Feminist Review, No. 45, Autumn 1993

CONTENTS

Editorial: Thinking Through Ethnicities

1

Audre Lorde: Reflections

4

Re-framing Europe: En-gendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe Avtar Brah

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Towards a Multicultural Europe? ‘Race’ Nation and Identity in 1992 and Beyond Kum-Kum Bhavnani

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Another View: Photo-essay Ingrid Pollard

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Growing Up White: Feminism, Racism and the Social Geography of Childhood Ruth Frankenberg

52

My Grandmother: Poem Jackie Kay

86

Looking Behind the Violent Break-up of Yugoslavia Meg Coulson

88

Personal Reactions of a Bosnian Woman to the War in Bosnia Indijana Hidovic Harper

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Serbian Nationalism: Nationalism of My Own People Maja Korac

110

Belgrade Feminists 1992: Separation, Guilt and Identity Crisis Lepa Mladjenovic and Vera Litricin

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Report on a Council of Europe Minority Youth Committee Seminar on Sexism and Racism in Western Europe Danielle J.Walker

121

Reviews Amina Mama on Showing Our Colours: Afro-German Women Speak Out

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Catherine Hall on Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle 134 East, 1718–1918 and Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism and Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation Laura Chrisman on Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History 138 Liz Bondi on The Sphinx in the City

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Noticeboard

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Feminist Review is published three times a year by a collective based in London, with help from women and groups all over the UK. The Collective: Avtar Brah, Ann Phoenix, Annie Whitehead, Catherine Hall, Clara Connolly, Dot Griffiths, Gail Lewis, Helen Crowley, Lola Young, Loretta Loach, Lorraine Gamman, Lynne Segal, Mary McIntosh, Naila Kabeer, Sue O’Sullivan. Corresponding editors: Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Ann Marie Wolpe (currently resident in South Africa). Correspondence and advertising For contributions, books for review and all other correspondence please write to: Feminist Review, 11 Carleton Gardens, Brecknock Road, London N19 5AQ. For advertising please write to: David Polley, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Subscriptions Please write to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP10 5BE. Contributions Feminist Review is happy to discuss proposed work with intending authors at an early stage. We need copy to come to us in our house style with references complete and in the right form. We can supply you with a style sheet. Please send in 4 copies plus the original (5 copies in all). In cases of hardship 2 copies will do. Bookshop distribution in the USA Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY10001, USA.

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EDITORIAL: Thinking Through Ethnicities

In the spring of 1992 the Feminist Review collective decided to do a special issue for 1993 on ‘Ethnicities’ as part of our prioritizing of issues around gender, race and ethnicity (see the editorial in Feminist Review, Number 40, Spring 1992). The decision came out of our annual planning weekend at which we discuss the agenda for the following year and focus on what seem to us to be the pressing debates to which the journal could make a contribution. Within Europe it is clear that questions around ethnic identities have become vital and pressing. In other parts of the world (for example, Malaysia and parts of Africa) differences and antagonisms expressed around ethnicity had been part of the political, economic and social agenda for more than a decade. That the power of ethnicity as a key site of contestation would proliferate around the world to such an alarming extent was not something that we in Europe anticipated in the 1980s. In this context we were all aware that our approach to ideas about ethnicity would need to be fresh and complex, not least because historically the word ‘ethnicity’ has had problematic and politically oppressive connotations. For example, rarely has the term ‘ethnic’ in the mass of literature on the subject been used to refer to white identities or to imagined communities that have emerged in the West. Colonialism and imperialism have resulted in the ethnocentric idea that the white majority are not ‘ethnic’—only Others are. Without any acknowledgement of the political implications of language, ‘ethnic’ has become a word in daily use on the BBC and in the press as news pours in of the eruptions associated with the break-up of the old socialist states. The reconstitution of old ethnic identities, the emergence of new ones and the violent struggles and conflicts associated with these developments have become part of our daily news. That most horrific term, ‘ethnic cleansing’ which we have grown so familiar with, is only the most graphic instance of the ways in which ethnic divisions have forced themselves into the popular imagination. To some extent this marks a shift in consciousness around issues of ethnicity in the 1990s. Yet that shift is only partial. Constant references to ethnic dress, ethnic jewellery, ethnic food,

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film and artifacts imply that the word ‘ethnic’ belongs only to those defined as Other. At the political, at the popular and at the academic level, ‘ethnicity’ is a concept which we all need to come to terms with and ‘ethnic identities’ are identities which we need to be able to grasp and understand. This understanding is necessary if we are to come to terms with the contradictory nature of ethnicities and the ways in which ethnicism (the construction of culturally essentialized groups) becomes a tool to produce and reconstitute relationships of dominance and subordination. Conversely, such an understanding can also permit a view of the ways in which ethnic identities may help to constitute emancipatory strategies in which we move beyond essences into a recognition of difference as fluid and potentially empowering. Our initial working title for the issue was ‘Re-thinking Ethnicities’. As we worked on it we became aware that the idea of completely rethinking the subject was an impossibly ambitious aim. Since shifts in ethnic identities are taking place all the time and the ground is moving beneath our feet, the conceptual tools are poorly developed to rethink what ethnicity means. We hope that by highlighting certain moments and certain issues we will contribute to the debates that are going on and encourage further writing. There are case studies to be developed, the connexions between gender, sexuality and ethnicity to be elaborated, the articulation between ethnicity and class to be explored, the fantasy of ‘imagined communities’ to be assessed. What we hope to have achieved in this issue of the journal is to think through ethnicities—to look at issues through the lens of ethnicity, to contribute to the development of analytic clarity and to inform contemporary feminist politics. Our focus in this issue is on Europe and the United States. We are well aware of the ethnicities we have not discussed, the issues we have neglected. Europe is a focus because of the dramatic developments since 1989 and the pressing problems which have emerged as old states have disappeared and new ones are struggling to achieve recognition. The emergence of ‘Europe’ as a world bloc and the dangers associated with the ‘Fortress Europe’ throw into relief questions of margin and centre. The mythical or presumed European cohesion suppresses those differences which are at its heart, whether these be in terms of the single market of the European Community or the geo-political region of Europe. Avtar Brah, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Meg Coulson, Indijana Harper and Maja Korac, among others, address issues connected with this. In the United States ethnicity has been a term in common usage for a long time because of the historic place of immigration within that society. Here Ruth Frankenberg turns her attention to the constructions of a centralized ethnic identity, that of whiteness. We realize that ethnic identities are being fought over in many parts of the world. Often such struggles have been focused through forms of religious belonging such as fundamentalism and we hope to return to this in later issues of Feminist Review. In the instances this special issue looks at, religion is not always a key dynamic in the construction of ethnic identities but the persecution of

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Bosnian Muslims and the effects this is already having on world politics provides a striking example of the dangers we face. We regret our lack of focus on the cultural aspects of ethnicity but are delighted to publish Ingrid Pollard’s photo-essay and Jackie Kay’s poem. These link us to the explosion of current work on black British ethnicities and identities in the field of cultural politics—again work which we hope will continue to be represented in Feminist Review. We do not yet know what are the theoretical grounds on which we might begin to construct new and more powerful ways of thinking through ethnicities. Such work must be a collective project and we hope that not only the articles and reports that we are publishing but also the access we are giving through them to books, articles and people will contribute to that long-term project. At this critical moment ethnicity provides the ground on which issues about race and nation, about gender and nationalisms are being played out in Europe and elsewhere. What is meant by ‘national sovereignty’? What defines a ‘citizen’? Who is excluded and who is included? How are nations imagined? What part does gender play in the construction of nations? How are new subject positions and subjectivities being constituted in these processes? These are all questions which our contributors pose and which we see as crucial. The shedding and reconstitution of ethnic identities is an emotionally destabilizing and politically painful process. This is particularly the case when it occurs in the context of the violent recomposition of power relations. This pain is most eloquently expressed in the pieces by Indijana Harper and Maja Korac. The search for identity and meaning in their lives vividly encode this process. But these contributors also remind us that life goes on, that people, even when their lives are torn apart by the horrors of war, have the capacity to resist, to survive, to create and reconstruct. We need to provide support where we can. As a feminist journal our aim is also to find analyses which attempt to understand what is happening around us and to think through the implications of this for other places, other ethnicities… Lorraine Gamman Catherine Hall Gail Lewis Ann Phoenix Annie Whitehead Lola Young

AUDRE LORDE: Reflections

On the 17 November 1992 Audre Lorde, Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, died at her home in St Croix, US Virgin Islands after a fourteen-year fight against cancer. During her life she dedicated herself to the struggle against injustice and centred much of her writing and activism on the difficult but urgent task of recognizing and utilizing difference. In pursuit of this she stood out as a foundation stone and beacon and we can think of no more apposite a dedication for this issue than to offer it to the continuation of Audre’s spirit. We offer here a few words in which she speaks for herself. Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women… Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion. Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behaviour and expectation…

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Audre Lorde

It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed…. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all…. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives… For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house… Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen selfdefinition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival. (Lorde, 1984)

Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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Stations Some women love to wait for life for a ring in the June light for a touch of the sun to heal them for another woman’s voice to make them whole to untie their hands put words in their mouths form to their passages sound to their screams for some other sleeper to remember their future their past. Some women wait for their right train in the wrong station in the alleys of morning for the noon to holler the night come down. Some women wait for love to rise up the child of their promise to gather from earth what they do not plant to claim pain for labor to become the tip of an arrow to aim at the heart of now but it never stays. Some women wait for visions that do not return where they were not welcome naked for invitations to places they always wanted to visit to be repeated. Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care. Some women wait for something

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to change and nothing does change so they change themselves. (Lorde, 1986) As a result of Audre’s writing and her activism across many continents, numerous events to mourn her death and celebrate her life were organized by groups of women in many parts of the world. Using Black and third-world women’s networks, attempts were made to connect as many of these as possible. The organizers of the New York City memorial event did this by gathering statements from several groups and printing them in a souvenir programme. Here we reproduce the statement sent by the women who organized the evening held to celebrate Audre’s life and work in London, which was held on the 18 February 1993 (Audre’s Birthday). It was a strange but not uncharacteristic irony that upon hearing the news of Audre’s passing, each of us turned to that poem, phrase, sentence, or essay from her writings which spoke most personally and powerfully to us. In our individual solitude, we remembered that Audre had shown us how to use the pain and terror of a loss that strikes deep at the heart of our sense of who we are. Her struggle against and with cancer became the metaphor through which we might all learn to share the development of a commitment to breaking the silences which cost nothing less than our lives. Her courage urged us to reach for the possibilities which might be garnered from speaking and acting out against the enforced separations of ‘race’, age, class, gender and sexuality. She dared us to make connexions across the invisible but powerful boundaries which divide us, whilst serving the interests of those who rule. Two themes became organizing principles of Audre’s life: to seek for and make connexions; and to continually break and challenge silence and invisibility. She connected with women in South Africa, the Caribbean, throughout the USA, and in Germany and Britain. She encouraged black gay men to recognize each other; black women to look ‘eye to eye’; and white women to see more than their own images. In London, at the First International Feminist Bookfair in 1984, we had the opportunity to join her in battle against what she called a ‘monstrosity of racism’. In the absence of any invited involvement of black women from the local community, this innovative event could have divided us from women of colour from overseas, whose input had been invited by the organizers. Audre connected and spoke: we all benefited.

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Survival and creativity—the one leading from the other—is an idea and practice she bequeaths us. For in the context of the Europe of the ‘New World Order’: in which unification means fortification; in which there is an alarming increase in racist violence and murder; in which organized and systematic mass rape is carried out in the name of an ‘ethnic cleansing’ process reminiscent of another sinister period of European history, there is a clear and present danger that silence and inactivity will yet again not protect us from horrors worse than our combined imaginations may muster. In this context Audre’s physical absence only defines our task more sharply. She summons us to dare the journey toward wholeness. A wholeness of selfdefinition, self-love and autonomy. A wholeness of liberation. Where difference is a strength and creativity blossoms. To honour Audre we need to struggle for it. To struggle for it we need to organize. Let this be a beginning. References AUDRE LORDE (1984) ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’ in SisterOutsider: essays and speeches Freedom, California: The Crossing Press. —— (1986) ‘Stations’ in Our Dead Behind Us London: Sheba Feminist Publishers.

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Dance celebration of Audre Lorde’s life and legacy

RE-FRAMING EUROPE: En-gendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe Avtar Brah

Introduction We are living in a period marked by profound changes. The political upheavals of recent times in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Central and South America—to note a few examples—and the aftermath of the Gulf War, signal major realignments in the structuring of the world political order. There has been a fundamental transformation in the political economy of late twentiethcentury capitalism with a growing dominance of multinational capital, an increasing consolidation of global markets, the development of new techniques in production and distribution systems, the formation of a new international division of labour, and a revolution in the technologies of communication. In the cultural sphere, the homogenizing tendencies of mass cultural consumption across transnational boundaries are paralleled by a reassertion of the local aesthetic, political and ethnic tradition, and a call for a recognition of heterogeneity and cultural difference. In Western Europe, ‘1992’ has come to signify a new phase in the relations between the twelve members of the European Community. On 1 January 1993, the internal borders of the twelve states officially came down with the intent of allowing the free movement of capital, goods, services and certain categories of people. The emerging configuration that is increasingly described as the ‘New Europe’ is as yet difficult to define. What will this new configuration be? Is the new Europe primarily a constellation of economic interests emerging in the face of growing competition, especially from Japan and the USA? To what extent will Eastern European countries become Western Europe’s new colonies? What will be the impact of such realignments of European countries on the “Third World”? What will be the place of Europe in the wake of the Gulf War now that the USA emerges as the dominant global military power? Will the ‘new Europe’ be an inherently unstable formation with its interstate conflicts over economic and political power, and tribal rivalries between different European ethnic groups Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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which currently are resulting in bloodshed and genocide? Such questions have a critical bearing on the construction of new European identities. Significantly, 1992 was also the fifth centennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas on 12 October 1492. This was also the year of the fall of Granada in Spain which marked the end of seven hundred years of power and influence of the Moors in Europe—an anniversary that places into relief the historical contestation between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and how such contestations are re-configuring in contemporary Europe. Such historical events constituted inaugural moments in the evolution of a world economic system in which Western dominance became inextricably linked with the history of transatlantic slavery, colonialism and imperialism. Throughout the five hundred years of European expansion and colonization the idea of ‘Europe’ as, in some sense, a unified category has been persistently challenged by intense European conflicts and rivalries, as testified this century by the two world wars and the subsequent Cold War between capitalist and the former ‘socialist’ power blocs. In such political landscapes ideals of a pan-European identity were continually interrogated by the processes of national identity formation, themselves subject to internal contradictions of gender, class, regional and ethnic specificities. Yet, Europe did exist as a conglomerate power on the world stage: as a concrete reality for all those whom it subordinated. Indeed as Balibar (1991) has noted, until the middle of the twentieth century, the principal meaning of the term ‘European’ referred to groups of colonizers in the colonized regions of the world. The processes of conquest, colonization, empire formation, permanent settlement by Europeans of other parts of the globe, nationalist struggles by the colonized, and selective decolonization constitute the terrain on which Europe constructed itself and its ‘others’. It is against this background that current changes in the global economic and political order are taking shape and a ‘New Europe’ is emerging. In this ‘New Europe’ we are presently faced with a growing resurgence and intensification of racism, nationalism, and a genocide that unabashedly asserts itself as ‘ethnic cleansing’ while it wreaks rape, death and torture. This makes it imperative that, as we rethink the concept of ethnicity we consider its affirmative inscriptive possibilities as well as its susceptibilities to potential recuperation in racism and nationalism. Under what circumstances does ethnicity become racialized? How does racism articulate with nationalism? How do gender and class inscribe these intersections? This paper is an attempt at addressing some theoretical and political aspects of the problematics raised by such questions. In the first part I discuss conceptual issues relevant to understanding the political terrain that these types of questions reference. In the second part I consider certain political and cultural features that are in the process of inscribing the Europe of a Single European Market. I develop my analysis with a focus on racism but explore its relationship to other axes of differentiation. I argue that racism, ethnicity, nationalism and class represent gendered phenomena, and that their changing configurations are immanent within the broader shifts associated

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with the transition from ‘modernity’ to what is variously described as postindustrialism, ‘post-modernity’, or late capitalism. I examine the concept of ‘neo-racism’ and suggest that its analytical usefulness is dependent upon the extent to which it is possible to establish criteria which could be utilized as a basis for distinguishing its ‘newness’ from older forms of racisms in Europe. Furthermore, I emphasize the need to address the plurality of racisms in Europe, not simply as parallel but rather as articulating modalities, and to the need to be attentive to new configurations of ethnicities. Racism, gender, and class: a problem of definition? There has been some considerable controversy about the use of the concept of race and the definition of racism. Should the concept of race be assigned analytical value given the weight of evidence that it has no biological validity? How is its importance as a social category to be addressed? Is racism an ideology or can it also be understood as structure? Such questions remain far from settled (Gilroy, 1987; Miles, 1989; Donald and Rattansi, 1992). But it is generally agreed that the concept of race references historically variable nexus of social meanings. That is to say that it is a social construction. Any number of markers— colour, physiognomy, culture, gene pools—may be summoned as signifiers of ‘race’. Certain forms of racism will highlight biological characteristics as indicators of supposed ‘racial’ difference. Other forms may single out cultural difference as the basis of presumed impervious racial boundaries between groups. Cultural racism may be silent or even deny any notion of biological superiority or inferiority, but what characterizes it specifically as racism is the subtext of innate difference that implicitly or explicitly serves to denote a group as a ‘race’. In other words racism constructs ‘racial’ difference. My argument is that it is not necessary for biological characteristics to be foregrounded in each and every racism but, if a phenomenon is to be identified as racism, the collectively signified within it must be represented as being inherently different. I would also suggest that racialized processes of differentiation do not always occur in a matrix of simple bi-polarities of negativity and positivity, superiority and inferiority, or inclusion and exclusion. Whilst racialized encounters have been predicated against a history of exploitation, inferiorization and exclusions, they have equally inhabited spaces of deep ambivalence, admiration, envy and desire. Desire for the racialized ‘Other’ is constructed and codified in and through patriarchal regimes of power, even as heterosexual cultural conventions that underscore this power may be disrupted by lesbian, gay, and other sexualities. At the same time all sexualities in a racialized context are inscribed by racialized matrices of power. In other words the ‘other’ of racism is not an unequivocal obverse of ‘self’; ‘otherness’ may be constructed primarily but not exclusively in antithetical terms. Moreover, racial and sexual otherness are intimately connected, the one is immanent in the other (Bhabha, 1986). I shall return to this point below.

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There is a tendency among some analysts of racism to confine the use of the concept of racism exclusively to an ‘ideological phenomenon’ as distinct from ‘social practices’. I am less than convinced of such categorical distinctions. If discourses, in the Foucauldian sense, are ‘orders of knowledge’ and ‘regimes of power’ which ‘are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relations (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter’ (Foucault, 1984:94), it follows that they are constitutive elements in the formation of different forms of human subjectivity and social practices. Consequently processes of signification such as racism cease to be a mere ‘surface’ phenomenon in contradiction to some ‘deep’ structural phenomenon. Rather, the focus of attention is shifted to the ways in which racialized regimes of power articulate with gender, class or other modalities of power as they come in to play in economic, political, cultural and psychic spheres. It is crucial to make it explicit that racism is always a gendered phenomenon. While many analysts treat racism as a gender-neutral concept, it must be borne in mind that racism constructs the female gender differently from the male gender (see Greenberger, 1969; Davin, 1978; Davis, 1981; bell hooks, 1981; Carby, 1982; Mackenzie, 1984; Mani, 1987; Brah, 1992a, b; Hall, 1992; Ware, 1992; Thapar, 1993). Not only are men and women from one racialized group differentiated from their counterparts in another racialized group, but the male from a subordinated group may be racialized through the attribution of ‘feminine qualities’, or the female may be represented as embodying ‘male’ qualities. Thus, for instance, Bengali men in colonial India were characterized as ‘effete’ or ‘feminine’ in contrast to a macho self-image of the self-assured and heroic British male. Similarly, black women slaves in the Americas were racialized visà-vis white women by the attribution of ‘masculine qualities’ which were thought to set them apart from ‘white womanhood’. Given the gendered nature of culture, racism is also experienced differently by men and women. Hence, racism encodes gendered differentiations while seeming to subsume them. The process of subsumption is significant in that it imposes an Imagined’ and imaginary unity upon the racialized group while simultaneously inscribing patriarchal regimes of power. Racism and sexism are similar in that both forms of signification serve to naturalize certain ascriptive differences: racism constructs human variation as codifying inherent and immutable difference, represents it as ‘racial’ and maps this imputed difference on to social collectivities; sexism invokes sex as a pre-given ‘fact’ that represents men and women as ‘naturally’ different such that women’s subordinate position is legitimized as deriving from innate differences between men and women. Both sets of significations figure the body as a bearer of immutable difference whether or not this putative difference is represented as biological or cultural. The sex/gender distinction that emerged as a result of feminist attempts to critique the biology-is-destiny formulation was invoked in some feminist accounts to differentiate between racism and sexism. It was argued that, whereas

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racism inscribed inequality through a mobilization of biological notions of ‘races’ when none existed except as social categories, sexism utilized the already existing biological sexual difference as the basis for institutionalizing unequal treatment of the sexes. Butler (1990), among others, takes issue with the sex/ gender distinction. She asks whether ostensibly natural facts of sex might not also be historically produced discursive formations, so that if the immutable character of sex is contested perhaps the construct labelled ‘sex’ is as much a cultural construction as gender. She argues how: On some accounts, the notion that gender is constructed, suggests a certain determinism of gender meanings inscribed on anatomically differentiated bodies, whereas those bodies are understood as passive recipients of an inexorable law. When the relevant ‘culture’ that ‘constructs’ gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology but culture becomes destiny. (Butler, 1990:8) For Butler, gender is not merely a cultural inscription of meaning on a pre-given sex but is also the very means by which the sexes themselves are established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, as a politically neutral surface on which culture adds. If this formulation is accepted then the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘race’ are both cultural constructions referring to relations among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts. Racism and sexism are then distinguishable primarily by the nature, content, and structure of significations, and by socio-economic and political practices. Butler’s account is silent on issues of racism or class. But her question: ‘To what extent does the body come in to being in and through the mark (s) of gender?’ may be reformulated as: ‘To what extent does the body come in to being in and through the mark(s) of gender, “race”, or class?’ There is then an implosion of boundaries between the physical and the social body. There has been some considerable discussion in Britain about the nature of the link between racism and class but much of this literature has been virtually silent on the relationship of racism and class to gender. This combined theme has been the subject of controversy in feminist discourses where, until recently, the general tendency had been to analyze gender without taking systematic account of racism (see Brah, 1992b for an overview of these debates). Such feminist debates have centred on whether racism and patriarchal relations should be seen as autonomous of social class, as reducible to social class, or as having separate histories but articulating with class relations in a given historical context. I have argued that racism is neither reducible to social class or gender nor is it wholly autonomous, and while it can have independent effectivity it does not constitute an independent form of domination. In my view the articulations between these phenomenon are best construed as historically contingent and context-specific relationships (Brah, 1992b). What is at issue then is how new constructions and

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representations of the categories of ‘race’, class or gender will come in to play against the imperatives of what Donna Haraway (1991) calls the ‘Informatics of Domination’ that inscribe the changing new world order. In this section I have explored certain issues associated with the conceptualization of ‘race’ and racism and their articulation with gender and class. Next I examine how the interlinks between racism, nation, ethnicity and gender may be theorized before going on to consider some of their configurations in the ‘New Europe’. Nationalism, racism, ethnicity and gender The concept of ‘nation’ has been the focus of some considerable debate in both the liberal and Marxist historiography (see Seton-Watson, 1977; Nairn, 1977, 1990; Anderson, 1983, Nazir, 1986; Hobsbawm, 1990; Smith, 1991). Anderson, for example, describes a ‘nation’ as a culturally grounded imagined political community. He attributes the rise of nationalism to the historical conditions of the late eighteenth century, arguing that the development of certain cultural artefacts, most notably print-languages, as a commodity in the form of texts were crucial to the formation of nations. Scholars such as Anderson view nationalism as a ‘modern’ phenomenon associated with the development of the nation-state. For others (see Van den Berghe, 1979) nations are primordial rather than historical constructions. A.D.Smith (1991) elaborates a ‘civic’ and an ‘ethnic’ model of the nation. The main components of the former are seen as the possession of a historic territory, a sense of a legal-political community that is subject to common laws and institutions, a presumption of legal and political equality among members of such a community, and identification with a common culture. By contrast, the ‘ethnic’ conception of the nation emphasizes a common descent and ties based on kinship, vernacular languages, customs and traditions. Smith characterizes the ‘civic’ model as a ‘Western’ model (although the sense in which he uses the term West is not specified) and locates the development of the ‘ethnie’ model with Eastern Europe and Asia. The extent to which the geographical derivation and applicability of the two models is justifiable along the lines suggested by Smith may be debatable. Yet, the notion of these two constructions of a nation remain useful. In practice, nationalisms almost always draw upon both ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ elements, although the manner in which they do so would vary according to the socio-economic, political and cultural context. Smith argues that ethnic processes are constitutive elements in the formation of a nation, and that the emergence of many polyethnic nation-states such as Britain has been predicated against the coming to dominance of a particular ethnic community or ethnie: in the British case the English ascendancy over the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh, although this hegemony has been continually contested.

