Reviews
E d it e d b y H e id i. S. M ir z a Routledge: London and New York, 1997 ISBN 0 415 15289 5 Pbk
This collection left me with a feeling which I rarely have on reading new feminist books in these troubled times: optimism. Not in a rhetorical, exhortatory, sisters-let’s-go-for-it way, but in a rather unfashionable sense of progress – a feeling of getting somewhere, of debates alive and ongoing, of theory and politics moving together, in many directions. In part this sense of progress is fostered by the structure of the book itself. The collection comprises twenty-two essays in all, including Mirza’s introduction, and is divided into three sections. The rst, ‘Shaping the Debate’, is a series of extracts from some of the seminal texts of black British feminism, particularly of black feminists’ sustained challenge to white hegemony in feminist theory and politics during the 1980s. Many of these texts, by such well-known authors as Hazel Carby, Pratibha Parmar, Amina Mama and Amrit Wilson, will be familiar to many – indeed several of them rst appeared in Feminist Review – and as such they serve to remind the reader of what has gone before as well as to ‘set the stage’ for the new pieces that follow. As extracts, however, they appear in heavily edited and even truncated form, and I am not sure how strong an introduction these extracts would really be for readers who did not already know the originals. For such readers perhaps they would make more sense retrospectively, after reading the subsequent sections, as the ground from which the later pieces have sprung. None the less, these extracts effectively recall the mood of the 1980s – the intensity of the struggle, the passion that went into identity politics as well as the disillusionment that followed, the rst grapplings with that notion of difference that is now so much the mainstay of feminist thought. The book’s second and third sections, ‘Dening our Space’ and ‘Changing
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our Place’ respectively, consist almost entirely of new pieces of work. These pieces are products of that paradigm shift from identity to difference in feminist thought charted by the rst section, and are of a political and intellectual generation for which difference is a point of departure rather than a problem – hence the sense of ‘moving forwards’ from the rst section. The collection is diverse, both in subject matter and in approach, but in the second section especially some shared trends emerge. Perhaps the most immediately striking of these is the recurrence of autobiographical modes of writing and reexion. The uses to which autobiography is put are quite different in each case. For Felly Nkweto Simmonds, autobiographical moments crystallize a sense of her own body as both observer and observed, whether inside or outside the white academy; for Nalini Persram, autobiographical writing articulates the inseparability of emotional, physical, political and intellectual journeys; for Sara Ahmed, the painstaking reworking of a single memory reveals the necessity and impossibility of being a black woman in a world where ‘all the women are white and all the blacks are men’; for Consuelo Rivera Fuentes, her own autobiographical writing about Audre Lorde’s autobiographical Zami is an expression of the mobile and multiple subjectivities of an ever-changing ‘I’. Moreover, while these are the most overtly autobiographical pieces in the collection, few if any of the other essays in these two sections are not explicitly informed by autobiography to some degree, whether that be a reexion on one’s own activist history (as for Pragna Patel) or on one’s own position as a researcher (as for Jayne Ifekwunigwe, Naz Rassool, or Magdalene AngLygate) or both. Thus the paradigm shift from identity to difference has in this collection yielded explorations of subjectivity and the role of memory, a demonstration that feminist thought is creative as well as analytical, and a privileging of process over identity in the scholars themselves as well as in their subject matter. The paradigm shift has also produced different ways of thinking about blackness, specically about the incoherence and instability of ‘black’ as a category of identity. A number of these articles address this issue explicitly, in the guise of skin colour (discussed by Debbie Weekes, among others), or of ‘mixed race’ or ‘métis(se)’ subjectivities (discussed by Ifekwunigwe and Ahmed, among others), or of the ethnic or national identications of women (such as the participants in Ang-Lygate’s study) who may not necessarily recognize themselves in black identities largely dened in a British context as African or South Asian descent – or indeed by questioning the hegemony of Afro-Caribbean Jamaican culture in the communities of those who do so identify, as Bibi Bakare-Yusuf suggests in her analysis of London’s raregroove scene. Such discussions are part of a wider recognition reected throughout the collection that incoherence and
