'the branch on which I sit': reflections on black British feminism

Author(s): Heidi Safia Mirza and Yasmin Gunaratnam

Source: Feminist Review , 2014, No. 108, black british feminisms (2014), pp. 125-133
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

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 open space

108 *the branch on which I sit1:

reflections on black British

feminism

Heidi Safia Mirza with Yasmin Gunaratnam

Heidi Safia Mirza in conversation with

Yasmin Gunaratnam

Heidi Safia Mirza's work has been concerned with the local and geo-politics of
gender, race, faith and culture. She has researched educational inequalities,
including young black and Muslim women in school, and the workings of
racialisation in higher education. Her recent work investigates current debates
on multiculturalism and diversity, as well as cultural and religious difference,
Islamophobia and gendered violence. Mirza's numerous works include Young,
Female and Black (London: Routledge, 1992), Black British Feminism: A Reader
(London: Routledge, 1997), Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black
Women Succeed and Fail (London: Routledge, 2009) and Black and Postcolonial
Feminisms in New Times (London: Routledge, 2010). The following conversation
explores Mirza's experience as one of the few black women professors in the UK
and her involvement in black British feminism over three decades.

Yasmin: I thought we could begin with the professional context of your life and
work, you've been an academic in the UK for a long time. Today, this is a world
marked by huge cuts to the public funding of higher education and a creeping
audit culture that has eroded the very idea of the public university (Evans, 2004;
Couldry and McRobbie, 2010). It is a world riven by inequalities. Recent figures
suggest significant pay gaps for academics racialised as "black and ethnic
minority', with those identifying as 'black' (African/Caribbean) being especially
under-represented.1 Currently, just 85 of the UK's 18,500 professors are
1 University black;
College
Union (UCU) (2013)
of these only 17 are black women (Grove, 2014). Can you tell'The
me something
Position of
Women and BME Staff
about what living and working in this institutional context has been like for you?
in Professorial Roles
in UK HEIs', http://
Heidi: I think I have been both lucky and privileged to belong to a generation of
www.ucu.org.uk/

postcolonial women of colour who have struggled together bmewomenreport,

in the world last
of
accessed 22 July 2014.
academe since the 1970s. While we have established a small but important

feminist review 108 2014

(125-133) © 2014 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/14 www.feminist-review.com

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 community of scholars in Britain, we are still something of an "endangered species'!
Of the small numbers of racialised women who have achieved the status of

professor in the British academy, seven contributed to my edited collection Black

British Feminism (1997), sixteen years ago, when they were young scholars. So it
has been a long, slow and difficult process and yet the arrival of even a few
racialised bodies in privileged white spaces is so often taken as a sign that race
equality has been achieved (Puwar, 2004; Mirza, 2009; Ahmed 2012). Navigating
the gendered and classed spaces of whiteness in academia can be wearing. It is
something that I feel every day as a hyper-visible, black female professor.

In comparison, my journey into and within black British feminism has been
something of a breathtaking roller coaster ride, marked by the highs of sisterly
camaraderie and the lows of political marginality. Of course, the 'political is
personal' for black feminists, and as a British/Trinidadian Indo-Caribbean woman
of mixed race heritage, black British feminism has been a place fraught with
painful struggles for acceptance and belonging, accompanied by periods of self
doubt. Yet, through the years, the reassurance that there is a 'place' of black
British feminism has remained constant, and I have long been consumed by the
passionate desire to celebrate black feminist scholarship and the critical social
justice project it embodies and aspires to. At the same time, the vulnerability of
this movement I cherish is very much apparent in the problematic of how the
mutually constituting relationships between post-race and post-feminist sensibil
ities are framing black British feminism nowadays. Younger black feminists have to
tussle with the simultaneous consequences of the illusion of post-racial equality
alongside the continued intransigence and violations of gendered racisms. The
argument is that holding fast to foundational identity categories, such as those of
race, class and gender, is no longer necessary in post-equality Western democratic
societies. Furthermore, social movements that do make use of such categories, like
black feminism, are seen as anachronistic and past their 'sell by date' (Ali, 2009).
Given the destabilising effects of advanced free market capitalism and the opening
up of all manner of borders via new technology, it is argued that we need new ways
to make sense of the fluid border crossings that constitute transnational gendered
identities (Puar, 2007). But it's not as simple as that.

