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Women's Studies International Forum

Volume 51, July–August 2015, Pages 1-9
Women's Studies International Forum

“Harvesting our collective intelligence”: Black British feminism in post-race times

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2015.03.006Get rights and content

Synopsis

At the heart of the contingent and critical project of black British feminism is the postcolonial impulse to chart counter-narratives and memories of racialised and gendered domination. This paper takes up this challenge by exploring the struggles of a new generation of black British feminists, 30 years after the landmark publication of Feminist Review's special issue Many Voices One Chant and the edited collection Black British Feminism which followed. The paper explores the changing articulation of black British feminism at a time where foundational categories such as ‘blackness’ as a political construct continue to have purchase but where new forms of activism are more fleeting and contingent in response to the changing post-racial terrain.

Introduction

This paper considers black British feminism against the context of the publication, 30 years ago, of Feminist Review's special issue Many Voices One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (Amos et al., 1984). Interweaving my own autobiographical reflections with narratives of a new generation of black feminist thinkers and activists, this essay does not attempt a genealogy of black British feminism. Rather my aim is to trace the continuities as well as the emergence of new affiliations, entanglements and forms of activism under which the terms of black feminist engagements are being simultaneously reawakened and reconstituted. At the recent Goldsmith's Black Feminist workshops and seminars1 and the Cambridge conference, A Vindication of the Rights of Black Women,2 I was struck by the continued desire for the articulation of a body of scholarship recognised as ‘black British feminism’ and the need for a place to call ‘home’. At these events two generations of black feminists were elated at our coming together and the opportunity, as one young black woman declared, “to harvest our collective intelligence”.

While I have long been consumed by the passionate desire to celebrate black feminist scholarship and the critical social justice project it embodies, the vulnerability of this movement I cherish was driven home to me in no uncertain terms. I organised a national seminar Black Feminism and Postcolonial Paradigms (Mirza & Joseph, 2010). While it was welcomed by many, one email from a young black woman stood out, she declared, “Thank you for organising this; I thought black feminism was dead!” I had to ask myself the question, has black feminism as a movement become fragmented, atomised and cut adrift in these post-race/post-feminism neoliberal times? Is black feminism, as Suki Ali (2009:81) provocatively asks, “past its sell by date?”

To answer this question we have to address the double problematic of the inter-relations between post-race and post-feminist sensibilities and how they are framing black British feminism today. In post-race times it is argued that in contrast to the ‘colour line’ that defined the 20th century, the embodiment of ‘race’ through skin colour is no longer an impediment to educational and economic opportunities (Kapoor, Kalra, & James, 2013). The election of Barack Obama and evidence of a rising black middle class in the USA and post imperial Europe has been hailed as signalling the coming of age of the post-race era (Goldberg, 2013, Lentin, 2012). The pernicious discourse of ‘white hurt’ that accompanies the ‘multicultural backlash’ of the post-race discourse sees equality for people of colour as an unfair advantage rooted in political correctness — and that those who are ‘really discriminated’ against are the displaced white majority (Gilroy, 2012). Post-feminism, post-race's sisterly discursive turn is also similarly framed by a vengeful patriarchal disavowal of gender injustices. The high-visibility ‘have it all’ tropes of freedom and equality now attached to this generation of young women is taken as evidence that feminism as a movement is now irrelevant, and should, like a ‘bad memory’, just fade away (McRobbie, 2011). Hegemonic masculinity is skilfully re-secured as young women, recast as the ideal ‘docile subjects’, are interpellated through popular culture and discourses of success, choice and empowerment into a seductive new ‘sexual contract’ (McRobbie, 2007: Ringrose, 2012).

The argument now is that movements like black feminism – which appear to hold fast to the foundational categories of race, class, and gender – are no longer viable in neo-liberal post-equality western democratic societies (Mohanty, 2013). Given the destabilising effects of advanced free market capitalism, new technology, and hyper securitisation post 9/11, it is argued that we need new ways to theorize the border crossings of new and affective transnational gendered identities that go beyond static historically rooted epistemological formulations (Puar, 2007). If this is the case then why do women who are racialised still remain one of the most economic, social, and politically disadvantaged groups nationally and globally (Mohanty, 2003a, Nandi and Platt, 2010)? Furthermore, if we are ‘beyond gender and race’ then why are we witnessing a new generation of black and ethnicised women3 who are ‘coming to voice’ in no uncertain terms, especially through their use of social media? In the last decade ‘subaltern’ groups, like black feminists, are “harvesting their collective intelligence” in the virtual world using websites like Blackfeminist.org4 and the twitterfeed #solidarityisforwhitewomen to organise and express what being a black British feminist means today.

