Beyond the Masks

Race, Gender and Subjectivity

Amina Mama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415035439
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134960361
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology has had a number of things to say about black and coloured people, none of them favourable, and most of which have reinforced stereotyped and derogatory images. Beyond the Masks is a readable account of black psychology, exploring key theoretical issues in race and gender. In it, Amina Mama examines the history of racist psychology, and of the implicit racism throughout the discipline. Beyond the Masks also offers an important theoretical perspective, and will appeal to all those involved with ethnic minorities, gender politics and questions of identity.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Beyond the Masks is a study that explores the construction of subjectivity and puts forward a theoretical account of the processes through which subjectivities are constituted. This is undertaken through a two-fold study of black subjectivity. The first three chapters of this book are devoted to the deconstruction of the black subject construed by scientific psychology, while the remainder is devoted to developing a theoretical approach to the construction of particular post-colonial black subjectivities.

I start by examining how the western academic establishment, particularly within the discipline of psychology, has historically construed the black subject in ways that have stereotyped and derogated black people, and so upheld white supremacist regimes. I argue that the reliance of both mainstream (white-dominated) and black psychology¹ on the postEnlightenment philosophical assumption of the human subject as a rational, unitary and fixed entity is responsible for the narrow and simplified constructions of ‘the Negro’ and ‘the Black’. The subject of colonial and white-dominated psychological discourses concerning the African and the Negro are deconstructed, revealed to be not an objective scientific truth but rather a product of wider social conditions and the unequal power relations that have characterised white supremacist discourse and practice. I then examine the newer theorisations of identity developed by contemporary black American psychologists: theorisations that I argue have done much to redress psychological racism but that have been limited by their remaining within the empiricist paradigm.

I then set out to develop a different approach to the study and theorisation of historically racialised identities, using conceptual tools drawn from recent advances in post-structuralist and psychodynamic theory. I use the concept of subjectivity instead of the psychological terms ‘identity’ and ‘self’ to indicate my rejection of the dualistic notion of psychological and social spheres as essentially separate territories: one internal and one external to the person. Instead I regard both as being continuously constituted and changing, as being locked in a recursive relationship of mutually advancing production and change. Subjectivity is conceptualised throughout this study but for introductory purposes it is worth stating that my use of the term follows the authors of Changing the Subject, a leading text in post-structuralist psychology. Here subjectivity is used to refer to ‘individuality and self-awareness—the condition of being a subject’ (Henriques et al. 1984: 3). Weedon has succinctly located the concept and its usage as follows:

The terms subject and subjectivity are central to post-structuralist theory and they mark a crucial break with humanist conceptions of the individual which are still central to western philosophy and political and social organisation.‘Subjectivity’ is used to refer to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world…. (P)ost-structuralism proposes a subjectivity which is precarious, contradictory and in process, constantly being constituted in discourse each time we think or speak.

(Weedon 1987: 32–3)

I investigate the production of subjectivity through a case study of how contemporary black women construct their own subjectivities in the particular social context of 1980s and 1990s Britain, and the role played by the contradictions of race and gender experienced in the course of their personal development. My approach looks at the historical and social material they draw on, and how they creatively transform and yet remain influenced by some of the discourses that have historically positioned black women living in Western Europe. Through my exploration of the subjectivities of a number of black women, I develop and apply a theorisation of subjectivity that does not assume a unitary, static subject at its core but instead conceptualises subjectivity as multiple, dynamic and continuously produced in the course of social relations that are themselves changing and at times contradictory.

I take the epistemological position that all knowledge is socially situated. Therefore there is no such thing as value-free social theory, and the goal of intellectual rigour can best be served not by claiming objectivity and ignoring the values underpinning one’s intellectual work but rather by acknowledging the commitments, motivations and conditions that are likely to have played a part in its production. It is in keeping with this position that I now highlight some of the social and theoretical changes that have influenced this work.

BLACK POLITICS, BLACK FEMINISM

The arena of struggle that has been most central to the production of this work has been that of the black political struggles being waged outside but later carried into the academies and institutions of governance, in the years immediately prior to the Labour Party winning control of the Greater London Council.

Involvement in the black women’s movement greatly heightened my awareness of the fact that questions of identity were central to the black radical and black women’s politics of both the late 1970s and early 1980s. Having arrived in London in 1979, and trying to make sense of the racial and sexual dynamics of the community in which I found myself in the area of South London where I lived, I joined the black women’s group nearest to my rented room in central Brixton, known at that time simply as the ‘Black Women’s Group’ (BWG).