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instability are not political obstacles, but are the very stuff of politics. This recognition continues in the nal section of the book, where the everydayness of black women’s collective ideas and actions – as educators, as campaigners, as thinkers – is explored, and where alliance appears as a concrete manifestation of difference in action. For all of its strengths, the collection is not without its shortcomings. There are some signicant silences: some urgent issues of the political and economic real are strangely absent. At the time of writing (February 1998), for example, sacked public sector workers – most of them Asian women – have been on strike and on the picket line for over two years at London’s Hillingdon Hospital (The Guardian 19.2.98). Going back to re-read Amrit Wilson’s account of the Grunwick strike in the rst extract in this Reader, my optimism began to falter: there are so many apparent parallels between Grunwick and Hillingdon, so little seems to have changed on the ground, and yet little if any attention, feminist or otherwise, has been paid to the Hillingdon women’s struggle. Moreover none of the newer articles in this volume deals with issues of poverty, of low pay or employment rights for black women workers. In this volume – as, arguably, in recent black and non-black 1 feminist debate more generally – the move to explorations of subjectivity and autobiography has not served these issues well, and the reguring of class within the ‘difference’ paradigm has tended to present it as a matter solely of one’s sense of self, rather than of one’s empty purse at the end of the week. Another striking absence was that of any mention of the many recent deaths of black people, the overwhelming majority of them men, in police custody, particularly in London. These deaths have been a major focus of recent black political speech and action, and yet they receive no mention at all in Black British Feminism. I worried at this, and worried more generally about feminism’s relationships and perhaps even responsibilities to men. Black and non-black feminists have long insisted that ‘men’ cannot be seen as a homogeneous or monolithically privileged group, but still I wonder whether, ironically, gender might not be one form of difference which is still in some senses difcult to handle. This is an ethical as well as a political question: how we may hear, touch or speak with those (both women and men) who are in many ways outside of feminism, when feminism itself is so much a part of one’s political impulse to touch, speak or hear. One does, as Gargi Battacharyya writes, need ‘stories to live by’ (p. 240) and that is neither a frivolous need nor one solely felt by the relatively privileged. But all too often stories by themselves are not enough, and given the state of Britain today I would have welcomed a sustained discussion of matters of physical as well as of spiritual, emotional and intellectual survival.
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Reading this collection positioned me very specically, both racially as a white feminist, and also generationally as a (relatively) young feminist for whom the struggles over racism documented in the rst section marked not a rupture but a beginning. When the famous Grunwick strike broke out, I was still at primary school; the furious racism debates of the 1980s are the rst intra-feminist (perhaps indeed the rst feminist) debates in which I remember participating. The politics of difference was for me a starting point in feminism, chronologically at least if not always intellectually or emotionally. On a mundane and purely instrumental level, then, I am hopeful that this collection, by situating those 1980s struggles explicitly as a background out of which a wealth of black feminist scholarship has grown, will nally force non-black teachers and scholars to begin to work with the richness of current black feminist thought. There are still too many classrooms in Britain (both feminist and non-feminist) where feminist discussions of racism are presented as though nothing had been said, thought or written since the mid-1980s, and where (homogenized) black feminist scholarship is largely presented as reactive to (monolithic) white feminist politics. There has never been a good reason for such obstinate time-warping among so many non-black intellectuals and I hope that a widespread use of this collection will mean that there is now no excuse for it either. This hope may of course be misplaced: British readers may recall a dismal episode on the collection’s publication in 1997, when a white feminist columnist in the liberal broadsheet The Guardian reacted with defensive hostility to what she saw as the divisiveness of a book on black British feminism – an incident which left some of us wondering whether we really had slipped into a time-warp after all. Unexpectedly, however, for a collection so founded on difference, my strongest overall sense as I reect back on the book is of the quiet emergence of similarity. What many of these essays reveal, it seems to me, is the inevitability of ambivalence in contexts where one is constituted by the very discourses which one is struggling to resist: where one’s position as black, for example, is always premised on the very ction of ‘race’ which has been racism’s alibi; where one’s position as female is always premised on the discourses of ‘natural’ gender one seeks to subvert. These essays do not attempt to solve this paradox in any simple way, but rather try to nd creative ways to acknowledge and work with it, both politically and personally. The specic forms taken by this paradox will differ in each instance for both black and non-black women and men, and indeed it usually takes many forms at once for each of us; but its dynamic is familiar within black and non-black thought and politics, feminist or otherwise. This is a very long way indeed from the ‘common oppression’ or ‘shared identity’ that so many feminists once so ardently sought. But it may enable
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a feminist political imaginary where we can acknowledge that alliances are difcult, risky and at times painful but also necessary and effective, where difference is a responsibility without always or necessarily being a burden, and where, in Mirza’s words, ‘you can have difference (polyvocality) without a conscious construction of sameness’ (p. 21). We are all familiar strangers, to each other and to ourselves. Merl Storr
N o te 1 This term is used by Helen (Charles) in her contribution to this collection.
