Abstract
We are very fortunate to work on Race & Class for it has meant so much more than working on a journal; it is perhaps pretentious to call it working in or for a movement. But since its inception some forty-five years ago – and given the fact that we are remembering this year the contribution of its founder, the late A. Sivanandan, we are even more conscious of the fact – Race & Class is a symbol of a particular political practice. And it was this practice that, during the 1970s, attracted anti-colonial scholar-activist giants such as Basil Davidson, Malcolm Caldwell, Eqbal Ahmad, Thomas Hodgkin, Ken Jordaan, John Berger, to the burgeoning journal’s cause. But along the way we attracted new giants, too – such as Jan Carew, Cedric Robinson, Barbara Ransby. We did not necessarily have to meet one another, we knew subliminally through the way we wrote, the issues we took up, the audiences we had in mind, that we were of the same family. And that family was not just organised around the issues of the journal – race, class, Black and Third World liberation – but also in the way we conveyed knowledge. ‘The function of knowledge is to liberate’, ‘the people we are fighting for are the people we are writing for’, went the aphorisms in our first 1974 editorial of the revamped magazine.
And that is where giant Barbara Harlow stepped in. Or rather she slunk in, like one of her beloved cats. Following a very positive review in the journal of Resistance Literature in 1988 by Liz Fekete, she asked if she could visit us when she next passed through London. And from then on, she was a regular attendee at our lunchtime staff meetings every time she visited the UK. You knew Barbara was in the building as her favourite perfume ‘Maroc’ wafted up the stairwell – as tell-tale as the haircut and trousers. Like the proverbial cat, Barbara always found her way home – to us – and became one of our most regular, if quiet, visitors at meetings, celebrations and parties.
Looking back now at the tributes others have paid her as incisive thinker, tough arguer, hard but fair teacher, I am struck by the demeanour she showed to us. She was usually silently attentive around that lunch table, imbibing the information we were exchanging, the tenor of the questions being asked of the organisation, the way we might discuss a contribution to the journal or our online news service. Barbara had come to learn; she was absolutely humble. We were the workers. Again, on reflection, I realise just how important our way of working was to her. It was she, of all members of the Editorial Working Committee, that noticed and queried why we had dropped our injunction to contributors that language should be clear (as opposed to obscure) and free of jargon. We reinstated it. Similarly it was she who circulated to her students a paper we had written on submissions to the journal in our exasperation at the way in which political movements were being depoliticised as students were taught to analyse discourse and lose their opinions in quoting others’.
Barbara was a Race & Class stalwart sans pareil. We are delighted that Avery Gordon and Neville Hoad should have agreed to prepare this specially themed issue of the journal to honour her work.