Brixton Black Women’s Group (BBWG), as it later became known, was one of the first to be set up, established as it was in 1973 by women who had been involved in the Black Power movement organisations that mushroomed across London in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Women angered by the suppression of gender issues within the black movement had begun to hold caucus meetings at the beginning of the 1970s, before deciding to form an autonomous organisation to address the concerns of black women. Subsequently these were joined by women who felt alienated by the reluctance of the women’s liberation movement (WLM) to address the realities of racism both within and beyond their ranks. Black women’s groups subsequently formed in other parts of London and all over Britain. In addition to these community-based groups, many of the African women living in Britain were active through national organisations—the ZANU Women’s League, the Eritrean and Ethiopian Women’s Study Groups, the Black Women’s Alliance of South Africa, and others.

After an initial meeting held in February 1978, a national umbrella organisation known as the Organisation for Women of Africa and African descent (OWAAD) was formed with the aim of prioritising African and Afro-Caribbean women’s issues. The central committee of OWAAD produced a newsletter FOWAAD! and brought the various emerging local black women’s organisations together at annual conferences. At the local level, black women organised political campaigns and cultural activities and serviced their communities through the establishment of women’s centres, advice lines and refuges for women facing abuse. In the course of all these activities, a great many underwent a process of self-discovery and change, developing their identities in various ways, some of which are detailed in Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. At the collective level, political awareness was developed, both through campaigning work and through study and consciousness-raising activities. For example, the BBWG articulated its position as being one of black feminism as early as 1981, as is documented in a position statement published in the collective’s newsletter Speak Out.

The status of black women places us at the intersection of all forms of subjugation in society—racial oppression, sexual oppression and economic exploitation. This means that we are a natural part of many different struggles—both as black people and as women…It is in the context of an understanding of our oppression based on sex, race and class, and the recognition of our struggle being part and parcel of the greater struggle for the liberation of all our people from all forms of oppression, that black feminism is defined for us.

(BBWG 1981)

The early history of the black women’s movement and its active participation in the wider antiracist and anti-sexist struggles has been outlined elsewhere (see BBWG 1984a, Bryan et al 1985, Williams 1993). What has not been fully explored is the way in which issues of identity were continuously problematic terrain within a black women’s movement committed to the ideal of unity, yet faced with the reality of cultural and political diversity within its ranks. This diversity undermined the bold political proclamations of black unity and the ideal of a united, autonomous black feminist movement, and must be counted among the factors that contributed to the demise of OWAAD in 1983, only five years after its formation:

The task of uniting so many diverse and differing elements, particularly in the absence of a fundamental grounding and appreciation of the concrete experiences of each particular grouping, proved too much.

(BBWG statement, 1984b)

In the same statement, various sources of this difficulty are detailed. First among these was the problematic nature of realising the proclaimed commitment to the unity of African and Afro-Caribbean interests, when these disparate groups of women knew so little about each other and were loaded with historical prejudices and presumptions about each other. After all, until the later development of Black Studies, people of African and Caribbean descent derived whatever limited knowledge they had about each other from the same colonial and racist education systems as everyone else in the West. Asserting the ‘objective reality’ of unity did not automatically forge an alliance out of the very diverse subjective realities and political priorities that characterised Britain’s black communities.

Within its first year the organisation began to focus on the realities of life in Britain where, by this time, approximately half of the non-white population were of Asian extraction. Before the end of 1978, OWAAD changed its name from the Organisation for Women of Africa and African Descent to become the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent, adopting a commitment to the unity of Afro-Caribbean and Asian women as one of its central tenets. With this shift in focus came other changes. During the annual national conferences held in 1978–82 for example, OWAAD reflected the concerns of its constituent groups in focusing more on British antiracist and feminist concerns than on anti-imperialist and African national liberation struggles. While this may have made a great deal of sense politically, it failed to ameliorate the difficulties emanating from the cultural and historical diversity of the membership. There was heightened attention to specific histories and a growing interest in exploring cultural roots, so that while political commonality was being asserted, differences in identity were being discovered. The political assertion of black unity and sisterhood was accompanied by a construction of the black woman as a unitary identity category.²

The inner-city disturbances of April and July 1981 overtook the black women’s movement before a more thorough exploration of these and other contradictions could be undertaken. When these were followed up by mass arrests and intense community defence, members of the largest group within OWAAD, the BBWG, devoted much of its energy to the Brixton Defence Campaign: to picketing courts and police stations, to campaigning against the Scarman Inquiry,³ and to supporting men as well as women who had been subjected to the oppressive policing and the legal injustices that preceded and followed the disturbances.