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How ethnicity is mobilized in a given nationalism and what effects it produces remains an empirical question. The nationalist struggle for independence in India, for example, involved the construction of a sense of a nation amongst a people who were ethnically extremely heterogeneous. The forging of this national identity required an emphasis upon the common condition of being a colonized people struggling for the right of self-determination. Initially, the nationalists underplayed the particularities of religion, regional languages, local customs and traditions in order to invent a new set of allegiance to a nation-state. But this nationalism became internally fractured when religion emerged as a focus for mobilization in the political movement for the creation of Pakistan. Different modalities of ethnicity were invoked in the two instances: in the first case the notion of a common Indian culture was highlighted as a synchretic entity, a collective endeavour of all constituent ethnic groups; in the second case cultural identity centred around religion was brought to the fore as the primary basis of ethnic identification. It bears reminding that nationalisms can be mobilized for very different purposes. Whether the outcomes are empowering and progressive or reactionary is dependent upon the context. The concept of ethnicity begs the question as to how ethnic groups are to be defined. According to Barth (1969), ethnic groups are categories of selfidentification and ascription by others. He emphasizes social processes by which ethnic groups identify themselves as a distinctive entity and maintain boundaries with others. His main argument is that an ethnic group should be defined not by its cultural characteristics but by reference to the process of boundary maintenance. His definition has the merit of constructing ethnic groups in nonessentialist terms. For instance, processes of boundary construction, maintenance and dissolution vary over time. They are subject to the forces of socio-economic and political change. Since they are historical products bonds of ethnicity may shift in meaning, may be strengthened, weakened or dissolved, and they will have varied salience at different points in an individual’s or group’s biography. Ethnic boundaries may be maintained with reference to a range of criteria which may articulate in varying combinations in specific situations. These may include a belief in common ancestry, claims to a shared history that gives shape to feelings of shared struggles and shared destinies, attachment to a homeland which may or may not coincide with the place of residence, and a sense of belonging to a group with a shared language, religion, social customs and traditions. In Barth’s formulation ethnic groups do not constitute a category of ‘primordial ties’. But, under particular political circumstances, they may come to be represented in such terms. Ethnic groups are both formed and exist within and through discursive and material practices inscribing economic, political and cultural modalities of power. They are heterogeneous categories differentiated, along a variety of axes such as gender, religion, language, caste or class. But political mobilization of ethnicity in nationalist and racist discourses may serve to conceal precisely such social divisions. Discourses of ethnic distinctiveness,

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‘race’ and nation, are all able to call upon metaphors of blood, kith and kin, heritage, and sexuality. To the extent that they may share a common content or generalized object they are subject to articulation in particular forms in a specifiable context (Miles, 1989). For example, a particular nationalism may construct the ‘nation’ as having mythic origins, and it may invoke dreams of historical destinies through visions of ‘racial purity’. The ethnicities of the dominant and subordinate groups may now come to be represented as constituting immutable hierarchical boundaries. Indeed, it is precisely the power of such imagery and its fusions that can give these types of discourses a special purchase on the popular imagination. And concerns about ‘racial contamination’ may stir patriarchal fears about women’s sexuality. It is no coincidence, therefore, that women occupy a central place in processes of signification embedded in racism and nationalism (see Davin, 1978; Enloe, 1989; Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992). These and other studies demonstrate how women are crucial to the construction and reproduction of nationalist ideologies. Women may serve as the symbolic figuration of a nation. They are also seen as embodiments of male honour, and as such become a site of contestation for this honour. Hence, the defence of women and children becomes a rallying slogan of men going to war, as women from opposing factions fall victim to rape and other sexual atrocities. When represented as guardians of the ‘race’ and nation women not only signify and demarcate juridical, political, cultural and psychic boundaries of a national collectivity but they inscribe these boundaries in and through a myriad of cultural practices, their assumption of particular feminized subject positions, their relationship to the upbringing of children, and involvement in religious and other ritualistic practices that construct and reproduce particular notions of tradition. In racialized contexts these processes are inscribed through racism positioning different groups of racialized women differently with respect to constructions of a national collectivity. Rethinking the ‘New Europe’ Having established certain broad parameters for analyzing the linkages between racism, ethnicity, nationalism and class as gendered formations, I now explore some of these articulations as they are figured in contemporary Western Europe while the Single European Market goes in to effect. How is the ‘New Europe’ being constituted economically, juridically, politically and culturally in and through ‘race’? Who is a ‘European’? How is the juridical conception of the ‘European’ effected in and through immigration and citizenship law? What is the likely impact of the Single European Market upon women and other groups discursively represented as minorities? How is ‘Europeaness’ figured in racist and nationalist discourse, and in what ways are these constructions challenged and contested by the emergent new ethnicities? Is ‘neo-racism’ a useful analytical category in understanding new configurations of racism in Europe today? How

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does this concept compare with that of ‘new racism’? These are some of the questions that frame this section. I begin with the concept of ‘new racism’ as it was elaborated in Britain in the early 1980s before addressing its relationship to the concept of ‘neo-racism’ where Western Europe of the 1990s has formed the focus of analysis. New racism In Britain, the ‘New Racism’ thesis emerged in the wake of the hegemonic success of Powellism and its institutionalization in the politics of the New Right. Martin Barker (1982) proposed that this new racism was essentially a theory of human nature linking ‘race’ and nation. It was a racism that combined a disavowal of biological superiority or inferiority with a focus on ‘a way of life’, of cultural difference as the ‘natural’ basis for feelings of antagonism towards outsiders. Within this discourse national consciousness came to be understood as an instinct for self-preservation and national survival. This analysis provided some important insights into racialized discourses that emerged from a realignment of different forces on the right of the political spectrum both inside and outside the Conservative Party. But what signals the ‘newness’ of this racism from a previous racism, I would suggest, was not so much its espousal of a ‘pseudo-cultural’ racism, for this was not an infrequent phenomenon in the past. For example, cultural difference as a signifier of innate difference was a particularly strong strand in colonial discourses on India (Mani, 1987; Mohanty, 1989; Mackenzie, 1984; Hobsbawn and Ranger, 1983). Rather, the distinctiveness of this specific brand of cultural racism resides in its emergence in the metropolitan in a post World War Two era where it articulates with a New Right discourse. This discourse develops against a background of economic restructuring, high levels of unemployment, youth rebellions, and strikes in such sectors as the National Health Service, the mining industry and in newspaper publishing. The New Right discourse, especially as articulated in the ideological matrix of Thatcherism, deployed notions of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ against ‘class’, ‘trade unions’, and ‘scroungers on the welfare state’. It combined a free-market philosophy with social authoritarianism centred around a concern to uphold traditional morality and preserve the British nation from presumed dangers of cultural decline and disintegration of law and order (Hall and Jacques, 1983; Jessop et al., 1988). It celebrated ‘traditional family values’, exalted motherhood as a vocation, espoused ‘pro-life’ programmes, fiercely attacked lesbian and gay relationships as ‘unnatural’ and generally sought to villify feminism (David, 1983; Harding, 1990; Phoenix, 1990). The New Right constructed the essence of being British to be white, without explicitly proclaiming to do so, by deploying the language of ‘immigrants’ and ‘swamping’ which, in an earlier phase during the post-war period, had become a code for people of African and Asian descent. These groups had already been described by Enoch Powell as social collectivities

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who could be ‘in Britain’ but not ‘of Britain’. The use of the metaphors of ‘nation’, ‘family’ and the ‘British way of life’, in the New Right ideology resonated with a long history of racialized exclusions as a centrepiece of British identity. These metaphors invoked pathologized notions of African-Caribbean and Asian households (Carby, 1982; Phoenix, 1986), constructing these groups as the ‘Other’ of the ‘British Character’ which, according to Margaret Thatcher, is presumed to have ‘done so much to civilize the world’. It was easy within this ideological frame to represent the lived cultures of African-Caribbean and Asian people, organically interwoven though they are into the economic and political fabric of post-war Britain, as not only different from but a serious threat to the ‘British way of life’. To the extent that Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities occupy a somewhat contradictory and ambiguous relationship to ‘Britishness’ their positioning within this discourse remained obscure, as did the positioning of the ethnicities of other European groups settled in Britain such as the Italians, Polish and the Greeks. As, indeed, has been the case with the European Jewish collectivity which also remains outside the ‘nation’ in so far as the ‘nation’ is represented as Christian. But the New Right ideology did not mobilize these European ‘differences’ to any significant extent, although, in a different political discourse, the representations of the Irish continued to be linked with ‘terrorism’. However, such discursive ambiguity is not inconsequential for it simultaneously incorporates and differentiates between these European ethnicities. Their precarious and ambivalent location within the discourse of Britishness means that they may be inferiorized in relation to ‘Englishness’ or with respect to one another; conversely, these ethnicities may be mobilized in unison vis-à-vis ‘nonEuropeans’. Neo-racism Facing a growing resurgence of popular as well as institutionalized forms of racism, nationalism and fascist activity in Europe, with officially sanctioned policies of ‘ethnic cleansing’ stalking parts of the landscape, commentators have increasingly come to utilize the concept of ‘neo-racism’ to refer to contemporary configurations of racialized formations (see Balibar, 1991). But how are these new formations to be understood? What are the particularities of this neoracism? How is this racism to be distinguished from older forms? I would emphasize that we are dealing not with one but several racisms in Europe. There are a variety of colour-centred racisms directed at groups defined as ‘non-white’. Other forms of racism include anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, antiArab, anti-Turk, anti-African (itself internally differentiated in terms of how it constructs peoples from North Africa and those from sub-Saharan Africa), and anti-Gypsy racism. Each of these has its own specific history, its own characteristic features, and each has undergone various transformations during the course of its development. This suggests that we consider:

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• how each racism has changed over different historical periods; • what shape and form each of them presently assumes in Europe; • how each differs from the other, as well as from its previous forms in content, structure, and its mode of signification; • and, how they currently intersect both within individual European countries and at a pan-European level. Anti-Jewish racism, for example, has an ancient history but not only has its trajectory varied in different countries of Europe, its post-World-War-II manifestations are framed against the background of Nazism and the creation of Israel, as well as the present-day turmoil in Europe following the political change in Eastern Europe, Germany and the former Soviet Union. One aspect, then, that distinguishes contemporary anti-Jewish racism from its previous forms is its emergence in this changed historical context. It would also be important to examine (and this is subject to empirical verification) whether there has been a discursive shift in the nature of representation of Jewish people. Hence, a second specific feature of present day anti-Jewish racism may be signalled by the questions: how are anti-Jewish discourses presently structured and what forms of signification do they articulate? What are the continuities and differences in the way Jewish women and men are differentially represented? Furthermore, we would need to understand the specificity of present-day anti-Jewish racism in different European countries, while taking in to account also the constitutive elements of a more generalized pan-European anti-Jewish racism. As another example, we may consider the case of South Asians in Britain. The racism directed against these groups was initially elaborated within a colonial encounter. It has been reworked in post-World-War-II Britain within a context, at first, of an economic boom in which South Asian labour was recruited and deployed in low-skilled and low-waged sectors of the economy; and subsequently that of an economic recession, the arrival of Asian refugees from East Africa, and a relative growth in small businesses owned by Asians. More recently, it has been elaborated with reference to the events surrounding the fatwah against Salman Rushdie. A characteristic feature of this racism has been its focus on cultural difference as the primary signifier of a supposed immutable boundary: a view of the Asian as the ‘alien’ par excellence; the ultimate ‘Other’. The racialization of religion with respect to South Asians is in itself not a new phenomenon. Creation of racialized categories alongside religion was a significant part of colonial discourses and political practices. Muslims and Hindus, for instance, were attributed distinctive qualities that were imbued with connotations of innate/natural difference. The gender of Muslim and Hindu women was differentially constructed with the vocabulary of ‘purdah’ and ‘sati’ becoming emblematic means of signifying the presumed religious differences inscribing their womanhood. However, present-day racialization of Islam since the fatwah represents a new discursive formation. It inheres within fundamental realignments in the global economic and political order following the

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dismantling of socialism as an economic and state structure in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Gulf War, and other major political upheavals. It marks a period when most of the old certainties are in deep crisis. Even as liberal democracy declares itself triumphant, Western rationality and secularism stands challenged by religious movements of all manners and types. In these religious movements the world over, whether they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, reinvigoration of patriarchy and the control of women is central (see Yuval-Davis and Saghal, 1992). Racism directed against South Asians in postRushdie Britain can thus be seen to differ from its previous forms partly because of the particular circumstances of the late twentieth century. It differs also because it represents a reconstitution of the discourse of ‘the Asian’ (itself a peculiar construction of post-war Britain referring only to South Asians) through a foregrounding of ‘the Muslim’, the latter having certain very particular panEuropean and global connotations. It is not sufficient, however, to delineate the transformations that each racism has recently undergone. They are not merely parallel racisms but constitute crisscrossing configurations. It is critical therefore, that we examine how these different racisms articulate in present-day Europe, how they position various categories of people differentially in relation to one another. For example, the Irish represent a subordinate racialized category within anti-Irish racism in Britain but as ‘Europeans’ they occupy a discursive space of dominance via a racism that constructs all non-Europeans as the ‘Other’. White European Jews too would be positioned in a relatively ‘privileged’ position vis-à-vis nonEuropeans by such a discourse but their positioning will be interrogated by antiJewish racism. A black Jewish woman, for example, would be simultaneously positioned within anti-Black racism and anti-Jewish racism. The specific consequences for an individual or a group who is the bearer of multiple racialized significations would depend upon which particular racism(s) achieve prominence in a given context. What is new about the 1990s then is not that there is a single neo-racism in Europe but that a variety of racisms (some of which had become less salient) are being reconstituted into new configurations. They are not old forms in new guises but new forms that subsume in and through processes of the reconstruction of selective elements of the old. These neo-racisms across Europe may or may not overlap with the discursive shifts analyzed in Britain via the concept of ‘new racism’. Some of these racisms, as for instance anti-Semitism, emerged in Europe and were directed at populations inside Europe, whereas others, such as the racism against people of African descent was elaborated in the context of slavery and colonialism. I am reluctant to use Balibar’s schema of distinguishing the former from the latter by the designation ‘racism of the interior’ and ‘racism of the exterior’ respectively because I believe that this could perpetuate the erroneous view that European racisms directed against peoples outside Europe were not an internal dynamic of the historical constitution of ‘Europe’. Be that as it may, what is particular about the present moment is that

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many of the groups who were previously racialized outside Europe are now in Europe. The nature and form of struggles against these racisms will be set against a major restructuring of European and world economies and labour markets, marked changes in the composition of the labour force, the emergence of new supranational state structures across the EEC countries, and fundamental shifts in cultural formations. A Single European Market in labour? The creation of the Single European Market is likely to have a profound economic, political and social impact. The post-war economic boom that resulted in the use throughout Europe of ‘migrants’ or ‘immigrants’ as replacement labour in the low-wage sectors of the economy where they were largely consigned to perform unskilled or semi-skilled work, also helped to draw a growing number of women in to the labour force at lower levels of the occupational heirarchy. That class, gender, age, ethnicity and racism intersect as constitutive elements in the formation of labour markets is amply demonstrated by feminist research. It has been shown, for instance, how such intersections underpin the definition of skill, the construction of the division between full-time and part-time work, division of occupations in to ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ jobs, differences in men and women’s earnings, cultures of the workplace, and the meaning of paid work in the construction of identities. (Westwood, 1984; Bruegel, 1989; Westwood and Bachu, 1989; Beechey, 1988; Phizacklea, 1990; Walby, 1990; Bhavnani, 1991; Brah and Shaw, 1992) More recently, the economies of the advanced capitalist societies have undergone major restructuring. Flexible specialization has been identified as a key characteristic of contemporary developments in methods of production. Technological changes making small-batch production economical have led to a growing decentralization of production. Parts can now be produced in many different locations and ordered for assembly in small batches, thus by-passing the need for large, inflexible holdings of inventories. General purpose machinery and adaptable labour can be used to produce semi-customized goods to suit differing markets, and segments within different markets. This method contrasts with the large-scale production aimed at the mass market. It enables firms to deal relatively easily with changing and uncertain demand, and it is attractive as much to multinationals as to small firms (see Allen and Massey, 1988; Hirst, 1989). As a consequence labour has become decentralized while a new gendered division of labour has emerged both internationally and within the national economies. Workers in Third World countries, especially women, as well as specific categories of the population in the advanced capitalist world such as Black and other ‘minority’ groups, and women as a general category, have been drawn in to this new division of labour at the lower rungs as cheap, semi-casualized, relatively disposable labour (see Mitter, 1986). Creation of the Single European Market is both predicated against and constitutive of these trends.

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Current forecasts suggest that completion of the Single European Market will result, especially in the early stages, in large increases in job losses within Britain in specific industries such as textiles, food industries and telecommunication, and in particular regions, most notably Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Strathclyde. This is likely to have an adverse impact on the employment prospects for Black and other ‘minority’ men and women, as well as other categories of women with a history of employment in such industries. It is also predicted that the impact of restructuring will be uneven in relation to the size of the firms. While large-scale multinational capital will emerge stronger, small and medium-sized firms will be the hardest hit. This will have a disproportionate impact upon ‘minority’ businesses since they are mostly concentrated in small firms. The small firm is also where a substantial proportion of women from these communities are employed. Although there are some important variations in the position of different ‘minority’ groups both within and between different Western European states, there are major similarities in their structural location in Western economies. In other words, peripheralization processes underlying the formation of the Single European Market are realized in and through processes of gender, ‘racial’ and other modalities of subordination. That is to say that such economic processes are simultaneously political and cultural. Slogans such as ‘they are taking our jobs’ are easily mobilized in racialized/patriarchal discourses which, in turn, may articulate with nationalist discourses. Immigration law and citizenship One of the main aims of the Single European Market is to facilitate the freedom of movement of people across national boundaries of the member states. However, this freedom will not be available to all groups of people. Citizenship rights in Europe are currently underpinned by a racial division between citizens, demizens (people with established residential and civic rights in one of the member states but with Third Country’ nationality) and migrants who essentially have extremely limited rights. In Britain, its former colonial subjects were initially accorded full citizenship rights. However these rights have been persistently eroded since 1948 through the introduction of increasingly restrictive immigration legislation. The history of immigration control in Britain serves as a constant reminder of how common-sense racism came to be appropriated and institutionalized into parliamentary politics of the post-war era. Racialized notions of ‘culture’, ‘marriage’ and ‘family systems’ have been organizing themes in the debates surrounding the introduction of immigration control. The ideological construction of women as the ‘privileged bearers of their race and culture’ means that white women and Black or other ‘ethnic minority’ women have been differentially positioned in the discourses surrounding immigration issues. Black and other ‘ethnic minority’ women have been singled out as a serious problem for the state as a potential source of primary male immigration through marriage. It is worth noting that the Immigration Rules governing the

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entry of foreign husbands or fiancés were changed five times between 1969 and 1983 to curtail the rights of ‘non-patrial’ (read non-white) women to have their partners join them in Britain, while allowing white women to enjoy this right. The current legislation on immigration divides the world into those with a ‘British ancestry’ through a parent or a grandparent born in Britain (and these individuals have normal rights of citizenship), and others who are ‘non-patrials’ and as such are subject to immigration control, deportation and restriction to taking up employment (see Brah, 1992a). This means that while a majority of the three million people from Britain’s former colonies and their descendants are currently citizens, there are almost a million who are classed as ‘Third Country’ nationals. The rights of residence in Britain of the latter ensure them entitlements to work, housing, education, health care, pensions, etc. But, the rest of Europe has no such arrangements, and it appears that the rights of these people will not be transferable throughout the EC. If such people move to other parts of Europe, they are liable to be classified as ‘migrants’ or ‘aliens’, with the corresponding loss in political and social rights. For example, like many Algerians in France, they will not have any rights to take part in local and national elections. In Brussels, they may encounter laws excluding them from living in certain parts of the city. Europe contains some 7.5 million such people from mainly the Third World countries, and these women, men and children bear the brunt of hostility, discrimination and economic exploitation throughout Europe (see Race and Class, 1991; New Community, 1991). The impact of ‘1992’ will also be adversely felt by people seeking asylum or refugee status. Asylum-seekers from Third World countries are often seen as ‘economic migrants’ rather than individuals escaping political persecution. New measures to curtail this flow of people include fines of £2,000 sterling to be paid by air-lines bringing in passengers without valid documentation, and restricting the asylumseekers’ right to movement in EC countries by stipulating that they can claim asylum only in the country in which they first arrived. In the process of its formation, the ‘New Europe’ is instituting a wide variety of measures to keep out immigrants and refugees from the Third World while simultaneously strengthening its internal controls. (For a discussion of some of these measures see Bhavnani, this volume.) This entails the development of supranational political and administrative operations which are part of the formation of new state structures to regulate economic, juridical and social domains in order to manage the interest of the member states under new regimes of accumulation. They are also of profound symbolic value, demarcating the boundaries of ‘them’ and ‘us’. The relationship of national states to the institutions of this supranational entity is at an evolutionary stage and is likely to be subjected to all manner of stress and strain as is already evidenced by expressions of fear of the loss of sovereignty. The realm of politics and culture will remain crucial, sites where much of the power of state institutions in differentially structuring economic, political and social rights of different groups will be contested.

