In this introduction, our aim is to map some of the feminist lineages that appear in the book, as a means of drawing out the common ground shared by the interviewees and identifying what we consider to be absolutely crucial for feminist politics in our current conjuncture. When we write ‘our’ current conjuncture, we mean an explicit location: a postimperial metropolis, in which the mainstream political scene has jolted (again) to the right, with a highly developed neoliberal economy and mode of governance unfolding hand in hand with an ever-emboldened racist nationalism. Although the global financial crisis of 2008 shook the very foundations of the economic system, capital quickly recalibrated to offload the crisis onto ordinary people through long-term austerity politics, intensifying its assault on public services and living standards. This is consistent with the longer-standing neoliberal capitalist project, in the making for several decades, that has entailed the restructuring of capital on a global scale, the rise of new centres of accumulation, the weakening of trade unions, and the flexibilisation of labour. As we explore below, this has disproportionately affected people of colour and women workers.
The conversations included in this book are part of feminist genealogies rooted in Black feminist engagements with communist politics in the United States and the UK; feminist engagements with Marxism and communism in Italy, India and beyond; Indigenous feminisms grappling with the specifically gendered aspects of racial, settler colonial capitalism; and diasporic and queer feminisms confronting the racial caste hierarchies of labour markets and borders in postcolonial and settler colonial states. Fundamentally, these feminisms are formed by – and formative of – diverse histories of radical thought and action. Going against the contemporary obsession with novelty and newness in academic and related media environments, our aim in this introduction is more or less the opposite: it is to explore the collective memory and histories of struggle that shape the very possibilities of radical change in our present and near future.
While based in the academy, the scholar-activists interviewed here have long-term engagements with social movements and have consistently worked to maintain archives of resistance – indeed, ones which are often excluded from mainstream accounts. We thank them for the time they so generously gave to this project, engaging with our questions and believing in the aims of the book. We opted early on, in the tradition of community building and collaboration, to develop this volume in conversation with them, rather than writing about their work. It was more in line with the praxis we discuss below to collectively think through earlier periods of resistance, past political trajectories and lessons learned, and to recognise how they continue to shape our present. As Angela Y. Davis eloquently noted in her 2016 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, ‘Legacies and Unfinished Activisms’:
Students are now recognising that the legacies of past struggles are not static. If these legacies mean anything at all, they are mandates to develop new strategies, new technologies of struggles. And these legacies, when they are taken up by new generations reveal unfulfilled promises of the past and therefore give rise to new activisms. As an activist of Steve Biko’s generation, I have to constantly remind myself that the struggles of our contemporary times should be thought of as productive contradictions because they constitute a rupture with past struggles, but at the same time they reside on a continuum with those struggles and they have been enabled by activisms of the past. They are unfinished activisms.
In the following discussions, we aim to collectively grapple with this continuum of ‘unfinished activisms’ – the continuities and discontinuities, complexities and contradictions of anti-racist and Indigenous feminist resistance.2 We assemble a small group of authors to critically engage with movement histories, to examine useful conceptual tools and forms of praxis for feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist movements. We hope this makes a contribution to contemporary struggles.
As we think through collective memory of struggle, we want to do more than make direct connections between oral histories, conventional archives, and the written work produced by feminists over the past several decades. We want to emphasise that our political inheritance exceeds and stretches far beyond what is typically understood as ‘history’ and lineage. It is transmitted to us through the stories we grow up listening to, in what we come to recognise, retrospectively, in ourselves and others as ways of surviving the daily onslaught of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism and ableist forces that structure our everyday – as well as the shared forms of leisure, pleasure and joy that are also a source of our collective resilience. We were struck by the interviewees’ detailed recollections of early life experiences and observations on domestic life as they reflected on their intellectual and political formations. For us, the making of this volume is itself the result of a diverse set of experiences – some lived directly, others inherited, some observed in others, and all of them felt (in the way that one’s emotional and psychic life tells us something about social and political cultures) – of migration, estrangement, displacement, settlement, exile and differentiated belongings.3 We should also add that we are keenly aware of the geopolitical limits of this project. Certainly the inclusion of Latin American and African feminists, for instance, would have greatly enriched the terrain covered in this volume. The interlocutors included here are based primarily in North America, the UK, and Europe, and while they are nowhere near representative of left, anti-racist feminisms as they exist globally, the ideas and analytic frameworks they have developed have undoubtedly had a very wide and influential reach.
Lee Maracle, a leading Indigenous feminist scholar from the Sto:lo First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, illuminates a complex notion of memory – one that is transgenerational, biophysical (i.e., carried in our bodies and psyches), transmitted through song and orality. Memory, for Maracle, is intensely bound up with language (written and oral, English and Salish). She writes:
Memory is powerful. It can twist us in knots, but the imagination can untwist the knots, unravel the memory, rework it into blankets that protect us, designs that promote, carry, and create new being. Re-membering is significant, holy in its duty, recollecting bits of engagement, social interaction, success and failure. The imagination can transform memory from depression to a simple incident … from perverse to natural or from failure to opportunity if you are moving toward the good life. It can inspire us to re-evaluate our intervention, alter our course, and create a new beginning.4
Memory, and the act of re-membering, as theorised by Maracle, rearticulates several concepts that are often held apart; the desire to resist, to survive, coalesces with an embodied will in a movement towards freedom. In stating that her ‘memory begins with an imagined world’ – that is, her vision of a world free from war, violence, poverty and racism – Lee begins to describe a method for decolonising our ways of thinking and seeing the world. This radical imagining of freedom finds common ground with the thought and praxis of feminists who have grasped the complexity, and indeed the enormity, of intergenerational political struggles for freedom from the oppression of globalised racial colonial capitalism. In what follows, we map out some of the diverse intellectual and political terrain that has given rise to the scholarly and political work explored in the interviews, with particular attention to the points of contact among these different feminisms.
Anti-racist and Indigenous feminists have long analysed the international character of colonial and settler violence, carceral violence and police brutality.5 While it has become more common to speak of a ‘boomerang effect’ of military and security policies ‘returning’ to the West, there is hardly newness to this: there has always been fluidity and learning from such processes of exploitation, as well as resistance to them, across borders and empires. However, as Lisa Lowe has argued, these connections ‘between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ are often obscured by dominant understandings of the development of the liberal individual subject. Significantly, Lowe utilises the term ‘intimacies’ to grasp such links among a constellation of political economic, literary, philosophical and sociocultural meanings of interiority. She deploys the concept to investigate, ‘against the grain’, how the figure of the liberal individual, and attendant political