Decolonizing and Feminizing Freedom

A Caribbean Genealogy

Denise Noble

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137449504
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137449511
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces the powerful discourses and embodied practices through which Black Caribbean women have been imagined and produced as subjects of British liberal rule and modern freedom. It argues that in seeking to escape liberalism's gendered and racialised governmentalities, Black women's everyday self-making practices construct decolonising and feminising epistemologies of freedom. These, in turn, repeatedly interrogate the colonial logics of liberalism and Britishness. Genealogically structured, the book begins with the narratives of freedom and identity presented by Black British Caribbean women. It then analyses critical moments of crisis in British racial rule at home and abroad in which gender and Caribbean women figure as points of concern. Post-war Caribbean immigration to the UK, decolonisation of the British Caribbean and the post-emancipation reconstruction of the British Caribbean loom large in these considerations. In doing all of this, the author unravels the colonial legacies that continue to underwrite contemporary British multicultural anxieties. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of social and cultural history, politics, feminism, race and postcoloniality.

© The Author(s) 2016

D. NobleDecolonizing and Feminizing FreedomThinking Gender in Transnational Timeshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44951-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Denise Noble¹

(1)

Department of Sociology and Criminology, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

Denise Noble

End Abstract

In Britain, as in many other Western postcolonial nations, the contemporary politics of difference and anti-racism have tended to privilege the nation-state as the condition and the container of difference and the guarantor of rights, based on entitlements of citizenship. This book resists this preoccupation by casting a transnational and transhistorical lens on the often hidden entanglements between global processes, the governing strategies of nation-states and the vernacular practices of ordinary people; between Western multicultural nations and their histories of empire; between ‘civilizing’ missions and emancipatory projects; and between ‘the woman question’ and ‘the race question’. These longstanding relations—frequently viewed by the Western nations as over, defunct and forgettable—continue and persist, albeit in altered forms. They therefore require new analysis and renewed critiques to understand their novel articulations with the changing identities, political and social grammars and practices of the present; a present that has been variously characterized as postcolonial, postracial, postfeminist and neoliberal.

This partial, sociohistorical and biopolitically situated Caribbean genealogy of liberal freedom offers a narration of a particular experience of Black Britishness and Caribbean womanhood, beginning from the perspectives of women of Caribbean descent living in London. This book’s transnational perspective attends closely to the politics of location, both geographically and discursively, which construct the interdiscursivities of heterosexual Black femininity. This inevitably must include attention to how the formation of the post-emancipation free African-Caribbean woman has emerged in relation to other categories of Blackness, Caribbean identity and woman, engaging with the local, regional and uneven global flows of the diasporic, the transnational and the global. The writing of this book has principally been informed by my own location as a Black British-born scholar of African-Jamaican descent, and my own frustrations with and yearning to find a way of analysing the politics of race, ethnicity, gender and racism in Britain in ways that can take seriously their conjunctural global and local historical formations. These histories reappear in the national and trans-imperial legacies, which, in their interactions with the neocolonial formations of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, constituted the conditions of possibility framing twenty-first-century postcolonial Britain. Understanding the contemporary politics of race and ethnicity in Britain outside this analytical frame is to perpetually misdiagnose the times in which we live and misrecognize the nation Britain claims to be.

This book constructs a Caribbean genealogy of Britain in its colonial articulations of racialized modernity, tracing the links between contemporary postcolonial neoliberal racisms and racial formations and earlier colonial modes of racial thought and ruling practices. In particular, it focuses on the moments of intensification and crisis in the liberal modes of governance that define Britain’s liberal identity and in which the complicity between race, nation and broader global political and cultural processes are revealed. These considerations are particularly pertinent at a time when government ministers in Britain, along with other political leaders in Europe, have proclaimed the ‘failure’ and ‘crisis’ of multiculturalism in Britain and Europe, with the former prime minister, David Cameron, calling for a turn to ‘muscular liberalism’ as the solution. Rarely made explicit in these discussions of multiculturalism is the very obvious gendered dimension of this representation of both liberalism and Britishness, given that muscularity in Western culture is normatively valued as an expression of a certain kind of active rugged masculinity, typically associated with conquest, rule and mastery. That this ‘muscular liberalism’ is represented as the indigenous moral character and political identity of the British nation and its people requires interrogation and explanation using analytical frames that can address the entanglements of modernity’s gendered racial formations.

This is advanced through a transnational and postcolonial sociocultural history of the formation of the Black Caribbean woman as a subject of British liberal freedom since the abolition of slavery in Britain’s Caribbean territories in the early nineteenth century. Starting with the current period of the twenty-first century, the arguments presented in this volume trace the changing identities of liberalism—not as a philosophy or theory, but as: (1) a set of rationalities and practices for governing and critiquing the limits of both freedom and government in liberal states (Foucault 1991a, b); and (2) a central tenet of British modern national identity.

Centrally, this volume addresses the tensions, contradictions and appeasements that take place within and between diverse state and non-state liberal projects for governing African-Caribbean and other racially-constructed populations in the name of freedom. In particular, it analyses how African-Caribbean women have been discursively constituted and targeted as racially-gendered subjects of modern freedom and how they have in turn utilized their available freedoms in efforts to govern themselves. It asks what conceptions of freedom underwrite these practices and what insights might they offer for a project of decolonizing freedom.