If race and gender are no longer seen as powerful forces in structuring our social
relations then why do racialised women remain one of the most economically,
socially and politically disadvantaged groups in the global North and South
(Mohanty, 2003; Nandi and Piatt, 2010)? My thinking on this is that we need to
continue to anchor the black feminist critical project in both a collective struggle
for a justice of economic redistribution and a politics of our recognition (Butler,
1997; Fraser, 1997).

Although the imagery and the idea of feminist genealogy as successive 'waves' is
problematic (Hemmings, 2011), what is also interesting to me is witnessing a new

126 feminist review 108 2014 'the branch on which I sit'

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generation of black feminists who are Coming to voice in no uncertain terms, and
who are mobilising around the term 'black feminism', despite the contested nature
of the terms themselves.

Yasmin: yes, those nostalgic and unifying plotlines of the stories that we tell about
feminism as 'waves' are difficult to avoid. I am also increasingly aware of how what
Mohanty (2013: 968) calls the neoliberal 'posteverything' is being used by the
political right to gloss oppression and injustice in the here and now. It's a double
sided move, with both temporal and territorial registers. Not only 'It's so much
better now!' but also 'It's so much better here', with 'here' being the civilised,
egalitarian North. And yet, I have to say that despite what you have just talked
about as the 'vulnerability' of black feminism, I also detect a certain hopefulness
in what you say about the political energy among younger black feminists. And all
at a time when we are being told that young people are politically disaffected.
From your perspective, what do you see?

Heidi: Black British feminism for me is not so much a riding of the progressive
'waves' of Western feminist narratives, but rather something more akin to what
Sara Ahmed (2006, 2013) has imagined as 'lifelines' that are thrown to
successive generations. One such lifeline for me, thirty years ago, was Feminist
Review's special issue on black feminism, Many Voice, One Chant: Black Feminist
Perspectives (Amos et al., 1984). Many Voices captured a bold and brave
dialogue about the critical scholarship and activism of a postcolonial gene
ration of black British feminists, united in their marginalisation within main
stream politics and Western feminist theory. The Heart of the Race: Black
Women's Lives in Britain (Bryan et al., 1985), which charted the struggles and
political agency of black British women, marked our powerful and unique canon.
My edited collection Black British Feminism (Mirza, 1997), which followed more
than a decade later, articulated feminist concerns in the 1990s, very much
inflected by the 'cultural turn' of poststructuralist-inspired feminism, with its
decentring of essentialist notions of identity and difference. When the book was
launched, Patricia Hill Collins (1998: 73) spoke about the collection's 'energy
and freedom' and 'coming to voice'. For her, the collection was reminiscent of
the early African-American feminist movement, embracing a collective 'black'
but far from uniform voice.

The dialogic and polyvocal nature of 'black' as a multiracial signifier in the UK

has been another lifeline that reaches back over seventy years to the 1940s
when the term 'black' was a conscious political rather than a racial identifica
tion, used to forge allegiances between African and Indian anti-colonial
liberation activists. Today, these same resonances can be found in the
positioning of those such as the collective 'blackfeminists.org'. On their website
blackfeminists state, 'We use the word "black" in the political sense to denote
women who self-identify, originate or have ancestry from global majority

Heidi Sofia Mirza with Yasmin Gunaratnam fe m i n i St revi e W 108 2014 127

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 populations (i.e., African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin America) and
Indigenous and bi-racial backgrounds'.2 2 See 'About us:
Definitions', http://www
.blackfeminists.org/
Though there are many differences among black British feminists, be they cis about-us/, last accessed
22 July 2014.
gender, trans or queer of colour, I notice young women today still speak of 'black
feminism', not "black feminisms'. So, for me, the contingent political project of black
feminism is still very much concerned with dismantling the 'normative absence/
pathological presence' dynamic of racialisation—so wonderfully named by the black
feminist psychologist Ann Phoenix (1987). So, the issue is not so much whether we
can fashion a common 'voice' but rather how we might honour and nurture dynamic
differences and tensions (see also Swaby, this issue). As Hazel Carby (1987: 15) has
put it, 'Black feminist criticism (should) be regarded critically as a problem not a
solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions'.

