To begin with actual, existing social relations and not with the abstract requires an immense amount of intellectual labour. Our interviews with Himani Bannerji, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware explicitly illuminate how in the context of feminist organising and political work in the 1970s and ’80s, one was expected to do the work of informing oneself about a range of issues of geopolitical import that lay outside their own immediate range of concerns. This was what building solidarity required: taking the time to do the research, to read, engage with, listen to people whose experiences and conditions of work and life were sometimes radically different to your own. This was the essence of creating shared and common political ground for collective action. While debates continue to rage about the perils of appropriation – of ‘speaking for’ others from a position of privileged ignorance, of adopting a lazy cultural relativism in approaching the conditions of people who live according to norms, cultural practices and philosophies that are not liberal, Western or secular44 – these earlier feminist commitments to the expansion of one’s understanding of people in other parts of the world, or in other parts of the city one inhabits, for that matter, were undertaken with the aim of building solidarity.
Throughout, there was an emphasis on the challenges of building such solidarity within the existing hierarchies that characterise the differences between feminists. As Brah writes:
Is this not one of the most difficult things to do, positioned, as each and every one of us is, in some relationship of hierarchy, authority or dominance to another? How do we construct, both individually and collectively, non-logocentric political practices – theoretical paradigms, political activism, as well as modes of relating to another person – which galvanize identification, empathy and affinity, and not only ‘solidarity’?45
Brah breaks open the notion of political solidarity to include terms that could loosely be described as affective – empathy and affinity. Her provocation also posits the individual and collective character of the challenges that critical race scholars and Third World, Marxist feminists have been working through for decades: the challenges of creating political spaces and intellectual frames of analysis that account for the complex reality of power relations between and among women. The desire to construct non-logocentric political practices also reflects the desire to refuse (or at least, to make visible) symbolic and linguistic orders that constrain our political imaginaries, and the very real, concrete ways in which we make sense of the world around us.
Asserting voice and claiming space
The authors of the pathbreaking Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (first published in 1985) note, in their introduction, that what matters to them is the way Black women have challenged [their] state of triple bondage:
Black women in Britain today are faced with few positive self-images and little knowledge of our true potential. If we are to gain anything from our history and from our lives in this country which can be of practical use to us today, we must take stock of our experiences, assess our responses – and learn from them. This will be done by listening to the voices of the mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts who established our presence here. And by listening to our own voices.46
They proceed to frame their intervention into contemporary issues of racism, sexism and class exploitation with a history of labour relations, resistance and revolt. The history of slavery and indentureship, throughout the Caribbean in particular, and the modes of resistance employed by the colonised inform their understanding of contemporary Black politics in the UK. As they note, writing in relation to ‘the massive political upheaval throughout the 1930s’, in Jamaica, Saint Kitts, Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean, the militant strike actions of workers – ‘dockers, sugar workers, shop girls, street cleaners, domestic workers and casual labourers’ – would serve the workers well later on in England.47 The authors put the agency of the enslaved, and in the aftermath of slavery, the colonised, populations of the Caribbean at the forefront of their understanding of the prehistory of the large-scale migration to the UK after World War II. And, following that, they trace the more recent modes of resistance into present struggles in the UK in relation to employment and labour, health services and housing. They show how discriminatory practices are historically embedded in the state apparatus. The book is exemplary in the method it employs: it is historically grounded from the perspective of Afro-Caribbean women, women who are workers, mothers, carers and a part of transcontinental and intergenerational communities.
Among Black feminist organisers, an emphasis on finding and asserting the political voice of their communities was certainly prominent throughout the 1980s and ’90s. But this was not primarily rooted in a concern about impacting white-dominated spaces and discourses in pursuit of inclusion; it was a reflection of a demand to be seen and heard – both historically and in the present – as active agents and makers of their own lives.48 They were not merely the victims or objects of racist state practices who needed to assert their voices in order to be ‘heard’ and ‘listened to’ in an ordinary sense. The demand ‘to be listened to rather than examined or spoken for’ was about creating a space where Black women could collectively ‘define their own realities’, based on their experiences as active agents of change.49 These demands were never about some kind of liberal move towards reconciliation or mutual understanding, to be reached through dialogue with white people; rather, these were powerful assertions of autonomy.
It is a common misunderstanding that Black feminism stressed racial identity and fetishised difference to the detriment of structural change. This reading ignores the very nuanced writing and rich organising undertaken which insisted on grounding analysis in the lived reality of racism within and against capitalist social relations – studying how class itself is raced, while race is historically constructed and utilised to differentially insert communities into the economic system. The anti-racist critique was not a one-dimensional grievance around the inclusion of race, but an analytical intervention that detailed how a lack of attention to race produces a flawed analysis that does not adequately expose or help us to challenge the realities of capitalist exploitation. The interviewees in this book also point to the importance of rejecting culturalist essentialism and the commodification of racial identity into its most visible and ‘colourful’ aspects. In the Canadian context, Himani Bannerji has written powerfully about the co-optation of anti-racist organising into a liberal multiculturalism which reified static notions of culture and promoted diversity at the expense of social justice and economic equality. There are indeed stark differences between liberal notions of cultural diversity and those initially articulated by anti-racist feminisms, which ultimately aim to challenge institutionalised racism and dismantle structural oppression.
This is not to say that the diverse bodies of critical race feminist work have not been subjected to critiques, particularly with a notable shift in the 1990s to more identity-driven and individualistic tendencies. Julia Sudbury, for instance, charts a movement away from the emphasis on collective organising by Black women and towards engagements with race and racism that seemed to reify racial identity in ways that worked against collective action across differences:
By the 1990s black women intellectuals who were at the forefront of national black women’s organising in the 1980s were beginning to feel a sense of disillusionment with the methods of that very movement. Experience of the more excessive and essentialising forms of identity politics, ‘guilt tripping’ of white women, aggressive comparisons of oppression in a hierarchy of ‘isms’ all led to a questioning of the assumptions underlying black women’s organisations.50
It is notable, therefore, that reissues of texts foundational to Black and critical race feminisms have become increasingly prevalent, and that many of these centre questions of solidarity and collective action. Importantly, their modes of praxis (discussed in more detail below) are rooted in critiques of individual leadership (a structure that often glorifies male leaders). The focus is on democratic grassroots organising that empowers every member to be able to do their