Revolutionary Feminisms. Brenna Bhandar

of the lived experience of class oppression and gendered racism within and beyond the workplace. This pushed against some strands within left politics that saw radical action as taking place only at the so-called point of production, thus fetishising the industrial male worker. Their understanding of the totality of social relations as located within the body, home, community and workplace, in turn, opened up important avenues for organising in multiple sites. For example, in the UK context, Asian and Black women’s collectives were at the forefront of a number of long industrial struggles, and they also organised against racist anti-immigration campaigns such as the infamous virginity tests, while at the same time tackling issues of domestic violence and actively organising against fascist violence targeting their communities.

      This multi-scalar organising was vital to building coalitions between Black and South Asian feminists – coalitions that worked to tackle state-sponsored racism and sexism while openly discussing how communities and individuals are differentially racialised. This required very patient and conscientious work to study how class, race and gender operate in specific historical conjunctures. The analytic link they drew between class and race helped to articulate an inclusive and militant Black political identity. As we have noted, there were tensions and contradictions in this form of coalitional politics – yet it remains an important moment that foregrounded political unity.

      This political identification was also reflected in novel forms of organising. Specifically, cultural production took on a vital role, as discussed above. Our interlocutors, in the following pages, invoked the potent work of poets and authors like June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand, among many others, in helping to shape their politics, while powerfully naming racism as a lived reality. As Bannerji has put it elsewhere, ‘the greatest gain, was meeting with young Black women, whose experience and politics matched with mine, whose poetry along with mine named our world’.⁵⁷ Theatre, music, poetry, poster art and spaces of leisure, as well, helped to create a sense of common struggle and community, but also to address challenging subjects. For example, in her interview, Brah explains the importance of community theatre productions in tackling taboo topics like domestic violence.

      There are important lessons to draw from this mode of organising, whereby campaigns were orchestrated not from above but in collaboration, utilising varied repertoires of oppositional practices while continuously reassessing the political situation, allowing for shifts in tactics and multiple entry points for campaigners, as well as room for mistakes. As Brah puts it, ‘we must take politically thought-through positions. Because I don’t think we can have blueprints for all situations’ (49). Thus, organising can develop with sensitivity to particular contexts, foregrounding community voices and needs. The prison abolition organisation Critical Resistance is a good example of a formation that has incorporated important aspects of this praxis, ensuring a multiplicity of tactics. Apart from more attention-grabbing legal cases against government departments, the group also produces a variety of media for outreach and builds grassroots coalitions whose aim is to stop prisons from being built in the first place.⁵⁸ Some of the most crucial work is mundane and hidden from public view – from setting up regular meeting times and places to ensuring continuity and access to the organising space.

      Finally, a critical aspect of the praxis we are discussing is its internationalist orientation, and the struggle to build feminisms that stretch across national borders and mobilise against multiple imperial interventions. As noted above, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism are foundational to Black, Indigenous and postcolonial feminism(s), and an internationalist stance continues to inflect their organising. Historically, its influence is evident in the profusion of statements and practical support for international solidarity campaigns against militarism and military occupations, including the anti-apartheid movement, solidarity with Palestine, and anti-imperialist opposition in Central America and Southern Africa. In more recent times, this has included a feminist response to the more overt racialisation of Arabs and Muslims under the guise of the War on Terror. The opposition to direct regional military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, long-term support for the state of Israel, and the internationalisation of racialised surveillance practices aimed at Arabs and Muslims have generated a rich body of feminist literature from within North Africa, West Asia, Europe and North America.⁵⁹ In Europe and North America, anti-racist feminists have advanced an anti-imperialist analysis and worked tirelessly to build multiracial anti-war coalitions and, especially, to add Palestine to the agenda of the progressive feminist movement. They have argued for a feminist praxis that centres support for anti-colonial struggles and understands solidarity with Palestine as a feminist issue.⁶⁰ More recently, this has included advancing the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which in turn has galvanised discussions within the feminist movement. As Palestinian scholar-activist Rabab Abdulhadi has asserted however, this work was underpinned by much-longer-standing solidarities, built through decades of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist organising in different contexts.⁶¹ In other words, there is nothing spontaneous about solidarity; it is historically rooted and comes about through consistent dialogue, learning/unlearning, and joint struggle.

      It is common to present the contemporary moment as one of multiple crises and ongoing emergencies; as Lauren Berlant puts it, ‘politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure.’⁶² If we are to face this ‘infrastructural failure’, the reimagining and revitalisation of anti-capitalist and anti-racist feminist politics is crucial. It is no coincidence, then, that we are seeing social movements take on multiple issues and make the links between political, economic, environmental and social demands. Various movements, from Black Lives Matter, Idle No More and the Women’s Marches to the teachers’ strikes, the square occupations across southern Europe and the Arab uprisings, have brought with them critical questions about forms of organising and sustainability, as well as a growing interest in radical anti-colonial and anti-imperialist feminisms. This surge in interest has not been based on abstract theory but has originated overwhelmingly with people in movements who are interested in learning from past resistance.

      As we confront the impending climate catastrophe, which is becoming more widely understood among different layers of the population, this broader movement desperately needs to centre feminist anti-racism in its analysis.⁶³ As many anti-racist activists have pointed out, ignoring the fact that the climate emergency is racialised leads to very troubling conclusions, steeped in neocolonial formulations. With only 10 per cent of the world’s population responsible for 50 per cent of all global emissions,⁶⁴ the class and racial hierarchies of the climate crisis are unmistakable, as well as the inequalities between the global North and South, or what feminist geographer Doreen Massey identified as the ‘power geographies’ of globalisation. From this perspective, there is urgent need to consider the interconnections of struggle and to link campaigns for environmental, economic and racial justice, rather than operate within self-constructed silos. The revolutionary feminisms explored in this volume have the potential to help us tackle the root causes of the climate crisis – how resources are used and distributed, and to what ends, within an economic system based on extractivism, militarism and the drive for profit. Taking this critical approach would necessarily include an analysis of the social sorting process codified in immigration policy, whereby those fleeing the impacts of climate change, war, poverty and gender violence are deemed a threat to be contained, while capital moves freely and so-called golden visas allow for the purchase and protection of citizenship.⁶⁵

      As anyone who has spent time in organising spaces knows well, collectively (re)imagining a process as all-encompassing as climate change is easier said than done, especially in such a fragmented landscape of resistance and given the hyper-atomisation of individuals within neoliberalism. From the intensely classed and racialised spaces we inhabit, to the decimation and privatisation of public services, finding the grounds to think and act collectively is challenging. Yet, from within this very material and political fragmentation there have emerged inspiring acts of resistance that we can build upon. The challenge, in part, is how to bring these often-disparate campaigns together and how to sustain them for the long term. Here, it is useful to draw from the lessons of political resistance emanating from earlier moments in time – not because