Yasmin: Black feminism as a political signifier without guarantees, an opening up

rather than a closing down of thought and critical adventuring, is a stance that
many of us have found sustaining. Connected to this, I'd like to go back to the
point that you made about thinking of a genealogy of black feminism as 'lifelines',
rather than what Clare Hemmings (2011) has identified in Western feminism as the
allure of the teleogenic plotline, that reorganises the past to better fit a narrative
of progress. What has struck me about contemporary feminist organising is how key
ideas developed by black feminists in the 1970s and 80s are being reclaimed and
reworked, and across the political spectrum. For instance, there is the reanimation
of intersectionality among young feminists of colour. At the same time inter
sectional ity has become a form of anti-racist capital for some white feminists, a
currency that nods in the direction of black feminist concerns but that does very
little to dismantle racial thinking and privilege.

Heidi: Intersectionality as it is being used nowadays rearticulates the scholarship

of Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991), who refined the idea within critical race theory
and used it as a way to understand how particular racialised identities (black and
female) are tied to particular sexualised and gendered inequalities (violence
against women (VAW)). But intersectional thought has a long history in feminism of
colour, before Crenshaw conceptualised it as a term. Feminist scholars and
activists such as The Combahee River Collective (1982), Angela Davis (1983) and
Audre Lorde (1984) were all concerned with the intimate and shifting intimacies
between race, gender and class in the lives of black women.

For black feminists, intersectionality is a means of articulating and understanding

structural oppressions as not only interrelated, but also as intra-related, co
constituted by the flows of cross-cutting social systems (Flill 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

128 fe minist review 108 2014 'the branch on which I sit'

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 life is not experienced as discrete 'pure' identities, each brought into play
at different times. Rather, our multifaceted and embodied lives are lived out
simultaneously within a matrix of power that is also—relentlessly—cross-cutting.
As Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix (2004: 76) write, the idea of intersectionality is
regarded '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'.

I think that there is a bemused sense among some Western feminists at the moment
that intersectionality can (ought to?) somehow magically facilitate inclusion, that
somehow our differences can be dealt with or smoothed over by this fashionable
'catch all' concept (McCall, 2005; Davis, 2008; Nash, 2008). I also think that the
distinctions between intersectionality as a political/analytic lens and as an
experience are frequently overlooked. As one young woman explained at an inter
3 This and other sectionality workshop last year,3 'I don't understand how you can be a human being
comments were made by
young black women at and not have intersectionality in us'.
black feminist workshops
held at Goldsmith's
College, University of
At the level of scholarship and activism, the taking up of intersectionality by new
London. A series of events
generations of feminists is most certainly accompanied by political tensions and
were organised by Joan
Anim-Addo, Director of ambivalence. Many black feminist activists express how they feel 'othered', 'sick'
the Centre for Caribbean
and 'exhausted' by the politics of intersectionality which excludes them from being
Studies, including 'Black
British Feminism then and recognised as 'just feminist'.4
now', 22 October 2011,
and 'We are here: Black
feminism residential Rather than accepting intersectionality as a descriptive term, more critical ques
weekend', 26-28 October
2012. tions are being asked of what the discourse of intersectionality does at different
times and in different circumstances. Has intersectionality become, as Jasbir Puar
4 Blackfem.org, 'Black
feminists discuss
(2011) suggests, 'an alibi' for the re-centring of white liberal feminist projects?'
intersectionality',
13 December 2013, http:// Puar's argument is an important one. She makes the point that despite decades of
www. blackfeminists. org/
feminist theorising on the question of difference, racialised women are seen in
2013/12/13/news-black
feminists-discuss 'a prosthetic capacity' to white women because of the fundamental premise that
intersectionality-video/
difference continues to be a 'difference from' the white woman. It seems to me that
October, last accessed
22 July 2014. this is precisely how intersectionality is being 'done' within some contemporary
feminist circles. Black women's 'difference' is interpellated into the hegemonic
whiteness of liberal feminist and multicultural post-racial discourses of inclusion,
where it is 'cooled out', absorbed and accommodated. As Puar concludes, 'much
like the language of diversity, the language of intersectionality, its very invocation,
it seems, largely substitutes for an intersectional analysis itself'.

So, for me, simply acknowledging the long list of isms—racism, sexism, classism,
ablism ... and so on, has the effect of re-centring hegemonic patriachal whiteness.
Saying you are 'for' intersectionality becomes a speech act performed by feminists
who may pronounce intersectionality as their location but still continue to situate
(white) gender difference as the foundational position from which they speak
(Lewis, 2013; Eddo-Lodge, 2014).