In this paper I take an autobiographical narrative interpretative approach, reflecting on the social media exchanges and academic gatherings I have encountered in the past 3 years (2011–2014).5 A reflexive and experiential positioning of the ‘self’ in theory is fundamental to a black feminist praxis and the autobiographical narrative method is a powerful tool as it draws on individual stories to illuminate the collective effects of discursive processes that construct our social and political worlds (Cosslett et al., 2000, Mirza, 2010). My aim, as the postcolonial feminist critic Gayatri Spivak (1988:297) councils, is to “plot a history” of black British feminism in post-race/post-feminist times, tracing continuities and speculating about future possibilities and opportunities from a personal perspective.

In her forceful exuberant opening speech at the conference, A Vindication of the Rights of Black Women, Pricilla Mensah (2013)6 – student at Cambridge – questions the racial inclusiveness of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 seminal feminist text. The challenge, she explains still remains, “… the pursuit of Black women to find their ‘own’, unbound by racist, sexist stereotypes” (sic). Mensah's fresh articulation of Sojourner Truth's 19th century black women's plea, “Ain't I a woman?” (hooks, 1981), highlights black feminism's genealogical concern with the dehumanising gendered racist construction of the ‘black woman’ across time and space (McKittrick, 2006). Situating the ‘story’ of black British feminism and how it is being re-made in the British national context requires an understanding that disrupts the sedimented chronology of first, second, third waves that is cemented into the canon of white feminist historiography. Clare Hemmings (2011) argues that as feminists we need to challenge our ‘linear generationalism’ in both how we tell the story of our nostalgic past (lamenting the loss of a politics now gone), but also in how we occupy the brutality of the present (where the past is abandoned as irrelevant to understanding the present). Being attentive to the political grammar of feminist storytelling is important if we are to interrupt the dominance of white feminist narratives of progress, loss, and return that situates black and lesbian feminism firmly in the second wave past (Hemmings, 2011). The political grammar of such linear narratives also seek to contain the ‘dangers’ of the black feminist intersectional challenge to white feminism in the third, and now fourth wave present (Clark Mane, 2012). As postcolonial feminists Alexander and Mohanty explain, to focus on our genealogies, legacies and futures does not suggest a frozen or embodied inheritance of domination and resistance,“… but a constant thinking and rethinking of history and historicity … which has women's autonomy and self-determination at its core” (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997:xvi).

What marks black British feminism out is not its riding of the uneven ‘waves’ of mainstream feminist phaseology, but the continuities marked by the constant flow of ‘life lines’ that are ‘thrown to’ successive generations to ensure our group survival in this life (Ahmed, 2013). One such ‘life line’ was Feminist Review's special issue on black British feminism. Thirty years ago, Many Voices One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (Amos et al., 1984) was a bold and strong dialogue about the critical scholarship and activism of a postcolonial generation of black British women united in their marginality from politics and white feminist theory.7 In their article Challenging Imperial Feminism, Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar exemplified the height of this critical time with their searing analysis of white feminism's ethnocentric subversion of the discourse around the family, sexuality and the peace movement (Amos & Parmar, 1984). Similarly Amina Mama in Black Women the State and Economic Crisis, mapped the clear-sighted, lucid project of the restructuring of the postcolonial British capitalist state where black migrant women were (and are) disproportionately employed in low paid, low status work (Mama, 1984). The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain (Bryan, Dadzie, & Scafe, 1985), which followed a year later marked our unique British activist canon.8 It charted the foundational grassroots struggles of black British women in OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent) whose call to Afro-Asian unity was a conscious political response to the racism inherent in the feminist, trade union and antiracist movement.

Black British Feminism (Mirza, 1997) embodied the 1990s feminist concerns with decentring identity and incorporating post-modern difference. The collection of writings opened up a moment of radical possibilities. Re-thinking African and Asian identity as fluid, complex and fragmented, the book incorporated the tensions inherent in ethnic, sexual, political, and class differences under the multiracial signifier ‘black’. The use of the term ‘black’ for black British feminists has been another ‘life-line’ that reaches back over 70 years- to the 1940s when it evolved as a conscious political act uniting African and Indian anti-colonial liberation activists in their solidarity against British Imperialism (Swaby, 2014). When Black British Feminism was launched, Patricia Hill-Collins (1998:73) remarked on its “energy and freedom” and “coming to voice” reminiscent of the early African American black feminist movement, embracing a collective ‘black’ but far from uniform voice.

