‘The branch on which I sit’: Reflections of two ...



‘The branch on which I sit’: Heidi Safia Mirza in conversation with Yasmin Gunaratnam

(125–133) © 2014 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/14 feminist-

Heidi Safia Mirza’s work has been concerned with the local and geo-politics of

gender, race, faith and culture. She has researched educational inequalities,

including young black and Muslim women in school, and the workings of

racialisation in higher education. Her recent work investigates current debates

on multiculturalism and diversity, as well as cultural and religious difference,

Islamophobia and gendered violence. Mirza’s numerous works include Young,

Female and Black (London: Routledge, 1992), Black British Feminism: A Reader

(London: Routledge, 1997), Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black

Women Succeed and Fail (London: Routledge, 2009) and Black and Postcolonial

Feminisms in New Times (London: Routledge, 2010). The following conversation

explores Mirza’s experience as one of the few black women professors in the UK

and her involvement in black British feminism over three decades.

Yasmin: I thought we could begin with the professional context of your life and

work. You’ve been an academic in the UK for a long time. Today, this is a world

marked by huge cuts to the public funding of higher education and a creeping

audit culture that has eroded the very idea of the public university (Evans, 2004;

Couldry and McRobbie, 2010). It is a world riven by inequalities. Recent figures

suggest significant pay gaps for academics racialised as ‘black and ethnic

minority’, with those identifying as ‘black’ (African/Caribbean) being especially

under-represented.1 Currently, just 85 of the UK’s 18,500 professors are black;

of these only 17 are black women (Grove, 2014). Can you tell me something

about what living and working in this institutional context has been like for you?

Heidi: I think I have been both lucky and privileged to belong to a generation of

postcolonial women of colour who have struggled together in the world of

academe since the 1970s. While we have established a small but important

community of scholars in Britain, we are still something of an ‘endangered species’!

Of the small numbers of racialised women who have achieved the status of

professor in the British academy, seven contributed to my edited collection Black

British Feminism (1997), sixteen years ago, when they were young scholars. So it

has been a long, slow and difficult process and yet the arrival of even a few

racialised bodies in privileged white spaces is so often taken as a sign that race

equality has been achieved (Puwar, 2004; Mirza, 2009; Ahmed 2012). Navigating

the gendered and classed spaces of whiteness in academia can be wearing. It is

something that I feel every day as a hyper-visible, black female professor.

In comparison, my journey into and within black British feminism has been

something of a breathtaking roller coaster ride, marked by the highs of sisterly

camaraderie and the lows of political marginality. Of course, the ‘political is

personal’ for black feminists, and as a British/Trinidadian Indo-Caribbean woman

of mixed race heritage, black British feminism has been a place fraught with

painful struggles for acceptance and belonging, accompanied by periods of self doubt.

Yet, through the years, the reassurance that there is a ‘place’ of black

British feminism has remained constant, and I have long been consumed by the

passionate desire to celebrate black feminist scholarship and the critical social

justice project it embodies and aspires to. At the same time, the vulnerability of

this movement I cherish is very much apparent in the problematic of how the

mutually constituting relationships between post-race and post-feminist sensibilities

are framing black British feminism nowadays. Younger black feminists have to

tussle with the simultaneous consequences of the illusion of post-racial equality

alongside the continued intransigence and violations of gendered racisms. The

argument is that holding fast to foundational identity categories, such as those of

race, class and gender, is no longer necessary in post-equality Western democratic

societies. Furthermore, social movements that do make use of such categories, like

black feminism, are seen as anachronistic and past their ‘sell by date’ (Ali, 2009).

Given the destabilising effects of advanced free market capitalism and the opening

up of all manner of borders via new technology, it is argued that we need new ways

to make sense of the fluid border crossings that constitute transnational gendered

identities (Puar, 2007). But it’s not as simple as that.

If race and gender are no longer seen as powerful forces in structuring our social

relations then why do racialised women remain one of the most economically,

socially and politically disadvantaged groups in the global North and South

(Mohanty, 2003; Nandi and Platt, 2010)? My thinking on this is that we need to

continue to anchor the black feminist critical project in both a collective struggle

for a justice of economic redistribution and a politics of our recognition (Butler,

1997; Fraser, 1997). Although the imagery and the idea of feminist genealogy as successive ‘waves’ is problematic (Hemmings, 2011), what is also interesting to me is witnessing a new

generation of black feminists who are coming to voice in no uncertain terms, and

who are mobilising around the term ‘black feminism’, despite the contested nature

of the terms themselves.