R e f e re n c e The Guardian (1998) ‘The invisible women’, 19 February.
*** In this article, I would like to outline some (and only some) of the tensions I have encountered as an academic psychologist on issues around black feminist subjectivities. In doing this, I want to illustrate how I feel Black British Feminism tackles some of these issues and contributes to how they may be understood and made useful to a Black Feminist Project. Black British Feminism for me, touches on many issues that women, including myself, have encountered in the academic realm. Having worked as an academic psychologist for some years now, it has occurred to me how the identities of certain groups of people have been constructed in often derogatory and oppressive ways. There has already been an extensive critique of traditional ‘malestream’ psychology by ‘feminist psychologists’ (Hollway, 1989; Nicolson, 1992; Ussher, 1990) for construing women as ‘abnormal’ compared to the male norm. There has also been a critique by many ‘black’ psychologists’ for the inherent racism within psychology which has constructed ‘black’ subjects as similarly abnormal compared to the white, western subject at the heart of much psychological theory (e.g. Henriques, 1984; Hill Collins, 1990; hooks, 1981; Howitt and OwusuBempah, 1994; Mama, 1995). In response to these criticisms, many feminist theorists and ‘black’ psychologists have tried to redress the balance. However, in consequence, as this book clearly reminds us, some feminist theories have been criticized
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for not taking ‘race’ or class into account and therefore, in many cases, have theorized a subject who is a unitary female, rather than the male one often assumed in the traditional psychology it aims to criticize (see Mama, 1995; Hill-Collins, 1990). That is, the subject at the heart of much feminist theory is a unitary female, white, western and middle-class woman, with unitary experiences and oppressions to match (see Afshar and Maynard, 1994; Bhavnani and Phoenix, 1994). Feminist theories have been useful in challenging dominant assumptions about gender which have been criticized for being patriarchal in character. However, where the experiences of non-western women have been considered, too often, feminism has been regarded as something owned by white western women, which could be passed on to their “under-privileged sisters” (Mama, 1995). Hence, the non-western female subject has often been patronized by white western feminism. However many black feminist political writers have criticized this imbalance within both existing black and feminist movements. By focusing on ‘race’, gender and also class simultaneously, these writers have demonstrated that racism, patriarchy and class divisions cannot be understood as separate systems which intertwine in some unitary straightforward manner, or that ‘racial’, gender and class dynamics can be understood as interrelating under a single framework. Rather they have highlighted the various and complex experiences and oppressions, in order to challenge the unitary and xed way in which ‘race’, gender and class have often been thought to impact on each other. Therefore, as well as demonstrating how axes of differentiation such as ‘race’, gender and class (amongst others) cannot just be separated out when theorizing identities, they have also demonstrated how they cannot merely be ‘added on’ to each other in some one-dimensional way as if this takes care of the issue (Afshar and Maynard, 1994). Hence, the emergence of Black feminist movements has allowed a space for ‘black’, non-western women, a space which many women have had difculty nding within existing perspectives.