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Which way ethnicity? Europe is struggling to re-cast its self-image in the face of tumultuous changes across the globe. In the process, different European ethnicities confront one another as much as those that ‘Europe’ has defined as the ‘Other’. It is a precarious encounter with the outcomes not as readily predictable or inevitable as they might at first seem. We noted earlier that under specific circumstances ethnicity may become racialized. We also considered how nationalist discourses may potentially draw upon discourses of ‘race’ or ethnicity. One possible outcome is the growing entrenchment of different racisms or ethnicisms constructing essentialist notions of the African, the Arab, the Jew, the Turk, the Asian, the Muslim, the Gypsy. In practice these categories are not all mutually exclusive but they may come to be represented as such. To varying degrees and in different ways nationalist discourses may include or exclude such groups as part of or outside the ‘nation’. Hence there is the potential for considerable polarization and division. However, those defined in discourse as outside the ‘nation’ could be experienced as part of the ‘nation’ especially when faced with people from another part of Europe. I am reminded of an incident during an exchange visit in the early 1980s by a group of mainly African-Caribbean and Asian youth and community workers to Germany. One evening as we sat chatting outside a downtown café, the black Liverpuddlian youth-worker was warmly greeted by a group of white Liverpuddlians on holiday in Germany. His accent provided his fellow Liverpuddlians with the clue to his ‘origins’, and they spent a pleasant half-hour engaged in Scouse rites of male bonding. In that moment their Scouse ethnicity, forged in the lived experience of working-class masculinity, was the most salient. The coming in to play of this ethnicity did not erase the history of anti-black racism in Liverpool, but it interrogated and challenged its hegemonic tendencies as it simultaneously operated within and across invisible boundaries of Scouse/not Scouse, German/British and Black/White. Such examples could easily be dismissed by some as anecdotal trivia, but I believe that they are important in signifying precisely the complex and contradictory relationship between discursive representations and the lived experience of, for instance, class, gender, religion and locality—the very crucible in which personal identity, however fragmented or fragmentary, connects with social identities, and where politically identities may come to be assumed and proclaimed. Ethnicities are not fixed but constantly in process. In other words they reference contingent, conditional, and provisional specificities. The boundaries of ethnicity, as I pointed out in a previous section, may be drawn around a variety of criteria—language, religion, memories of a shared history and visions of a shared destiny, a belief in common origins—so that one may be positioned within more than one ethnicity depending upon the criteria rendered salient in a particular context. Moreover, the processes of boundary construction and the criteria invoked in a given situation is subject to political, cultural, and economic

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contingencies. The question of when and where these borders are imagined and instituted, or how they may shift, change, weaken or dissolve is critical. Equally important is the issue of how ethnicity is deployed: in terms of a non-hierarchical difference or as a means of representing its distinctiveness as natural and superior, as is the case, for example, with a nationalist discourse of Englishness. But Englishness does not have to be constructed invariably in racialized terms. Whether or not it does is a matter of struggle over policies, practices, and over cultural meanings. Hence, as Hall (1988) notes, the politics of representation are central to the contestation over ethnicities. To reiterate a point made earlier, ethnicities are always gendered in terms of both how they construct sexual difference and how they are lived. Furthermore, they inscribe and are inscribed by relations of class and other modalities of differentiation. This means that they are also a site for contestation over patriarchal, class and other inscriptions of power. This applies to both dominant and dominated ethnicities. That is, as women from dominant and dominated ethnicities we need to be attentive to how we are positioned in and through these relations of power amongst ourselves and vis-à-vis men from these groups. In the European context this will be a complex task of addressing the relational positioning of a diverse set of ethnicities. Among other things we will need to distinguish between ‘difference’ as a process of acknowledging specificities of the social and cultural experience of a group, between ‘difference’ as a contestation against oppression and exploitation, from a situation where ‘“difference” itself becomes the modality in which domination is expressed’ (Brah, 1991:173). Resistance to the processes of exclusion may come from many sources, not least from those excluded, and such resistance may take many forms, from workplace struggles through campaigning against specific state policies and, importantly, through culture: music, art, literary production, cinematic practices, fashion. For example, African-Caribbean and Asian young women in Britain seem to be constructing diasporic identities that simultaneously assert a sense of belonging to the locality in which they have grown up, as well as proclaiming a ‘difference’ that references the specificity of the historical experience of being ‘black’, or ‘Asian’, or ‘Muslim’. And all of these are changing subject positions. The precise ways and with what outcomes such identities are mobilized is variable. But they speak as ‘British’ identities with all the complexity, contradiction, and difficulty this term implies. The ongoing debate over the ‘New Europe’ in the media, educational institutions, organizations of employers and employees, in the cultural industries and so on, may serve to create a new awareness of commonalities that potentially hold the promise of interrogating parochial and xenophobic tendencies. On the other hand, given the particular histories of different nation-states of Europe, their internal differentiations and divisions, and their differing positioning within the global social order, the emerging New Europe is likely to be an unstable complex of competing interest groups. The economic and political uncertainties

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of the present conjuncture provide fertile ground for the growth of racisms and xenophobia, and their articulation with nationalist imaginations. The outcomes would seem largely to depend on the nature and forms of political struggle in the 1990s at all levels of the social formation. Notes Avtar Brah teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. From 1992–3 she was a visiting Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz, during which time this article was written. She has been active in Black, antiracist and feminist struggles for the past two decades. This paper is based on material presented in Belfast at the 1992 annual conference of the Political Studies Association. I would like to thank Catherine Hall, Gail Lewis and Ann Phoenix for their helpful comments on an earlier version. References ALLEN, J. and MASSEY, D. (1988) editors, The Economy in Question London: Sage/ Open University Press. ANDERSON, B. (1983) Imagined Communities London: Verso. ANTHIAS, F. and YUVAL-DAVIS, N. (1992) Racial Boundaries London: Routledge. BALIBAR, E. (1991) ‘Migrants and racism’ New Left Review 186. BARKER, M. (1982) The New Racism London: Junction Books. BARTH, F. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries London: George Allen & Unwin. BEECHEY, V. (1988) ‘Rethinking the definition of work’ in Jensen, J., Hagen, E. and Redd, G. (1988) editors, Feminisation of the Labour Force Cambridge: Polity Press. BHABHA, H.K. (1986) ‘The Other Question: difference, discourse and differentiation’ in Barker, F., Hulme, P., Iverson, M. and Loxley, D. (1986) editors, Literature, Politics and Theory London: Methuen. —— (1991) editor, Nation and Narration London: Routledge. BHAVNANI, K.-K. (1991) Talking Politics Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress. BRAH, A. (1991) ‘International feminism and questions of difference’ in Aaron, J. and Walby, S. (1991) editors, From Margins to the Centre Brighton: Falmer Press. —— (1992a) ‘Women of South Asian origin in Britain’ in Braham. P., Rattansi, A. and Skellington, R. (1992) editors, Racism and Antiracism London: Sage. —— (1992b) ‘Difference, diversity, differentiation’ in DONALD and RATTANSI. —— (1993) ‘“Race” and culture in the gendering of labour markets: South Asian young Muslim women and the labour market’ New Community Spring Issue. BRAH, A. and SHAW, S. (1992) Working Choices London: Department of Employment, Research Paper No. 91. BRUEGEL, I. (1989) ‘Sex and race in the labour market’ Feminist Review No. 32, Summer. BUTLER, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity New York: Routledge.

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CARBY, H. (1982) ‘White women listen!’ in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) The Empire Strikes Back London: Hutchinson. DAVID, M. (1983) ‘Sexual morality and the New Right’ Critical Social Policy Vol. 2, No. 3. DAVIN, A. (1978) ‘Imperialism and motherhood’ History Workshop Issue 5. DAVIS, A. (1981) Women, Race and Class London: The Women’s Press. DONALD, J. and RATTANSI, A. (1992) editors, Race, Culture and Society London: Sage. ENLOE, C. (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics London: Pandora, Unwin Hyman. FOUCAULT, M. (1984) A History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books. GILROY, P. (1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack London: Hutchinson. GREENBERGER, A.J. (1969) The British Image of India: a study in the literature of imperialism 1880–1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press. HALL, C. (1992) White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History London: Verso. HALL, S. (1988) ‘New ethnicities’ in Black Film/British Cinema London: ICA Documents 7. HALL, S. and JACQUES, M. (1983) editors, The Politics of Thatcherism London: Lawrence & Wishart. HARAWAY, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women London: Free Association Press. HARDING, S. (1990) ‘If I should die before I wake up: Jerry Falwell’s pro-life gospel’ in Ginsburg, F. and Lowenhaupt Tsing (1990) editors, Uncertain Terms Boston: Beacon Press. HIRST, P. (1989) After Thatcher London: Collins. HOBSBAWM, E (1990) Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HOBSBAWM, E. and RANGER, T. (1983) The invention of tradition Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HOOKS bell (1981) Ain’t I a Woman? Boston: South End Press. JESSOP, B., BONNET, K., BROMLEY, S. and LING, T. (1988) Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations Cambridge: Polity. MACKENZIE, J. (1984) editor, Propaganda and Empire Manchester: Manchester University Press. MANI, L. (1987) ‘Contentious traditions: the debate on Sati in colonial India’ Cultural Critique Fall. MILES, R. (1989) Racism London: Routledge. MITTER, S. (1986) Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy London: Pluto. MOHANTY, S.P. (1989) ‘Kipling’s children and the colour line’ in Race and Class Vol. 31. NAIRN, T. (1977) The Break Up of Britain London: New Left Books. —— (1988) The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy London: Radius. NAZIR, P. (1986) ‘Marxism and the national question’ Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 16, No. 4. NEW COMMUNITY (1991) Special Issue on European Integration, Vol. 18, No. 1.

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PARKER, A., RUSSO, M., SOMMER, D. and YAEGER, P. (1992) Nationalisms and Sexualities London: Routledge. PHIZACKLEA, A. (1990) Unpacking The Fashion Industry London: Routledge. PHOENIX, A. (1986) ‘Theories of gender and black families’ in Weiner, G. and Arnot, M. (1986) editors, Gender Under Scrutiny London: Unwin Hyman. —— (1990) ‘Black women and the maternity services’ in Garcia, J., Kilpatrick, R. and Richards, M. (1990) editors, The Politics of Maternity Care Oxford: Clarendon. RACE AND CLASS (1991) Europe: Variations on a theme of Racism, Vol. 32, No. 3. SETON-WATSON, J. (1977) Nations and States. An Inquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism Boulder, Colorado Westview Press. SMITH, A.D. (1991) National Identity Harmondsworth: Penguin. THAPAR, S. (1993) VAN DEN BERGHE, P. (1979) The Ethnic Phenomenon New York: Wiley. WALBY, S. (1990) Theorising Patriarchy Oxford: Blackwell. WARE, V. (1992) Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History London: Verso. WESTWOOD, S. (1984) All Day, Every Day London: Pluto Press. WESTWOOD, S. and BACHU, P. (1989) editors, Enterprising Women London: Routledge. YUVAL-DAVIS, N. and ANTHIAS, F. (1989) Women-Nation-State Basingstoke: Macmillan. YUVAL-DAVIS, N. and SAGHAL, G. (1992) Refusing Holy Orders London: Virago.

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The Brandenberg, Gate 1989: W(h)ither New Ethnicities

Celebrations at Reunification

Facists at the gate

TOWARDS A MULTICULTURAL EUROPE?: ‘Race’, Nation and Identity in 1992 and Beyond1 Kum-Kum Bhavnani

While the end of 1992 marked the consolidation towards a ‘New Europe’, it was also a time of much turbulence and change. In the recent past the world witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, the war against Iraq, the massacre of over a million people by the State of the People’s Republic of China, the break up of Yugoslavia, the US invasion of Panama, and the jury verdicts of not guilty against four Los Angeles police officers who were recorded on videotape as beating a black man. All of these events had the themes of ‘race’, nation and identity as central to their occurrence. In a similar, yet more optimistic vein, Nelson Mandela was freed in South Africa in 1990. For although Nelson Mandela was gaoled because of his opposition to apartheid, he was also freed as a result of that very same opposition. It is in this way that the inequalities of ‘race’, nation and identity contain the seeds for their own destruction—they produce their own gravediggers. While 1992 was supposed to mark a unified Europe—more specifically, the amalgamation of the twelve EEC nation-states into one bloc—it also marked the passing of five hundred years since the European invasion of the Americas. Since that invasion, the destruction of indigenous Americans—the peoples, the cultures, and the societies— has continued (Institute of Race Relations, 1992). That story, which I will not dwell on here, is not irrelevant to the impact of 1992 on European countries. It is, at best, a cruel irony that 1992 was defined as a year celebrating the joining together of all of Europe, a year which was to connote Europeanness. But this very European identity has a history which is one of ruthlessness and imposition—that is, the imposition of an identity through murder, looting and stealing on the lands of native Americans. The murders, lootings, thefts and other forms of appropriation were legitimated by earlier forms of colonization, as well as by forms of colonization which followed after this fifteenth-century invasion. The exploitation and colonization of the continent of Africa is but one example of this. Simultaneously, 1992 was a year in which a new and apparently singular European identity was being urged upon the populations of the twelve member states of the EEC, and it was also a period Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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which led to the role of the nation-state becoming ambiguous and uncertain (Balibar, 1991). In this way, ‘Europe’ in 1992 connotes more than the consolidation of a Single European Market, for it carries with it shifting ideas of European ‘races’, European nations and European identities. At the same time, the concept of a new European identity conflates citizenship with ethnicity (Kofman and Sales, 1992). The consequence of this conflation is that ethnicity— whose elements are ‘race’, nation and identity—becomes the terrain upon which the New Europe, and European culture, is discussed. In other words, ‘race’, nation and identity form the discursive boundaries for the concept of culture, and thus form the boundaries for the cultural landscape which is defined as Europe.2 On this changing cultural landscape of Europe, women’s relations to the landscape is also in flux, for it is women who are the icons and the bearers of cultures (e.g., Rosaldo and Lamphere, 1976). As many others have pointed out, it is women’s work which both ensures that the world, and indeed the human race continues; and images of women—whatever they may be—signify the extent of respect accorded by any society towards the women in its population. In the last decade of the twentieth century, a century which is defined, albeit inaccurately, as connoting modernity and progress, it seems banal to state that the development of any society or group is only as advanced as the status of the women in that society. And yet, in a period of change and uncertainty women come to be marked as the symbols of national identity and as the reproducers of universal values. These points form the reasons why I want to argue that ‘race’, nation and identity are the boundaries for the cultural landscape and environment known as Europe, and that while women constitute the markers on this landscape, it is also women who can supply the directions for its future development. Examining the nature of the environment ‘Race’ ‘Race’ is a concept which has no biological basis (Gould, 1984). All the criteria which apparently assert the reality of ‘race’, such as hair type, shape of face, blood group, are shown not to be discrete across human populations and genepools. In other words, we are all members of the same species, even if we are phenotypically different. However, the acceptance of ‘race’ as a scientifically valid concept has helped to create a certain type of legitimation for racism: that is, that racism comes to be seen as ‘natural’, and as intrinsic to ‘human nature’. Given that there is no sound evidence from the natural and biological sciences to justify the supposition that the human species can be divided up into separate ‘races’, however, both ‘race’ and racism become economic, political, ideological and social expressions. In sum, ‘race’ is not a biological category which is empirically defined. Rather, it is created and reproduced, as well as

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being challenged and eliminated, through economic, political and ideological institutions. Explicit and crude racism is not a respectable aspect of public political life in many contexts. The exception to this is South Africa, whose constitution still does not have universal suffrage. Therefore, when the Dowager Lady Birdwood in England, a woman known for her racist and far-right political views, subscribes to slogans such as ‘racialism is patriotism’, and distributes leaflets which describe the Holocaust as the Holohoax (quoted in The Guardian, 17.10. 91), her actions are frowned upon by the British legal system. The charge against her was of distributing anti-Semitic literature intending to stir up racial hatred; she was given a conditional discharge and directed to pay £500 in costs. But although this style of racism is on the increase in Europe (e.g., Carr, 1991; Martiniello and Kazim, 1991; Merckx and Fekete, 1991), as is the increase in farright and neo-Nazi organizations (see Race and Class, 1991), racism is, in general, treated only as an unpleasant presence in much of contemporary European politics. For example, racism is not explicitly mentioned in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which is the Treaty which contains the Constitution of the EC. The Treaty does not guarantee any protection to those who do not receive equal treatment on the basis of ‘race’, colour, religion, or ethnic origin (Lester, 1992). The treaty does support women’s rights in ways such as equal pay for equal work (Hoskyns 1992), and by the resultant setting up of Action Programmes whose goal is to create better access for women to education, training and employment (Duchen 1992). Racism was also not explicitly outlawed when Article 8A was inserted into the Treaty in 1987 by the Single European Act, which Act defined the Single Market of Europe. The Treaty does, however, forbid discrimination on the grounds of nationality, but only if that discrimination occurs against Community nationals and their families (Lester, 1992). While it is true that most anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds of ‘race’ is often weak and implemented unevenly (Dummett, 1992), such legislation does at least permit a public discussion of racism through the legal institutions of a nation-state. So, while racism is sometimes publicly deplored, very few nation-states in Europe have legislation which allows such acts to be declared illegal. The Netherlands and Britain are exceptions to this rule. The effect of having antiracist legislation is not that some people must be punished for racial discrimination, or for perpetuating hate crimes, because many of those who are consciously determined to intimidate and assault black people are unlikely to be deterred by such legislation. It is, rather, that simply having such legislation might create an atmosphere which does not encourage statements such as the one made by Edith Cresson, the French Prime Minister, when she said, sadly, that ‘of every ten immigrants found to be here illegally, only three are expelled’ (quoted in Hall, 1991). Remarks like hers, along with Jacques Chirac’s about ‘the “noise and smell” of foreigners which drove decent French people “understandably crazy”’ (quoted in Hall, 1991) suggest that there is a code which considers these types of statements by professional politicians to be acceptable. What I am

34 TOWARDS A MULTICULTURAL EUROPE?

suggesting is that if incitement to racial hatred was defined and followed up as a crime it may be possible that professional politicians would make fewer remarks such as these.3 Therefore, I am suggesting that legislation against racism may provide an atmosphere which is hostile to explicit race hatred. Such legislation could also be an indication to black people that national governments are prepared to protect our rights. Nation Once ‘race’ is defined, and racism and state opposition to racism discussed, it can be seen that the concept of nationalism, when discussing racism in the context of Europe, is a closely related concept. The idea of the modern nation-state was pioneered in Europe (e.g., see Pietersee, 1991), with the result that the word ‘Eurocentric’ has specific origins in European nationalism. This nationalism, whose consequence is often racism, took the form, for example, of the 1939 law in France which prohibited non-French nationals from forming associations. This law was only repealed when François Mitterrand became the president in 1981. It is this nationalism which is currently continuing to reproduce racism and xenophobia. This racism and xenophobia can be seen from the rapid and alarming growth of right-wing and fascist groups in Europe who use nationalism as their raison d’être such as, for example, the Front National in France. The leader of that organization, Le Pen, is quoted as saying, ‘We are not extremists… our programme is republican and democratic…. We think the nation is the best defence of liberty. We are opposed to all internationalism and cosmopolitanism’ (my emphasis, in Chaddock, 1990:12). At the same time, such organizations forge links internationally with groups who have racist ideas similar to themselves (Graff, Hornblower and Simmons, 1992), and it is this interplay of xenophobia with the creation of international connexions which is one aspect of contemporary nationalisms. Another way in which this contradiction—that of claiming nationalism and yet needing international links—is expressed is through a reversal of the relation between internationalism and nationalism. That is, under the guise of internationalism, there is a strengthening of nationalism, and it is this process which is presently occurring within the EC countries. That is, that as the populations who live in these countries are being urged to be Europeans, and not lay claim to national identities such as being French, or Dutch, or German, so, this very ‘European identity’ strengthens the distinction between European and non-European. My argument is that in the process of removing borders among EEC countries, the border between EEC and non-EEC nations becomes symbolically and actually stronger. There are two ways in which there is a strengthening of the distinctions between Europeans and non-Europeans. Firstly, this is happening by the coordination of the frontier activities of some nation-states in Europe through the Schengen Agreement. Schengen is a hamlet in Luxembourg, and it was here, in