Sociological and feminist studies of race and ethnicity in Britain have largely focused on the role of the state in responding to ethnic diversity and racism, women’s rights and gender inequality. Despite the turn to culture inaugurated by the work of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, sociological investigations that specifically address the cultural worlds and self-understandings of Black women in Britain have been conspicuously thin on the ground. This study addresses this gap by exploring the practices and discourses of freedom through which British women of Afro-Black Caribbean identity have sought to understand and shape themselves as free women with personal and social value and power. Focusing on the post-emancipation formation of the free Black woman of the Caribbean, this work analyses the self-fashioning practices of freedom that are produced from this interdiscursively inscribed subject position, and the extent to which this figure may exceed or escape the sum of her historically mutable, biopolitically constructed parts. In writing a British Caribbean genealogy of the modern free Black woman, this volume considers how Black African-descended, or Afro-Caribbean women in various times and locations have sought to utilize, revise, extend and redefine their available freedoms. This analysis asks who is the contemporary self who emerges from this self-affirming and self-determining subject?; what can we learn from her about our contemporary times?; and how does this history of the present produce new ways of understanding liberalism’s changing racialized and gendered governmentalities and the intimate co-production of racialized modernity (Hesse 2007) and the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2008).

This book is not a chronological history; neither does it aim to merely narrate a particular experience of woman or Blackness. Rather, as a history of the formation of the post-emancipation free Black Caribbean woman within British rule and modern freedom, it is an intellectual practice of critical ‘rememorying’. Novelist Toni Morrison defines rememorying as a creative act of imagination in which, as a writer, she must trust her own recollections and also depend on the recollections of others (Morrison 1995, 91) to undertake ‘a kind of literary archaeology’ whereby ‘on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply’ (Morrison 1995, 92). This imaginative act of fiction-writing for Morrison is constituted in three parts: the image, the recollection and the creative imagination. For Morrison, the imaginative process of fiction-writing combines the image (the ‘remains’ and the feelings that accompany it) with recollection, and as a result they ‘yield up a kind of truth’ (ibid.). Rememorying then uses the memory and past of others to facilitate both an individual as well as a collective rememorying. Rememorying is thus a practice that does not rely only on subjective memories, since they can so easily forget what they did not realize would be important to remember, and can succumb to the power of hegemonic histories that wilfully produce collective amnesia. Rememorying also does more than simply remember, as though that which needed to be recalled was simply sitting there waiting to be picked up again. Rememorying as genealogy is investigative, interrogative and insurgent, seeking out the threads of power, its repressions and activations. Rememorying is both recovery (in the sense of retrieval) and critique (Morrison 1995, 95), in order to better understand the present. In this sense, there is some overlap between Morrison’s concept of rememorying and Michel Foucault’s methodological perspective of genealogical historical analysis (Chap. 2).

While Foucault’s genealogy and his critiques of liberalism, modern power and freedom are central to this work, they will also be questioned and reworked in the service of other subordinated knowledges and will be inflected by feminist and decolonial-postcolonial perspectives. In this regard, the argument presented in this book contributes to a body of work in the social sciences and humanities that bears the marks of the influence of Foucault’s work on postcolonial and feminist theories, but which has sought to redress Foucault’s enigmatic disengagements with empire, race and woman, despite his interests in difference and countermodernities. This has generated important work that has been able to examine the diffusion of coloniality as a global system of power through cultural imperialism and colonial governmentality. This book is influenced by an approach to analysing these concepts spearheaded by Ann Laura Stoler (1988, 1995, 2002). This work retains the deep theoretical rigour of postcolonial and decolonial analyses that foreground the conjunctures and articulations of power, resistance and struggle, while also focusing on the intimacies of power marked on the body and in the everyday lived micropractices of race and gender, through which the ‘performative nature of state power’ (Wilson 2011, 1295) seeks to govern its citizens in the name of freedom. This book contributes to the growing body of postcolonial/decolonial analysis by feminist scholars addressing the interdiscursive formations of race and gender in the production of colonial governmentality. For example, Bannerji (2001) and Azim et al. (2009) on gender and British colonial rule in India, and Sheller (2012) on gender and British colonial rule in the Caribbean. Stoler’s work has demonstrated how inter- and transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches can be deployed to move within and between questions of representation and experience, discourse and the lived everyday, between state governing practices and ethics of the self, performativity and affect, race and gender, to understand more fully their cultural and political intersections, interactions and articulations in the making of colonial modernity. These insights are applied in this study to explore conceptually and experientially how coloniality as a naturalized relation of difference as inequality is reproduced in the name of advancing and extending the reach of liberal freedom. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial critiques of race and modernity, the following chapters aim to engage the experiences of Caribbean women and the politics of gender and sexuality in Western modernity’s racialized logics, and within Black modernity’s gendered formations (Spillers 1987). This volume seeks to take seriously how Black heteronormativities are both hegemonic and governmental in defining Black identities and so reproduce and often reinforce Western heteronormativity, but also how they are paradoxically racially ‘queered’ by colonial modernity’s Western and liberal sex/gender order.

Black Like Who?

Black British identity is a contested and diverse identity, which has to be understood and theorized through its formation in dispersed ‘diasporic exchanges, dialogues and renewals’ which ‘become a fundamental part of thinking what the politics of blackness might be’ Walcott (2003, 145). The resulting multiplicities of blackness that follow from this are captured by the all-inclusive British anti-racist conception of Black to refer to all non-white people. In this book, unless otherwise stated, Black will be used to refer to non-white people of African descent. The book seeks to acknowledge ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Turning History Upside Down
• 3. The Old and New Ethnicities of Postcolonial Black (British)ness
• 4. ‘Standing in the Bigness of Who I Am’: Black Caribbean Women and the Paradoxes of Freedom
• 5. Two Reports, One Empire: Race and Gender in British Post-War Social Welfare Discourse
• 6. Discrepant Women, Imperial Patriarchies and (De)Colonizing Masculinities
• 7. Beyond Racial Trauma: Remembering Bodies, Healing the Self
• 8. Taking Liberties with Neoliberalism: Compliance and Refusal
• 9. Conclusion: Rebellious Histories
• Correction to: Decolonizing and Feminizing Freedom
• Back Matter