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These criticisms have been well rehearsed but what I see as one of the functions of Black British Feminism is to remind us of them. The way in which the book is structured demonstrates this. In Part I (Shaping the Debate) many of the chapters reiterate these arguments. For example, Razia Ahmed in her chapter demonstrates the problems with homogenizing black women, and places an emphasis on a ‘feminism of difference’. The chapters by Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Margaret Coulsen; Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar; and Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, for example, present a critique of what they see has for a long time been predominantly ‘white’ feminism. These criticisms are presented historically, illustrating that these are concerns of the past but also that they are still
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of relevance now. In other words, even if such criticisms have been made over and over again, we should not take them for granted. A possible danger of putting together a collection of texts which are from a variety of perspectives and positions and appearing to give it an all encompassing label of Black British Feminism may be that readers will be led to believe, rstly, that all the texts come from the same perspective and secondly, that Black British Feminism is an homogenous category itself. This was something which made me (before I had read the book in detail) a little nervous at rst. However, what this book alerts us to are many of the problems, tensions and dilemmas that we encounter when trying adequately to theorize the subjectivities of black British women. For instance, many feminists have found an explicit move towards postmodern or relativist theory and epistemology useful; a move which, as Ros Gill explains involves constructing a position from precisely what is attractive about postmodernism and postructuralism: namely the way in which they deconstruct and interrogate the nature of Enlightenment thought – its false universality, the partiality of its knowledge, the notion of the white Western male which constitutes its unied subject. (Gill, 1995: 176)
However, this epistemological move has not been without its problems, particularly in terms of the theorization of ‘difference’. Within this epistemological framework, homogenous categories of identity have been seriously challenged, as several chapters in this book, particularly Part II (Dening our Space) have demonstrated. For example, Sara Ahmed’s autobiographical account of the problems of being xed by a single label is a useful illustration of this point. This has led to an emphasis on heterogeneity and diversity, in an attempt to acknowledge the differences within, as well as between, various groups. Therefore the notion of difference and diversity has become an important and popular one. Black politics have used it to refer to the heterogeneity, for example, amongst Black and Asian communities. However ‘Diversity of experience’ (Maynard, 1994b) is an alternative perspective which can be seen as positioned within a more ‘realist’ (rather than postmodern) framework. This refers to the idea that people’s experiences should be central to one’s analysis. This, for some feminists, has often been the fundamental issue. This is so that those oppressed people who may have been silenced by dominant claims to knowledge about them are given a voice to confront such dominant voices about the limitations of their knowledge. Many feminists have advocated this position most convincingly. They have not only focused on women’s experiences, but acknowledged difference by also looking at the diversity of experiences amongst
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women. So for instance, the ways in which ‘race’ affects women’s experiences have been a concern for many black feminists. Acknowledging people’s experiences in this way means not only that some people have different major sites of oppressions (e.g. oppression may be qualitatively different for black women compared to white women due to the impact of ‘race’) but also, within these categories is great diversity (e.g. the term ‘Black’ or ‘Asian’ can be used collectively to classify a diverse group of people of different cultural backgrounds). Therefore categories and axes of differentiation such as ‘race’, gender, class, culture, religion, ablebodiedness, etc. can all simultaneously have an impact on people’s lives. However, postmodernists have argued against a notion of difference based on experience, and have criticized it for being based on taken-for-grante d ‘common sense’. Also, some writers have emphasized the point that experience does not necessarily equal truth. For example, Pratibha Parmar in her chapter ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’ critiques the use of ‘authentic subjective experience’, on the grounds that it should form the basis from which to acknowledge similarities and contradictions in people’s lives and to develop theories about how this might be understood collectively. The postmodernist view of experience emphasizes fragmentation rather than grand theories and the assumption of a unied rational subject. Therefore, the notion of difference and multiple subjectivities is central to postmodernist thinking.