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June 1985, that the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg came together to ‘co-ordinate and harmonize’ issues such as their policy on visas, road and rail transport, and also to improve their co-ordination of police activities in relation to crime prevention, with particular reference to narcotics, drugs, firearms and immigration (Groenendijk, 1989). It is worth noting that they discussed prevention of drug crimes at the same time as immigration, policy on borders and policy on entry visas. Thus, as the five countries harmonized their policies about their borders, they also defined those who did not qualify as citizens of these countries. Although only five nation-states signed the original Agreement, it is clear that its aims were not a source of alarm to other EEC member states. For example, while Britain took no part in the Schengen Agreement, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in 1988, in apparent opposition to the relaxation of the borders within the EEC: Of course we must make it easier for goods to pass through frontiers. Of course we must make it easier for our people [sic] to travel throughout the Community. But it is a matter of plain common sense that we cannot totally abolish frontier controls if we are also to protect our citizens from crime and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists and of illegal immigrants. (Quoted in Gordon, 1989:8.) Her distinction between ‘our people’, who are ‘citizens’, and ‘immigrants’, who are not, and, it is implied, are unlikely to be, is crude. However, this insular approach of the British government to the so-called easing of frontier controls is not very different from the concerns of the countries who signed the Schengen pact. In other words, Schengen signifies a distinction between the ‘good European’ (our people who are citizens) and the ‘criminal/illegal Other’ (the immigrants). The opposition between those who are citizens and those who are immigrants is one which feeds and sustains racist expressions of hatred on the basis on nationality. The Schengen Agreement also laid the grounds to further restrict asylum for refugees within the EC. Refugees are still to be given asylum in the EC, as long as they can prove that they would be persecuted if they were to return to the country from which they have arrived. But this is a very hard thing to prove, and the Schengen Agreement, combined with the TREVI group,4 alongside the Common Asylum Policy drawn up in Madrid in May 1989, will work together to restrict the means available to refugees to obtain shelter in one of the twelve EC states. The situation at the moment is that anyone seeking refugee status by arriving in one country will not be allowed to travel on to another which has a more liberal policy; nor, if someone is refused asylum in one EC nation will they be permitted to travel to another EC country in order to obtain more favourable treatment. In limiting such movement, the law of the EC countries is ‘tacitly encouraging states to breach the principle of non-refoulement—that is that refugees and asylum-seekers should not be returned to the situation from which

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they have fled—and which is [a principle] at the heart of international agreements for the protection of refugees’ (Gordon, 1989:14). The various discussions in the press in Britain in the past eighteenth months, for example by Kenneth Baker and Douglas Hurd in Britain, both of whom are senior Conservative Party politicians in Britain, and both of whom were members of the Cabinet, have also created a distinction between ‘economic migrants’ and ‘political refugees’. These two British politicians claimed that rights of entry should be restricted for ‘economic migrants’, more than for ‘political refugees’. However, the difference between these two concepts seems slight. A refugee is defined as someone who is likely to be persecuted if they continue to stay in the country from which they originate. Yet, hardship due to economic lack can also make life virtually impossible, although in a different way, to that of being politically persecuted. But if a distinction is made between economic migrant and political refugee, it is possible for EC nations to claim, inaccurately, that some Third World peoples, who are refugees, are allowed to enter, but that there is no room, and no money, for immigrants. In addition, the distinction between hardship due to persecution and hardship due to economic lack can seem negligible if you are in either of these positions, and the distinction can appear to be merely a bureaucratic device to thwart your entry into a particular nation-state. So, rights of entry, whether as an ‘economic migrant’ or as a ‘political refugee’ had been severely restricted at the end of 1992.5 In this way, the Schengen and related agreements continue and expand on themes which form the underpinnings of racism—namely the simultaneous equation of citizen with desirable, and immigrant with undesirable. This undesirability is then apparently justified with reference to narcotics and crime. It is this European internationalism which is a racialized nationalism, in the sense that ‘black/Third World’ people are always defined as immigrants, and therefore not citizens, and therefore not Europeans, and therefore not desirable. While many will be familiar with these processes of racialization in individual countries of the EC, the spectre of 1992 is that such processes are explicitly globalized across Europe, and, simultaneously in the US and Japan (e.g., Cohen, 1991). Thus, the claim of internationalism, stemming as it does in this instance from a consolidation of European nationalism, works so that this internationalism is virtually limited to freedom of movement for white people. And in this way, nationalism and racism, while being distinct, also feed and perpetuate each other. This internationalism, which consolidates racism and nationalism is the first way in which the EC borders are becoming more fixed. The second way in which the European borders are becoming symbolically, and actually stronger is through the Community silence about ‘race’ and racism. This silence, which encompasses European fascism, European imperialism, and European decolonization means that any discussion of immigration to the EC, by definition, is placed within a racist framework. Germany provides a good example for it gives insights into a process which is actually taking place in all twelve member states of the EC. The concept of the German nation is defined

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biologically, unlike the French idea of nation, which defines French citizenship as an assimilation into ‘French culture’. This demand for assimilation will be taken up later in this essay. A German national, has, on the whole, to be born as one. Although the present idea of the German nation is that it is comprised of people who share an origin, the history of the people in Germany is that there are both ethnic and non-ethnic Germans. German citizenship was first defined as homogeneous—that is, being restricted ‘to those of German blood’—in the mid-1930s (Räthzel, 1991:42). This led to the removal of citizenship from groups such as Jewish people and Travellers. In other words, the contemporary citizenship legislation in Germany derives from German Fascism. The silence about the racist history of this legislation means that the definition of who is not a foreigner becomes a ‘natural’ common-sense definition, namely an ethnic German. From that, it is but a small step to talk about Ausländerfeindlichkeit— hostility against foreigners—which comes to be seen as natural, understandable and therefore rational. This spurious rationality is posed in contrast to racism, which is usually treated as irrational. To organize a society around the categories of ‘citizenry’ and ‘foreigners’— which is the basis of all nation-states—and to be simultaneously silent on racism can serve to legitimize and condone the lack of rights offered to immigrants. While Britain, France and Germany are EC countries where popular and official racism, expressed as anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner statements, is once again coming to the fore, such hostility is also in countries who are not part of the twelve member states such as Norway and Sweden—countries whose very hallmark is a liberal welfarism. For example, the immigration policies of Norway have defined all immigrants as a problem, and such a definition opens the door for the racist connexion to be made that any ‘outsider’ who is defined as a problem is also a threat (Salimi, 1991). In Sweden, the Sjobo referendum was passed in 1988. The passage of this referendum refused shelter to political refugees in the small town of Sjobo in Sweden. It was a mainstream political party which put forward this referendum. In this instance, although racist sentiments were not explicitly expressed, racism gained currency through the discourses of ‘“local democracy” where “ordinary people” can have a say’ (Larsson, 1991:109). As such, the referendum represents a considerable shift in the public domain of politics of that country. Implicit racism, as in this Swedish example, and not speaking out against racism can often have the same results. For example, the Progress Party in Denmark was originally a populist, anti-tax protest party. It is now an explicitly right-wing organization which not only preaches economic Darwinism, but also calls for a ‘“Denmark with no Musselmen” [sic]’ (Quraishy and Connor, 1991: 118). These three countries, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, in contrast to France, Britain, Germany and The Netherlands, have all been receiving a larger number of Third World migrants in recent years than they had previously. The growth of explicit racism within their frontiers has been synonymous with this migration.

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These instances underline the point that ‘race hatred is the gigantic open secret that everyone understands and no one needs to mention’ (Tonkin, 1992).6 That is, this secret is continually being expressed through undemocratic sentiments, with the racist undercurrents of these undemocratic sentiments being widely shared. Thus, the boundary of nation working in tandem with the concept of ‘race’ leads to a legitimization of racism and xenophobia. Identity The third boundary on this cultural landscape is identity. Identity is a concept which has provided the motivation for many struggles for democracy—for example, for those who struggled against enslavement (James, 1938), as well as those who fought against the British in the First Indian War of Liberation, often referred to as the Indian Mutiny; it also formed the basis for those who struggled to obtain women’s suffrage in the United States, albeit in very racist ways at times (Davis, 1982). Similarly, identity is the rationale which underlies the work of those who struggle for greater state support to help those who are living with AIDS, as, indeed, it has also formed the motivation for struggles over institutional discrimination against people on the grounds of their sexual orientation—against anti-lesbian and homophobic definitions of people. And, women’s movements throughout the world have organized themselves, despite the contradictions and tensions, on the basis of an identity of ‘woman’. In other words, the conception of identity has been powerful in propelling challenges to social, economic, political and ideological injustices. Identity is a slippery concept, for it is not fixed, it is never closed and it is created through difference. For example, I am not simply a woman, nor black, nor a university academic, nor Indian, nor someone who teaches social psychology and feminist studies, nor an aunt, nor heterosexual, nor a socialist. Each of these categories is both circumscribed and limited by the other categories, and, each of them can always change. Indeed they have, and my own biography reflects some of the ways in which the categories can change. For well over two decades I, a black Indian woman who has spent the main part of her life in Britain, fought against racism, struggled against sexism, shouted out against anti-lesbianism and anti-gay structures, worked within trades unions and dreamt, longingly, of the day when apartheid would be dismantled and would wither away in South Africa. And I would always claim, when asked why I went to women’s groups, tradeunion meetings and to antiracist demonstrations that it was necessary to organize autonomously, at that moment, according to our identities, in order to usher in the day when our differences would not be barriers to communication and fulfilling relationships. Rather that our differences would be causes of celebration of the diversity of humanity. While my optimism has become rather daunted in the era of this current New World Order, I still know that this must be the aim for all of us who try to make the world a better place.

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But the difficulty is that identity is treated as a means of establishing authenticity. The true/real European, according to Le Pen, for example, would be someone who is contemptuous of black people. There are many white Europeans who are not contemptuous of black people, but Le Pen would not consider them to be true/real Europeans. There are, of course, many Europeans who are not white. The question therefore arises—who is the authentic European? And who will be given the privilege of deciding the answer to this question? Further, it is not only reactionary movements which urge particular identities on particular groups. Progressive social movements can also aim to create authentic notions of identity. For example, movements such as Queer Nation, or some black liberation movements, can be seen as urging particular and singular identities on their constituents. And some religious-based movements urge an authentic identity on their participants—whether that is of the real Christian, the actual Hindu, the true Muslim, or the proper Jew. This is also true with definitions of women. Is the true/authentic woman someone who wishes to have employment outside the home, or someone who wishes not to have employment outside the home? Another way to think of this is to ask if the authentic woman is someone who wears see-through blouses because she wants to assert that women should be able to wear what they want or is she someone who wears trousers or jeans because they symbolize androgyny? I ask these questions not to confuse the argument about a multicultural Europe, but to move it along. For just as ‘woman’ is neither a homogeneous category, nor indeed a category whose meaning is the same throughout time, or across the world (Bhavnani, 1993), so the same is true of ‘culture’. The problem with some approaches to multiculturalism, however, is that they often work as if each ‘group’, whether defined according to religion, for example Muslims, or geographical origin, for example as coming from the continent of Africa, or linguistic heritage, for example as speaking ‘Chinese’, is homogeneous in its composition. Such an approach not only by-passes the historical and political differences within such groups, but also sidesteps the recognition that the groups contain class, gender and distinctions of sexuality within them. It is true, therefore, that culture is neither homogeneous nor static, and that cultures are created through histories and politics. Therefore, identity may provide a boundary for definitions of culture which permits more fluidity and dynamism. ‘Each people has a duty to preserve its own cultural identity’, said Le Pen in 1990 when he was bemoaning the presence of Third World peoples living in France (quoted in Chaddock, 1990:12). What is it about identity, and indeed, culture, which permits those of us in movements for greater democracy to harness identity to our causes, while it can simultaneously be used by our opponents to act as a source of support for their views? In other words, is identity used to close down perspectives different to our own individual, specific ones? Or is it possible to move towards a world where identities are conceptualized as open, fluid, and inclusive? The question I want to address next, therefore, is what are the ways in which ‘race’, nation and identity could come to represent not

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fixed interests but, rather, reference points within the idea of a multicultural Europe, which could then open up the discussions over internationalism, rather than close such discussions down. So far I have suggested that while the project of a multicultural Europe is an important goal to struggle for, the present era is one which is subverting multiculturalism into racism.7 What has been the focus for my attention is that the goal of creating multicultural nation-states is being used to avoid the question ‘Why is any one culture seen as superior to another?’ (see e.g., Bhavnani, 1983). If this question is avoided, then the way is clear for racism to enter. If, however, the question is engaged with, it is then possible that ethnic identity could be seen as a notion which brings peoples together, rather than as at present—where it seems to divide us up. As I said earlier, it is women who provide the landmarks on this cultural landscape so that the boundaries of ‘race’, nation and identity are only reference points rather than stakes in a hopeless and unequal future. Towards a New Europe? As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world. These well-known words written by Virginia Woolf are appealing. But the problem is, that while a woman may choose to not lay claim to any particular country or culture, she is often assigned to one, especially if she is defined as being of Third World origin within Western Europe. Of the twelve to fifteen million non-EC nationals in the twelve member states, approximately half are women (Morokvasic, 1991); many have entered as spouses of other immigrants, but some have been allowed in as workers in their own right. Primary migration to the EC countries has virtually ceased if the migrants are of Third World origin, so women who now migrate to these nationstates can really only do so as ‘political refugees’, and I have already noted the difficulties with that argument. The other way in which women are able to enter the EC countries is if they are prepared to work as sex-workers, or to enter as potential ‘brides’ for men living in the EC. This is the case not only for women from the Philippines or Thailand, but is now also true for women who are from the previous Eastern European states, such as Polish women. This example demonstrates that while the immigration policies and legislation are not differently written for women and men, their effects can be very different (Morokvasic, 1991). Because the effects of formal and public legislation are different for women and men, in this last section of this article I would like to explore a set of events which occurred in France and which demonstrate the difficulties and dangers of understanding ‘race’, nation and identity on the European cultural landscape

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without their gendered axes. These events will allow me to return to the question I raised earlier: in what way can cultural differences be constructed so that cultures do not become reified into essences? The French headscarf events The events occurred almost four years ago in France, in October 1989. They began when the head teacher of a school in Creil, a suburb of Paris, informed three young women school students that they would not be allowed to attend school if they insisted on wearing a headscarf at all times in the school. Some Muslims argue that in Islam it is customary for women to cover their heads in the presence of men and when a woman covers her head in this way, it is usually taken to mean that she is Muslim in her religion. The debates and confrontations which occurred over this set of events are instructive. Charles Pasqua, a politician commonly associated with right-of-centre politics, supported the head teacher in his demand that the women students not wear scarves at school, as did Henri Emanuelli, the deputy head of the Socialist Party (quoted in The Economist, 28 October 1989:58). On the other hand, Michel Rocard, the French Prime Minister at the time, was quoted as saying, The past few weeks have brought into question the need to have a secular system which is at once faithful to the principles of tolerance and to those of progress and emancipation’ (quoted in The New York Times, 12.11.89: A7). At that time, one of the main judicial bodies in France, the Council of State, said that ‘while the wearing of religious insignia by pupils is not incompatible with lay education’, such wearing must not be ‘ostentatious’ or intended as a ‘political statement’. It also gave schools the right to exclude pupils if they saw fit to do so (quoted in The Runnymede Trust Bulletin, March 1990:11). Gisèle Halimi, described as a ‘prominent lawyer and a founding member of SOS Racisme’, the national French organization which campaigns against racism with slogans such as ‘Touche pas mon pote’ (‘Don’t touch my pal’) is also quoted in relation to these events. She is supposed to have said, referring to veiling, ‘It is a sign of imprisonment that considers women to be subhuman under the law of Islam’ (The New York Times, 12.11.89: A7). While the headscarf issue was debated as being about the French state’s commitment to a secular education system, it is clear that the events were also inscribed within the cultural landscape of ‘race’, nation and identity in Europe. ‘Race’ was a clear motif in the discussions: and it was present by the constant mention of the national/cultural origins of the young women, usually through descriptions of their fathers’ national origins. Further, Rocard and others, in their comments represented the Orient as ‘tradition’ and the Occident (France) as ‘modernity’. This opposition between modernity and tradition, between France and Islam, was a dominant theme in framing the discourse. Harlem Desir, the leader of SOS Racisme, is quoted as arguing that Muslim girls should be tempted away from attending Muslim schools (in Lloyd and Waters, 1991:62), and then, ‘the hijab that North African women wear to go modestly on the street will

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eventually give way to jeans’ (quoted in The Economist, 15.2.92:24). Comparatively little mention was made in these articles of how frequently crucifixes, the symbol of Christian belief, were worn by students in French schools. Although Christianity was the unnamed religion against which headscarf-wearing was implicitly assessed, there seemed to be virtually no explicit discussion of the ways in which symbols of religion were present on the bodies of other French school students, whether Christian or Jewish. Le Monde commented on the issue by suggesting that the question was one which went beyond the separation of church and state: they wrote, ‘these events could conclude with a grand debate over immigration’ (quoted in The New York Times, 12.11.89: A7). This quote shows that issues of the nation, and who constitutes a legitimate part of the nation was also a subtext of these events. The subject of ‘belonging’ to the nation is never far from the surface when Islam is discussed in much of Europe. Issues of identity were also central: the implication of many of the comments, whether claiming progressive politics, or right-way politics, was that of ‘when in France, do as the French’. That the school students were born in France (mentioned in The New York Times, 12.11.89:7) clearly did not make them ‘French’. The point I made earlier about the contrast between French and German citizenship, the former being based on assimilation, the latter on a notion of German ethnicity, now warrants a closer look. For it is clear that it was not seen as possible to assimilate into French culture if one adheres to a religion which is defined as other in France, for example, Islam. This is despite the fact that France prides itself on being a secular nation. Thus, modernity is posited against tradition, and tradition is associated with undesirable immigration and the impossibility of assimilation. These three points of reference—modernity, tradition and undesirable immigration—link the boundaries of ‘race’, nation and identity when culture is collapsed into religion. These events do have some resonance with the demonstrations surrounding the demand for a ban of The Satanic Verses.8 But the anger at Salman Rushdie’s book was expressed by Islamic fundamentalists while the French headscarf events led to expressions of racism and nationalism on the part of majority populations in France. Despite this important difference, it is clear that nationalism and culture were important themes in both of these events; yet the public expressions of these issues often ignored that it is women who were the markers, the icons and indeed the reproducers of cultural forms. Modernity (France) was pitted against tradition (Islam), and this last is linked to immigrants, and the supposed impossibility of their assimilation into French culture. One wonders what the young women themselves thought; none of the accounts tell us.

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The Future of Europe ‘Race’, nation and identity are the boundaries of culture, and women are the markers of these boundaries. How can the future landscape of Europe be designed? The answer lies in politics. I have tried to suggest, in this article, that the possibilities for constructing a multicultural Europe have to permit the free development of each inhabitant as the condition for the free development of all. The ways in which that goal can be achieved lies in the domain of the political. There is a responsibility on all people, on all of us, whether defined as citizens of any nation, or not, whether of high status or not, whether women or men, to organize ourselves so that the world may move nearer the elimination of injustices and inequalities of power. The particular ways in which this can be done depend on so many different situations, ideas and histories that I will not even try to specify them. But I will say that this aim—to eliminate injustice— demands both that we think politically and, also, that we act collectively. They stoop to pick up the golden apples from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot sugar and potato spirits. (Marx and Engels, 1888:107) Marx and Engels wrote this in a discussion of the German aristocracy in the nineteenth century. If the European environment is only conducive to bartering truth, love and honour in return for wool, beetroot sugar and potato spirits, then its future is indeed bleak. However, if the vehicles for achieving truth, love and honour can be based on anti-racism, internationalism and respect for diverse identities, then, the New Europe of 1992 and beyond will be an exciting place to be. Notes Kum-Kum Bhavnani teaches and conducts research at the Department of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara, where she moved in September 1991. Her areas of interest are feminist epistemologies, cultural studies and contemporary feminisms. She has written articles with Margaret Coulson, for example, on socialist feminism and the challenge of racism, as well as on the limitations of contemporary feminist theorising. She has been part of the Feminist Review Collective since 1987, and is presently an Associate Editor of Feminism and Psychology. Her book, Talking Politics, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1991. 1 This article was originally dedicated to my mother, and was delivered as the Fourth Biennial Lecture for the Bernardijn ten Zeldam Foundation, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in September 1992. The Foundation has published that lecture as a booklet and copies may be obtained by writing to the author. I should also like to

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2

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4

5

6 7

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thank the Board of the Bernardijn ten Zeldam Foundation, along with Kaushika Amin, Dana Collins, John Foran, Dorothy Griffiths, Gail Lewis and Ken Plummer for their comments on early and recent drafts of this essay. It is clear that other boundaries could also be laid out here, or specified, in this discussion of identity—for example, those of sexuality and gender—and how these are inscribed within class inequalities. But that is beyond the scope of this essay. For a recent example of an exploration of nationalism and sexual identities see Parker et al. (1992). I am well aware of the dangers of this position. In Britain such legislation has been frequently used to silence black people and not to punish white people who are racists. Indeed, this argument continues, what else would one expect from a racist state. Despite the validity of this contention, and I am very sympathetic to it, I would still argue that the defining of incitement to racial hatred as a crime could permit some public and official condemnation of such incitement in civil society. Even if that condemnation is not forthcoming, the existence of such a law may allow the issues to be debated within the public domain. TREVI refers to a group of EC justice ministers and ministers of the interior whose original remit was to be an inter-nation group aimed at combating terrorism. It was set up in 1976 and is discussed by Tony Bunyan (1991). It is not an institution of the EC, but its membership is limited to EC countries. It meets in secret (Gordon, 1989). The other main point about this Agreement is that its ‘spectacular novelty’ (Schutte, 1991:559) lies in the Schengen Information System (SIS). The aim of the SIS is to enforce the legislation on the rights of entry of ‘alien’ persons into the EEC in order to maintain public order and security. This computerized surveillance system will be distinct from the local information systems of each country, and will store information on, for example, ‘aliens classed as “undesirable”, asylum applications… [and] persons under surveillance’ (Bunyan, 1991:25). While this article specifically discussed the strength of the Front National on the French Riviera, I am drawing a more general point from his argument. I am not, here, specifically thinking of the attacks on multiculturalism which are being viciously waged under the mantle of decrying ‘political correctness’ in the United States (e.g., Berman, 1992). This is a novel written by Salman Rushdie which some groups considered to be blasphemous and disrespectful of Islam. As a result, the novel became the focus for demonstrations and expressions focusing on who can lay claim to belong to a nation, and what rights do they, and should they, have if they subscribe to a religion such as Islam in Western Europe.