Yasmin: Yes, those nostalgic and unifying plotlines of the stories that we tell about

feminism as ‘waves’ are difficult to avoid. I am also increasingly aware of how what

Mohanty (2013: 968) calls the neoliberal ‘posteverything’ is being used by the

political right to gloss oppression and injustice in the here and now. It’s a doublesided

move, with both temporal and territorial registers. Not only ‘It’s so much

better now!’ but also ‘It’s so much better here’, with ‘here’ being the civilised,

egalitarian North. And yet, I have to say that despite what you have just talked

about as the ‘vulnerability’ of black feminism, I also detect a certain hopefulness

in what you say about the political energy among younger black feminists. And all

at a time when we are being told that young people are politically disaffected.

From your perspective, what do you see?

Heidi: Black British feminism for me is not so much a riding of the progressive

‘waves’ of Western feminist narratives, but rather something more akin to what

Sara Ahmed (2006, 2013) has imagined as ‘lifelines’ that are thrown to

successive generations. One such lifeline for me, thirty years ago, was Feminist

Review’s special issue on black feminism, Many Voice, One Chant: Black Feminist

Perspectives (Amos et al., 1984). Many Voices captured a bold and brave

dialogue about the critical scholarship and activism of a postcolonial generation

of black British feminists, united in their marginalisation within mainstream

politics and Western feminist theory. The Heart of the Race: Black

Women’s Lives in Britain (Bryan et al., 1985), which charted the struggles and

political agency of black British women, marked our powerful and unique canon.

My edited collection Black British Feminism (Mirza, 1997), which followed more

than a decade later, articulated feminist concerns in the 1990s, very much

inflected by the ‘cultural turn’ of poststructuralist-inspired feminism, with its

decentring of essentialist notions of identity and difference. When the book was

launched, Patricia Hill Collins (1998: 73) spoke about the collection’s ‘energy

and freedom’ and ‘coming to voice’. For her, the collection was reminiscent of

the early African-American feminist movement, embracing a collective ‘black’

but far from uniform voice.

The dialogic and polyvocal nature of ‘black’ as a multiracial signifier in the UK

has been another lifeline that reaches back over seventy years to the 1940s

when the term ‘black’ was a conscious political rather than a racial identification,

used to forge allegiances between African and Indian anti-colonial

liberation activists. Today, these same resonances can be found in the

positioning of those such as the collective ‘’. On their website

blackfeminists state, ‘We use the word “black” in the political sense to denote

women who self-identify, originate or have ancestry from global majority

populations (i.e., African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin America) and

Indigenous and bi-racial backgrounds’.2

Though there are many differences among black British feminists, be they cisgender,

trans or queer of colour, I notice young women today still speak of ‘black

feminism’, not ‘black feminisms’. So, for me, the contingent political project of black

feminism is still very much concerned with dismantling the ‘normative absence/

pathological presence’ dynamic of racialisation—so wonderfully named by the black

feminist psychologist Ann Phoenix (1987). So, the issue is not so much whether we

can fashion a common ‘voice’ but rather how we might honour and nurture dynamic

differences and tensions (see also Swaby, this issue). As Hazel Carby (1987: 15) has

put it, ‘Black feminist criticism (should) be regarded critically as a problem not a

solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions’.

Yasmin: Black feminism as a political signifier without guarantees, an opening up

rather than a closing down of thought and critical adventuring, is a stance that

many of us have found sustaining. Connected to this, I’d like to go back to the

point that you made about thinking of a genealogy of black feminism as ‘lifelines’,

rather than what Clare Hemmings (2011) has identified in Western feminism as the

allure of the teleogenic plotline, that reorganises the past to better fit a narrative

of progress. What has struck me about contemporary feminist organising is how key

ideas developed by black feminists in the 1970s and 80s are being reclaimed and

reworked, and across the political spectrum. For instance, there is the reanimation

of intersectionality among young feminists of colour. At the same time intersectionality

has become a form of anti-racist capital for some white feminists, a currency that nods in the direction of black feminist concerns but that does very little to dismantle racial thinking and privilege.

