Heidi Safia Mirza

Plotting a History: Black and postcolonial feminisms in ‘new times’

Black feminist thought is grounded in an understanding of the nature of power and the way black/othered difference women’s is systematically organised through social relations. Postcolonial feminist approaches enable us to situate the silent ‘spectral’ power of colonial times as it appears in the production and reproduction of marginalised, racialised and gendered others in new contemporary times. This special issue brings the two perspectives together to explore the complexities of black and ethnicised female marginality through an intersectional analysis where race, class, gender and other social divisions are theorised as lived realities. Through a variety of methodologies – such as the oral tradition of storytelling in CRT (critical race theory), embodied autobiography and geographically embedded longitudinal ethnographies – black and postcolonial feminist scholars chart new perspectives on multiple identity, hybridity, diaspora, religion, culture and sexuality. Exploring issues as diverse as black female marginality in higher education and their regulation and resistance in the neocolonial sites of schooling, work, family and the media, black and postcolonial feminist scholars of colour demonstrate their contribution to critical race and feminist thinking.

Transcendence over Diversity: black women in the academy

Universities, like many major public institutions, have embraced the notion of ‘diversity’ virtually uncritically – it is seen as a moral good in itself. But what happens to those who come to represent ‘diversity’ – the black and minority ethnic groups targeted to increase the institutions’ thirst for global markets and aversion to accusations of institutional racism? Drawing on existing literature which analyses the process of marginalisation in higher education, this article explores the individual costs to black and female academic staff regardless of the discourse on diversity. However, despite the exclusion of staff, black and minority ethnic women are also entering higher education in relatively large numbers as students. Such grass-roots educational urgency transcends the dominant discourse on diversity and challenges presumptions inherent in top-down initiatives such as widening participation. Such a collective movement from the bottom up shows the importance of understanding black female agency when unpacking the complex dynamics of gendered and racialised exclusion. Black womens desire for education and learning makes possible a reclaiming of higher education from creeping instrumentalism and reinstates it as a radical site of resistance and refutation.

Empowering Muslim girls? Post-feminism, multiculturalism and the production of the ‘model’ Muslim female student in British schools

Abstract This article draws on an analysis of the narratives of teachers, policy-makers and young Muslim working-class women to explore how schools worked towards producing the model neoliberal middle-class female student. In two urban case-study schools, teaching staff encouraged the girls to actively challenge their culture through discourses grounded in western post-feminist ideals of female ‘empowerment’. The production of the compliant ‘model Muslim female student’ appeared to be a response to the heroic western need to ‘save’ the young women from backward cultural and religious practices. While this approach had many positive and liberating effects for the young women, it ironically produced forms of post-feminist ‘gender friendly’ self-regulation. The article concludes with a black feminist intersectional analysis of race, religion, gender, sexuality and class in the context of British multiculturalism and rising Islamophobia, exploring the contradictions of gendered social justice discourses that do not fully embrace ‘difference’ in educational spaces.

Black Bodies ‘Out of Place’ in Academic Spaces: Gender, Race, Faith and Culture in Post-race Times

This chapter takes a black feminist embodied approach to investigating the intersectionality of gender, race, faith and culture as it manifests itself in our overwhelmingly white places of teaching and learning in post-race times. The research study looks at the accounts of white Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) tutor’s ‘best practice’ when teaching and engaging with black and minority ethnic students. The three ‘best practice’ narratives of the tutors demonstrates the ways in which gender, race, religion, and other social divisions are simultaneously experienced as lived realities on and through the Muslim, black, male and female bodies of Keith, Sam and Kusbah. All three students were constructed as ‘bodies out of place’ in the ‘best practice’ equality narratives of the tutors. In each case the student’s embodied raced and gendered human agency framed their struggle for life chances and determined their academic well-being and progress through the course.

Racism in Higher Education: ‘What Then, Can Be Done?’

The launch of this Collection represents an important moment of critical intervention into the wider debates concerning the future of the Higher Education sector in Britain. 50 years on from the progressive twentieth century reforms to expand higher education, the birth of the concept institutional racism, and the landmark civil rights and Race Equality legislation in Britain and America, we find ourselves at a moment of consolidation and reflection. The chapters in the book document the scale of ‘What’s to be done’. We see how the entrenched mechanisms of institutional racism, from the overt admission processes, to covert everyday microaggressions operate to keep the academy an enclave of white privilege. We dismantle the ruse of equality and diversity policies which have become no more than a sham, a slick bureaucratic performance which contains the problem, but leaves the rot. We hear the voices of students and scholars who speak back to these institutions of higher learning with their revolutionary calls to decolonise the still impenetrable hub of imperial white knowledge production—and like them, we ask not ‘What’s to be done’—but ‘How can we do it?’

Embodying the Veil: Muslim Women and Gendered Islamophobia in ‘New Times’

In this chapter, I explore the intersectional dynamics of race, gender and religion by looking at the relationship between gendered Islamophobic discourses that circulate in the ‘West’ and the embodied identity of professional Muslim women working in universities in Britain. Framing the analysis is the macro discourse of anti-Islamic hostility in Britain and its production of the raced and gendered Muslim female body. In-depth interviews with three Muslim professional women of Turkish, Pakistani and Indian heritage give us an insight into their subjecthood and inner ‘sense of self’ as they negotiate the ‘postcolonial disjunctures’ of racism and Islamophobia which frame their everyday lives as professional women in educational spaces. Developing the concept of ‘embodied intersectionality’ enables an analysis of race, gender and religion through embodied practices such as choosing, or not, to wear the veil (hijab). This chapter concludes that while gendered and raced representation is powerfully written on and experienced within the Muslim female body, Muslim women continually challenge and transform the affective hegemonic discourses of Islamophobia that circulate in the ‘West’.

Book Reviews : Educational Inequality - mapping race, class and gender

The authors skilfully draw together and compare data and findings on the relationship between attainment and race, class and gender. Evidence includes DfEE data, LEA submissions in application for EMAG (Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant) and the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales. Data relates to the main minority ethnic groups Black Caribbean, Black African, Black other, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi. (Gypsy and Traveller children were covered by another project, and Chinese children excluded because of low numbers in each locality and a greater proportion educated outside the state sector.) Some data sources were necessarily incomplete, as even bids for EMAG funding have varied between authorities, and a third of those authorities bidding for these funds had not kept attainment data crossreferenced to ethnic group.