Abstract
This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.
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Notes
Walker (1999: 5), for example, would privilege, rather, ‘the knotty Rasta dreadlock’.
For Black underachievement in higher education, figured as the ‘attainment gap’ (NUS, 2011: 19), the research climate signals change. See, for example, ECU’s 2010 and 2013 reports, http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-in-higher-education-statistical-report-2013/, last accessed 6 August 2014.
The disparity between the attainments of Black students of differing ethnicities should not be overlooked. See ‘Briefing on ethnicity and educational attainment, June 2012’ highlighting an important differential for Pakistani and Black Caribbean children, www.runnymedetrust.org, last accessed 6 August 2014.
See Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html, last accessed 6 August 2014. Baucom’s (1999) analysis of Powell’s racist politics and its attempt at limiting Britishness to the English is insightful.
See ‘I, too, am Oxford’, http://itooamoxford.tumblr.com/, last accessed 6 August 2014.
Published research attests not only to racism but also to a hierarchy of those persistently discriminated against. See, for example, Coard (1971), Stone (1981), Department of Education and Science (1985) and NUS (2011).
Himid (1988: 8), an important pioneer of the Black Art movement prominent in the 1980s, writes concerning ‘the artistic practice of gathering and re-using’ fragments.
Collins (2000: 190) refers to Black women’s frequent usage of ‘family language’ to describe Black children as indicative of ‘ties that bind’ the Black self to certain community responsibilities.
‘Why isn’t my professor black?’, 4 March 2014, http://yewandeokuleye.com/2014/03/04/why-isnt-my-professor-black/, last accessed 6 August 2014.
Black feminisms include, for example, womanism, African feminism, third world feminism, stiwanism and postcolonial feminism.
Levy’s Queenie gives away her baby because of a signified racial mixing. Similarly, in Cherish (Sunmonu, 2004) the African child is subject to a problematic trans-racial adoption.
Mohanty’s (1988) important ‘Under Western Eyes’ documents such feminist action even as she challenges its blindness to the specificity of the history of Black women, their culture and politics.
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Anim-Addo, J. activist-mothers maybe, sisters surely? Black British feminism, absence and transformation. Fem Rev 108, 44–60 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2014.35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2014.35