Heidi: Intersectionality as it is being used nowadays rearticulates the scholarship

of Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991), who refined the idea within critical race theory

and used it as a way to understand how particular racialised identities (black and

female) are tied to particular sexualised and gendered inequalities (violence

against women (VAW)). But intersectional thought has a long history in feminism of

colour, before Crenshaw conceptualised it as a term. Feminist scholars and

activists such as The Combahee River Collective (1982), Angela Davis (1983) and

Audre Lorde (1984) were all concerned with the intimate and shifting intimacies

between race, gender and class in the lives of black women.

For black feminists, intersectionality is a means of articulating and understanding

structural oppressions as not only interrelated, but also as intra-related, coconstituted

by the flows of cross-cutting social systems (Hill Collins, 1990). In this

sense, intersectionality draws our attention to the ways in which identities as

subject positions are not reducible to just one or two or three or even more

dimensions, layered onto each other in an additive or hierarchical way. Our social

life is not experienced as discrete ‘pure’ identities, each brought into play

at different times. Rather, our multifaceted and embodied lives are lived out

simultaneously within a matrix of power that is also—relentlessly—cross-cutting.

As Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix (2004: 76) write, the idea of intersectionality is

regarded ‘as signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which

ensue when multiple axis of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic,

subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts’.

I think that there is a bemused sense among some Western feminists at the moment

that intersectionality can (ought to?) somehow magically facilitate inclusion, that

somehow our differences can be dealt with or smoothed over by this fashionable

‘catch all’ concept (McCall, 2005; Davis, 2008; Nash, 2008). I also think that the

distinctions between intersectionality as a political/analytic lens and as an

experience are frequently overlooked. As one young woman explained at an intersectionality workshop last year,3 ‘I don’t understand how you can be a human being

and not have intersectionality in us’.

At the level of scholarship and activism, the taking up of intersectionality by new

generations of feminists is most certainly accompanied by political tensions and

ambivalence. Many black feminist activists express how they feel ‘othered’, ‘sick’

and ‘exhausted’ by the politics of intersectionality which excludes them from being

recognised as ‘just feminist’.4

Rather than accepting intersectionality as a descriptive term, more critical questions

are being asked of what the discourse of intersectionality does at different

times and in different circumstances. Has intersectionality become, as Jasbir Puar

(2011) suggests, ‘an alibi’ for the re-centring of white liberal feminist projects?’

Puar’s argument is an important one. She makes the point that despite decades of

feminist theorising on the question of difference, racialised women are seen in

‘a prosthetic capacity’ to white women because of the fundamental premise that

difference continues to be a ‘difference from’ the white woman. It seems to me that

this is precisely how intersectionality is being ‘done’ within some contemporary

feminist circles. Black women’s ‘difference’ is interpellated into the hegemonic

whiteness of liberal feminist and multicultural post-racial discourses of inclusion,

where it is ‘cooled out’, absorbed and accommodated. As Puar concludes, ‘much

like the language of diversity, the language of intersectionality, its very invocation,

it seems, largely substitutes for an intersectional analysis itself’.

So, for me, simply acknowledging the long list of isms—racism, sexism, classism,

ablism…and so on, has the effect of re-centring hegemonic patriachal whiteness.

Saying you are ‘for’ intersectionality becomes a speech act performed by feminists

who may pronounce intersectionality as their location but still continue to situate

(white) gender difference as the foundational position from which they speak

(Lewis, 2013; Eddo-Lodge, 2014).

Yasmin: Your earlier work in education and with black supplementary schools drew

attention to the low-key and slow collective activism of women of colour,

challenging racism from within local settings. At this time of intensified austerity

and new forms of racism ‘without race’, such as in increasing anti-immigrant

sentiments, how might black feminists sustain collective actions and solidarities

and make incursions into systemic forms of injustice?

