part of efforts to abolish racialised patriarchy, and gender as we currently know it.
If it is not clear by now, let us emphasise that the methods developed by the feminists interviewed in this volume prioritise as their points of departure the grounded, place- and site-specific, phenomenal (i.e., experiential), and embodied, lived realities of differently situated subjects. For instance, the ‘diasporic’ method41 developed by Avtar Brah emphasises the spatial dimension of the performance and embodiment of racial identification and subjectivisation, gender relations, and class-consciousness in particular sites of migration and movement. The spatial politics of migration and dislocation typify Brah’s method and find points of contact with other leading critical race feminists, such as Sherene Razack, who have established new pathways of thought in relation to the spatial politics of race, gender, class and colonialism.42
The spatial dynamics of capitalism – the mainstay of critical Marxist geography – have, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘everything to do with human-environment interactions … the social, and the scale and organisation of capitalist and anti-capitalist space’.43 Gilmore, part of a group of radical Black geographers, has expanded the bounds of her discipline in conjunction with decades of activism for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. In Golden Gulag, she analyses the spatial and financial abstractions that determined where and how prison expansion was planned in California in the 1990s; moreover, she brings these geographies into direct confrontation with the lived realities on the ground – the specific places, people and communities that bear the material consequences of the violence of abstraction. Her work is an object lesson in how to think about scale, and how to investigate the mutually constituting relationships between domestic spheres, local government, the state, and the global economy. Her work reflects an acute sensitivity to recent and longer histories of struggle against racial capitalism that are present in the urban and rural, and significantly, challenges this divide itself.
To begin with actual, existing social relations and not with the abstract requires an immense amount of intellectual labour. Our interviews with Himani Bannerji, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware explicitly illuminate how in the context of feminist organising and political work in the 1970s and ’80s, one was expected to do the work of informing oneself about a range of issues of geopolitical import that lay outside their own immediate range of concerns. This was what building solidarity required: taking the time to do the research, to read, engage with, listen to people whose experiences and conditions of work and life were sometimes radically different to your own. This was the essence of creating shared and common political ground for collective action. While debates continue to rage about the perils of appropriation – of ‘speaking for’ others from a position of privileged ignorance, of adopting a lazy cultural relativism in approaching the conditions of people who live according to norms, cultural practices and philosophies that are not liberal, Western or secular44 – these earlier feminist commitments to the expansion of one’s understanding of people in other parts of the world, or in other parts of the city one inhabits, for that matter, were undertaken with the aim of building solidarity.
Throughout, there was an emphasis on the challenges of building such solidarity within the existing hierarchies that characterise the differences between feminists. As Brah writes:
Is this not one of the most difficult things to do, positioned, as each and every one of us is, in some relationship of hierarchy, authority or dominance to another? How do we construct, both individually and collectively, non-logocentric political practices – theoretical paradigms, political activism, as well as modes of relating to another person – which galvanize identification, empathy and affinity, and not only ‘solidarity’?45
Brah breaks open the notion of political solidarity to include terms that could loosely be described as affective – empathy and affinity. Her provocation also posits the individual and collective character of the challenges that critical race scholars and Third World, Marxist feminists have been working through for decades: the challenges of creating political spaces and intellectual frames of analysis that account for the complex reality of power relations between and among women. The desire to construct non-logocentric political practices also reflects the desire to refuse (or at least, to make visible) symbolic and linguistic orders that constrain our political imaginaries, and the very real, concrete ways in which we make sense of the world around us.
Asserting voice and claiming space
The authors of the pathbreaking Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (first published in 1985) note, in their introduction, that what matters to them is the way Black women have challenged [their] state of triple bondage:
Black women in Britain today are faced with few positive self-images and little knowledge of our true potential. If we are to gain anything from our history and from our lives in this country which can be of practical use to us today, we must take stock of our experiences, assess our responses – and learn from them. This will be done by listening to the voices of the mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts who established our presence here. And by listening to our own voices.46
They proceed to frame their intervention into contemporary issues of racism, sexism and class exploitation with a history of labour relations, resistance and revolt. The history of slavery and indentureship, throughout the Caribbean in particular, and the modes of resistance employed by the colonised inform their understanding of contemporary Black politics in the UK. As they note, writing in relation to ‘the massive political upheaval throughout the 1930s’, in Jamaica, Saint Kitts, Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean, the militant strike actions of workers – ‘dockers, sugar workers, shop girls, street cleaners, domestic workers and casual labourers’ – would serve the workers well later on in England.47 The authors put the agency of the enslaved, and in the aftermath of slavery, the colonised, populations of the Caribbean at the forefront of their understanding of the prehistory of the large-scale migration to the UK after World War II. And, following that, they trace the more recent modes of resistance into present struggles in the UK in relation to employment and labour, health services and housing. They show how discriminatory practices are historically embedded in the state apparatus. The book is exemplary in the method it employs: it is historically grounded from the perspective of Afro-Caribbean women, women who are workers, mothers, carers and a part of transcontinental and intergenerational communities.
Among Black feminist organisers, an emphasis on finding and asserting the political voice of their communities was certainly prominent throughout the 1980s and ’90s. But this was not primarily rooted in a concern about impacting white-dominated spaces and discourses in pursuit of inclusion; it was a reflection of a demand to be seen and heard – both historically and in the present – as active agents and makers of their own lives.48 They were not merely the victims or objects of racist state practices who needed to assert their voices in order to be ‘heard’ and ‘listened to’ in an ordinary sense. The demand ‘to be listened to rather than examined or spoken for’ was about creating a space where Black women could collectively ‘define their own realities’, based on their experiences as active agents of change.49 These demands were never about some kind of liberal move towards reconciliation or mutual understanding, to be reached through dialogue with white people; rather, these were powerful assertions of autonomy.
It is a common misunderstanding that Black feminism stressed racial identity and fetishised difference to the detriment of structural change. This reading ignores the very nuanced writing and rich organising undertaken which insisted on grounding analysis in the lived reality of racism within and against capitalist social relations – studying how class itself is raced, while race is historically constructed and utilised to differentially insert communities into the economic system. The anti-racist critique was not a one-dimensional grievance around the inclusion of race, but an analytical intervention that detailed how a lack of attention to race produces a flawed analysis that does not adequately expose or help us to challenge the realities of capitalist exploitation.
