Avtar Brah

‘Race’ and ‘culture’ in the gendering of labour markets: South Asian young Muslim women and the labour market

This article attempts to develop an analytical framework for understanding the racialised gendering of labour markets. It is offered as part of an effort to theorise more adequately the place of pa...

The Scent of Memory: Strangers, Our Own, and Others

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lotts recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mothers suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lotts discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of ‘race’ are all but absent, and the racialized ‘commonsense’ that pervades the interviews with other local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the ‘diaspora space’ of London/Britain, interrogating essentialist ‘origin stories’ of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism, and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms – ‘ajnabi’, ‘ghair’, and ‘apna/apni’ – in constructing a nonbinarized understanding of identification across ‘difference’.

Global mobilities, local predicaments: globalization and the critical imagination

abstractAnalysing some of the key discourses of ‘globalization’ and their relationship to global/local processes of gender, the article makes a distinction between the ‘global’ and ‘globalization’, such that the latter is seen as only one dimension of the ‘global’. Globalization is understood as comprising complex and contradictory phenomena with diverse and differential impact across distinct categories of people, localities, regions and hemispheres. Hence, the notion of being straightforwardly ‘for’ or ‘against’ globalization is problematized. The essay explores media response to a major global event – the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September – in terms of the ‘agenda setting’ role of the USs ‘mainstream’ national television news coverage in the aftermath of the first two weeks. A subsequent peace rally, the ‘International Day Against War and Racism’, held in Washington DC, is analysed as the site for the emergence of a new oppositional political subject in the current context. The article underscores the importance of addressing ‘intersectionality’ to a critical imagination.

Interrogating cultural narratives about ‘honour’-based violence

On 3 August 2012, Shafilea Ahmed’s parents were convicted of her murder, nine years after the brutal ‘honour’ killing. The case offers important insights into how ‘honour’-based violence might be tackled without constructing non-Western cultures as inherently uncivilised. Critiquing the framing devices that structure British debates about ‘honour’-based violence demonstrates the prevalence of Orientalist tropes, revealing the need for new ways of thinking about culture that do not reify it or treat it as a singular entity that can only be tackled in its entirety; instead, it is important to recognise that cultures consist of multiple, intersecting signifying practices that are continually ‘creolising’. Thus, rather than talking purely about culture, debates on ‘honour’-based violence should explore the intersection of culture with gender and other axes of differentiation and inequality.

contemporary feminist discourses and practices within and across boundaries: an interview with Avtar Brah

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Feminist Review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version BRAH, A. and CLINI, C., 2018. Contemporary feminist discourses and practices within and across boundaries: an interview with Avtar Brah. Feminist Review, 117 (1), pp.163–170 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0079-2.

some fragments by way of an afterword

This is the hundredth issue of Feminist Review (FR) and much has changed since its inception in 1979, yet there are some important continuities. As before, the journal maintains its commitment to prioritise work that seeks to further theoretical and political debates that animate variegated forms of feminism. In 1979, the journal was produced by a group of women who explicitly described themselves as socialist feminist, although they welcomed contributions from any point of view within feminism. The project of socialist feminism has metamorphosed into many different formations. Some would say we have seen its demise. But for me, some of the critical questions it raised about global socio-economic inequities and inequalities still remain hugely pertinent in the face of neo-liberal globalisation that we face today.