References BALIBAR, Etienne. (1991) ‘Es Gibt Keinen Staat In Europa: Racism and politics in Europe today’ New Left Review No. 186, 5–19. BERMAN, P. (1992) editor, Debating P.C. The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses New York: Laurel. BHAVNANI, Kum-Kum (1983) ‘Racist acts’ Spare Rib Nos. 115, 116 and 117, April, May and June.

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—— (1993) Talking racism and the editing of Women’s Studies’ in RICHARDSON, Diane and ROBINSON, Vicki (1993) editors, Introduction to Women’s Studies London: Macmillan, 27–48. BUNYAN, Tony (1991) ‘Towards an authoritarian European state’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, 19–30. CARR, Matthew (1991) ‘Spain: racism at the Frontier’ in ‘Europe: Variations on a Theme of Racism’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 93–7. CHADDOCK, Gail Russell (1990) ‘Interview: Le Pen decries Third World immigration’ Christian Science Monitor 12 December. COHEN, Steve (1991) Imagine There’s No Countries Manchester: Greater Manchester Immigration Unit. DAVIS, Angela Y. (1982) Women, Race and Class London: The Women’s Press. DUCHEN, Claire (1992) ‘A continent in transition; issues for women in Europe in the 1990s’ Women’s Studies International Forum Vol. 15, No. 1, 1–5. DUMMETT, Ann (1991) ‘Racial equality and 1992’ Feminist Review No. 39, Winter, 85–90. THE ECONOMIST (1989) ‘Behind the yashmak’ 28 October, 58. THE ECONOMIST (1992) ‘Strangers inside the gates’ 15 February, 24. GORDON, Paul (1989) Fortress Europe? The Meaning of 1992 London: The Runnymede Trust. GOULD, Stephen Jay (1984) The Mismeasure of Man Harmondsworth: Penguin. GRAFF, James, HORNBLOWER, Margot and SIMMONS, Ann (1992) ‘Surge to the right’ Time 13 January, 22–4. GROENENDIJK, C.A. (1989) ‘Schengen, refugees and human rights’ paper presented at a seminar on ‘Refugee Policy in a Unifying Europe’ held in Zeist, The Netherlands, April and reprinted in GORDON (1989) 31–9. HALL, Stuart (1991) ‘Europe’s other self’ Marxism Today August, 18. HOSKYNS, Catherine (1992) The European Community’s policy on women in the context of 1992’ Women’s Studies International Forum Vol. 15, No. 1, 21–8. INSTITUTE OF RACE RELATIONS (IRR) (1991) ‘The far right in Europe: a guide’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March 127–46. INSTITUTE OF RACE RELATIONS (IRR) (1992) The Curse of Columbus London: Race and Class Books. JAMES, C.L.R. (1938) The Black Jacobins London: Secker & Warburg. KOFMAN, Eleonore and SALES, Rosemary (1992) Towards Fortress Europe?’ Women’s Studies International Forum Vol. 15, No. 2, 29–39. LARSSON, Stieg (1991) ‘Swedish racism: the democratic way’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 109. LESTER, Anthony (1992) ‘Race and law: the European vacuum’ in The Runnymede Bulletin London: The Runnymede Trust, February. LLOYD, Cathie and WATERS, Hazel (1991) ‘France: one culture, one people’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 49–66. MARTINIELLO, Marco and KAZIM, Paul (1991) ‘Italy: two perspectives’ in Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 79–89. MARX, Karl and ENGELS, Friedrich (1888) The Communist Manifesto Harmondsworth: Penguin, 107. MERCKX, Freddy and FEKETE, Liz (1991) ‘Belgium: the racist cocktail’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 67–78.

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MOROKVASIC, Mirjana (1991) ‘Fortress Europe and migrant women’ Feminist Review No. 39, Winter, 69–84. PARKER, Andrew, RUSSO, Mary, SOMMER, Doris and YAEGER, Patricia (1992) editors, Nationalisms and Sexualities New York: Routledge. PIETERSEE, Jan Nederveen (1991) ‘Fictions of Europe’ in Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 3–10. THE NEW YORK TIMES (1989) ‘Arab girls’ veils at issue in France’ 12 November. QURAISHY, Bashy and CONNOR, Tim O. (1991) ‘Denmark: no racism by definition’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 118. RÄTHZEL, Nora (1991) ‘Germany: one race, one nation?’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 31–48. ROSALDO, Michelle and LAMPHERE, Louise (1976) editors, Woman, Culture and Society Stanford: Stanford University Press. SALIMI, Khalid (1991) ‘Norway’s national racism’ Race and Class Vol. 32, No. 3, January-March, 111–14. TONKIN, Boyd (1992) ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ New Statesman and Society 20 March, 32. WOOLF, Virginia (1938) Three Guineas London: Hogarth Press.

ANOTHER VIEW Ingrid Pollard

Note Ingrid Pollard is a photographer who has exhibited widely in Britain and internationally. She teaches and lectures both the practice and the theory of

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photography. Ingrid’s work has covered theatre, portraiture, landscape and phototexts. Her most recent show is a solo installation piece in New York.

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GROWING UP WHITE: Feminism, Racism and the Social Geography of Childhood1 Ruth Frankenberg

Whiteness: a privilege enjoyed but not acknowledged, a reality lived in but unknown.2 Introduction: personal and contextual notes This essay is about the ways racism shapes white women’s lives, the impact of race privilege on white women’s experience and consciousness. Just as both men’s and women’s lives are shaped by their gender, and both heterosexual and lesbian women’s experiences in the world are marked by their sexuality, white people and people of colour live racially structured lives. In other words, any system of differentiation shapes those upon whom it bestows privilege as well as those it oppresses. At a time in the histories of both the US and UK when we are encouraged, as white people, to view ourselves as racially and culturally ‘neutral’ rather than as members of racially and culturally privileged or dominant groups, it is doubly important to look at the ‘racialness’ of white experience.3 This essay traces the early lives of five white US women to help concretize these ideas and contextualize some of my questions about feminist theory and antiracist feminist politics. For the last two decades and more, women of colour have worked to transform feminism, challenging white feminists’ inattention to race and other differences between women, and the falsely universalizing claims of much ‘second wave’ feminist analysis (for the 1970s see, among others: Cade, 1970; Garcia, 1990; for the 1980s and 1990s, key works include Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981; hooks, 1981, 1984; Sandoval, 1982, 1991). Women of colour in North America and Black women in Britain have mapped the ways racism and ethnocentrism limit feminist theory and strategy over issues such as family structures (Carby, 1981; Bhavnani and Coulson, 1986) and reproductive rights (A.Y.Davis, 1981; see also S.E.Davis, 1988, for a more recent analysis that takes seriously the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and class) as well as making feminist Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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institutions exclusive, be they workplaces, journals or conferences (Zinn et al., 1986; Sandoval, 1982).4 Alongside this critique feminist women of colour and, more recently, white feminists also, have analyzed women’s lives as marked by the simultaneous impact of gender, sexuality, race and class (the founding text here is, I believe, Combahee River Collective, 1979; Zavella, 1987; Alarcon, 1990; Haraway, 1991; Sandoval, 1990) and generated visions and concepts of multiracial coalition work (notably Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981:195–6; Reagon, 1983). In this context, white feminists like myself have learned a great deal about the meaning of race privilege. The interviews presented here, and my analysis of them, represent one approach to understanding the meaning of being white in a racist society such as the USA, one piece of the broad task of doing antiracist work, within feminism and beyond. White Privilege

Today I got permission to do it in graduate school, That which you have been lynched for, That which you have been shot for, That which you have been jailed for, Sterilized for, Raped for, Told you were mad for— By which I mean Challenging racism— Can you believe The enormity Of that? (Frankenberg, 1985) I came to the United States from Britain in 1979, a Marxist Feminist. My antiracist activism had involved participating in the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism, and the All-Cambridge Campaign against Racism and Fascism —organizations that emerged in the mid-1970s in reaction to a resurgence of farright, organized racism in the UK I marched in London, picketed in Cambridge, and declared myself ready to join in physically defending the boundaries of Black neighbourhoods from the incursions of racist gangs.5 In that context, I saw racism as entirely external to me, a characteristic of extremists or of the British State, but not a part of what made me, or shaped my activism. Ironically, however, and exemplifying the extent to which racism constructed my outlook, I barely noticed, much less questioned, the reality that the All-Cambridge Campaign was almost entirely white in its membership. My ‘externalizing’ of racisms changed in the United States, where, initially through university, I met, learned from, and later wrote, co-taught and lived with lesbian women of colour and white working-class women, who pushed the limits of my perceptions of racism

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beyond the purely external, so that I increasingly saw its ever-present impact on daily lives—mine and theirs. In the context of a group called the Women’s Work and the Capitalist State Collective, we struggled to teach, write and analyze in new ways—to develop modes of working that might join, but not falsely unify all of our divergent, yet linked, experiences as women.6 Through the early 1980s I and my white feminist sisters groped for a language with which to talk about racism and feminism, racism and ourselves. By the mid-1980s as white feminists continued acting out elements of racism and ethnocentrism, I felt the need for a more systematic analysis of the situation. I wanted to ask why white feminist thought and practice replicated the racism of the dominant culture, about the social processes through which white women take our places in a racially hierarchical society like the US, and what we might do to challenge racism from within those places. My presumption here was one I’d held to since I first came to political activism in the early 1970s— that knowledge about a situation is a critical tool in dismantling it. Between 1984 and 1986, I undertook in-depth life history interviews with thirty white women, ranging in age from twenty-one to ninety, diverse in class, family and household situation, sexuality, political orientation and geographical region of origin, but all living in northern California. While interviewing women and analyzing their narratives, I looked not only for the stories white women told, but also thought critically about the languages available to us in the 1980s and 1990s, for talking about race, culture, selfhood, otherness, whiteness. I wanted to think about what those languages made visible and what they concealed, as well as the historical moments in which they had come into being (I have written about this work in Frankenberg, 1993). Racial identity is complex and in no way reducible to biological terms. In fact, as the history of the USA amply shows, race, race difference and racial identity are politically determined categories, intimately tied to racial inequality and racism, and constantly transformed through political struggles. Thus the names that groups of people give themselves, and the names ruling groups give to others, change over time.7 My study worked with an avowedly political, provisional, historically and geographically specific understanding of race difference. As such, I viewed groups in US society who are targets of racism—including Native, Latino, African and Asian Americans and other immigrants of colour—as racially different from white people and from each other. As is the case for people of colour in the US (itself a chosen name with the specific purpose of coalition-building in the United States), ‘white’ is neither a fixed nor a homogeneous label. My study set out to explore some of its meanings for white women and to understand the political and social shifts which have given whiteness its present shape. I came to view whiteness as having at least three dimensions. Firstly, it is a position of structural advantage, associated with ‘privileges’ of the most basic kind, including, for example, higher wages, reduced chances of being impoverished, longer life, better access to health care, better treatment by the legal system, and so on. (Of course, access is influenced

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by class, sexuality, gender, age, and in fact ‘privilege’ is a misnomer here since this list addresses basic social rights.) Secondly, whiteness is a ‘standpoint’ or place from which to look at oneself, others and society. Thirdly, it carries with it a set of ways of being in the world, a set of cultural practices, often not named as ‘white’ by white folks, but looked on instead as ‘American’ or ‘normal’. For reasons of space, this paper for the most part examines the first two dimensions of whiteness, rather than the third (see Frankenberg, 1993, Chapter 7, whiteness and cultural practice). My analysis of white women’s childhoods is organized around what I call ‘social geographies of race,’ exploring the ways racism as a system helps shape our daily environments, trying to identify the historical, social and political processes that brought these environments into being. Geography refers to the physical landscape—the home, the street, the neighbourhood, school, parts of town visited or driven through on rare or regular occasions, places visited on vacation. My interest is in how physical space was divided, who inhabited it, and of course for my purposes that ‘who’ is a racially or ethnically identified being. Social geography suggests that the physical landscape is peopled—by whom? How did the women I interviewed conceptualize and relate to the people around them? What were they encouraged, forced, or taught by example to do with the variously racially identified people in their environments? And how is the white sense of self constructed with reference to notions of race or ethnicity? Racial social geography, then, refers to the racial and ethnic mapping of a landscape in physical terms, and enables also a beginning sense of the conceptual mapping of self and other with respect to race operating in white women’s lives. Ultimately, the concept of social geography came to represent for me a complex mix of material and conceptual ingredients for I saw increasingly that, as much as white women are located in racially marked physical environments, we also inhabit ‘conceptual environments’ or environments of ideas, which frame and limit what we see, what we remember and how we interpret the physical world. They tell us, for example, what race is, what culture is, and even what racism means. Just as material environments have histories which are political and the product of social change or of oppression, so too do the conceptual frameworks through which we view them. For example, women I interviewed at times saw people of colour through the filter of racist ideas generated in the context of West European colonial expansion, or were raised to live by the rules of segregation associated with an explicit white supremacism. Other white women did not ‘see’ racism, and failed to recognize cultural difference, in part because of the ‘melting pot’ and ‘colourblind society’ myths which have dominated thinking on race in the US for much of the post-war era. Or more positively, some women had begun valuing cultural diversity and recognizing structural racism, here drawing on the anti-imperialist, antiracist and feminist struggles of recent decades. All of these ways of being and seeing with respect to race were, in short, the product of historical and political process—not surprisingly, for racism is as unnatural as the concept of race itself.

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The landscapes of childhood are important because, from the standpoint of children they are received rather than chosen (although of course from an adult standpoint they are chosen and crafted in complex, conscious and unconscious ways). As the narratives discussed below will show, none of the women I interviewed was passive in relation to her childhood environment. However, beyond a point, children do not define the terms in which the world greets them; they can only respond. And while throughout their lives people can and do make profound changes in the ways they see themselves and the world, it seems to me that the landscapes of childhood are crucially important in creating the backdrop against which later transformations must take place. Looking at the social geography of race in white women’s childhoods may then provide information and tools useful to us in the project of comprehending and changing our places in the relations of racism. As I compared narratives with one another, common threads and lines of differentiation emerged. Narratives typified certain experiences, separable into four modes of social geography of race. Of these, one seemed at first to be characterized by an absence of people of colour from the narrator’s life, but turns out, as I will explore below, to be only apparently all-white. Secondly, there were contexts organized in terms of explicit race conflict, hierarchy and boundary-marking. Thirdly, there were contexts in which race difference was present, but unremarked, that is, in which race difference organized white women’s perceptions, feelings and behaviour, but was not, for the most part, consciously perceived. Finally, white women described experiences I have interpreted as ‘quasi-integrated’, that is, as integrated, but not fully so, for reasons that should become clear below. Growing up white This section explores in detail the childhood and teenage years of five women, with one drawn from each of the four modes just named, and one extra from the ‘quasi-integrated’ group. All five of the women in this group were between twenty-five and thirty-six years old at the time of the interviews, their childhoods and teenage years spanning the mid-1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. One woman, Beth Ellison, grew up middle class, the other four—Pat Bowen, Sandy Alvarez, Clare Traverso and Louise Glebocki—in working-class homes. Pat grew up in Maryland, Beth in a Southern family in Alabama and Virginia, Sandy and Louise are from the Los Angeles area and Clare from a small town outside San Diego, California. The women are referred to by pseudonyms, with an effort to give them surnames reflecting their own or their spouses’ ethnicities. Thus Beth’s and Pat’s ‘real’ surnames suggested Anglo, or Scottish heritage, and Louise’s her Polish ancestry. Clare’s married name reflected her husband’s Italian-American identity, and Sandy’s the fact that her husband is Chicano. These women’s stories all bear the marks of an era of challenges and transformations in terms of race, racism and antiracism. Sandy’s mother, for

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example, was a political activist involved in struggles for integration. By contrast, as will be seen, Beth’s mother was ambivalent in the face of challenges to the racial status quo in her all-white, middle-class neighbourhood. All five women spent at least part of their childhoods in racially desegregated schools, indicative of the effects of the Civil Rights movement on the patterning of children’s daily lives. However, as will be abundantly clear, the women’s material and conceptual environments were shaped in complex ways by long histories of racism. Regional histories also differentiated the racial and ethnic landscapes of these women’s childhoods. Thus for Southerners Pat Bowen and Beth Ellison, the people of colour with whom they had contact were mainly African American (or in the language of the time, Black). By contrast, Clare Traverso grew up on the US-Mexican border, in the same town as Native Americans and Mexican Americans. And both Sandy Alvarez and Louise Glebocki grew up in racially heterogeneous (Latino, Asian, Black) workingclass, Los Angeles neighbourhoods. As adults, these five women were also distinctive in the extent to which they had thought about, or acted on, antiracism. Two of them, Sandy Alvarez and Clare Traverso, taught in high schools whose students were predominantly Asian and Latino and, for each of them, teaching was to some extent tied to social change. Thus, for example, Sandy had tried (with limited success) to raise faculty consciousness about racism, and Clare had worked to make student literacy a vehicle for empowerment. Louise was active in a left party. And while neither Pat Bowen nor Beth Ellison described themselves as activists, both had thought a great deal about the interracial dynamics with which they had grown up. In addition, Louise and Sandy were both in long-term primary relationships with Chicano men. One of the five, Beth, was lesbian, the others heterosexual. These women, were, then, unusual in certain ways, politically and in their life choices. However their accounts of childhood resonated with those of more conservative interviewees and, like the others, their experience ran the gamut from explicitly articulated or de facto segregation, to what I will refer to below as ‘quasi-integration’. There was, then, no predictive relationship between ways of growing up and adult perspectives. (Indeed, even Sandy, whose mother, as noted above, was an active integrationist, described her sister as having become ‘racist’ in her attitudes, as an adult.)8 Beth Ellison: an ‘apparently all-white’ childhood Many of the women whose childhoods were apparently all-white shared suburban middle-class childhoods. Beth, born in 1956, grew up in a white, middle-class, professional suburb in a town in Virginia. Today, she describes herself as a feminist. She is an artist who makes a living as a retail worker. Beth said of her childhood:

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I was born in Alabama, and spent my real early years in New Orleans. I was five when we moved to Virginia. I remember living in a professional subdivision, our neighbours were all doctors and lawyers […]. It was a white neighbourhood […] The only specifically racist thing I remember from growing up in Virginia was when a Black doctor and his family moved into the neighbourhood […] at that time I guess maybe I was fourteen and I still didn’t think about racism […] I wasn’t interested in politics […] but I vaguely remember neighbours banding together to see if they could keep this family from moving in and I remember thinking that was disgusting but I was more concerned with my life and being a young teenager. In the telling of this incident, Beth categorizes racism as ‘politics’, and as separate from her daily life as a teenager. Her description highlights a key difference between many white people’s experience of racism and that of most people of colour: for the latter, racism is very frequently pushed to the forefront of consciousness, as a construct that organizes hardship and discrimination (see, for example, many contributions to Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981). The statement that the only specifically racist incident was the attempted exclusion of a Black family from the neighbourhood implies a limited definition of racism, including only individual, conscious acts of ‘discrimination’ or ‘prejudice’. Yet, the very existence of a neighbourhood whose residents are all white itself bespeaks a history of the racist structuring of that community. Elements of that history include both the ‘redlining’ of neighbourhoods by realtors to prevent Black people from buying property in them, and also the economic dimensions of racism which would place affluent neighbourhoods beyond the reach of most Black families. The incident that drew Beth’s attention to racism was, then, only the tip of the iceberg. There were, in fact, Black people not too far away. For Beth says, I saw a lot of Black people around […] on the street and […] in class and downtown, but […] I don’t remember there being many Black and white people hanging out together, I just don’t remember seeing that. And also I didn’t pay real close attention to it, either. She continues: […] now that we’re talking about this, I remember seeing a lot of Black people around, and I remember not really hanging out with them […] it wasn’t any kind of conscious decision but it was just not what I did. Thus, with or without conscious decision on Beth’s part, her experience of friendship and community was racially structured in multiple ways.