On their website blackfeminists.org (2013) explain, “We use the word ‘black’ in the political sense to denote women who self- identify, originate or have ancestry from global majority populations (i.e. African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American) and Indigenous and bi-racial backgrounds.” If we are meant to be beyond the ‘rational absurdity of race’ (Gilroy, 2001:14) then why are a new generation of women continuing to claim a politically articulated ‘idea of political blackness’? This knowing political construction of ‘blackness’ – as embodied through multiple racial/colour signifiers and shared colonial histories and geographies – remains a subversive naming. As Stuart Hall cautions, “It is important not to fall into the post-structuralist trap of thinking that because we have exposed binary forms of conceptualization (for example black/white; inclusion/ exclusion; superiority/inferiority) then binary structures in the ‘real world’ have somehow been dispersed” (Hall, 2012:31–32). Thus the knowing ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak, 1993) of naming a heterogeneous space ‘black’ – inherent in ‘black’ feminism – goes beyond the anti-foundationalist claims of the left and right that there is no such thing as ‘race’ (Nayak, 2006). Instead black British feminism ‘brings home’ the pragmatic ‘fact of blackness’ (Fanon, 1986) with its endeavour to reveal the ways in which ‘race’ – inextricably linked to gender, class and sexuality – still matters in our organisational structures, both symbolically and as part of our political story. As Suki Ali writes, “though we live in an increasingly post-race world … the irrational and corporeal ground of ‘race’ can still be a powerful force in social relations” (Ali, 2003:2).

Though there are many differences among black British feminists, be they cis-gender, transgender, queer of colour, I notice young people today still speak of ‘black feminism’, not ‘black feminisms’ (Bernard, Balani, & Gupta, 2014). The contingent political project of black British feminism still appears to be consumed by the single purpose to reveal the normative absence and the pathological presence of a group of racialised women collectively assigned as ‘other’. Thus the issue it is not so much whether we can fashion a singular ‘voice’ but how can we maintain a dynamic black women's self-defined standpoint that enables us to engage in the larger project of black women's intellectual knowledge production (Collins, 1998). As Hazel Carby explains, “Black feminist criticism (should) be regarded critically as a problem not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions. Black feminist criticism has its source and its primary motivation in academic legitimation, placement within a framework of bourgeois humanistic discourse” (Carby, 1987:15).

In her speech at A vindication of rights of black women, Nydia Swaby (2013) articulates the sentiment among a new generation of black women that the many intersecting facets of oppression and discrimination that frame her life is, “quite simply a way of life”. That intersectionality means, as one woman in the Goldsmith's workshop says, “all of me is recognised” is a recurring theme in black women's burgeoning discussion groups and conferences. There is a bemused sense among black women that intersectionality, a ‘catch all’ term that refers to the complex inter-related matrix of power in which our multifaceted identities are lived out, should, for ‘mainstream’ white feminists become a ‘new-fangled buzz word’ that facilitates the inclusion of women of colour (Davis, 2008, McCall, 2005). As one young woman explained at an intersectionality workshop, “I don't understand how you can be a human being and not have intersectionality within you”. 9

Long before this interpellation of ‘difference’ into white feminist consciousness black and postcolonial feminist scholars and activists such as The Combahee River Collective (1982), Angela Davis (1983), and Lorde (1984) were concerned with the intimate interrelationship between race, gender and class in the lives of black women. The intersectionality which they described was rearticulated in the scholarship of Kimberle Crenshaw, 1989, Crenshaw, 1991 who refined the concept within critical race theory. Crenshaw used intersectionality to unpack how particular racialised identities (black and female) are tied to particular sexualised and gendered oppressions (violence against women) reinforced through law, politics and perception. Thus for black feminists intersectionality is intimately concerned with understanding the dispersed flows of domination and subordination in which cultural patterns of oppression and privilege are not only interrelated, but bound together and influenced by the cross-cutting systems and structures in society (Collins, 1990). In this sense intersectionality draws our attention to the ways in which identities, as subject positions, are not reducible to just one, or two, or three, or even more dimensions layered onto each other in an additive or hierarchical way — our social life cannot be separated out into discrete and pure strands. Instead, as Brah and Phoenix write, “We regard the concept of intersectionality as signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axis of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts” (Brah & Phoenix, 2004: 76).