These were also the early years of municipal socialism, with the Greater London Council making resources available at community level. This led to a preoccupation with the practical activities of establishing and managing projects for black women, rather than with political activism and campaigning work. With few exceptions, many activist groups can be said to have become increasingly ‘projectised’, that is to say, drawn into the management of funded welfare projects, during this period. One consequence of becoming a funded project was that activists became volunteers; they had less time for intellectual and political activities as community servicing and the bureaucratic tasks that result from becoming accountable to funders took over.

By 1982, the weakened state of OWAAD, the exhaustion of a central committee that was no longer united and the increased concentration of constituent groups on local community concerns rather than national or international politics, led to the inevitable decline of the organisation. With hindsight one can see that the historical importance of the black women’s movement lay in the way in which it created a new discursive space within which a great many black women were able to share and explore their identities and develop their political awareness through a collective process. In Britain at least, black feminism was first articulated within this movement.⁴ Long after OWAAD itself had ceased to exist, the proliferation of new cultural forms and articulations of identity has continued in the black communities and subsequently in the wider society.

Many of the difficulties that this fledgling movement encountered were about the relationship between identity and politics, the contradictions between one’s subjectivity and one’s professed position. The influential feminist slogan ‘the personal is the political’ was generally taken as meaning that the one was the same as the other and therefore, that if one had the correct political analysis, all else would fall into place. History has demonstrated that nothing could be further from the truth. Adopting political rhetoric and symbolism, however earnestly, does not unproblematically lead to personal change.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a period of intense engagement with class, race and gender issues. Similar processes were occurring in the antiracist struggles of ethnic minorities across Europe. These newly articulated postcolonial identities were dynamic and changing, and forced a more general reconsideration of European identities. The relationships between race and nationality were soon to be reappraised in many countries (see for example Gilroy 1987). The new black identities in particular were forged in the cauldrons of new forms of repression and resistance. In Britain it was an era of political campaigns against heavyhanded policing and the repeated deaths of young blacks in custody, of protests against immigration harassment at ports of entry and through the notorious workplace fishing raids. Community groups also organised campaigns against racism in the education system, in housing, in the health and welfare services and on the job market. Within the various community organisations, people sought to redefine themselves, to articulate what it meant to be black in Britain and to demand their rights as British citizens. Within these struggles, black people also sought to redefine themselves and their cultures positively, as proud and assertive rather than as inferior and pathological. Political change was seen as a lived reality, with personal and cultural change as an integral aspect of wider social transformation towards a racially equal society.

Assertions of black identity in the early 1980s were the psychological and cultural aspects of the post-colonial metropolitan struggle against racism and white supremacy, a struggle carried out not only on the battle-field of liberation struggles in Africa but in the imperial heartlands—in the inner cities in the belly of the beast.⁵ More than this, the articulation of black identities was about changing into a different kind of human being—about changing one’s consciousness of one’s position in the world, about constructing new subjectivities and rejecting the disempowering legacies of centuries.

The changes within London’s black communities were part of my own growing political awareness during the 1980s, and have influenced the direction and subject matter of this study, as well as forming part of its contents. The analysis and theory of subjectivity put forward in the later chapters is based on studying that ongoing process of cultural and individual change, change that was happening simultaneously within individuals and at the collective, social level.

FEMINIST STARTING POINTS

The other major influence on Beyond the Masks has been the emergence and development of feminist theory and research throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and the particular engagement that has taken place between black and mainstream feminism. At the most general level, a commitment to women’s liberation was as central to this resea...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2: ENSLAVING THE SOUL OF THE OTHER
• CHAPTER 3: INVENTING BLACK IDENTITY
• CHAPTER 4: RESEARCHING SUBJECTIVITY
• CHAPTER 5: LOCATING THE INDIVIDUAL IN HISTORY
• CHAPTER 6: BLACK BRITISH SUBJECTS
• CHAPTER 7: PSYCHODYNAMICS OF RACIALISED SUBJECTIVITY
• CHAPTER 8: BLACK FEMININITY
• CHAPTER 9: CHARTING POST-COLONIAL SUBJECTIVITIES
• APPENDIX
• REFERENCES