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Unlike some of the other women with apparently all-white childhoods, who described obeying their parents’ explicit instructions to stay away from particular neighbourhoods or subway stops, Beth said that there had been no sections of town that she avoided. In fact, in the town where she spent her teenage years, the poorest—and Black—part of town was en route to the downtown record and bookstores, so Beth crossed it regularly. However, if Beth felt no anxiety, her mother seemed to oscillate between what Beth called a ‘humanist’ belief in at least a limited integration and the sense of a need to keep her children apart (and in her perception, safe) from Black children and adults. This is illustrated in Beth’s description of school integration, which for her began in fifth grade. I would have been about ten when schools desegregated [in 1965]. I don’t remember anyone in my family being upset about it, or my mother trying to withdraw me from school or anything. […] I was […] a little bit excited about it because it was something new. […] My mother tried really hard to be—she’s kind of a humanist, so I don’t remember her saying anything like, ‘don’t hang out with the Black kids’. But, later, in high school, Beth was involved in an incident in which she was pushed up against the wall of the gym changing room by a Black girl. This, Beth felt, was directly connected with her parents’ decision to move Beth to a segregated private school: [W]e didn’t talk about it at the time, but as I look back on it now […] it seems evident to me that they did this because it was a school where there wouldn’t be, uh, what they might consider rowdy Black girls for me to have to contend with. Beth’s mother seemed similarly ambivalent or conflicted on the question of residential integration. On the one hand, Beth did not think her mother had taken part in the effort to keep the Black family out of her neighbourhood. However, her response was very different when Beth, at twenty, moved to a poor, racially mixed part of the same town: I do remember my mother being really concerned and I don’t know if that’s because there were a lot of Black people living there or because it was an extremely poor part of town where you’d be more inclined to be ripped off […] [but she] wouldn’t let my younger brother come visit me. So Beth grew up in a context in which Black people were the ‘significant others’ of colour, and where race and income were intertwined. Being white and middle class meant living somewhere different from Black people. The social distance between white and Black people —which was significant—was produced and

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reproduced both through the conscious efforts of white people, including Beth’s mother, and the neighbours, and through the more diffuse but still intentional effects of the interplay of the class structure with racism. White people like Beth’s mother deliberated over the permissibility and safety of living in the same terrain as Black people, seemingly projecting their fear of Black people when they made such decisions.9 What is not seemingly visible, however, are the forms of personal and structural violence directed towards African Americans by white people, which marked both residential and school desegregation, and the period of Civil Rights struggle in general. In any event, Beth received mixed messages. Her environment was shaped by at least three factors. First, there was a pre-existing arrangement of racial segregation and inequality, reproduced, for example, by the all-white private school. Second, Beth’s mother’s verbal messages about segregation espoused ideas about equality or what Beth called ‘humanism’. Thirdly, and contrasting with her humanism, there were Beth’s mother’s actions in response to Beth’s experiences and choices, which as Beth tells it, frequently leaned in the direction of segregationism and hostility towards Black people. The result was that, without trying, Beth could continue to live a mostly racially segregated life. Thus, the ways racial inequality shaped Beth’s own life was for the most part, ‘a reality lived in but unknown’, or at least a reality known in rather limited terms. However, if the impact of racism on herself was not always obvious to Beth, the effects of race and class hierarchy on others were at times very clear: she says of the two communities she knew well, growing up: Beth: In [one] it seems like it was mostly poor neighbourhoods where Black people lived, but there were also a lot of poor white people that lived there too. But in [the other], there was a Black part of town and a white part of town. There was the rich part of the white town, the middle-class and then the poor white section. And then there was shanty town and it was literally shacks. RF: So the shanty town was really the Black part of town? Beth: Yeah […] these tiny little shacks that looked like they’d been thrown together out of plywood and two-by-fours. The difference was incredible, because you could drive for one minute in your car and go through rich, beautiful neighbourhoods to […] what looked squalid to me. Comparing Beth’s words here with her memories of her own neighbourhood, it is striking that Beth is much more sharply aware of racial oppression shaping Black experience than of race privilege in her own life. Thus, Beth can be alert to the realities of economic discrimination against Black communities, while still conceptualizing her own life as ‘racially neutral’—non-racialized, non-political. It is, in fact, conceptually rather than physically that people of colour (here, Black people) are distant: for Beth and the other women in this ‘apparently allwhite’ category, there are in fact at least one or two people of colour not too far away. In this regard, one feature of several accounts of apparently all-white

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childhoods is the sudden appearance in the narratives of people of colour as employees, mainly Black, mainly female and mainly domestic workers. As always there is an embedded history here, since up until the 1960s as many as half of all Black women in paid employment worked as domestic workers (Malveaux, 1988). Thus, what is striking here is not the presence of domestic workers as such, so much as the way in which they are talked about. For most often these Black women are not summoned into white women’s accounts of their lives by means of questions like, ‘Were there any people of colour in your neighbourhood?’ or ‘Who lived in your household, growing up?’ Rather, they arrive previously unheralded, in context of a discussion about another topic. In Beth’s narrative, the mention of Black women domestic workers came when I asked her if she remembered the first time she became conscious of race difference, or that there were Black and white people in the world. Beth responded that her first consciousness of race as a difference was at about four years old, when her mother chastised her for referring to a Black woman as a ‘lady’. Here, of course, we are not just seeing race as difference but as hierarchy. We are also seeing the limits of Beth’s mother’s discourse of humanism. However, Beth said: […] ever since I was a baby, Black people have been around, the person who taught me to walk was a Black woman, that was a maid for our family […] pretty much all throughout my childhood, there was a maid around […]. She added that, although she had not really noticed at the time, she realized now that when her mother remarried, the family stopped employing anyone to do housework. Thus Black domestic workers, despite involvement in Beth’s life on the very intimate level of teaching her to walk, seemed on another level to have been so insignificant as not to have merited mention earlier in conversation. Nor were they noticeable enough for their departure from the household after a certain point in her life to have been called to attention. The image of the forgotten and suddenly remembered domestic worker recurs across several of these white, middle-class childhoods. In another instance, Tamara Green, raised in her words ‘solidly middle class’ in suburban Los Angeles, said: I totally forgot until I just started thinking about it—we had housekeepers who, all but one from the time we lived in California, were Latin American, Mexican, Columbian, Honduran, Salvadoran. There was one British Honduran who was Black. And I had a close relationship with one of them. Why is the story told in this particular way? It may be the status of domestic workers from the standpoint of white middle-class women, or the status of people of colour from the purview of a white and middle-class childhood, that

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makes these women invisible and seems to strip them of subjectivity in the landscapes of childhood (Rollins, 1985:207ff describes at length the ‘invisibility’ of Black women domestic workers in the households in which they worked). But whether or not it is race per se that creates the form in which the domestic worker of colour appears in the interviews, it is primarily through employeremployee, class-imbalanced relationships that women from ‘apparently allwhite’ homes encounter women of colour. If not themselves in positions of clear authority, these white middle-class women must have seen their parents in such positions, able to summon and dismiss the ‘racially different other’ at will. It is perhaps in this sense of control and authority that the home was indeed all-white, and the neighbourhood similarly so. Patricia Bowen: race conflict and ‘segregation’ Patricia Bowen grew up in Maryland in the 1960s: I grew up in a town that was semi-Southern […] a fairly small town and pretty much in a working-class family. The town was very racist, it was very segregated. Everyone was aware of race all the time and the races involved were pretty much white and Black people. Pat describes her town as ‘segregated’: yet as will be seen, she and her family had more interaction with people of colour (specifically, Black people) than either Beth (above) or Clare (whose narrative follows). Segregation, in Pat’s experience, meant a complex system of interactions and demarcations of boundary, rather than complete separation. In fact, Black and white people lived near together: [We] lived on a street that was all-white, and there were no Black people on that street. But the back of our house—our front door faced an all-white street, the back door faced an all-Black street and that was all-Black. It was completely separate. The boundary between white and Black was thus very clear. And differences between the streets were also obvious to Pat: the houses on the ‘Black street’ were poorer, more ‘shacky’ (her term), and there were more children playing outside. Added to these sharp distinctions was a feeling of fear on the part of Pat: We were kind of told that it wasn’t safe to walk down the Black street. […] [Black children would] yell at you […] I never got hurt but [they] threatened you a little bit. […] So I grew up learning that Black people were dangerous.

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Pat never actually came to any harm on the ‘Black street’: the idea of danger was introduced by adults and by the taunts or threats of the Black children (apparently never carried out) but, in fact, Pat went in fear rather than in danger. As an explanation for the threats she experienced, Pat suggested that the Black children ‘weren’t used to whites walking through’—yet Pat explained that she and other white children routinely used the ‘Black street’ as a shortcut. One is tempted to interpret the situation as another aspect of boundary demarcation, or gesture of turf maintenance on the part of African-American children frustrated at their treatment by their white neighbours. In any event, in Pat’s experience, difference, opposition and threat lived right on the back doorstep. However, as Pat describes others in her family, it seems for them the issue was not fear so much as maintaining a complex balance of association with and differentiation from Black people. African American and white people used the same stores. As the person in charge of the household, Pat’s grandmother took care of shopping. As a result, Pat explained, her grandmother knew many of the Black women in the other street. She would chat and even visit their homes but: Pat: she’d tell me proudly or just very self-righteous, Well, you know, I would never sit down when I go in their house. I would go over and talk to them, but I wouldn’t sit down.’ You know, because to sit down would imply some equal relationship and she wouldn’t do that. They would come up to the back door. RF: Instead of the front door? Pat: Yes. This kind of elaborate and contradictory process of boundary maintenance was undertaken by other relatives too: My uncle was pretty young […], a teenager when I lived there. He and his friends would play with the boys who were Black, but again they didn’t really consider them friends in the same way […] Black culture was really cool, they would imitate them all the time, and the funny thing was they spoke exactly like them […] it was pretty much the accent something like they had anyway. The way they danced was really cool and everyone listened to Black music all the time […], but at the same time there was this ‘niggers, niggers, niggers’, it was this weird contradiction. The direct teaching Pat received from family members about racism was equally mixed. On the one hand: [M]y mother was more liberal […] so she would always tell me not to say ‘nigger’, that Black people weren’t any worse than white people. On the other:

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I remember this one incident […] When I was about eight or nine and walking with my uncle down the street and kind of mutually bumping into a Black woman. I just said ‘Excuse me’, and he said, ‘Don’t ever say excuse me to a nigger. If you bump into them or they bump into you, it’s always their fault.’ And I said, ‘How is it their fault if I bumped into them?’ It is important to notice here Pat’s memories of resistance or at least puzzlement, in the face of explicitly racist socialization. Like Beth, Pat was not, perhaps, always an unquestioning recipient of her environment. Pat’s descriptions of two relationships she had with young Black teenagers, in junior high school years, dramatize the room for manoeuvre that young people managed to find in relation to racism, even in the very constrained context of segregationism: There are some things about friendships that I developed with Blacks at that time that are kind of interesting. There were two in particular that I really remember. One was a guy in my junior high […] who was kind of a leader, very charismatic person, and he started hassling me a lot, he wanted to pick on me and he would tease me and kind of threaten me, pull my hair or whatever and I was terrified of him. This went on for a while and then one Halloween my friends and I were out trick-or-treating—we were teenagers and were tagging along with the little kids. […] We saw him with a friend also trick-or-treating and we laughed, it was a kind of bonding because we were both these obnoxious teenagers out trick-ortreating, trying to get candy with the kids. So I had a feeling he kind of really liked me after that […] The relationship kind of switched from him threatening me to being a real friendly relationship, I wasn’t afraid of him any more. But the way that got played out [was by means of] a lot of jokes about racism acted out, like he would pretend to threaten me or tease me in front of people, like Black and white people who were there, and I would play with him back, and everyone would be nervous and thought a fight was going to break out. […] It was something where we would never really talk or become friends, but it was a neat little thing. Similarly, with a girlfriend: She was a very, very large woman and she would pretend to threaten me sometimes and I remember some Black girls going ‘Ooh’ because I was much smaller than she was. We’d play around with that. In playing with the segregation system like this, Pat and friends are taking at least a small step towards subverting it. By acting out their roles as enemies but not really fighting, they at least signal that they know what it is that they are caught

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in; the dramatization is a kind of stepping aside from the assigned role, although not necessarily changing it. For Pat, one could say that this involves acting being white, simultaneously with being white. However, alongside the subversion there is also another, less self-conscious inversion of social reality here. For if Pat’s Black friends were playing with the racial order by pretending to threaten her, that threat itself inverts the institutionalized relations of the dominant culture where, in fact, Black people have much more to fear from whites than vice versa. Commonplace as is white people’s fear of people of colour, and especially of Black people, it is important to step back from it and realize that it is a socially constructed fear and thus in need of analysis. I will return to this issue below. In any event, most of the time Pat and others around her lived out the rules of segregation without subverting them. The same girlfriend with whom Pat ‘played’ racial tension also experienced it directly in an incident that Pat describes: There were three of us that hung around together, […] Janet, who was Black, and my friend Sandra and me. Sandra—again, like I had this whole liberal interpretation I got from my mother about Black people and race. Sandra was just more—‘nigger’—she would whisper that word and things like that—yet we were both friends with Janet. […] I remember one night —this is really an awful, painful thing—we were at Janet’s house just hanging around, she was drinking coke out of a can and she passed it to my friend Sandra, and Sandra […] said ‘No’, and we all knew it was because she wouldn’t drink out of a can after a Black person, but yet this was our friend that we hung around with. I remember Janet just looking really sad, but also accepting, like it hurt her. […] I guess it never occurred to me not to drink the coke. Pat, Sandra and Janet were all around twelve years old at the time that they were friends. It is worth noting that Pat does not state the colour of her white friend, Sandra: as is often the case, white stands for the position of racial neutrality, or racially unmarked category. Pat commented further on this incident: We never really talked about race, it was just too taboo a subject. In the context of Pat’s childhood, race difference and racism seem never to be far from the forefront of consciousness and experience. Pat lives a life visibly defined by race hierarchy. Here, segregation as a practice is linked to the presence rather than absence of people of colour. This may be partly a result of class. Pat points out that middle-class whites in the town would probably have had less contact with African Americans than she did, and in fact one can speculate that, had Pat been middle class the racial social geography of her childhood might have resembled Beth’s.

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The process of boundary demarcation of physical space—being in the same street or house, sitting or standing, making physical contact, sharing a drink, seemed to be a major concern for the white people Pat describes, probably precisely because of the proximity of white and Black people in the context of an ideology and practice of white superiority and segregation. However, boundary maintenance was an issue in other women’s stories too, evidenced, for example, in Beth’s all-white neighbourhood. Clare Traverso: race difference as a filter for perception Clare was born in 1954 and grew up in a small, rural town, not far from San Diego. The town, said Claire, was kind of like a redneck town, actually. […] Very conservative, politically. People off to themselves, don’t want to be bothered with government or politics or other people, love to drink beer and drive around and stuff like that. The situation described in Clare Traverso’s narrative is a complex mix of noticing and not noticing ‘difference’ and people of colour. The question of whether Clare saw that people of colour were seen as ‘different’ or ‘the same’ as herself was similarly complex. Clare’s parents were, in her words, ‘fundamentalist Christian, but not moral majority’ people who had moved to California from South Dakota with their children. Clare, fifth child out of six, was born in California. Describing how her time was spent as a child, Clare said: We lived sort of off into the hills. We didn’t really go into town much […] the amount of times I went out to eat before I went to college was maybe five times […] See, my parents had more traditional values from the Midwest—always saving money and […] we never went on vacations. I went on two, but they were back to South Dakota to visit my relatives. Consequently, aside from school, and later, church-related activities, Clare spent much of her early years playing on the land around her family’s house. None the less, Clare was able to describe the racial composition of the town. Aside from the white people, said Clare: The town itself is located right next to an Indian reservation. […] There was also a small Mexican-American population, that went to our high school, but I would say probably, no Blacks. Maybe one or two. Clare’s standpoint here is clearly different from that of the African-American townspeople themselves, for whom it would be impossible to confuse existence with non-existence. Rather than measuring their physical presence, what Clare’s

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cloudy memory indicates, I think, is the lack of importance accorded to Black people in her community. Clare’s first conscious contact with people of colour was when she began travelling on the school bus. At that point, like Pat, her response was one of fear: The bus I rode, there were these […] Mexican-American families, lived on the hill across from us, so they rode our bus, and they always had the reputation for being really tough. And I was really scared of this one girl, I remember, because she used to get in fights with this other girl. Clare speculated that her fear was probably bolstered by her brother who was also in class with one of the ‘tougher’ Mexican-American boys.10 Again like Pat, Clare’s fear did not come from experience of personal attack so much as from a sense of different behaviour perceived as louder or rowdier than her own: They used to yell, flip people off—I came from a more sheltered environment. My parents never did things like that. In a sense the comment, ‘my parents never did things like that’, suggests that, unconsciously, a cultural explanation is being advanced for the difference in behaviour: it is placed in the realm of things taught. However, although the fact that this group is Mexican American is clearly a part of the anecdote, once off the bus and in school, Mexicanness becomes less important as a feature of conscious differentiation: RF: So your [kindergarten] class was all white? Clare: I’m pretty sure it was—probably—oh, wait, I had one little friend, Ralph Vasquez. Their whole family was Mexican American, my sister went through school with one girl in that family. […] But, I never really thought of them as, like, different from me. I don’t think I was aware of them being culturally different. A similar pattern is repeated in Clare’s description of her sense of NativeAmerican schoolmates, later on in school. On the one hand: I was so unaware of cultural difference that I probably wouldn’t have noticed they were different from me. On the other hand, she remembers Native Americans in school as a distinct group, noting that they were in the remedial classes. Differences were thus both seen and not seen, or perhaps seen but only partially. Race difference entered into Clare’s conscious perception of her environment only on those rare occasions when it carried a feeling, real or imagined, of potential threat to herself (as when she was afraid on the school bus). The ways in which racism did seem to cause hardship for students of colour, by contrast, were perceived only dimly,

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accessible to memory but not remembered as having made a strong impact on Clare at the time. For, presumably, racism accounted for the location of the Native-American students in remedial classes and, more indirectly, perhaps for their intra-group fights too. Clare’s friendship group in high school further supports this picture of a daily life that was in effect patterned by race. Structured around the student council and a church youth group, it was all-white. What shapes Clare’s descriptions of all three groups, whites, Mexican Americans and Native Americans, is, on the one hand, the absence of a conscious conceptualization of cultural and racial difference per se but, on the other, the experience of a racially structured environment, not understood as such at the time. In sum, Clare saw individuals in her immediate community through a racial lens, but did not consciously see race, cultural difference or racism. Clare came to awareness of all three concepts as she grew older, but in relation to communities other than her own. She says: Clare: In sixth grade I started learning Spanish and learning a bit about Latin culture, Latin America. My awareness of race came through that rather than Mexican-American people. […] RF: So what did you learn about Latin America? Clare: Pyramids, music, sometimes we’d listen to the radio. I was fascinated by the Aztecs and the Incas. Latin America thus appears to Clare as a site of more real or authentic cultural difference, and as the proper adjunct to learning Spanish. In the education process, cultural difference was located at a distance and in the past, rather than nearer to home. At the same time, in a contradictory vein, Clare commented that Spanish seemed like the appropriate language to study in school, rather than German or French, ‘because we were living around and across the border from people who spoke it’. If Latin culture was conceived as being far away, then, it was clear that the Spanish language was closer at hand. In this nearer context though, difference referred to social inequality more directly than to cultural difference. The Mexican border was less than two hours drive from Clare’s home and for some, although not for Clare’s family, border towns like Tijuana were places to visit, on day trips. However Clare did visit across the border in rather different circumstances, described in the following story: Clare: […] even though I had Spanish in high school, I didn’t really speak it— once when we went down to Tecate at Christmas to give away clothes and we spoke a little bit of Spanish to real people who spoke it […] One may note here the implication that Mexican Americans or Chicanos somehow do not really count as members of a Latino, Spanish-speaking culture. Again the issue is one of the perceived inauthenticity of Latinos on the US side of the border. Clare’s story continues:

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Clare: This Spanish teacher I had […] every year they used to collect all these clothes and bring it down and give it away to people in Tecate. I think we did that twice. And you’d give away the clothes to people, the poor people there. RF: So how do you do that? Clare: You just walk up to people and say, ‘Hey, do you need something?’ RF: Just like that? Clare: Yeah, it was kind of weird, really. […] We would walk around— and, yeah, we had trucks or cars or something. […] Our teacher knew someone there. I think he knew the mayor. […] I felt really odd about giving away things like that, even though they didn’t have anything and I know they needed things. They needed food and clothes. You could tell by the way their houses were, just like little shacks, really—dirt floors […] I remember feeling a real contrast between myself and them […] RF: Do you remember any comments, from your parents, or from school? Clare: I’m sure they thought it was good […] We all felt happy that we’d helped poor people out. In this incident Clare is unwittingly inscribed into the power relations involved in any act of charity. While the sharing of wealth in almost any form is of course useful, here the process is controlled entirely by the giver. In a process that dramatizes power imbalance between Mexico and the US, the adult Mexican receiver is dependent on the mercy of the North American schoolchildren who, at their teacher’s behest, walk the streets asking, ‘Do you need anything?’ One wonders if this power imbalance may in part have accounted for Clare’s feelings that something was not quite right about the situation. In going to Tecate, Clare becomes starkly aware of the imbalance of resources on either side of the border. However, it was not clear from our conversation how, if at all, this imbalance was explained. Rather than seeing ways in which the US is partially responsible for Mexico’s poverty, it is most likely in this context that the US would become identified with the giver and the side of ‘good’. This expedition took place in the context of learning a language. As adjuncts to the language, Clare was taught about ancient and distance culture exemplified by her fascination with Aztec and Inca culture, along with present-day, physically nearer poverty. This pattern replicates the classic colonialist view of the conquered society: a view of past glories and present degradations, from which, within a colonialist ideology, it is the conqueror’s duty to save the poor native. Further, authentic difference of any kind was placed firmly outside Clare’s home community. Asked about the possibility of practising Spanish with Mexican-American fellow-students, Clare was unsure whether any of them spoke Spanish. Clare sums up this contradictory situation thus:

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I think I was so—like I say, we never went to Mexico, we never had contact with other races, really, and if they were there I wasn’t aware that they were from another race, I mean vaguely, only looking back on it. Towards the end of high school, social studies classes analyzing global inequality, as well as her sister’s involvement in the movement against the Vietnam War gave a political outlook and set of values which, she felt, were more ‘liberal’ than those of most people in her family and home town. However, again the focus was largely outside her immediate community. The same was true in terms of the process whereby Clare began to see herself as a culturally specific being: I went away to college [in Minnesota] and I met […] all these people who had a real sense of ‘I am Swedish’, ‘I am Norwegian’. And then when I went to [stay in] Mexico. That was the two strongest things, I think. The social geography of race for Clare differed from Beth’s ‘apparently allwhite’ context described above, in the greater number of people of colour she encountered and the absence of the racially divided employer-employee relationships in the family. Her story also differed from Pat’s, such that racial difference was not to the forefront of consciousness, nor was the situation one of such visible ongoing conflict. However, aside from their differences, one feature common to all three stories is the description of white women’s fear of people of colour. As I have suggested, this fear needs careful analysis, both because of its prevalence and because of its status as an inversion of reality. In general, people of colour have far more to fear from white people than vice versa, given, for example, the ongoing incidence of white supremacist terrorism around the United States, which targets African, Asian, Native, Latino, and Jewish Americans (in addition to gay men and lesbians); the problematic relationship between the police and many communities of colour which leaves men and women of colour with, at the very least, a sense that they lack legal and physical protection. White people’s fear of people of colour is I think, an inversion that can be contextualized in multiple ways. Most importantly, it must be understood as an element of racist discourse crucially linked to ‘essentialist racism’, of the idea that people of colour are fundamentally ‘Other’ than white people: different, inferior, less civilized, less human, more animal, than whites. Further, US history is marked by multiple moments when the power of racist imagery constructing men of colour as violent, dangerous or sexually threatening has been renewed, as rationale or pretext for white hostility, in the context of political and economic conflicts between particular communities of colour and white Americans. Thus for example, a key aspect of white women’s fear of Black men has to do with the persistent, racist image of the Black man as rapist. As Angela Davis has clarified, the production of this myth took place alongside the abolition of

