Abstract
This book was written before the global pandemic – before Covid-19 exposed systemic race and class inequalities; before Black Lives Matter protests broke out across the world, pushing an abolitionist agenda to the fore; before revolutionary feminisms took to the streets of London in collective grief and anger following the death of Sarah Everard in March 2021. And yet, this anthology of conversations with ten scholar-activists, that detail their personal, political and scholarly trajectories, speaks directly to our current moment. Revolutionary Feminisms imparts an uplifting ‘political inheritance’ of anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles to people organising today.
Comprised of ‘conversations’ between the editors Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah and ten scholar-activists (Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis, Vron Ware, Himani Bannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Silvia Federici, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon and Angela Y. Davis), the book is arranged into three sections: migration and empire; colonialism and capitalism; and abolition. Each voice speaks from a range of contexts, including Black feminism, Marxist feminism, communist movements, Black internationalism, indigenous struggles, anti-racist organising and queer activism. Yet each interview speaks to the others, across sections, converging around key themes – the formation of political consciousness, the relationship between theory and praxis, and how to build on struggles of the past.
By compiling these different voices together, the editors extend the notion of what constitutes feminism, including writers who are not always considered part of mainstream feminist thought. As noted in the introduction, the book was ‘initially motivated by a justifiable sense of plaintiveness, and fatigue, at the continual marginalisation of left, anti-racist feminist thought and praxis’. None of the individuals interviewed here subscribe to a narrow conception of feminism being solely about certain types of ‘womanhood’, detached from race, capitalism and colonialism. Although the term is never explicitly defined, the editors sculpt the contours of what ‘revolutionary feminism’ is in the pages of the book – a praxis forged by generations of communities that seeks to transform the current social order, based on an understanding that gender justice must also address racism, capitalism and imperialism.
The easy conversational format helps convey key principles of revolutionary feminism: the mutuality and interdependence that binds us whatever our context and the historical continuum to which we belong. Avery F. Gordon quotes Martin Luther King to articulate this connectedness: ‘We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects us all indirectly.’ This ‘single garment of destiny’ entwines us all together, denoting the indivisibility of struggles, but also the interrelation of knowledge – ‘we are peoples with reciprocal relationships of life’, says indigenous artist and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, ‘we have always ethically shared land, time and space with plants, animals and other humans, stretching back to the past and reaching forwards to coming generations’. Structures of power are also co-constitutive, ‘racial, economic and gender justice are inextricably connected’, says Angela Davis in her concluding chapter, ‘one is not possible without the others’.
Indeed, recognising the symbiotic relationship of state, institutional and interpersonal violence is one of the key tenets of abolitionism – the movement that Davis and Gilmore have spearheaded in the US. In order to abolish the carceral state, we have to undo the political, social and economic conditions that produce it. With calls to ‘defund the police’ beginning to become a practical reality since the summer of 2020, Revolutionary Feminisms’ exploration of what abolition means in practice, articulated by key organisers of the movement, could not be more urgent. ‘Abolition is not primarily about an end to be achieved, but rather about how we conceptualise social justice issues as always interconnected and interrelated’, says Angela Davis. ‘What do you do the day after you win?’ asks Ruth Gilmore Wilson, ‘abolition is not the absence of something; it’s the presence of something’ – a sentiment captured in protesters’ calls to ‘divest and invest’. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson expresses this symbiotic relationship, of dismantling and building, through the idea of a ‘generative refusal’. This means not just dismantling colonialism and its related projects, but ‘generating, building, making, organising, struggling to create and actualise alternatives’ which makes tangible a different present. As several of the interviewees explore, this means funding social workers, counsellors and support workers; building networks of community care, and creating spaces for collective organising for the day after ‘we win’.
This ongoing process, of building something better for the future, ‘unlocks theory and knowledge’. The two editors skilfully tease out crucial insights from each interlocutor on the purpose of theory and its relation to activism, providing important signposts for scholars now attempting to carve out radical spaces in the neoliberal academy. Speaking from Canada, sociologists Himani Bannerji and Garry Kinsman explore the need to unite university workers and combat the competitive atmosphere between academics through centring collective struggles against the commodification of education, precarity and corporatisation. As Kinsman writes, ‘[universities] are also sites of class struggle all the time’. These insights on the purpose of radical scholarship are not just for academics. What the book does so well is make theories (Marxist, psychoanalytic, Black feminist, abolitionist, to name but a few) accessible.
One of the most vital contributions to theory here is a nuanced discussion on the origins, uses and limits of the term ‘intersectionality’. Bannerji outlines the limits of the term, related to the legal discourse in which it emerged and its subsequent lack of critique of the wider capitalist order in which different oppressions exist. Avtar Brah draws on her use of the term ‘intersectionality’ in Cartographies of Diaspora (1996), hinting towards the longue durée of women searching for ways to name their lived experiences of race, class and gendered oppression. From as early as 1949, Claudia Jones referred to a ‘triple oppression’, a term echoed by the Third World Women’s alliance in their newspaper Triple Jeopardy (racism, imperialism and sexism), later taken up by the Combahee River Collective in 1977 and then used by the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent at their first conference in London. As several of the contributors indicate, we must recognise the long histories of women naming the interrelated modes of dominance they exist within, and hold on to these terms in the face of neoliberal co-option. But also, as Gail Lewis voiced at an online book launch in October 2020, we must acknowledge the myriad ways in which those who are exploited, devalued and oppressed may live in ways ‘otherwise’.
One of the key sites of resistance, of living ‘otherwise’, is in the realm of social reproduction, where global struggles around care work, led by domestic workers, cleaners and carers, moved to the fore during the pandemic. In her contribution, Silvia Federici outlines the totality of social reproduction, which encompasses the many processes that make and sustain life, not just in the home but in the workplace, in hospitals, in schools; work that is predominantly shouldered by migrant women from previously colonised countries. Federici ends her section highlighting the need to link social reproduction with ecological and indigenous struggles, provoking the reader to make their own links. For me, it brought to mind the mining of rivers in Indian-administered Kashmir, where thousands, who rely on the river for their livelihood, have faced unabated sand and mineral excavation that has vandalised their ecosystem and dried up their water source. 1
Although the perspectives covered in the book come from different locales, with all the interviewees bringing in an internationalist perspective, I was eager for additional interviews with feminists in Latin America, Africa, South and East Asia and Eastern Europe. I hope this anthology marks the beginning of further collaborative projects that archive the oral histories of revolutionary feminisms around the world – a project that will always be unfinished, just as feminist consciousness constantly evolves through the struggles of communities that forge radicalism on a daily basis.
As suggested in the editors’ introduction and Lisa Lowe’s afterword, histories of past struggles are not static, but are constantly reworked in the present as we work towards building a different future. These are ‘unfinished activisms’, 2 that contain promises, dreams and questions of past struggle, which young activists continue to grapple with today. This book, collaborative to its core, invites scholars, activists and researchers to join in, pick up the threads of struggles that came before us and weave them into new contexts.