Black feminism still carries within it the tensions produced by a white feminist legacy steeped in the power struggle to define gendered bodily space and place. As black feminist blogger and commentator Reni Eddo-Lodge (2014) explains, “We live in exciting times. Intersectionality continues to gain traction…with this traction comes a catch all phrase to describe feminist politics that rejects intersectional values. That catch all phrase is ‘white feminism’.” Many black feminist activists express how they feel ‘othered’, ‘sick’ and ‘exhausted’ by the politics of intersectionality which excludes them from being recognised as ‘just feminist’ (Blackfem.org, October 2013, Okolosie, 2014). Black feminists continually need to ask, what does the discourse on intersectionality ‘do’? Has intersectionality become, as Jasbir Puar (2011:1) asks, “an alibi for the re-centering of white liberal feminists?” She suggests that in post-race times WOC (women of colour) are seen in ‘a prosthetic capacity’ to white women because of the fundamental premise that, “despite decades of feminist theorizing on the question of difference, difference continues to be ‘difference from’, that is, the difference from the ‘white woman.’” This is precisely how intersectionality becomes ‘done’. Black women's scholarship on ‘difference’ is interpellated into ‘mainstream’ white feminist epistemology and multicultural post-racial discourses and so becomes ‘cooled out’, absorbed, and accommodated through the ‘presence–absence’ syntax of whiteness (Clark Mane, 2012). As Puar (2011) concludes, “much like the language of diversity, the language of intersectionality, its very invocation, it seems, largely substitutes for an intersectional analysis itself”. Thus simply acknowledging the long list of ‘isms’ — racism, sexism, classism, ablism … and so on, has the effect of re-centring hegemonic whiteness through the symbolic performance of intersectionality. Saying you are for intersectionality becomes a ‘speech act’ for many feminists who may pronounce intersectionality as their location but still continue to situate (white) gender difference as the foundational position from which they speak (Ahmed, 2009, Alcoff, 1991, Clark Mane, 2012, Lewis, 2013).

On the other hand, it has also been controversially argued by some feminists that intersectionality has been appropriated as a uniquely black feminist standpoint epistemology (Anthias, 2011, Nash, 2008). To focus on black women's ‘lived lives’ is seen to privilege the situated knowledge of an authentic ‘black’ womanhood when the anti-foundationalist impulse within postcolonial and poststructuralist feminism has been to de-essentialise the subject (Bar On, 1993, Suleri, 1993). However the spectre of the over-determined figure of the ‘most marginal black woman’ is not a sign of intersectionality's failure as an ‘all inclusive’ heuristic device. Black women's urgency to adopt intersectionality should not be its undoing. It is precisely because, as a theoretical and methodological concept, it enables us to knit together a complex array of unstable ‘mobile’ subjectivities which by imposition, choice or desire are written on and lived within the black female body, that it is a useful tool for our analysis. It is only by attention to situated localised accounts of ‘marginalised lives’ that we can reveal the ways of ‘being and becoming’ a gendered, sexed, raced and classed subject of materialist discourse. In this sense ‘embodied intersectionality’ (Mirza, 2009b) moves intersectionality as a concept beyond the burden of a never ending list of ‘gridlocked’ cross-cutting ‘isms’ (Butler, 1990, Puar, 2007). If you start with the embodied experience of any socially situated subject, what you have is the bringing together of all those complex multifaceted elements of identity in flux, captured holistically in a ‘lived life’. ‘Embodied intersectionality’ as a concept valorises situated experience which is at the heart of black feminist epistemology.

The notion of ‘embodied intersectionality’ engages with the ‘messiness’ of simultaneously lived identities, moving beyond the limitations of fixed, modernist ‘capacity endowed’ raced, gendered and classed identities where separate pre-given ‘capacities’ are attributed to certain bodies. However ‘intersectional’ knowledge of our black female ‘embodied’ lives can easily be appropriated and recorded as objective knowledge so we become ‘known’ better than we ‘know’ ourselves. Mohanty (2003a:231) explains, “marginalised subjects have to make visible the politics of knowledge and the power investments in it…learn to read up the ladder of privilege …colonised people must know themselves and the coloniser”.

Over 30 years ago Hazel Carby (1982) articulated the classic black British feminist response to white feminist exclusion and authority in her essay, White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood. Centering her argument on the key areas of feminist discourse — the family, patriarchy, and reproduction, Carby called for the recognition of racism in white feminist theorizing and the need for white feminists to relinquish their authority to define the social reality of the universal gendered subject. Recently I was interviewed by Helen Armitage (2013) a young white student for her end of year journalist project about my views on the viral twitter hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen — a ‘call-out’ of exclusionary white feminism. She was keen to openly address the prickly topic of racism in the feminist movement in response to tweets from black women such as, “it is not so much about who is racist and who isn't, it is about unfair privilege and recognising it”. She asked me straight up, why feminism is still largely seen as a movement for white women, and why are some feminists unwilling to address issues of white privilege in feminism? I had to say I have been mentored and supported by many generous white women scholars to whom I owe much, however if the racial privilege of the gendered female subject is to be truly acknowledged then a critical position in relation to the discourse on hegemonic whiteness still has to take place within feminism.