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slavery and efforts, by Black and white people, towards reconstruction of the Southern economy and polity along more racially egalitarian lines. The lynching of Black people was a means of social and political repression, with accusations of rape used as an alibi for what were in effect politically motivated death squads. Here, a discourse ostensibly about threat or danger was in fact a rationale for repression or control (A.Y.Davis, 1981:172–201). Similarly, it was in tandem with white, Nativist movements for immigration control and economic protectionism that, from the late nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, first Chinese, then Japanese, then Filipino male immigrants were represented in the white-owned press as sexually lascivious and physically violent (Osumi, 1982). Most recently in the United States, in context of the Los Angeles Rebellion of May 1992, once again newspaper and television reports described African-American protesters as ‘savage,’ ‘roving bands’, engaged in a ‘feeding frenzy’ of looting. More generally in the present, I would further speculate that white people’s fear of men and women of colour may have to do with the projection or awareness of the anger of individual people of colour over white accountability for racism. Beyond these few examples of contextualization, white people’s fear of people of colour, and the distinctively gendered dimensions of it, require far more extensive discussion than is possible here (a discussion of the imperialist context for the social construction of white women’s fear of men of colour is a key theme in Ware, 1992). And it is also crucial to ask what ‘interrupts’ or changes white people’s fear of people of colour: for those who are not afraid, what made, or makes, the difference? I do not know how to answer these questions, but register them here as important ones for us as white women to address. Quasi-integration: Sandy and Louise The final pair of narratives to be examined here are those of Sandy Alvarez and Louise Glebocki, both of whom grew up in contexts that I choose to call ‘quasiintegrated’, which is to say seemingly or apparently integrated. I qualify ‘integration’ in this way because it seems to me that true integration would require a broader antiracist social context than existed in the US while Sandy and Louise were growing up. It might involve, for example, that no area of physical space be marked by racial hierarchy and that racist ideas be entirely absent: a situation that is impossible in the context of the United States as presently constituted. As Sandy and Louise’s narratives show, neither women’s life circumstances in any sense placed her outside the system of racism. However, their experience of close, peer relationships with men and women of colour none the less marks them off from the other women whose narratives have been discussed so far. Both women grew up working class in Los Angeles. Sandy was born in 1948. She teaches English as a second language, in a high school. Her husband is Chicano and she has two small children. Louise was born in 1958. She cleans

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houses, not a job she enjoys but which she feels is ‘OK for now’. She describes herself as always learning, growing and active. She and her partner of seven years were about to get married at the time of the interview. Like Sandy’s husband, he is Chicano. Sandy Alvarez Sandy said of the neighbourhood where she lived before she was five years old: The main things I remember […] are some friends […] the Vernons were two sisters and they had a little brother too, just like our family, and they were Black. And the Frenches […] they were white. I’m only mentioning race because of this interview […] as a kid it wasn’t until I went to elementary school that I really became aware that these people were different races. Before that you just played with everybody. From the beginning Sandy had friends from ethnic and racial groups different from her own. At five, she moved to a community, still in Los Angeles, that was, in her words, ‘equal thirds Japanese, Mexican and white, with two Black families’, and her friends reflected this mix. Sandy says that she played with Japanese boys and with the only girl in the neighbourhood, who was in Sandy’s terminology ‘Anglo’. Her school friends were Mexican and white. Her ‘crushes’, (again to use her word) and boyfriends were Anglo, Mexican, Guamanian. Also, a Black woman who was Sandy’s neighbour when she was growing up is to this day like a second mother’ to Sandy: [She] is one of my dearest friends. She always thought of me as her daughter. She never had a daughter, and couldn’t have any more kids. She really loves me and I really love her, and it’s a real close relationship. Looking at the differences in Sandy’s experience and Beth’s, the first and obvious precondition for Sandy’s more racially mixed childhood is that people of colour and whites were living nearer to each other. But in addition, physical proximity was responded to in a particular way and need not have led to the mixed friendship groups Sandy describes. This point is underlined by comparison with the largely tense, conflictual and unequal relationships, and the elaborate boundary maintenance between Black and white people in Pat Bowen’s neighbourhood (above). By contrast, there was much visiting back and forth between the Vernons and Sandy’s household. The Vernon children would often stay overnight at her house. The other major difference between Sandy as a child who grew up ‘integrated’ and most of the other women I interviewed, was her parents’ explicit antiracism

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and activism. I asked Sandy what her mother thought of her having friends who were Black. She responded, Well my mother is really—she’s a radical, politically […] the church we went to […] the community had turned primarily Black and it was an allwhite church and [my parents] were really into helping to integrate the church. Manifestly, Sandy’s mother was a woman unlikely to object to her children having Black friends—and for preschoolers, parental co-operation is key to social interaction. Less obvious is Sandy’s awareness that her childhood was unusual and requires explanation, such that she cites her mother’s activism to account for it. Sandy’s parents may well have been different from other whites in the neighbourhood: otherwise, integrating the church would not have required work. Later in the interview, Sandy made explicit her sense of being unusual, saying: I don’t know that a lot of people have had the integrated experience that we’ve had growing up, where it wasn’t just our acquaintances but our real good friends and all our peers were of different races. How are race and cultural difference conceptualized in this context? As suggested earlier, Sandy felt that before the age of five she was not aware of race difference between herself and her peers. She explained: In second grade […] there are just two pictures in my mind, and I just remember a Black boy, about my age. I don’t remember if he was just one of the things that made me aware […] I just remember becoming aware different kids were different races. And this one girl that I’ll never forget. I was really aware she was culturally different, because—she may not have been Mexican, she could have been Filipina, I don’t know which culture— somehow I think she was Mexican because the neighbourhood was about a third Mexican—But she’d wear her hair up in a bun, and um, she must have been Asian, because she had those big chopsticks in her hair and in the playground she fell down once and one went right inside her skull and they had to take her to emergency hospital. And, uh, I was just aware that was a big cultural difference, that I would never wear those in my hair. Here, specifics of cultural difference are perhaps more imaginary than real in any substantive sense. Sandy, drawing on the memories and perceptions of herself at six, did not know which ethnic group the little girl belonged to—she may have been Mexican, Filipina or East Asian. However, the key here is not whether Sandy could or can answer this question correctly, so much as that we can witness the process of her struggle as a child to make some sense of cultural difference. At six, Sandy remembers herself as registering cultural and race

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differences as things that shape appearance and what might happen to one; moreover, unlike Clare and Pat, an awareness that her schoolmates and friends were culturally and racially different did not evoke in Sandy any sense of fear for herself. It was not until adulthood, Sandy claims, that she was conscious of people of colour seeing her as white and therefore belonging to a dominant, even oppositionally situated, group. When I asked Sandy whether her sense of race changed as she grew older, she said: As you grow older you see how others perceive you, look at yourself. Before that you just act, you are who you are. In that sense […] that’s the only change. I continued, ‘So in junior college and at university you were still “acting”, rather than thinking about how you were acting?’ Sandy said, ‘Yes’. So I asked, ‘At any point in your life did you think of yourself as white?’ Sandy replied, ‘From elementary school on up I guess I was aware of that.’ Here, strikingly, Sandy describes herself as having noted her whiteness without any negative or positive charge, in contrast with most contexts in today’s US where, I suggest, white either connotes superiority or is ‘neutralized’ and ignored. Often—and this may be the most common experience for white feminists of the 1980s and 1990s— ‘white’ is a concept learned simultaneously with a negative connotation, in terms of its attachment to privilege and exclusionism. However, for Sandy in this early period, ‘white’ or ‘Anglo’ apparently merely described another ethnic group. One cannot help but see this as connected to the multiracial context within which she experienced her ethnicity: one in which, at least within the local conditions of home, elementary school and the neighbourhood, racial and ethnic identities were not hierarchically ordered. However, it is important not to present a falsely utopian picture of Sandy’s experience. For one thing, although her friendship groups were racially mixed from preschool to college, she points out that there was racial tension and division elsewhere in the schools she attended. Secondly, it is of course quite possible that Sandy’s friends of colour were more conscious of racial hierarchy than was Sandy herself. Thirdly, Sandy was not immune to the impact of racist ideology. For example, she told me that a Black, male schoolfriend had asked her out on a date. She explained that she did not accept, because she could not bring herself to face the stares that she knew they would receive as an interracial, especially as a Black and white, couple. Sandy is not convinced by the element of racist discourse which says that only ‘bad’ white women date Black men. However, she is still afraid to challenge it in public. In other words, growing up in a racially mixed context did not mean that racism was absent from the environment, nor that the environment was not racially structured. Rather, Sandy’s childhood, while clearly characterized by an antiracist intent on the part of her parents and a sense of interpersonal racial

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equality between Sandy and those in her immediate world, was equally clearly surrounded and ultimately challenged and disrupted by, the broader, racially hierarchical social order. In fact, Sandy’s was an integrating family, rather than a family living in an integrated environment. This was also true for two of the other women whose childhoods were marked by what I call a ‘quasi-integration’. Their parents were also radicals, and both of them felt it necessary to offer this fact to explain a state of affairs they know to be abnormal (although desirable) in a racist society. Louise Glebocki The final narrative in this article is that of Louise Glebocki, who was born in 1958. While not coming from a family that spoke of integration or antiracism, Louise’s own experience growing up was one of more thorough-going connexion with a community of colour than the rest of the women I interviewed. Like Sandy, Louise had grown up in Los Angeles. Having spent her first six years on the East Coast, Louise, with her mother and two older sisters, came west, moving ‘into a barrio, basically around all Spanish-speaking people.’ Louise added: Besides Mexicanos, the others that lived there were poor whites […]. It was just a poor, small community. Right from the start, Louise and her sisters began having boyfriends. And more of Louise’s boyfriends and female friends were Mexicano, or Chicano, than white. Louise: I remember I had a white boyfriend and then a Chicano one. But I started hanging around more with the Chicanos. But both—always. RF: How come you hung out more with the Chicanos? Louise: To me they were more—at that point I did have white friends too. I don’t know, there was just something real honest about them, and real friendly, and real close relationships formed, I remember, around a couple of girlfriends I had. Just visiting their families was a really nice atmosphere—kind of like ours. Because for a white family, while we were poor, we grew up [around] a lot of people. We had a lot of relatives in the LA area. It was always a lot of activity, and hustle and bustle. And a lot of times I guess, among the whites, even if they were poor, it was kind of like more snobby, more uppity. In short, Louise viewed Chicano families as similar to her own, rather than different from it. Louise is also commenting here on class and people’s perceptions of themselves. She suggests, in effect, that there was a link between class position and cultural style, linking her own working-class position with a liveliness shared with Chicano families. However, the suggestion is, other poor whites acted differently, aspiring to a style of life with associated with a higher class position. Louise preferred the Chicanos’ mode of being, viewing it as more

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‘down to earth’, more honest and more like her own. Of course, Louise’s words are adult ones: it is hard to know exactly what form these thoughts would have taken in the consciousness of a younger person. In fact, Louise’s extended family was not only similar to the Chicanos, part of it actually was Chicano. For as Louise explained, a good number of her mother’s sisters and brothers had Mexican-American partners. RF: Did it feel to you like you were in a bi-cultural family, or a family with two cultures? […] Louise: I never looked at it like it was two separate cultures. I just kind of looked at it like, our family and our friends, they’re Mexican and Chicanos, and that was just a part of our life. More than any of the other women described here, Louise’s childhood was one in which a community of colour played a consciously central role for the interviewee. The following description from Louise’s narrative underlines three things: firstly, the closeness of Louise’s connexion to Chicano or Mexican culture; secondly, the fact that at the same time, Louise and her relatives were clear that she was white; and thirdly, the extent to which white culture remained, at least linguistically, Louise’s point of reference: RF: If you would go to your aunt’s house or your uncle’s house, would there be things about how their house was and how they raised their kids, things that they would have on the walls or would do, that came from the fact that it was a partly Mexican and partly white household? Louise: Yeah. Like I remember my aunt, she was married to this Mexican dude. And his background was really, strongly into the whole Mexican scene. […] He was real strong in terms of what he was. I mean, he would never want to be anything else but Mexican. And he had a real strong ‘machismo’. He had something like thirteen kids in his previous marriage. […] And she really took all that in. In fact she’s still constantly like that […] her attitude is, well, a woman should be a woman, and in her place—the whole mentality was, I don’t know, really a trip. But I remember like, with these relatives, the Chicanos, they would always joke around, you know, around us being Polish, and white. There would be a lot of joking and stuff, oh you know, ‘You honkys gotta learn more…’ and stuff. And in terms of their house? They’d play a lot of Mexican music, and a lot of regular music, and have stuff on the Indians up on the walls, and from Mexico […] There are contradictions and complexities here. On the one hand, Louise said that she did not conceptualize the two cultures as separate, yet it is clearly possible for her to do so descriptively. The sense of Chicano culture as more sexist (assuming that ‘machismo’ connotes sexism in Louise’s usage of it) is

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jarring, given Louise’s view elsewhere that Chicano culture was better, more ‘in tune with reality’. The distinction between ‘Mexican’ and ‘regular’ music suggests that the dominant culture remains in her description the reference point, the cultural practice that requires no name or explanation. However, Louise is also conscious of her whiteness in this description as, it seems were her Chicano relatives. The use of the, usually negative, ‘honky’, to describe Louise and her white family members suggests that no one has lost sight of the wider context of race conflict. At the same time, taking on board and using the word honky in a playful way suggests, I think, a context in which it has been possible to situationally subvert racial hierarchy, to bracket it while simultaneously not evading consciousness of racial inequality. Curiously, despite this mix of relatives on her mother’s side of the family, Louise’s father had very different ideas, including, as Louise put it, ‘racist tendencies’. For example: My parents had been saving money, and they wanted to buy a house. […] I’m pretty sure one of the things my dad really emphasized was […] a nice, white community. However, although the family moved to a white section of a small town in the Los Angeles area, their situation ended up little different from the previous community, because our school just ended up being pretty poor, and the majority was Chicanos, and a lot of them were people who had just come over from Mexico, so there was a lot of Spanish-speaking people. And there was a whole section of whites too, but it wasn’t this pure, middle-class, white area, it was once again a real mixture. Through school and into adulthood, Louise continued to be close friends with Chicanos, as much or more than with whites. But like Sandy, she may well have been unusual in this, for she described increasing racial and cultural conflict amongst students, throughout her school career: When we were in elementary school, everybody was together, playing. By junior high, things started really dividing up, into groups of people. Hey! By high school—to me, the school system really helped set it down. You had your sections. By that time, you had a whole section of these white racists that were into surfing—very outspoken on being racist. I just started seeing a whole lot of divisions—a whole lot of different lifestyles coming together and just crashing. […] low riders, […] gangs. Things started becoming more segregated, more separate.

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Louise described the ‘surfers’ attempts to recruit her to their side, and her refusal to move over: ‘I saw myself with pride as an antiracist white.’ In addition, Louise saw herself as Polish, identified as such by her surname: We had to put up with […] a lot of racist, Polish jokes, but I looked at it—I just laughed, you know, I just looked at it like, ‘It doesn’t bother me! I feel great!’ In Louise’s life, then, despite her own connexions to Chicano culture, a level of explicit racial conflict was as visible in her environment as that which Pat Bowen experienced in Maryland. Louise responded to it, though, by means of a much more explicit antiracism, self-consciously rejecting the attentions of racist white students. Like Sandy, class and in fact, poverty, were preconditions for greater racial equality between Louise and those around her: only because Louise’s family was almost as poor as those of her neighbours of colour was it possible for her to approach them as peers. Louise’s narrative also challenges the assumption that all families are racially homogeneous, and in doing so, indicates from Louise’s point of view some of the complexities of negotiating membership in multiracial family and community, in a racially hierarchical society. As noted earlier, despite the extent to which Sandy and Louise grew up with close ties with Chicano (and in Sandy’s case, also Black and Asian) people, there are reasons to argue that experiences like Sandy’s and Louise’s represent only a partial or qualified integration. Nor can they be anything else in a racist society, if racial integration is taken to mean the absence of race hierarchy and racist ideas. Conclusion: white women’s lives as sites for the or the reproduction of racism—and for challenges to it or challenges to it In all five narratives discussed in this paper, landscape and the experience of it were racially structured. This was true whether those narratives were marked predominantly by the seeming presence or absence of people of colour. This is of course not to say that race was the only principle by which the social context was organized. For example, class intersected with race in differentiating Pat’s and Beth’s relationships with Black communities, and in making possible the ‘quasiintegrated’ experiences of Louise and Sandy. Again, controls on sexuality link up with racism in creating frequent hostility towards relationships between African-American men and white women. In addition, once in a landscape structured by racism, a conceptual mapping of race, of self and others, takes shape, which follows from and feeds the physical context. Thus, for example, Sandy experiences the term ‘Anglo’ initially without any negative or positive connotation; Clare both sees through the lens of racial stratification in her own environment, and does not perceive racial stratification

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as such. Even the presence and absence of people of colour seem to be as much social-mental as they are social-physical constructs. Here one can cite the positioning and invisibility of African-American and Latina domestic workers in some apparently all-white homes. These narratives have some implications for a white feminist analysis of racism. To begin with, they clarify some of the forms, obvious and subtle, that racism and race privilege may take in the lives of white women: including educational and economic privilege, verbally expressed assertions of white superiority, the maintenance of all-white neighbourhoods, the ‘invisibility’ of Black and Latina domestic workers, white people’s fear of people of colour and the ‘colonial’ notion that the cultures of peoples of colour were great only in the past. Racism thus appears not only as an ideology or political orientation chosen or rejected at will; it is also a system and set of ideas embedded in social relations. My analysis underscores the idea that there is no place for us to stand ‘outside’ racism, any more than we can stand ‘outside’ sexism. In this context, it seems foolish to imagine that as individuals we can escape complicity with racism as a social system. We cannot, for example, simply ‘give up’ race privilege. I suggest that as white feminists we need to take cognizance both of the embeddedness of racism in all aspects of society and the ways this has shaped our own lives, theories and actions. Concretely, this means work in at least three linked areas: work on re-examining personal history and changing consciousness; thoroughgoing theoretical transformation within feminism; and participation in practical political work towards structural change. Re-examining personal history is necessary in part because it is possible that white feminists continue relating to people of colour, as well as doing feminist work, on the basis of patterns and assumptions learned early on. For example, there could be a connexion between white women’s ‘not noticing’ people of colour in their childhood environments, and white feminists’ capacity to continue ‘forgetting’ to include women of colour in the planning of conferences and events. This forgetting may, in other words, be a socially constructed one. Reconceptualization of past experience in fact marked each of the narratives discussed here. Although this was not the case for all the women I interviewed, this group indicated as they told their stories that, with hindsight, they had become more aware of how race differences and racism had been a feature of their childhoods. Phrases like, ‘Now that we’re talking about this I remember…’ and ‘I was so unaware of cultural differences that…’ signal both lack of awareness of racism and moments of recognition or realization of it. In addition, each woman’s experience is complex and contradictory. Thus the two women most explicitly raised to ‘be racist’, Beth and Pat, found contexts and moments, however fleeting, to question the racist status quo. Conversely, Sandy and Louise, raised to find spaces not to be racist, were none the less in no sense outside the reach of racism: racism as well as antiracism shaped their

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environments, and both women at times drew on white-centred logics in describing and living their lives. It is from these places of contradiction that the work of revisioning begins. For white women in ‘mostly racist’ contexts, the moments of questioning are perhaps moments when the door opens on to other realms of possibility, other ways of being. Those moments should give us hope. For white women who grew up in situations of ‘quasi-integration’, the racism that still pervades reminds us that this is not a simple struggle, that it is all too easy for us, as white women, to be ethnocentric or patronizing, at the same time as being consciously and purposively antiracist. For these five white women (as for most white feminists) access to information about the impact of racism on people of colour, and/or direct or indirect access to the intellectual and political work of people of colour, seem to be crucial to the process of rethinking racism. Thus for example, Louise’s awareness of racism first came about as she saw her friends of colour ‘tracked’ into vocational and remedial classes in high school. And, as an adult, Beth Ellison described how reading African-American women authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, as well as meeting African Americans, had pushed her to question many of the assumptions about racism and about African Americans with which she had been raised. Pat Bowen described participating in discussions about racism in university Women’s Studies classes. And although her cohort was mainly white, the impetus for these discussions had come from the challenges posed by activist women of colour. Pat Bowen’s experience raises a further point: the call to accountability raised by women of colour must be met in part by white women learning from one another, teaching each other, and thinking together, for example, about race privilege and its effects on feminism, rather than expecting women of colour to do all of this work for us. This kind of work is going on in the published writings of white antiracist women (Bulkin, Pratt and Smith, 1988; Segrest, 1985 among others) as well as through (usually multiracial) ‘unlearning racism’ workshops and racism consciousness-raising groups (sometimes multiracial, sometimes not) developed in feminist communities around the country. None the less, the painful truth is that white feminists continue to ‘forget’, to ‘not think’, and this means that the bulk of antiracist work is being done by people of colour. There is another link between the reconceptualization of experience and the making of feminism, given that white feminists have often relied on notions of ‘women’s experience’ in order to develop theory and strategy for feminism. As mentioned earlier, the experience referred to by white feminists has almost always been white women’s experience, over generalized. Rarely and only recently have white feminists begun to examine the intersection of their gender and class positions with race privilege. Much white feminist theory generated ‘from experience’ has thus been flawed on two counts, very often assessing neither differences between white women and women of colour nor adequately describing the race-privileged positions of white women ourselves. (The same