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Although both notions of difference – diversity of experiences and postmodernism – can be regarded as contradictory due to their different epistemological rootings, they do share some things in common (Maynard, 1994b). They both emphasize multiplicity and also present a challenge to analyses which make generalizations and develop grand theories about the nature of, for instance, ‘race’ and gender oppression. The approach based on experience also takes into account how oppressive relations can occur within the same group (as some of the empirical chapters in the book have demonstrated), therefore challenging the idea that relations of dominance and subordination only occur between groups. Therefore an emphasis on difference provides the scope for multiple identities and subjectivities and, hence, the scope (theoretically at least) for people to take up new, radical and sometimes emancipatory positions. This is one of the things I like most about the book. Often, it is easy to assert such ideas theoretically, but rarely are they seen in practice or is an analysis provided in the ‘real’ world. In Tracey Reynold’s chapter, we see how the raregroove scene, for instance, can be a site for taking up such positions. However, at the same time Debbie Weekes’ chapter on how black women dene beauty around ‘shades of blackness’ is a clear illustration of how, as she puts it, ‘The complex ways in which we talk about our identities at the experiential level
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do not always t with those expressed at the conceptual level.’ In other words, in the ‘real’ world there may be many instances where radical positions are taken up, but just as many where they are not, regardless of how we theorize. However, all such positions are ‘realities’ for those asserting them so we cannot simply ignore them or patronizingly put them down to ‘false consciousness’ just because they don’t t into our simple idealistic frameworks. This creates a political dilemma, a discrepancy between the way we may wish to theorize as black feminists and what actually goes on in ‘real life’. This is something which I think the book, in places, tries to tackle. However, a major concern about advocating difference as if that is all there is to it, suggests that all these differences exist at the same level. This does not allow for an analysis of inequality or power which means wider sociopolitical explanations become redundant except at a very localized level (Maynard, 1994b). So, for example, much of the power of racism is based on how value is assigned to difference which is then used to justify denigration (Gilroy, 1987). Therefore an analysis of difference alone does not allow for an analysis of power differentials in society. The focus should shift to an analysis of how social relations convert difference into oppression, for instance (Maynard, 1994a). There should be the possibility of an analysis which takes into account the effects of differences in culture, and of multiple discourses, but still acknowledges that such differences and discourses have real effects, and that there are conditions which exist outside the sphere of the discursive (Hall, 1988), for example in the moral and political realm (Parker, 1990). There has also been great concern over whether we should be getting carried away with notions of difference and multiplicity and on how useful the idea of difference alone can be (YuvalDavis, 1993; Maynard, 1994b). The main criticism has been that concentrating on difference, particularly the postmodern formulation of it, has meant that no possibilities are offered which allow us to make any statements of an evaluative or ethical nature, without then again being the subject of yet more deconstruction. This also means that there is no scope for any kind of coalition politics or self-conscious activity (Burman, 1994; Yuval-Davis, 1993). However, advocating ‘multiple voices’ means that new voices may get added but this does not necessarily mean that what has been said by old oppressive ones are challenged or changed (Maynard, 1994b). So for example, the chapters in Part III remind us of the value of political and social activism, how it was at the roots of black feminist politics and how it should be maintained and take us forward. There are no magical answers to how we deal with such tensions and neither does Black British Feminism try to provide them. What it does do is to tackle these tensions rather than ignore them or pretend they don’t
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exist. It presents ways in which, for example, we can still form coalitions and act to challenge institutions and dominant oppressive discourses and by taking into account these dilemmas, how such dilemmas may be productive rather than constraining. Bipasha Ahmed