White feminists often do not ‘see’ our racialised world as it is not a world they know about or enter into on a daily basis. Such seemingly ‘unconscious’ refusal to imagine the worlds of ‘the other’ emanates from the ‘normalcy’ of a conceptual (white) social order in which the production of otherness and misrecognition of that difference is central to its own (empowered) self-recognition (Applebaum, 2008). There is a great deal of self-absorption and a lot of pressure to build reputations in certain theoretical, political and popular areas with different takes on feminism (The Guardian, 2014). For example there is a popular preoccupation with (white) gender equality and its inhibitors in neoliberal times, such as precarious careers, work-life balance, success, leadership and power in male dominated boardrooms and universities (Bostock, 2014). But how do these issues of relative gender (dis)advantage in western contexts connect with black and Muslim mothers' concern about racist policing and Islamophobic state surveillance of their sons and daughters, or gun and knife crime on the streets? Often white feminists are more focused on issues closer to hand relating to their own situation — like the ‘Everyday Sexism’ Project,10 which focuses on sexual harassment, or media concern with the rise of post-feminist ‘ladette culture’, fashion, body image and eating disorders (Jonsson, 2014). While these are crucial and important manifestations of entrenched patriarchal domination which concern us all, it begs the question of universality and solidarity within the sisterhood. How does an anti-racist, self-conscious feminism of the (white) minority “One-Third World” women truly embrace the global issues that consume the majority “Two-Thirds World” women (Mohanty, 2003b: 505-7)? What are the ‘transversal’ (Yuval Davis, 2006) connectivities between white western women's privilege and the conditions endured by Indian female factory workers? How do they engage with growing incarceration, militarisation, forced migration, sex trafficking, rape and honour crimes in our communities? As one tweet succinctly puts it “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen is when you care more about the organic label on your strawberry than about the immigrant woman who harvested it”.

Angela Davis (2003) in her forensic study of the prison industrial complex shows how – through enslavement and incarceration – ‘disposable’ gendered black bodies provide the means by which hegemonic white privilege is sustained through the interests of global capitalism. In unenunciated histories of white privilege, the unreconciled violence of colonial pasts are often experienced as ‘discomfort’ by white women when the proximity of ‘othered’, black, indigenous, colonised bodies brings the spectre of ‘white guilt’ into sharp relief. Audre Lorde shows how such guilt becomes attached to the black female body. She writes, “When women of colour speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are ‘creating a mood of helplessness’, ‘preventing white women from getting past guilt,’ or ‘standing in the way of trusting communication and action’” (Lorde, 1984:131). Like Carby, Lorde wrote her inspirational treatise on the uses of anger three decades ago. However at A vindication of the rights of black women, Nydia Swaby (2013) passionately declares, “I can't tell you how many times I've been characterized as an angry black woman, man-hating feminist, or hypersensitive for pointing out when I think something is racist, sexist, or classist. I can't tell you how many times!” Sara Ahmed explains that if black women legitimately express anger about the ways in which racism and sexism diminishes their life choices they are seen as ‘feminist kill-joys’, who “bring feelings of unhappiness into the room” (Ahmed, 2009:19). No wonder black women still need to tweet “#solidarityisforwhitewomen when WOC (women of colour) are accused of creating racial division in feminism simply for saying it exists.”

The struggle for black women to claim a space within the modernist western feminist discourse has indeed consumed the black British feminist project since its inception. The sheer effort to raise the racial consciousness of white feminists since 1970s through engendering critical self-reflection and the recognition of racism in white feminist theorizing has so often left us ‘angry’, exhausted and in need of self-recovery. Just as the ‘angry black woman’ is a fantasy figure in the white imaginary that produces its own logic of exclusion, ‘the veiled Muslim woman’ has become a new object of white feminist guilt and desire — an abject symbol of oppression and therefore in need of the ultimate ‘saving’ (Abu-Lughod, 2002, Mirza, 2013, Spivak, 1988). The objectification of the ethnicised–racialised body raises the question of ‘who speaks for whom’ and the power and purpose of voice and agency in the production of critical feminist knowledge (Alcoff, 1991). Just as Mohanty (1988) illuminated the way in which the ‘Third World Woman’ is represented in western feminism as a passive and oppressed homogeneous ‘other’, a new generation of black women still need to ask, “why does black feminism still require independent recognition in mainstream (white) feminist academic thought?” (Mensah, 2013). If black feminism's political response is honed by its exclusion from feminism, then our liberation and creative vision must lie in revealing the deep social and psychic effects of the intersectionality of racism and sexism. It is precisely the energy of our anger honed in personal pain which compels us as black feminists to ‘move’ into feminism — a place where we also bring “care, joy, hope and wonder to the feminist table ” (Ahmed, 2004: 175).

