We used our place in the world to imagine ourselves differently': Black Feminist Activism and the Politics of Race, Nation and Empire in Britain

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My doctoral thesis will investigate Black British feminist activism during the period 1968-1988. This timeframe covers the beginning of Black women's organising within the Black Power movement, through to the end of the Black Women's Movement (BWM) in the Thatcher years. Despite the relative lack of scholarship on the subject, Black women throughout this era constructed an anti-imperialist praxis that resisted the racist, sexist and classist sources of their oppression in Britain. Black women's activism offers fertile ground to examine the intersection of race, gender, nation and empire in Britain, yet, fifty years after they began to organise collectively, their revolutionary work remains a marginalised narrative. My interdisciplinary and transnational study brings together intellectual history and the history of activism in order to reconceptualise our understanding of Black British women's contribution to feminist theory and praxis. Instead of understanding Black women as merely responding to and critiquing the multiple oppressions that they faced, my thesis will examine how they utilised their liminal position in Britain to form fundamentally new and radical political theorisations. Such an investigation will inform my central research question: how did Black feminists use their marginal position in Britain to develop new understandings of imperialism and to contemplate the possibility of a post-imperial future? My thesis will engage with its central inquiry using three key bodies of sources. Primarily, my analysis will be structured around oral history interviews that I will conduct with women who were involved in activist spaces throughout this period. This will include members of the British Black Panthers, OWAAD and Brixton Black Women's Group (BBWG), the most prominent organisations and vanguards of Black feminist organising in Britain. Oral history methodology will be key to this thesis, seeking as it is to challenge the historical erasure of Black British feminism and counteract the limited availability of documentary material on Black women's activism. In addition to oral history interviewing, I will also analyse printed and archival sources located at the Black Cultural Archives, where OWAAD co-founder Stella Dadzie's personal papers are stored, along with other archival collections and oral history interviews of Black women activists conducted by the archive in 2010.My interdisciplinary approach will enable me to make an original contribution to scholarship on the impact of empire on the metropole. Recent works by Bill Schwarz (2011) and Camilla Schofield (2013) have exemplified the significance of this impact; however, these works do not interrogate the seminal contribution of Black British feminism in the development of anti-imperialist thought and activism. Similarly, whilst earlier groundbreaking feminist sociological studies by Heidi Mirza (1997) and Julia Sudbury (1998) sought to articulate how Black feminists challenged racism in Britain, they do not fully investigate such women's responses to British imperialism. In more recent scholarship, Natalie Thomlinson (2016) has argued that a specifically 'feminist' politics 'never entirely superseded older forms of Black women's organisation' in the BWM (65). Conversely, I will argue that Black women's groups engaged with a range of radical ideologies to construct a politics of Black Socialist Feminism.