R e fe re n ce s AFSHAR, H. and MAYNARD, M. (1994) ‘Introduction: the dynamics of “race” and gender’ in H. Afshar and M. Maynard (1994) editors, The Dynamics of ‘Race’ and Gender, London: Taylor & Francis. BHAVNANI, K.-K. and PHOENIX, A. (1994) Shifting Identities Shifting Racisms, London: Sage. BURMAN, E. (1994) ‘Experience, identities and alliances: Jewish feminism and feminist psychology’ in BHAVNANI and PHOENIX (1994). GILL, R. (1995) ‘Relativism, reexivity and politics: interrogating discourse analysis from a feminist perspective’ in S. Wilkinson and C. Kitzinger (1995) editors, Feminism and Discourse: Psychological Perspectives, London: Sage, pp. 165–86. GILROY, P. (1987) There ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson. HALL, S. (1988) ‘New ethnicities’ in Black Film, British Cinema, ICA Documents no.7, London: British Film Institute and Institute of Contemporary Arts. HENRIQUES, J. (1984) ‘Social psychology and the politics of racism’ in J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C.U., C. Venn and V. Walkerdine (1984) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, London: Methuen. HILL COLLINS, P. (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, London: HarperCollins. HOLLWAY, W. (1989) Subjectivity and Method in Psychology: Gender Meaning and Science, London: Sage. hooks, b. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Boston: South End Press. HOWITT, D. and OWUSU-BEMPAH, J. (1994) The Racism of Psychology, New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf. KITZINGER, C. and WILKINSON, S. (1995) ‘The challenge of experience for feminist psychology: false consciousness, invalidation and denial’ Proceedings of the Women and Psychology Conference, University of Leeds: MAMA, A. (1995) Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity, London: Routledge. MAYNARD, M. (1994a) ‘ “Race”, gender and the concept of “difference” in feminist thought’ in AFSHAR and MAYNARD (1994). —— (1994b) ‘Methods, practice, and epistemology: the debate about feminism and research’ in M. Maynard and J. Purvis (1994) editors, Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective, London: Taylor & Francis. NICOLSON, P. (1992) ‘Feminism and academic psychology: towards a
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psychology of women?’ in K. Campbell (1992) editor, Critical Feminism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. PARKER, I. (1990) ‘Discourse: denition and contradictions’ Philosophical Psychology, 3: 189–204. USSHER, J. (1990) ‘Sexism in psychology’ The Psychologist, 13: 388–90. YUVAL-DAVIS, N. (1993) ‘Beyond difference: women and coalition politics in M. Kennedy, C. Lubelsky and V. Walsh (1993) editors, Making Connections: Women’s Studies, Women’s Movements, Women’s Lives, London: Taylor & Francis.
*** This collection is an ambitious and excellent drawing together of the disparate strands of black feminism and represents an important intellectual, political and symbolic marker of such scholarship in this country. Although ‘genealogies span centuries’ (p. 6), as a genealogy this collection amounts to a valuable cultural and political record of black feminism. It is valid as a ‘localised analysis’ (p. 6) and as part of a wider political project on the politics of racism and gender. Also, as an assertion of black feminism’s power though self representation, it is rening the themes from the ‘Many Voices One Chant’ tradition (Feminist Review, Autumn 1984) and building on the pioneering books The Heart of the Race (Bryan et al., 1985) and Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (Wilson, 1984). Initially, the older, classic essays seemed to sit very uncomfortably with the newer ones, and on reection I still think that is the case. This is partly because the later essays are more theoretical and use a more pronounced academic language than most of the earlier contributions. However, what becomes apparent from the structure of the book and its aims is that it is representative of its subject. As a result it retains an internal coherence which is true to the spirit of black feminism’s struggles, rstly, in asserting its voice as H. Carby’s classic ‘White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’ demonstrates in Part 1. Secondly, by validating black women’s experiences as women and as black, in a society which is deeply patriarchal and racist in extraordinarily complex ways. The book is clearly aimed at an academic, feminist audience and I imagine that students in particular will welcome it enthusiastically and critically. The diversity of themes and styles, from the materialist to the postmodernist contains enough to whet any appetite and adds to its interdisciplinary slant. A weakness of the collection is the absence of critical attention on the politics and social constructions of black masculinities. As a result, the political and academic audience of the book is unnecessarily limited and a much neglected dimension of the politics of gender and race remains unexplored. The introduction adopts a cautious postmodernist stance, stressing the need
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to regard Black British identities as uid, diverse, strategically essentialist and far from passive. Postmodern concerns with difference permeates the book and Part 2 in particular pushes this theme in several different directions. For example, S. Ahmed’s