A new generation of hopeful young women of colour are coming up strong, imbued with a new confidence and expressing their identities through educational life choices and access to social justice. The approach they take and the resources they draw upon have been transformed by globalisation and in particular advances (and disadvantages) in new technologies and communications. In the last decade ‘subaltern’ groups, like black feminists, are setting ‘fourth wave’ feminist agendas for inclusive feminist struggle through social media (Cochrane, 2013). Nagarajan (2013), a black feminist activist, consummate blogger and tweeter asserts the need for “working towards a linked liberation, where the achievement of one set of rights is conditioned and incomplete without the achievement of all others”. At the event, Feminists in Dialogue, she describes a charter for collaboration. Black feminists asked that their privileged white sisters should be allies — open, collaborative, non-defensive and include their issues and share their platforms with them. White feminists in turn said they understood black women do not have a monolithic point of view and would find it constructive if they could be allowed to be vulnerable and admit not knowing or being able to act on specific cultural issues (such as FGM — female genital mutilation), but they also do not expect black women to bear the burden for educating them. Given the occlusion of whiteness in post-race times is this post-feminist truce enough? As bell hooks (1994) councils, it is black women who courageously expose the ‘wounds’ of struggle which guide new theoretical journeys towards an inclusive feminist solidarity.

The death of Cynthia Jarrett, a black woman killed during a police raid of her home in Tottenham, sparked off the Broadwater Farm ‘race’ uprisings in London in 1985 (Bhavnani et al., 2005). Thirty years on, her granddaughter came to our black feminist workshop at Goldsmith's College in search for ‘answers’. She still lived in Tottenham, the heart of the widespread British ‘riots’ that ignited in response to the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a young black man in 2011 (Bassel, 2012). She was seeking a black feminist ‘tool kit’ that drew, as she explained, “on the self-realisation and culture of women to organise under the conditions of disconnected and disheartened communities”. What does contemporary black feminist activism have to offer her to rebuild the burnt out and devastated racialised urban ‘battlefield’ that is her home?

For decades, black feminist activism has been central to raising awareness and tackling problems at the local level (Erel & Reynolds, 2014). Black women activists have long drawn on their social capital and cultural knowledge to form strategic spaces of radical opposition and struggle for new forms of gendered citizenship — what I have called acts of ‘real citizenship’ (Mirza, 2009a). Black female centred new social movements – like the supplementary school movement – which are steeped in women's transformative acts of commitment, love, and care, constitute a ‘quiet riot’ that is overlooked in masculine theories of social change that privilege violent confrontation on the streets. Women like Cynthia Jarrett's granddaughter occupy an intersectional ‘third space’ of radical black feminist opposition (Mirza, 1997). Through their everyday activities and campaigning they disrupt the static modernist distinction between the state and the family providing a base for new forms of democratic, multiracial, female centred politics.

Ranu Samantrai (2002) argues that black British feminist activism has been more than just about accessing rights and services. Black women's activist groups such as Southall Black Sisters are a contingent and politically destabilising force, in a constant state of flux, where neither allies nor enemies are readily identifiable and where even their own campaigns may become obsolete when gains are made. But more importantly, she argues, they play a central role in challenging the fundamental core of British identity. As she explains, black British feminists are, “a privileged interlocutor of the similitudes and differences that constitute post-imperial Englishness” (Samantrai, 2002:2). By challenging the racial subtext of British majority and minority identities, black and ethnicised women are engaged in the very radical project of refining the ‘We’ of the nation — in effect ‘Who are the British’.

