These were actually very accessible, excellently made programmes, which took away the mystique about how these multinationals operate globally. I remember throughout my teaching years using some of those kinds of resources with students, alongside the more strictly academic ones. I’m not teaching anymore, so you would know better than me what kinds of resources are available today, but I have a sense those kinds of resources are not that easily accessible. Am I right, or are there resources like that?
BB There are resources like that to be used, but I think what has changed is the environment in which we are working; the landscape of higher education has changed a lot, and in some ways the space for doing that kind of teaching has shrunk.
AB Now why is that? Is that because they find those kinds of critiques threatening? What is the reason?
BB My view is shaped by my experience in the field that I’m in. Law is always a more conservative discipline. But there was, for a period of time, particularly in the seventies and eighties, a very left, vibrant, critical movement within legal studies here. That work was however, with a few very important exceptions, void of any serious engagement with issues of race, gender, colonialism, and empire. More recently, we have seen renewed engagement with law and racial capitalism, but today, academics are increasingly isolated in the academy, and scholarly work is affected by a lack of engagement with the world outside. Alternately, where engagement does take place, it is often confined by the parameters set by an audit culture and a marketised system of education.
BB/RZ Going back to the concept of diaspora, you have written that diaspora can be understood in four different ways – first, by looking at diaspora as an analytical concept, which I think you explained before; second, by looking at diaspora as a genealogical concept; and third, the diasporic as focused on both ‘routes’ and ‘roots’, which we think is really compelling. Fourth, there is the fact that diaspora itself is an intersectional concept. So we just want to ask if you could tease out a few more of these different ways of thinking about those words.
AB I think when I came to this term ‘diaspora’ and started using it, I was very acutely aware that we were talking about diaspora in many different ways. There are, of course, many discourses of diaspora, and James Clifford talks about this as well.5 There are different types of discourses of diaspora, which need to be distinguished from the actual lived experiences of diaspora. Then there is the concept of diaspora, as distinct from lived experience and histories of diaspora. I wanted to think through the question: How can we distinguish the concept from the experience of diaspora and the discourses of diaspora? That was how I came to the notion of thinking about diaspora as a concept in terms of genealogy. I used the Foucauldian term ‘genealogy’ because it simultaneously foregrounds discourse and knowledge and power, which is very important when we are thinking about diasporas and how they are constituted, how they have been lived.
Then there is the notion of power, and notions of how knowledge and power are always connected, how different kinds of discourses construct diasporas in different kinds of ways. I decided that I was going to think of the concept of diaspora as a genealogy, and as a genealogy which doesn’t hark back to final origins or pure essences, or present truth claims as given rather than constructed. I came up with the idea that we needed to think of diaspora as a concept in terms of an investigative technology, which looks at the historical, cultural, social and political processes in and through which diasporas are constituted. I also wanted to point to the ways in which different diasporas are positioned in relation to one another other, and not simply in relation to the dominant group in society.
Then, in terms of routes and roots – yes, that’s very important, of course. I think it was Paul Gilroy who in his book used this term, ‘routes and roots’,6 because in a way there is a contestation between routes and roots, so to speak, in thinking about diasporas. There’s movement, but there is also a sense of actually putting roots in a place to which one moves. To hold these two axes together simultaneously is critical. Diasporas are historically specific formations. Each diaspora has its own history, such that you can have diasporas which emerge out of slavery. Then there are diasporas which emerge out of labour migrations. There are diasporas which emerge out of what is happening at the moment around us, refugees coming out of wars, war-torn countries, out of poverty.
So in all those different notions of diaspora, history is critical, because not all diasporas are the same, so we have to look at the history behind each formation of the diaspora. This term ‘intersectional’ – actually, I didn’t come to intersectionality through the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw. I was thinking about the ways in which questions of race, gender, class or sexuality constantly interact. This was during the process of writing Cartographies of Diaspora (1996). And I used the term ‘intersectionality’ in Cartographies. I came across Crenshaw’s work later. In a sense, maybe I have a slightly different take on intersectionality. I’m told that some people think that intersectionality only applies to dominated groups; whereas I think that intersectionality is about power regimes and how they intersect, and how they position different groups differently and differentially in relation to each other. One has to look at the regimes of domination if we are to understand the ways the dominated live their lives. But we also have to look at how the dominant groups dominate. Intersectionality for me, first and foremost, is about embodiment. How do we embody social relations? And this is as much about the social, political and cultural as it is about the psychic. It’s about subjectivity and it’s also about identity. So I talk about intersections throughout Cartographies, but I’m talking about all these different levels of them. I talk about difference, which is related to intersectionality very closely, again as social relation, but also as subjectivity, as identity and as experience.
The key thing is that these different axes – class, race, gender, sexuality, disability and so on – intersect both in our physical bodies and the social body. So intersectionality operates both at the social level and at the level of the physical body and the psyche. I greatly respect the debates that came afterwards and have learnt a lot from them as well, but my own take on intersectionality may have been slightly different from the way it at times appears to have become valorised now.
BB/RZ What do you think its valorisation has been about?
AB Well, intersectionality as a concept and a political practice emerges out of discussions around the experience of Black American women and workingclass Black American women. And this work is really important. Yet, there are other discourses where talk about intersectionality has become a mantra now. In reality, intersectionality demands a lot of hard work – analytically, politically, in every way. It’s not just about mentioning three or four words, and saying ‘yes, I’m doing intersectionality’ – it’s really looking at grounded analysis of these different axes. We can’t always do all the axes at the same time anyway. But it needs a lot of hard work.
BB One of the effects of its valorisation has been that it has allowed, to some extent, the continued universalisation of particular women’s experiences. For instance, in a given article there may be a couple of paragraphs that acknowledge, ‘that this issue is different for women of colour or different for working-class women of colour’. In this cynical sense, it can almost be used as an insurance policy to guard against the criticism that one is not integrating analysis of race or class.
RZ Academically, that can be the case. But then there’s also activist movements where it has been very much owned by people of colour. You have the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, and the insistence of the activists in BLM that this movement will be intersectional. The hard work you’re speaking of is partly on the academic level, but it’s required in the social movements too. When you say ‘it’s hard work to do’, what does that mean for an activist who would be starting today? How do you think that would play out?
AB Well, I have to go back to my roots in Southall Black Sisters.
RZ That’s what I was hoping you would do.
AB