exploration of autobiography as a discursive political practice for black women reveals how writing, power and histories of the self are very much a part of social and political life. By telling her own story, she attempts to undermine the foundational categories of ‘woman’, ‘black’ and ‘black woman’. This provokes questions about the diversity of black women and the need for a more radical postmodernism. I think the book could have gone a little further in its examination of the philosophical foundations of constructions of the subject and their role in constructing political and epistemological categories of race, gender national and cultural identities. This would have been particularly salient given that questions of overlapping identities lie at the heart of this collection. Fortunately, for those who maintain a healthy scepticism of ‘po-mo’, the introduction acknowledges the need to keep one foot outside its seductive possibilities and rightly so. As bell hooks states, It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of Otherness, still directs its voice primarily to a specialised audience that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. (hooks, 1991: 25)
Inseparable as feminism is from politics, the issue of which audience the book was targeting did make me wonder why it did not include any critical views on politics on Britain today and what the role of black feminism might be in 1990s Britain. Despite New Labour’s landslide victory and the optimism which initially swept through most of the country, we don’t have a very politicized society in which the political, economic and the social are all part of an agenda for change and tackling inequalities as political and moral imperatives. A feminism of the late 1990s needs to be more informed and critical of New Labour policies and its emphasis on ‘high politics’, such as security and defence, at the expense of ‘low politics’, such as sexual violence and child poverty which affect women disproportionately. Although both ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics are, in a sense, inseparable.
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The book’s title provokes questions about what kind of political terrain it has emerged from, where it is positioned in relation to the new Britain and what is really so ‘new’ about Britain. Poverty is rising, with the gap between the rich and the poor ever increasing. Any debate about the redistribution of wealth is smothered by mumblings about a meritocracy and crude or very polite arguments which favour different versions of individualism. In this context, women in general earn less than men but are
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still expected to be a cross between the Spice Girls and Mother Theresa with a dash of Delia Smith! Work is a case in point. There is still little or no recognition for the unpaid work women do in the home which dees the traditional cost benet analysis. This allegedly, New (rinsed clean) Britain does however create the space for an interrogation of what the myths, traditions and histories of Britain are in their accepted and hidden forms. Against this background I would have liked this collection to have given some attention to the ideas of Britishness which the title invokes. Given black women’s gendered and racialized positioning in a country which is still relinquishing its colonial territories and as potential reproductive ‘producers’ of future black British and black European citizens, black feminism’s role in n de siècle political debates needs to include questioning the ethnic specicites of Britishness. Feminism is fundamentally about improving the position of women. If we agree with this basic presupposition, we need to question how black feminism does and could contribute to women’s liberation today. Black feminism needs to be critically vigilant about difference, power and agency as well as patriarchy and capitalism and the ways in which these are enmeshed with constructions of race, gender and ethnicity. Despite the recent media affair with ‘Blair’s Babes’ as part of the drive to get more women in to Parliament, the government’s ‘White Ceiling’ remains in place (The Guardian, 22 July 1997); this despite the fact that there is no shortage of qualied candidates. Arguably, positions in government occupied by black men and women might cast Parliament, the symbol par excellence of Britishness, in a different light. This book’s strengths lie in its scope and in its role as a starting point for political engagements which stretch across important and negotiable differences. Razia Yaqoob
R e f e re n c e s BRYAN, B., DADZIE, S. and SCAFE, S. (1985) The Heart of the Race, London: Virago. hooks, bell (1991) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround. WILSON, A. (1984) Finding A Voice: Asian Women in Britain, London: Virago. Feminist Review (1984) Many Voices One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives, No. 17. The Guardian (1997) ‘Tackling the white ceiling: Where are the blacks and Asians in government?’ 22 July.
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