Coalitions are important for black British feminist activism to thrive. The question of how black British feminism can foster group solidarities while recognising heterogeneous experiences is a perennial one, but still vital and necessary. Black women's coalitions such as Southhall Black Sisters (Gupta, 2003, Patel, 2015, March 18, Patel and Siddiqui, 2010), Women Against Fundamentalism (Dhaliwal, 2014) and South Asian Woman's (SAW) trade union activism (Anitha & Pearson, 2014) have campaigned for African and Asian women's rights for many years. These organisations demonstrate the value of the tensions brought about by intersectional heterogeneity and conflict which open debate and expand democratic practices within the black British feminist movement. Women in contemporary organisations such as Imkaan, WLUML11 and many others are working within these tensions creating new negotiated solidarities across national, religious, ethnic and cultural lines, including building bridges through transversal politics with anti-racist white women (Yuval Davis, 2006: Thompson, 1982).

For a new generation of black feminists technology has changed the topography of campaigning as we knew it in the 1970s and 80s, opening up new possibilities for cyber feminist activism (Okolosie, 2014, Zabit-Foster, 2014). With opportunities on the internet to talk across geographies of time and place, unbounded by the physical divides of rooms and resources, black feminists have opened up new and live conversations — ‘loud voices’ in virtual ‘diaspora spaces’ (Brah, 1996). However, this mobility of communication also makes possible new modes of state surveillance and does not necessarily mean a greater political tolerance. Nagarajan (2014) the black feminist blogger describes how online debates spark off memories, reflections and conflicts that solidifies positions or instils polarisation. In a whirlwind on and off line bullying characterised by silencing and accusations it matters less who said what but the overall intent and patterns that can be mapped. She explains, “People think and talk with each other and then someone or a number of people, usually through a blog post or Twitter, point this out to the person concerned. Cue discussion played out in the public through articles, blog posts and tweets. What started out on a person-to-person level quickly turns into different groups coalescing in public and private fora.”

In this emerging cyberspace black feminists locate their multifaceted struggle in the shifting terrain of human rights — ‘nursing’ the raced and gendered casualties produced by ruptures and discontinuities of advanced neo-liberal capitalism and globalisation. The breath-taking aim of black British feminism is now to, “… end structural racism, homophobia, heteronormativity, ablism in all its forms, class oppression, neo-colonialism and global power structures, transphobia and transmisogyny” (Nagarajan, 2013, January 29). In this new ‘intersectional’ landscape black British feminists campaign against the racialised manifestations of VAW (violence against women), such as policies that trap immigrant women in abusive relationships, or the incarceration and deportation of LGBTQ12 and sexually vulnerable female asylum seekers. They struggle against patriarchal religious fundamentalisms and their specific impact on women's rights and freedoms, such as honour based violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation (Meetoo & Mirza, 2007: Thiara & Gill, 2010). Even though the funding of voluntary third sector black women's organisations has been decimated in recent years (Wilson, 2008: Patel, 2015), the small victories of campaigning organisations can shift state practices and image making by forcing adjustments to the conceptual boundaries of gendered rights. As long as structural racism and sexism remains intact black feminist activism will remain contingent, changing and strategic, making multiple connections, forming fleeting allies and grounded coalitions that are never easy. As Nydia Swaby (2013) explains, “Black feminism has taught me how to be a better ally, because it insists that if I remain silent on issues that do not directly affect me, I become an accomplice to inequality and injustice”.

The 21st century may be heralded as post-race times where we are beyond the 20th century's ‘colour line’, but 60 years on from the foundational black British feminist activism of Una Marson13 and 30 years on from Feminist Review's ‘Many Voices One Chant’ black women's bodies are still captured within the intersectional web of race, gender, sexuality and class. As a one young woman at our Goldsmith's workshop explains, black feminism represents, “the space in the middle, between the binary of white supremacy and the marginal below”.

Can black British feminism, as a conscious meaningful act of ‘black’ political self-identification, still bind us across the generations in our different national, ethnic, cultural, sexual, religious, class and gendered locations in seemingly fragmented, self-interested, neoliberal, post-race/post-feminist times? The ‘story’ of black British feminism as it unfolds in my interpretative mapping reveals the fluid dynamism and ‘willful’ other ways of knowing (Ahmed, 2014) that marks our intergenerational political and social struggle for social justice. As a critical social force, black British feminism is an intellectual and activist movement that is contingent in nature, shifting, confronting, and deconstructing the intersectionality of class, gender, sexuality and racial exclusion wherever it appears in eurocentric and western feminist academic and activist discourse. Black feminism continues this ‘story’ with new social movements in cyberspace, challenging the taken-for-granted ubiquitous discourse on whiteness that wholeheartedly embraces the post-race sentiment.

