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

我的博士论文将研究1968-1988年期间的英国黑人女权主义激进主义。这一时间框架涵盖了黑人妇女在黑人权力运动中组织起来的开始，直到撒切尔时代黑人妇女运动(BWM)的结束。尽管在这一主题上相对缺乏学术研究，但整个时代的黑人女性构建了一种反帝国主义的实践，抵制了种族主义、性别歧视和阶级歧视在英国造成她们压迫的根源。黑人女性的激进主义为审视英国种族、性别、国家和帝国的交集提供了肥沃的土壤，然而，在她们开始集体组织50年后，她们的革命工作仍然是一个被边缘化的叙事。我的跨学科和跨国研究将思想史和激进主义历史结合在一起，以重新定义我们对英国黑人妇女对女权主义理论和实践的贡献的理解。我的论文不是将黑人女性理解为仅仅是对她们所面临的多重压迫的回应和批评，而是研究她们如何利用她们在英国的有限地位来形成全新的、激进的政治理论。这样的调查将为我的中心研究问题提供信息：黑人女权主义者如何利用她们在英国的边缘地位来发展对帝国主义的新理解，并思考后帝国未来的可能性？我的论文将使用三个关键的来源来进行中心调查。首先，我的分析将围绕口述历史采访进行，我将在这段时间内对参与活动空间的女性进行采访。这将包括英国黑豹组织、OWAAD和布里克斯顿黑人妇女组织(BBWG)的成员，这些组织是英国最著名的组织和黑人女权主义组织的先锋。口述历史方法论将是这篇论文的关键，它试图挑战英国黑人女权主义的历史抹杀，并抵消关于黑人妇女激进主义的有限的文献资料。除了口述历史访谈，我还将分析位于黑人文化档案馆的印刷和档案来源，那里存储着OWAAD联合创始人斯特拉·达齐的个人文件，以及档案馆在2010年对黑人女性活动家进行的其他档案收藏和口述历史采访。我的跨学科方法将使我能够对帝国对大都市的影响做出原创性的学术贡献。比尔·施瓦茨(2011)和卡米拉·斯科菲尔德(2013)最近的作品已经证明了这种影响的重要性；然而，这些作品并没有质疑英国黑人女权主义在反帝国主义思想和激进主义发展中的开创性贡献。同样，尽管海蒂·米孜(1997年)和朱莉娅·萨德伯里(1998年)早期的开创性女性主义社会学研究试图阐明黑人女权主义者如何挑战英国的种族主义，但他们并没有全面调查这些女性对大英帝国主义的反应。在最近的学术研究中，娜塔莉·汤姆林森(2016)认为，在BWM(65)中，一种专门的“女权主义”政治“永远不会完全取代旧形式的黑人妇女组织”(65)。相反，我认为黑人妇女团体与一系列激进的意识形态接触，构建了一种黑人社会主义女权主义政治。

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.