Grappling with the aftermath of decolonisation and continuing forms of neo-imperialism, many of the feminisms explored in this volume have been shaped by the violence of partitions, the ‘pitfalls’ of anti-colonial nationalism, and itineraries of migration and exile. Third World, postcolonial and diasporic feminisms speak to the complexities of life for migrant women who carry with them radical political traditions from their countries of origin, and who have long confronted religious fundamentalism, patriarchy and racism as these formations change over time, reflecting geopolitical, cultural specificities. However, the oft-repeated linear division of feminist thought into first, second and third waves elides the complex geographies and travelling theories within feminism itself. This division has the tendency to obscure the much longer histories of feminist praxis within communities of colour, and commonalities across struggles – underplaying the conceptual tools developed through specifically feminist anti-capitalist praxis. As postcolonial scholar Rashmi Varma notes, ‘dissident histories’ of feminism are ‘rooted in trajectories of anti-colonial struggle’ and have multiple ‘diasporic genealogies’.7 One of the motivations of this book is to acknowledge and learn from the political and intellectual labour of Black, Indigenous and socialist feminisms that have attempted to capture and theorise the complexity and multiplicity of lived experience.
Each of the feminists interviewed in this book has, at one time or another, sustained a serious engagement with anti-capitalist politics, whether as a communist, a critic of Marxist thought from the left, or an acute observer of the effects of poverty and socioeconomic inequality on racialised communities (locally and globally). As noted above, despite the diversity of political and intellectual formations of the interviewees, their feminisms share some contact points that we aim to emphasise as crucial for our contemporary political moment: the understanding that radical thought emerges in conjunction with social and political movements; that the individual is, at a fundamental level, constituted through relations with others and that this entails an ethical and political responsibility, which is the basis for solidarity8; and that radical feminist thought and praxis must necessarily be internationalist in its solidarities, alliances and outlook.
Black feminism as it emerged in the early twentieth century in the United States was not, of course, a homogenous enterprise. Differences among activists and intellectuals formed along lines of ideology and class, as Black Communist women ‘modified or rejected certain aspects of the politics of respectability because they were neither seeking legitimacy from whites for their institution building, nor were they women trying to reconstruct black images through proper etiquette or accomplished midwifery’.9 While it would take some decades for sexuality to make its way into Black left feminist discourse, it is clear that radical Black working-class women rejected the norms and ideals of white bourgeois feminine respectability and their middle-class sisters’ attempts to reform their behaviour.10 What is clear from this earlier period of radical Black feminism is that the brilliant and bold work of the likes of Angela Y. Davis, Barbara Ransby, June Jordan, Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective, just to name a few prominent Black feminists to emerge in the 1960s and ’70s, was most certainly situated in a lineage of Black left feminism and more specifically, Black feminist involvement in the Communist Party USA and internationalist, Third World socialist movements.11
Angela Y. Davis has often, and from early on, located her own political and scholarly work within this trajectory. For instance, in her autobiography, Davis recalls her vital connection to Claudia Jones, a militant anti-racist Communist activist. Born in Trinidad in 1915, Jones immigrated to the United States at an early age. Persecuted for her political activities, she was arrested and detained in prison no fewer than three times between 1948 and 1953; she was eventually convicted under the Smith Act and sentenced to a year in prison.12 When Jones was deported from the United States in 1955, she went to London, where she resided in exile until her death in 1964. During her time in London, she cofounded the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News, the West Indian Workers and Students’ Association, as well as the Carnival in West London. She was a trenchant critic of UK immigration policies and worked as part of an international solidarity movement for the end of apartheid in South Africa. Jones’s outlook was fundamentally feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and internationalist, as evident in her political activism, essays and poetry.13
Writing about the few books that were held in the prison library in New York where she was detained following months underground (which included ‘a book on the Chinese Revolution by Edgar Snow, the autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois and a book on communism written by an astonishingly objective little-known author’), Davis describes their ‘enigmatic presence’, and realisation that the pages of those books had likely been read by ‘Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones or one of the other Communist leaders who had been persecuted under the Smith Act during the McCarthy era’.14 While Davis writes about ‘feeling honoured to be following in the tradition of some of this country’s most outstanding heroines, Communist women leaders’, we find Davis’s words remarkable in another way: namely, in their articulation of a kind of connection and memory, a felt proximity provoked through the pages of a book and by the physical and emotional experience of confinement. As noted above, this connection, both imagined and real, is crucial for understanding the conditions under which revolutionary struggle, radical thought and praxis can and do emerge. While we use Davis’s words as an example of the vital need to recognise and remember such connections to our radical feminist lineages, this mode of remembering, recalling, of memory work, is a significant aspect of much critical race theory, from the work of Patricia J. Williams and Derrick Bell15 to the scholarship of Avery F. Gordon, whose book The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins finds company with other works that do not adhere to strict divisions and conventions of genre.
Among other shared concerns, US- and British-based Black feminisms both engage transgenerational and transcontinental perspectives. While we do not aim to provide a genealogy of the development of Black feminism in the UK,16 which, moreover, is not a homogenous group or school of feminism, we will note that it emerged in the wake of large-scale migration from the former British Empire in the postwar period. Confronting myriad forms of racism and sexism in the fields of employment and work, immigration law, healthcare, housing, education and social welfare, and of course, faced with endemic police violence, collective feminist struggles for justice arose in the crucible of decolonisation, anti-imperialism and resistance to state-based racism in the UK. The formation of a political identity of Blackness was based on shared experiences and political objectives among Asian, Afro- and Indo-Caribbean, and African descent.17 We want to explore the immense amounts of intellectual and emotional labour involved in the creation of such solidarities, a concrete history that serves, in our view, as a vital and exemplary instance of the kind of praxis required to deal with the current conjuncture of neoliberal, extractivist and militarised global capitalism.
If Black feminism as it emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States was internationalist in the trajectories that many women followed, Black feminism as it developed in the UK was diverse in its very composition, owing to the history of the British Empire. Women from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, in all their diasporic richness, found common ground as they struggled against a neo-imperialist and racist state formation in Britain. In the 1960s and ’70s, Black feminists in the UK were at the forefront of resistance to racist violence, both at the hands of the Far Right (who were encouraged by politicians such as Enoch Powell), the private and public sectors (in relation to unemployment and racist working conditions) and state racism (in relation to education, health services and social welfare policy). Some of the most poignant industrial action that took place during those decades saw women workers striking, after struggling for union recognition, over unfair and discriminatory working conditions at the Grunwick photo-processing factory, the Chix bubblegum factory in Slough, the Imperial Typewriters in Leicester and elsewhere.
The militancy of trade unionism, particularly among large groups of immigrant workers of colour, was deeply affected by Margaret Thatcher’s brutal assault on the