Heidi Safia Mirza with yasmin Gunaratnam feminist review 108 2014 129

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 Yasmin: your earlier work in education and with black supplementary schools drew
attention to the low-key and slow collective activism of women of colour,
challenging racism from within local settings. At this time of intensified austerity
and new forms of racism 'without race', such as in increasing anti-immigrant
sentiments, how might black feminists sustain collective actions and solidarities
and make incursions into systemic forms of injustice?

Heidi: For decades, black feminist activism has been central to raising awareness
and tackling problems at a local level. Black women activists have long drawn on
their collective social and cultural knowledge to form strategic spaces of radical
opposition and struggle for new forms of gendered citizenship in their communities
—what I have called 'real citizenship' (Mirza, 2009). Coalitions have been, and
continue to be, vital for black British feminist activism to thrive. The question of
how black British feminism can foster group solidarities while recognising hetero
geneous experiences is a perennial one (Mohanty, 2003), and entirely vital and
necessary. As Rahila Gupta (2003) and Pragna Patel and Hannana Siddiqui (2010)
have shown, Black British women's coalitions such as Southhall Black Sisters and
Women Against Fundamentalism have campaigned for African and Asian women's
rights over many years. These organisations demonstrate the value of the tensions
brought about by heterogeneity and conflict, which open up debate and expand
democratic practices within black feminist movements (Samantrai, 2002). Women
in contemporary British organisations such as Imkaan, WUML5 and many others are 5 Imkaan is a UK-based,
black feminist
working within these tensions, creating new negotiated solidarities across national, organisation dedicated to
addressing VAW and girls
religious, ethnic and cultural lines, including transversal politics with anti-racist
http: //imkaan. org. uk/f
white women (Thompson, 1982; Yuval Davis, 2006). last accessed 22 July 2014.
WLUML is Women Living
Under Muslim Laws http://
Facilitated by digital technologies, black British feminists are now locating their www. wluml. org/node/
5408, last accessed 22 July
multifaceted local and global struggle as one that 'ends structural racism, 2014.
homophobia, heteronormativity, ablism in all its forms, class oppression, neo
colonialism and global power structures, transphobia and transmisogyny'
(Nagarajan, 2014). They campaign against the racialised manifestations of VAW,
such as policies that trap immigrant women in abusive relationships or the incar
ceration and deportation of LGBTQ6 and sexually vulnerable female asylum seekers. 6 LGBTQ stands for
'lesbian, gay, bisexual,
They struggle against religious fundamentalisms and their specific impact on transgender and queer'.

women's rights and freedoms, such as honour-based violence, forced marriage and
female genital mutilation. Even though the third sector has been decimated in
recent years, the small victories of campaigning organisations are that they have
been able to shift state practices and image making by forcing adjustments to the
conceptual boundaries of gendered rights.

What is perhaps most noticeable is how for a new generation of black British
feminists, social media and new technology have changed the topography of
campaigning as we knew it in the 1970s and 1980s, opening up new possibilities for
transnational online feminist activism (Cochrane, 2013). With the opportunities to

130 feminist review 108 2014 "the branch on which I sit'

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talk across geographies of time and place, black feminists are, as one young
woman explained, 'harvesting our collective intelligence' in novel ways. Websites
such as Blackfeminist.org and the Twitter feed #SolidaritylsForWhiteWomen have
opened up global conversations in a virtual 'diaspora space' (Brah, 1996). Yet, this
mobility of communication does not necessarily mean a greater political tolerance.
Chitra Nagarajan (2014), the black feminist blogger, describes how online debates
spark off memories, reflections and conflicts that can solidify positions or instil
polarisation. 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'.

But you are right to say that I am hopeful. I am heartened by a new generation of
black British feminists with their strident critiques of popular culture, global
inequalities and imperialism. For me, black feminism is a stalwart tree with rich,
deep roots, lovingly nurtured by a community of careful, critical gardeners. The
wise embrace of its strong branches reaches out across time and space to shelter a
multitude of different voices. It is why after more than thirty years, it is still 'the
branch on which I sit'.

authors1 biographies
Heidi Safia Mirza is Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths College,
University of London.

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College and a

member of the Feminist Review collective.

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