Heidi: For decades, black feminist activism has been central to raising awareness

and tackling problems at a local level. Black women activists have long drawn on

their collective social and cultural knowledge to form strategic spaces of radical

opposition and struggle for new forms of gendered citizenship in their communities

—what I have called ‘real citizenship’ (Mirza, 2009). Coalitions have been, and

continue to be, vital for black British feminist activism to thrive. The question of

how black British feminism can foster group solidarities while recognising heterogeneous

experiences is a perennial one (Mohanty, 2003), and entirely vital and

necessary. As Rahila Gupta (2003) and Pragna Patel and Hannana Siddiqui (2010)

have shown, Black British women’s coalitions such as Southhall Black Sisters and

Women Against Fundamentalism have campaigned for African and Asian women’s

rights over many years. These organisations demonstrate the value of the tensions

brought about by heterogeneity and conflict, which open up debate and expand

democratic practices within black feminist movements (Samantrai, 2002). Women

in contemporary British organisations such as Imkaan, WUML5 and many others are

working within these tensions, creating new negotiated solidarities across national,

religious, ethnic and cultural lines, including transversal politics with anti-racist

white women (Thompson, 1982; Yuval Davis, 2006).

Facilitated by digital technologies, black British feminists are now locating their

multifaceted local and global struggle as one that ‘ends structural racism,

homophobia, heteronormativity, ablism in all its forms, class oppression, neocolonialism

and global power structures, transphobia and transmisogyny’

(Nagarajan, 2014). They campaign against the racialised manifestations of VAW,

such as policies that trap immigrant women in abusive relationships or the incarceration

and deportation of LGBTQ6 and sexually vulnerable female asylum seekers.

They struggle against religious fundamentalisms and their specific impact on

women’s rights and freedoms, such as honour-based violence, forced marriage and

female genital mutilation. Even though the third sector has been decimated in

recent years, the small victories of campaigning organisations are that they have

been able to shift state practices and image making by forcing adjustments to the

conceptual boundaries of gendered rights.

What is perhaps most noticeable is how for a new generation of black British

feminists, social media and new technology have changed the topography of

campaigning as we knew it in the 1970s and 1980s, opening up new possibilities for

transnational online feminist activism (Cochrane, 2013). With the opportunities to

talk across geographies of time and place, black feminists are, as one young

woman explained, ‘harvesting our collective intelligence’ in novel ways. Websites

such as and the Twitter feed #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen have

opened up global conversations in a virtual ‘diaspora space’ (Brah, 1996). Yet, this

mobility of communication does not necessarily mean a greater political tolerance.

Chitra Nagarajan (2014), the black feminist blogger, describes how online debates

spark off memories, reflections and conflicts that can solidify positions or instil

polarisation. She explains, ‘People think and talk with each other and then

someone or a number of people, usually through a blog post or Twitter, point this

out to the person concerned. Cue discussion played out in the public through

articles, blog posts and tweets. What started out on a person-to-person level

quickly turns into different groups coalescing in public and private fora’.

But you are right to say that I am hopeful. I am heartened by a new generation of

black British feminists with their strident critiques of popular culture, global

inequalities and imperialism. For me, black feminism is a stalwart tree with rich,

deep roots, lovingly nurtured by a community of careful, critical gardeners. The

wise embrace of its strong branches reaches out across time and space to shelter a

multitude of different voices. It is why after more than thirty years, it is still ‘the

branch on which I sit’.

authors’ biographies

Heidi Safia Mirza is Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths College,

University of London.

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College and a

member of the Feminist Review collective.

Notes

1 University College Union (UCU) (2013) ‘The Position of Women and BME Staff

in Professorial Roles in UK HEIs’, , last

accessed 22 July 2014.

2 See ‘About us: Definitions’, , last accessed

22 July 2014.

3 This and other comments were made by young black women at black feminist workshops

held at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. A series of events were organised by Joan

Anim-Addo, Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies, including ‘Black British Feminism then and now’, 22 October 2011, and ‘We are here: Black feminism residential weekend’, 26–28 October, 2012.

4 , ‘Black feminists discuss intersectionality’, 13 December 2013, http://

2013/12/13/news-blackfeminists-discussintersectionality-

video/ last accessed October 2012

5 Imkaan is a UK-based, black feminist organisation dedicated to addressing VAW and girls

, last accessed 22 July 2014. WLUML is Women Living

Under Muslim Laws , last accessed 22 July2014.

6 LGBTQ stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer’.

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