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Professor Emerita of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, Avtar Brah has taught at the University of Leicester and the Open University. She specialises in the study of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and diaspora, where she explores the intersections within and across these axes of power in a variety of contexts. Her work has been influential within the academy, feminist movements and diasporic communities, from organising as one of the founding members of Southall Black Sisters to roles in campaigns against racist violence. Her political activism is deeply marked by a socialist, feminist and anti-imperialist, decolonial optic. She was centrally involved in the mobilisation of solidarity politics when Asian and Afro-Caribbean groups organised jointly under the common sign of Black as a political colour. She was active within the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent. For a period during the early 1980s, she took up a post as Head of Resources within the Women’s Committee Support Unit at the Greater London Council, which, as she recalls, was ‘a left project, sometimes dubbed as an experiment in “municipal socialism”’.
Her pioneering book Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1996) helped generate new perspectives in the study of diaspora as a concept and as a practice. Together with Annie Coombes, she edited Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture (2000). She worked with Mary Hickman and Máirtín Mac an Ghail in coediting two volumes: Thinking Identities: Racism, Ethnicity and Culture (1999), and Global Futures: Migration, Environment and Globalization (1999). For a number of years, she served as a member of the editorial collective of Critical Social Policy and the editorial board of Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is a member of the editorial collective of Feminist Review and of the international editorial board of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
BB/RZ Through several decades of meticulously grounded research, you have devised a methodological approach that reworks Althusser’s theory of interpellation, among other Marxian theories, to account not only for the effects of capitalist social relations, but also the psychic and symbolic relations of race, migration, class and gender. Stuart Hall stated that your method, arising at a distinct historical theoretical and political conjuncture, could be termed ‘the diasporic’. So the first question we want to ask is, could you tell us about this distinct conjuncture in terms of the historical moment, and the theoretical influences and the political landscape, during which you developed the diasporic as a method?
AB The concept of diaspora, or even the term ‘diaspora’, came into currency during, I think, the mid-to-late eighties and nineties in Britain. If we look back, one of the major political moments that comes to mind was the 1989 crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union as a Communist bloc. So that had a very significant global impact. In Britain at the time, of course, we had Thatcherism. That ideology and practice had a very significant impact on people of colour. Then, in the field of research and knowledge production in academia, for instance, and outside academia too, there were a lot of intellectual contestations around postmodernity and modernity, poststructuralism and structuralism. So there was a lot of both intellectual and political ferment going on. Looking specifically at the term ‘diaspora’, I’ll confine myself at this time to Britain, in the postwar period. Until the 1980s, really, the term used to describe people of colour was ‘immigrant’.
It wasn’t a straightforward descriptor; rather, it was a mode of marginalising and pathologising the communities. In fact, even British-born young people were called second-generation or third-generation immigrants. That still happens. It irritates me when I hear that. At the same time, the term ‘ethnic relations’, or ‘ethnic’, was also in currency. That was thought to be a slightly more polite way of referring to people of colour, although of course the term is not necessarily just applicable to people of colour, but any ethnic group. But in Britain that was used. Again, that particular term, although slightly more polite, still tended to pathologise minority ethnic groups. There was a tendency to talk about people of colour as a problem; the discourses were around problems.
In that kind of intellectual and political climate, people were beginning to think about ways to interrogate those terms. How could we actually talk about people whose historical trajectories touch on many continents and many countries? How could we talk about and think about those groups without pathologising them? And the term ‘diaspora’ emerged in that ferment. In part, it was thought to critique nationalisms or an undue focus on the nation-state. Again, we have to remember that this was a time when globalisation was a major feature of global economy and society. The concept of diaspora was intended to enable us to think beyond the nationstate and foreground communities that had links globally, so to speak. So the term emerges in that kind of political conjuncture. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic uses the term ‘diaspora’, and Stuart Hall used the concept as well.1
Then, the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ were also on the horizon; Hall coined the term ‘new ethnicities’, which is linked to ‘diaspora’ in the sense that new ethnicities were focused on generational shifts, on hybridisation, on politics of representation.2 Hall’s focus there was on the use of poststructuralist thought in relation to analysing ethnicity, again to wrench, he says, ethnicity from the older ways of pathologising communities, of marginalising communities. It is a non-essentialist concept which emphasises the place of history, language and culture. So that’s the kind of context in which the term ‘diaspora’ emerges. For many of us, it was a more positive way of conceptualising communities, and a way to deracialise them, because they were always thought of in a racialised mode at the time. So that’s the context in which the term emerges.
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