AB I think it did, yes. In some scenes, you find, for example, that they sit very formally. And in other shots they become quite spontaneous, especially at the end, where they start dancing. That’s where they really came into their own. But sometimes they were more formal, especially at the beginning, when each of them appears individually. Because traditionally, even when you had your photographs taken, you sat like that, that formal pose. I think it changed with time as the project progressed and, gradually, formality disappeared among the participants, and they loved it. They hadn’t had any opportunities like that to talk about themselves on film. What was very interesting was how they were very conscious about religious diversity among themselves. There were Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus among them. But they wanted to foreground a unity. We had nothing to do with that; that is what they decided. They talked about the partition of India, and they talked about how people tried to be unified, and how people used to live together in diasporas such as East Africa. So they were also trying to construct some kind of a solidarity among themselves, working across these differences.
BB/RZ Has cultural production been central in your activism and research?
AB That was the only film that we did, really. So in terms of cultural production, I haven’t really been involved in making videos or films, apart from this case. But culture itself, as a concept and as a practice, has been very central in my work. Even when I was doing my PhD, I was thinking about how to conceptualise culture in non-essentialist forms. That has always been a problem – well, not a problem, a challenge. It has been a challenge.
BB/RZ Going back to the question of the university: Can you tell us more specifically about your own experiences in the academy? How have you experienced the change in higher education from when you first started teaching to the period when you retired? It’s been a time of remarkable transformation in the higher education sector.
AB University life was challenging. I didn’t actually have my permanent job until 1985. In the early years after I finished my PhD, I couldn’t find a permanent job. I had a lot of temporary jobs, which come with their own problems. But politically it was a huge struggle, around knowledge production partly and these different ways of theorising. I was working around issues of race and ethnicity when I first started. In those days, you had discourses of ‘race relations’ and ‘ethnic relations’. People like John Rex, Michael Banton – these were the big professors at the time. It was quite hard to develop a critical and radical academic practice. I think everyone who was involved in this subject at the time would probably tell you that.
It was difficult whoever you were, but if you were a person of colour then it was more of a struggle. I took some pretty unpopular positions. I didn’t get much support from my immediate professors in my early years. I turned to the work of scholars such as Stuart Hall for inspiration. And later, when I got to know him at the Open University, he was very supportive. In the early years, I was employed mainly on research projects. I wasn’t teaching, because they were temporary jobs. Then, of course, in the latter half, I decided I was going to leave academia, so I worked with the Greater London Council. That was a quite positive experience, I must say. I was in the Women’s Support Unit and I had quite a senior position there, and we took up all kinds of issues we discussed earlier, such as intersectionality. We didn’t use that term, but we were trying to involve different categories of women.
That was a positive experience, because we were doing new things. We were able to fund women’s projects, and through that we were involving the women’s groups themselves in telling us what they needed and what they wanted. So I enjoyed that period of my working life. Then I got this job at Birkbeck College. At the time, we weren’t part of Birkbeck. It was an extramural studies department within the University of London. I found this work quite creative, actually, because for the first time I was working with a group of women that I got on very well with. There was Jane Hoy, Mary Kennedy and Nell Keddie. We had a lot of autonomy in developing courses, and we could liaise with communities, find out what they wanted, and then we could offer those educational experiences. These were courses at the certificate and diploma levels. Later on, once we merged with Birkbeck College, we developed a Master’s programme as well. But initially it was the certificate- and diploma-level courses.
We developed childcare courses, we had courses around antisemitism, and we had courses about Palestine. We organised all kinds of courses that we felt were important to communities – Caribbean studies, Irish studies and Asian studies, under the rubric of ‘community studies’, as a generic term. So that was really very good, very creative and generative. Then John Solomos (a sociologist) and I developed the Master’s programme in race and ethnicity in the politics department. That was one of the first Master’s programmes on the subject.
BB When was that?
AB That would have been around 1988, I think. So that too was a creative part of my experience, I must say. And it also meant we could include our own imprint. We developed a lesbian studies programme in the extramural studies department, which, again, might have been one of the first ones in Britain at the time. But on the other hand, my partner always says I was lucky that I was at extramural studies, that it might have been more difficult in other, more conventional departments. And he might be right about that. On the whole, I found academia quite difficult as a person of colour, although as I said, there were moments and stages when it was quite life-affirming as well. But it’s changed so much since I’ve left, I think; in the last four or five years, things have changed so much. Some of the courses we were developing then might not have the same purchase today. Things have changed a great deal. The neoliberal university is now a serious problem.
Selected Writings
Brah, Avtar. ‘“Race” and “Culture” in the Gendering of Labour Markets: South Asian Young Muslim Women and the Labour Market’. New Community 19:3 (1993), 441–58.
———. ‘Re-framing Europe: En-gendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe’. Feminist Review 45:1 (1993), 9–29.
———. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996).
———. ‘The Scent of Memory: Strangers, Our Own, and Others’. Feminist Review 61:1 (1999), 4–26.
———. ‘Global Mobilities, Local Predicaments: Globalization and the Critical Imagination’. Feminist Review 70:1 (2002), 30–45.
Brah, Avtar, and Ann Phoenix. ‘Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality’. Journal of International Women’s Studies 5:3 (2004), 75–86.
A psychotherapist and long-standing member of Brixton Black Women’s Group and a cofounder of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Gail Lewis has written extensively on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and gendered, racialised experience. She is a former faculty member of the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and has taught at the Open University and Lancaster University. According to Lewis, her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of Black feminist and anti-racist struggle and emerges from a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. Among her political and intellectual concerns, she notes, are the formation of and resistance to gendered and racialised social formation, including the lived experience of inequality within organisations, as well as bringing psychoanalytic and sociological understandings of subjectivity into creative dialogue in an effort to generate what she calls a ‘practice against the grain’.
Lewis has been a member of the editorial collectives of the European Journal of Women’s Studies and Feminist Review. She is the author of Expanding the Social Policy Imaginary (2000) and Citizenship: Personal Lives and Social Policy (2004), among other volumes, and has published articles in numerous journals, including Race & Class, Cultural Studies, Feminist Review and Feminist Theory.