The concept of ‘intersectionality’ has enabled black feminists to interrogate the ways in which power, ideology and the state intersect with subjectivity, identity and agency to maintain social injustice and universal patterns of gendered and racialised economic inequality. No longer falling into the ‘ideological blind spots’ created by the separate modernist narrative constructions of race, gender, and class, black feminists celebrate a theoretical framework that, as one young Goldsmith's women says, “is quite simply a way of life”. The criticism that intersectionality privileges black female authenticity on one hand, and marginalises black women from mainstream ‘white’ feminism on the other, reveals the productive instability that is necessary in any critical social and theoretical project.

The call to ‘solidarity with white feminism’ is one such destabilising strategy that goes to the heart of black feminist concerns — that is to ‘de-veil’ the central unspoken whiteness that masks privilege and power regimes. Black feminists in our Goldsmith's meetings talked of the value of working towards a “linked liberation”, where women's rights are incomplete unless it “embraces the rights of all”. As black British feminists we have learnt it is important to hold on to our strategic multiplicity and celebrate our ‘differences’ within a conscious construction of ‘sameness’. As a new generation of black feminists show this construction of ‘sameness’ extends to transversal, international antiracist solidarity across class, cultural, religious and racial divides. We need to navigate through our many voices in order to collectively mobilise in the antiracist, antisexist, postcolonial struggle for an equitable and socially just world.

British feminists continue the critical task of excavating new forms of cultural racism legitimated by dominant regimes of representation. The racialised fantasy of the ‘angry black woman’ still has popular legitimacy as she is openly paraded as an object of derision and ridicule in films, art and literature.14 She follows our bodies as we enter the bus, our children's schools and places of work. Black feminists activists in the academy are working towards a theoretical ‘conscientization’ of these racialised tropes, like Sara Ahmed who argues we need to remain ‘sore’ and ‘angry’ and refuse to be appropriated as the ‘happy objects’ of diversity in our institutions (Ahmed, 2012).

With the ascendancy of corporate multiculturalism and individuating rights-based approaches to ‘equalities and diversity’, black British feminists have to navigate the tricky terrain of racialisation and its bureaucratic technologies of concealment. The struggle to succeed in education and as professionals is set against well documented evidence of systemic institutional gendered racist exclusion (Ahmed, 2012, Alexandra and Arday, 2015). Pricilla Mensah (2013), a (rare) working class black female student at Cambridge articulates the confusing ‘diversity’ messages she receives. She explains, “Access schemes are aplenty, encouraging you to be ‘more black’, ‘more female’ and encompass diversity in any way you can to fill ‘the quota’”. If we are to embrace, like our white sisters, the ‘promise’ of gender equality and the unencumbered ‘good life’ (Berlant, 2011) in post-feminist times, insidious gendered racist perceptions such as the ‘angry black woman’ are yet to be undone. A generation of hopeful, confident young women are strategically negotiating post-feminist/post-race ‘fictions of equality’ with their strident cyber critiques of popular culture, the politics of black beauty (Phoenix, 2014), and eco-feminism (Craig, 2014), thwarting the hegemonic grip of neoliberal consumption and illuminating the persistent materiality of ‘race’.

We need to hold on to the collective struggle against inequality and for social justice which anchors the black feminist project. For it seems whether we live in colonial, imperial past times, or so called postcolonial, post-race new times, black and ethnicised ‘Two-Thirds World’ women in the global South and North remain subject to racialised and sexualised discrimination, exclusion, violence and exploitation as always. The transnational capitalist forces that are shaping women's lives in factories in Mexico or Sri Lanka are the same forces that are shaping a refugee African or migrant Bengali woman's access to employment in Britain, whether we analyse it through the lens of labour and capital, culture and representation, or patriarchy and sexuality (Mohanty, 2003a). Their lives are structured by the same ‘thing’ — a particularly black and female condition produced by neo-colonial globalisation. These forces fuel the ‘desiring machine’ of capital and its voracious hunger consumes their ‘soft brown bodies’ in the pursuit of ‘hard white profit’. For these women power is not diffuse, localised and particular – power is as centralised, secure and authoritative as it always has been – excluding, defining and self-legitimating. We need to look at the world from where black and ethnicised women are located, and hear the continuity of their stories of resistance and agency as it manifests itself across the generations.

For over 30 years black British feminism has offered me the sanctuary of its generous sisterhood. I have been privileged to belong to a strong generation of postcolonial women of colour who have struggled together to “harvest our collective intelligence” in the overwhelmingly white male world of the academe.15 For black feminists the ‘political is personal’ and while it has been a place fraught with painful struggles of acceptance and self-doubt, through the years I am constantly reassured there is a ‘place’ called ‘black British feminism’ and that in these ‘cold neoliberal times’ we need it's warm embrace more than ever.

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