout much of your work, you explicitly draw on your own life experience as part of your theorisation of a problem. How do you articulate the relationship between one’s experiences in the world and one’s intellectual and political work? How do you describe this method as you’ve developed it in your work?
GL You see, I don’t really know the answer to that question. If I were to choose where to start this whole conversation, I would begin with something I said during analysis.
As I was explaining to my analyst, throughout my adult life, I’ve felt impelled to understand the world through lots of political and analytical frameworks – I’ve felt I really need to understand Marxism, imperialism and anti-imperialism, feminism, post-structuralism and all of these things, right across the board. But everything I’ve done to try and grasp this complexity, and every framework I’ve tried to think though – in the end, it’s all because I’ve been trying to understand my mum. So that’s why I don’t know how to begin. To say I’ve been trying to understand my mum means that I’ve been trying to understand what it means to be a gendered subject in a particular nation-state formation, through different times and in the context of transgressive cross-racial sex and yet to still inhabit whiteness at those moments when she felt intense despair, pressure, fear. What does that mean? How does one understand the structure of their household through lenses of racism, and watching, experiencing, an ebb and flow in which she moved nearer and farther away from whiteness when she’d also been, as mum was, positioned as a transgressive, bad girl?
In a way, that’s what I’ve been trying to understand: the dynamics of a working-class household of multiraciality, living in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and why my granddad – my white granddad – was committed to working-class politics, an absolute socialist, but racist as fuck, excuse me, when it came to his daughter and me. And how do you understand that? What did it mean? So, I suppose, I’ve slowly come to more understanding across a life course; that statement to my analyst came not too long ago, when I could reflect back on my life and what shaped it. But it wasn’t that I was aware of what I was trying to understand; it was generated by the possibilities and the pains of that kind of household formation.
It was possibilities, as well: the possibilities of what can happen when jazz is played, and how all that has a connection. I mean, what do I know about jazz as a musical form? Other than that it provided the
