AB I think in terms of racism, it is quite clear. One needs to fight against Islamophobia, or any other anti-religious racism that is there. That is easier to deal with, in a way, because one takes a stand against any racism that goes around. But when I and my political allies organised in the old days, we were organising as secular groups. In a sense it was easier. But nowadays, people organise around religion; I don’t know what you do in universities now, because there are so many religious groups that are organising separately. So that the term ‘Asian’ doesn’t hold much sway – that’s what I meant earlier – because in the main, students don’t come together as Asians in universities. Rather, they come together as Sikhs or Hindus or Muslims or Arabs or other groups, Shias and Sunnis, and so on. I think I would still say we need to come together on broader platforms, on common political concerns. I personally wouldn’t organise around religion myself, unless I was oppressed on religious grounds. The key issue is one of oppression and exploitation. We know that the reality is that people do organise around religion. And given that there is an international onslaught on certain religious groups, it is understandable why they come together in the way they do. It is difficult to be sanctimonious. We must take politically thought-through positions. Because I don’t think we can have blueprints for all situations.
BB/RZ Do you think there is any political currency left in thinking about secularism as a basis for a feminist politics, or maybe a reconstructed secularism?
AB I think there is a reconstructed secularism. Because some secularists are as fanatical as the religious groups can be, at times. But a reconstructed secularism, I think, is important. I’m always told by my Muslim friends, ‘You don’t realise what it means to be Muslim today, because of all this onslaught all the time.’ My response is that there is that experiential dimension there which needs to be addressed, but it’s such a tightrope – a very tight rope indeed. You have to look at everything as it happens and say, ‘which way do I go?’ I personally think that we need secular politics, but we have to be able to take on board the reality of, for instance, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism.
BB/RZ We wanted to follow up with the concept of critical multiculturalism. Given the fragmentation of politics, that the issue of religion and religious identification has entered into the political landscape in a way that is much greater than in the eighties or nineties, does the concept of a critical multiculturalism still have relevance today?
AB Yes. Well, one of the things that I think, given what you’ve just said, is that when people criticise multiculturalism, they often fail to make a distinction between multiculturalism as cultural diversity and multiculturalism as social policy. People were often critical of the latter, because in the eighties and nineties there were policies in local authorities which were informed by multiculturalism. I think some of those policies were problematic, but not all of those policies were wrong. After all, multiculturalism emerged out of struggle; it wasn’t something that was just given to us by the state. It was a struggle to say, in education – the discourse of multiculturalism was most widely prevalent in education, that’s where it was most strongly felt – that we didn’t want an education system which pays no attention to the histories of colonialism and imperialism, which pays no attention to cultural diversity, to the ways in which people from the former colonies were concentrated in certain geographical locations where there were high rates of unemployment and poor housing and poor social services. That we wanted a different kind of education system, or different kind of social policy that actually took into account the specific needs of different groups of people.
I think at that level it was a struggle, and it was relevant to argue for multicultural education. But then there was a debate between anti-racists and multiculturalists. That was because once multiculturalism started being practised in schools and elsewhere, it became obvious that sometimes the question of racism or class was not taken very seriously. Thus, multiculturalism came to be caricatured as being about ‘samosas, saris and steel drums’, or something like that.
So we started talking about anti-racism in education, as opposed to multicultural education. That debate went on for a decade or so. It has now gone away, because people started attacking multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is problematic if it does not address an anti-racist critique. But what do we have instead? Monoculturalism? No! We may not call it multiculturalism; people are using different terms, currently. Instead of ‘multiculturalism’, they’re trying to use the term ‘interculturalism’. Basically, they’re struggling with the same thing, which is, how do you address the hegemony of white British culture, even when we know that there is nothing called ‘white British culture’, in the singular, because British culture is heterogeneous.
But nonetheless, when people talk about the ‘British way of life’, or ‘British values’, which is a current discourse, they assume there is something British which is inherently different from the rest of the world, somehow unique, when often they’re talking about very universal values, really. So if we don’t have some kind of a politics and a discourse around cultural diversity, how do we contest the discourse of ‘British way of life’? In other words, you’re right that ‘multiculturalism’ as a term now is a problem, because it has been so discredited. But how do we deal with cultural diversity? I’m not sure what kind of term we can use, other than just ‘cultural diversity’. Or ‘interculturalism’ – to me that sounds quite similar to ‘multiculturalism’ anyway. Perhaps ‘anti-racist interculturalism’? And then there is that whole discourse about ‘integration’. That term is a big problem, which is connected with ‘multiculturalism’. ‘Integration’ meaning assimilation. That’s what they mean. I don’t want assimilation. I think we fought against assimilation.
So how do we construct a new term? I’m looking at you, as well. Can you think of something that can replace it, but without giving in to the assimilationists?
RZ Like you were saying, many of these things have to come out of practice. These formulations tend to come about through the struggle for something specific.
AB It’s true, it’s very true.
BB In a way, this is related to your emphasis on practice. In thinking about intersectionality, for instance, as an approach that can only have meaning in working it through both intellectually and politically. This notion is quite distinct from the idea of grasping certain identifications in a mode of strategic essentialism, which reflects a more tactical approach.
RZ Just to change course slightly – we very recently saw a film that you had directed as part of a project on the Darkmatter journal website.12 And it was stunningly beautiful.
AB I’m glad you liked it.
RZ It was remarkable, both as a historical record but also the method that you used. How did you decide to do that, methodologically?
AB Well, I was working at the Department of Extramural Studies at Birkbeck College. A large part of the courses we developed were in relation to the needs of the communities we were working with. We wanted to undertake a project in West London because I got some external funding to develop educational opportunities for people who had been out of work. We identified a range of needs and organised courses relevant to those needs. One of the things we thought we would do would be to work with older adults and look at the ways in which we could collate their life histories. Because we were interested in oral histories. We said that people are dying, literally, and our oral histories in this country are not being recorded.
We thought we would do a video project to document the lives of older people and their backgrounds, and how they had experienced life in Britain. But we also wanted to skill them; it’s very easy to make a film about people and interview them, but we wanted a participatory project in which older adults would learn the skills of making a film, and that’s what we did. We involved a video trainer, who actually taught older adults skills to make a video film. This was followed by the older adults making a film by themselves. A colleague and the trainer were present, but they were there to facilitate, not to direct. So