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points may in fact be made in relation to other groups marginalized within feminism, such as women with disabilities.) The relationship between experience and the process of interpreting or describing it is by no means simple: as the narratives showed, there were multiple ways in which women named, forgot, remembered and reinterpreted their experience, through the lenses of racism and antiracism. Accounts of experience are partial, and we must review them as always being open to change. It is also critical, as white women examine and re-examine our complicity with racism, that we go beyond our immediate daily environments to learn more about the history of racist ideas. We need to do this in order to understand the contexts for the production of our ‘racist lenses’, including, for example, the ways white women ‘fear’ people of colour, or the ways we view whiteness as ‘neutral’. Reaching cognitive understandings of the history of white racist consciousness may be a valuable step towards loosening its grip on our daily lives and practice. As we formulate antiracist practices, focusing on issues of consciousness is, while necessary, not sufficient. As should be clear from what has been said here, challenging racism is not a project that can take place only on the level of ideas, but one which calls for major changes in the social, economic and legislative orders. These hold in place the unequal life chances of white people and people of colour, and indeed create what I have called the ‘social geographies of race’ in white women’s experience. By itself, reformulating ideas will change none of this. For example, I work in the arena of higher education. I am active in developing multiracial Women’s Studies curricula. However, it is clear to me that we cannot progress very far towards multiracial curricula unless we make strides towards more multiracial composition of faculty and student bodies. This in turn implies that we must work to strengthen affirmative action, challenge cutbacks in student financial aid, demand day-care facilities on campus for women with children, improve funding for public high schools, and so on. In short, there is a delicate balance to be maintained in white feminist practice, for it is precisely racist ideas and lack of awareness that have often prevented white women from challenging racism structurally. Unlearning racism, however, is not the same thing as ending it. Nor can we wait for a moment when we feel we have finished changing our ‘race consciousness’ before becoming active in working against racism in the world at large. Examining whiteness is as urgent now as it ever was, because of the persistence of systemic racism. In the last decade, at the urging of women of colour, white feminists like myself have learnt a lot about the meaning of race privilege. I believe that we can turn the corner into the next century knowing more about what ‘being white’ means than we did two decades ago. Moreover, we will know it from a standpoint that is specifically antiracist, one that will at the very least challenge the apparent invisibility or neutrality of whiteness,11 and at best will also see whiteness as a place from which to participate actively in struggles for racial equality. The story of what we will, in practical terms, do with that consciousness in our politics and daily lives continues to unfold, as we transform feminist demands and agendas, and build

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feminist organizations and institutions. For as always in feminist thinking, new ideas are not merely ends in themselves, but tools to assist in the larger project of social change. Notes Ruth Frankenberg grew up in Manchester, England and moved to the United States in 1979. She now teaches in the American Studies Programme at the University of California, Davis. Her book, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, was published in 1993 by University of Minnesota Press and Routledge, UK. She has been involved in pedagogical and activist antiracist work since the seventies. 1 This paper is offered with love to the memory of Rosa Maria Villafane Sisolak. The paper is adapted from a chapter of White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, and was originally a doctoral thesis, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988. Warm thanks are due to the thirty white women interviewed for the book. Advisers, friends, family, comrades and colleagues, including among others, Susan Alexander, Terry Berman, Nancy Chodorow, Jim Clifford, Reyna Cowan, Donna Haraway, Carol Lopes, Chela Sandoval, David Wellman, and above all, Lata Mani, have given me continued and unstinting support and advice on the project. Jacqui Alexander, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Mab Segrest and several anonymous readers have commented on this essay in particular. Finally, Rosamaria Zayas and Gloria Watkins/bell hooks initiated a seachange in my outlook on life when they taught me how urgently I needed to look at the world, and feminism, through the prism of antiracism. 2 These are the words of Cathy Thomas, one of the white women I interviewed in the research described here. Cathy Thomas is a pseudonym—unfortunately, given the confidentiality of the research, I cannot give Cathy credit by name for this acute observation about the meaning of whiteness for many white people socialized in contexts where the ideology of a ‘colourblind’ society overlays systemic racial inequality. 3 Here and throughout this paper, I assume neither that white women occupy equal positions of advantage in US society, nor that whites’ cultures are equally powerful, equally formative of dominant cultural practices. 4 Racism and ethnocentrism are key terms in this paper, so that their meanings unfold throughout the piece. However, a preliminary note on how I would distinguish between these two terms may be in order. I use racism very broadly to denote the structures, institutions, practices and patterns of thought implicit in a system of domination, of unequal relations of power, constructed around the notion of ‘race’. I do not view racism as an unchanging, timeless or inevitable system, but rather as one that is changing and historically specific, reproduced in conjunction with other social relations. In parallel, I view the term ‘race’ itself as referring to a socially constructed and historically specific categorization system, rather than to a set of essentially real, unchanging differences. I use ethnocentrism more narrowly

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5

6

7

8

9

10

11

than racism, to refer to the holding of presumptions about the universality, normalcy, superiority or ‘generic’ status of attitudes, practices and forms of social organization that are in reality culturally and historically specific. Ethnocentrism can then refer simply to attitudes, or to patterns of thought embedded in particular instances of theorization and analysis, as well as in actions, practices and institutions. I am using ‘Black’ here in the ‘British’ sense, to refer to people of Asian and African-Caribbean descent. However, it should be noted that elsewhere in this paper, when I and the women I interviewed spoke of ‘Black people’, we used the term in the ‘American’ sense, to refer to Americans of African descent. None of that writing was ever published, although we did present our perspective in workshops, both at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at the University of Oregon, Eugene, in the early 1980s. Our collectively taught class, ‘Women and Work’, University of California, Santa Cruz, January to March 1983, also exemplified our method. Finally, I have written about the collective and its method in, ‘Different perspectives: interweaving theory and practice in women’s work’, History of Consciousness, University of California at Santa Cruz, June 1988. For example, Gould (1985) describes the history of the reduction of race to biological differences; Omi and Winant (1986:3–4 and elsewhere) indicate the historical mutability of racial naming and the strong ties between naming and political struggle; Baldwin (1984) analyzes the consolidation of white racial identity in the United States, again in context of political struggle, and the consolidation of power and privilege. Given the constraints of a short essay, many kinds of experience explored in the research are left out of this article: for example, those of older and younger women, women with a stronger sense of cultural or ethnic identity, including Jewish women, women who have not critically rethought childhood experience. Discussion of the decisions Beth’s mother made are beyond the scope of this paper since I did not interview her, but her daughter. However, it is possible to speculate that, in relation to the Black doctor and his family, a sense of class similarity overrode or mitigated race difference in making Beth’s mother feel it was acceptable for the family to move in. In contrast, she did not accept Beth’s move to a racially mixed, low-income neighbourhood (in other words a neighbourhood different from Beth’s family’s in both race and class terms). It is also possible that for Beth’s mother, the presence of one or two Black people did not for her disrupt the ‘whiteness’ of the environment, whereas a greater number of Black people, in school or in a neighbourhood, were more disturbing. I have chosen to stay with Clare’s term, ‘Mexican American’ here, for it is impossible to know what name or names the Mexican-descended community in that town might have chosen for themselves and, in fact, ‘Mexican’ and ‘Mexican American’ are good guesses, given the region and timeframe in question. Conscious articulations of whiteness are, however, not necessarily anti-racist. For most of US history, use of the term ‘white’ has been deployed in the context of biology-based racist discourses and hierarchical constructions of ‘difference’. Moreover, in the present, the US white supremacist movement continues to use the term ‘white’ to articulate its sense of white superiority. A good source of information about white supremacist activity is the Center for Democratic Renewal’s newsletter, The Monitor, PO Box 50469, Atlanta, GA 30302.

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References ALARCON, Norma (1990) ‘The theoretical subjects of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American feminism’ in ANZALDUA (1990) 356–69. ANZALDUA, Gloria (1990) editor, Haciendo Caras: Making Face, Making Soul San Francisco: Aunt Lute. BALDWIN, James (1984) ‘On being white and other lies’ Essence April, 80–1. BHAVNANI, Kum-Kum and COULSON, Margaret (1986) ‘Transforming socialist feminism: the challenge of racism’ Feminist Review 23. BULKIN, Elly, PRATT, Minnie Bruce and SMITH, Barbara (1988) Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Racism and Antisemitism Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books (original publisher, Long Haul Press, 1984). CADE, Toni (1970) The Black Woman: An Anthology New York: Mentor. CARBY, Hazel (1981) ‘White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’ in Center for contemporary cultural studies (1981) The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in ’70s Britain London: Hutchinson, 212–35. CENTER FOR DEMOCRATIC RENEWAL The Monitor PO Box 50469, Atlanta, GA 30302. COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE (1979) ‘A black feminist statement’ in Eisenstein, Zillah R. (1979) editor, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism New York and London: Monthly Review Press. DAVIS, Angela Y. (1981) Women, Race and Class New York: Random House. DAVIS, Susan E. (1988) editor, Women Under Attack: Victories, Backlash and the Fight for Reproductive Freedom Boston: South End Press. FRANKENBERG, Ruth (1985) ‘White Privilege’, unpublished. —— (1993) White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. London: Routledge. GARCIA, Alma (1990) ‘The development of Chicana feminist discourse, 1970– 1980’ in DuBois, Ellen Carol and Ruiz, Vicki L. (1990) editors, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in US Women’s History New York: Routledge, 418–31. GOULD, Stephen Jay (1985) ‘Human equality is a contingent fact of history’ The Flamingo’s Smile New York: W.W.Norton, 185–97. HARAWAY, Donna J. (1991) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question and the privilege of partial perspective’ Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature New York: Routledge, 183–202. HOOKS, bell (1981) Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism Boston: South End Press. —— (1984) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center Boston: South End Press. MALVEAUX, Julianne (1988) ‘Ain’t I a woman: differences in the labor market status of black and white women’ in Paula S.Rothenberg (1988) editor, Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study New York: St. Martin’s Press, 76–9. MORAGA, Cherrie and ANZALDUA, Gloria (1981) editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Watertown, MA, Persephone Press (reprinted by Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983). OMI, Michael and WINANT, Howard (1986) Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 3–4.

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OSUMI, Megumi Dick (1982) ‘Asians and California’s anti-miscegenation laws,’ in Nobuya Tsuchida (1982) editor, Asian/Pacific American Experiences: Women’s Perspectives Minneapolis: Asian/Pacific American Learning Resource Center and General College, University of Minnesota, cited in Amott, Teresa L. and Matthaei, Julie A. (1991) Race, Gender and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States Boston: South End Press, 195. REAGON, Bernice Johnson (1983) ‘Coalition politics: turning the century’ in Barbara Smith (1983) editor, Home Girls: a Black Feminist Anthology New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 356–69. ROLLINS, Judith (1985) Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers Philadelphia, Temple University Press. SANDOVAL, Chela (1982) ‘The struggle within: women respond to racism— report on the National Women’s Studies Conference, Storrs, Connecticut’ Oakland, California: Occasional Paper, Center for Third World Organizing (revised version in Anzaldua (1990) 55–71. —— (1991) ‘US Third World feminism: the theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world’ Genders 10,1–24. SEGREST, Mab (1985) My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture Ithaca NY: Firebrand Books. WARE, Vron (1992) Beyond the Pale, White Women, Racism and History London: Verso. ZAVELLA, Patricia (1987) ‘The problematic relationship of feminism and Chicana studies’ paper delivered to conference on ‘Women: Culture, Conflict and Consensus’ University of California, Los Angeles. ZINN, Maxine Baca et al (1986) ‘The cost of exclusionary practices in Women’s Studies’ Signs Winter.

MY GRANDMOTHER Jackie Kay

My grandmother is like a Scottish pine Tall straight-backed proud and plentiful A fine head of hair, greying now Tied up in a loose bun Her face is ploughed land Her eyes shine rough as amethysts She wears a plaid shawl Of our clan with the zeal of an Amazon She is one of those women Burnt in her croft rather than moved off the land She comes from them, her snake’s skin She speaks Gaelic mostly, English only When she has to, then it’s blasphemy My grandmother sits by the fire and swears There’ll be no Darkie baby in this house My grandmother is a Scottish pine Tall straight-backed proud and plentiful Her hair tied with pins in a ball of steel wool Her face is tight as ice And her eyes are amethysts. Notes Jackie Kay is a black Scottish poet who was born in Edinburgh and raised in Glasgow. She has published her poems widely and her volume The Adoption Papers won an Eric Gregory Award in 1991. She has also written three plays, Chiaroscuro in 1986; Twice Over in 1988; and Every Bit Of It in 1992. Her television work includes films on pornography, AIDS and transracial adoption, and Twice Through the Heart, a poetry documentary for BBC2.

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This poem was first published in 1991 in That Distance Apart, London: Turret Books.

Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

LOOKING BEHIND THE VIOLENT BREAK-UP OF YUGOSLAVIA Meg Coulson

Why is it so difficult to write about the war in the Balkans? Struggling, over the past two years, to make sense of the bitter fragmentation of Yugoslavia, I became more acutely aware that every fragment has its own story and that the stories tend to become more incompatible. In that recognition, it seems appropriate to indicate where I have come from; to start by looking back: Sarajevo in the 1960s. Meet some friends of mine. Here’s Vera, she’s about my age (we were in our twenties then). We drink Turkish coffee around the kitchen table in her flat. The flat has just been returned to her, well half of it, the other half allocated to another family, in that slow process of sorting out housing needs and rights after the war. (Vera’s family had lost their house during that war, taking refuge in the hills…) There is little furniture as yet but the rooms are large with views across the city. Vera works in the university library, and used to live in a small room there with her young son. She’s independent, competent in the ways of getting round the system, critical, generous, witty. She seems to manage her lovers with a mixture of confidence and contempt. And here is Milena, our age too; she lives with her mother in a small (also divided) flat near to the centre of town; she works in the National Library, that fine building by the river where we sometimes visit her for coffee and conversation. She is not well this year, has had TB and needs more rest, and her love life is full of distress… The third member of this group is Jelena. She works in a travel bureau in town and can always provide advice, if not tickets, if we want to travel by bus out of town. Perhaps Jelena is a bit more serious than the others, shows her anxieties more, but with an underlying determination and strength. They are good friends these three, often together, three young, independent women. Between them they try to teach Serbo-Croat to my companion and me. Rosa is here too. We’re working with her, planning some research into political participation in the self-management structures (who really makes the decisions? —is what we want to know). She is older, teaches sociology at the Faculty, a

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serious, critical communist who believes (at this time) that this system can be made to work more democratically. She tells us that her first political act was at the age of ten or so, during the war, when she tore down a notice the Nazis had posted in her village which promised that ten villagers would be killed for every Nazi killed or injured. Maybe Rosa’s (first) husband is here as well, a journalist and satirist who still finds difficulty in getting regular work; he was imprisoned after Yugoslavia’s split from the USSR for openly supporting Stalin. Humour is his method of criticism now and he sharpens and applies it with skill; I am not sure if he believes in anything else… Through these and other friendships I got to know something about Yugoslavia through the 1960s and 1970s, to enjoy the warmth and sometimes overwhelming generosity of Balkan hospitality; the intensity of political and personal and cultural discussions. From year to year, observing the changing face of the country, with the development of new roads, new buildings, expanding towns and cities—evidence of that extraordinarily rapid change from an overwhelmingly rural society to a predominantly urban one. While critical of the regime, I believed in Yugoslavia in the late sixties and even thought that Yugoslav socialism might find a more democratic form. Now I think of the misleading magnificence of Sarajevo’s appearance in the year it hosted the Winter Olympics. Perhaps I had become less observant of the extent of deterioration and collapse. And yet the indicators were accruing through the 1980s… Sarajevo 1992/3. ‘Welcome to hell’ the wall slogans say. The city has been under attack since April 1992, under siege and bombardment from the surrounding hills; mortar fire, sniper fire, the site of fighting and ‘ethnic cleansing’ from suburb to suburb; there is little food, heating, water, medical supplies. It is one of many centres of civil war in Bosnia, the current phase of this bitter war in the Balkans. And those old friends? Jelena is in Sarajevo if she is surviving still; sharing her tiny flat with her Muslim neighbour and daughter and another woman. She did not leave Sarajevo when she could have got out a few months ago. In leaving she would have had to sign away the rights to her flat; it might seem a denial of the future, such meagre choices. Rosa died in autumn 1991, before the fighting reached Bosnia. She had been ill with cancer for some time. Vera is with the Bosnian Serbs in Pale. Is she still adamant in her conviction that this war was necessary to save Yugoslavia? And Milena? She is in Slovenia, her husband is working abroad and she may join him with their children. Meantime her house is full of refugees from Bosnia. She says she is not in danger, is all right and yet not all right at all. Among her family and friends are people from all communities, so it is sometimes difficult to talk for fear of opening divisions which will become too great. Although you know the most terrible things are happening it is sometimes almost impossible to believe it…

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I begin with this microcosm which is one source of my own political, personal confusion and turmoil over the war in the Balkans and of the questions that erupt out of it. There are so many levels of this war’s reality and so many layers of questioning that it can expose. What follows is an attempt to trace some of the layers which make up the specifically Yugoslav background to the present war. The promise of Yugoslavia For some of my generation on the left, Yugoslavia was first of all a ‘communist’ state with a difference. Pushed out of the Cominform in 1948—rejected by Stalin —Yugoslavia responded by developing a system of state socialism separate and distinct from that of the USSR. Internally this brought the policies of selfmanagement and the establishment of structures of workers’ councils, a decentralized system of decision-making; market mechanisms were allowed a place in the economy. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia recognized the ethnic diversity of its peoples in its federal structure and complex system of national rights. In the 1974 Constitution there was a three-tiered system. At the first level: the six republics (Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia) each had an associated nation—Muslims being counted as a nation since the 1971 census, along with Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbians and Slovenes; with three languages (Macedonian, SerboCroat, Slovenian), two alphabets and three major religious traditions (Islam and Christianity—both Orthodox and Roman Catholic). Within Serbia, Kosovo (with its majority Albanian population) and Vojvodina (with its large Hungarian population) had the status of autonomous regions. At the second level Albanians and Hungarians were two of the ten nationalities (the others being: Bulgarians, Czechs, Gypsies, Italians, Romanians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Turks) with a range of legal rights in respect of language, education, culture. Thirdly, other recognized national ethnic groups included Austrians, Greeks, Jews, Germans, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Vlahs and also those classifying themselves as Yugoslavs. Externally, the break with the USSR prompted Yugoslavia’s interest and involvement in the development of the nonaligned movement, an attempt to draw together an alliance of nations resistant to the domination of the two great powers of the Cold War era. This also gave Tito (and Yugoslavia) a high profile in international politics. The invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet army in 1968 sharpened fears of external threat from the USSR and influenced changes in defence arrangements to improve the ability to maintain a guerrilla defence in the event of Soviet (or NATO) attack or occupation. Territorial defence units were established which were the responsibility of Republics or Autonomous Regions, organized at the level of local communes and work organizations; they were armed with relatively simple light weapons. The territorial units shared responsibility (after 1969) for national defence with the Yugoslav National Army

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The Republics of the former Yugoslavia Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd; from The Fall of Yugoslavia by Misha Glenny (Penguin Books, 1992; Harmondsworth) (c) Misha Glenny, 1992

which continued as the most highly trained and equipped force directly under federal authority and closely connected to the Party. There was no comparable break with the Stalinist model to inform Yugoslav policies in relation to women. These followed the general East European recipe, promising to deliver women’s emancipation through participation in social production. During the war, women, albeit in small numbers, had fought and died heroically alongside men within the Partisans, and were among those praised for their contribution to the revolution afterwards. The rapid processes of social change which followed the war dramatically changed many women’s lives, particularly as the constraints of rural traditions were undermined and the move to urban living got underway. Women were drawn into paid employment though to a lesser extent than in other countries of Eastern Europe and, when unemployment rose, women’s rates of unemployment were higher than men’s. Nurseries and kindergartens were built, abortion was widely available after the 1974 constitution declared that ‘it is a human right freely to decide on family planning’; abortion tended to be used in place of contraception which was not adequately available. Women were marginalized by the political system and were left with that double shift of work at home and in employment which ensured that in general men’s lives were not greatly disturbed by domestic responsibility. If I was less aware of some of these failures in the mid-1960s than I became later, this reflects the uneven development of my feminism and also perhaps the extent to which I was impressed by the apparent assurance and independence which I saw in my women friends and other women I met,

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comparable, perhaps, to Frigga Haug’s observations in her comparison of the attitudes and behaviour of women in East and West Europe (Haug, 1991:38). In the context of post-war Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia became the most open of the ‘socialist’ states, the easiest to get into and out of. The most diverse in national and ethnic composition, it had the most developed and enforced system of national and minority rights. And at times it seemed to allow some limited space for critical discourse as exemplified in the journal Praxis and its international summer schools on the island of Kor ula, and expressed in critical actions: the waves of strikes, the student movement of 1968, etc. Despite evident instances of political authoritarianism and repression, the appearance of widespread assent to the system seemed convincing through the 1960s and 1970s. So much for political optimisms of the past. But what of the present and the hard and urgent questions that it raises? How to make sense of the bitter and brutal processes, unleashed and apparently spiralling outwards beyond control, in the former Yugoslavia? How—and why—should the rejection of communism in the most open of the East European states lead to the most vicious and destructive (so far) dynamic of war and fragmentation? How can Yugoslavia have ended so brutally? First of all, the wider context, Europe and world disorder Reviewing contemporary developments in Africa and the Balkans, Basil Davidson has argued for the urgent necessity to understand, ‘an obligation to meet the question—why have things turned out so badly?’ (Davidson and Munslow, 1990:10) By bringing together, in the framework of one discussion, the political failures and their disastrous consequences both in postcolonial Africa and in the Balkans, Davidson provides a timely reminder that ethnic and nationalist conflicts are raging and devastating societies in many parts of the world, including some in which there had previously been hope of more progressive and peaceful developments. Civil wars ravage lives across the world. And Europe is no exception. Over the decades since 1945, peace in Europe has tended to become increasingly taken for granted, distancing this continent from its violent past. In its peculiar way the Cold War was significant in keeping war more or less out of Europe for forty-five years. (Ireland and Cyprus would be notable exceptions.) Yet this European heritage is full of imperial wars and inter-ethnic conflict, the suppression and manipulation of national groups, the struggles for national identity and for nationhood, the redrawing of national boundaries, the trudge of the dispossessed survivors—the refugees…. Experience of earlier conflict and dispossession are still alive today in the older generations in former Yugoslavia as in many parts of Europe. The symbols of Second World War fascism and brutality revive old fears and rally new supporters; in the Yugoslav war the terms etnik (fighting for Serbian supremacy

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and domination) and ustaši (fascists based in Croatia) are alive again, to signify today’s enemies, and for a few, representing a return to settle old scores. In Britain, however uneven the media coverage of this war may be, it has brought vivid images, accounts and examples of death and destruction, the vicious processes of ‘ethnic cleansing’ involving bombing, shooting, arson and other forms of intimidation including systematic rape of women and girls. It is an insistent picture of the horrific effects of this kind of war and its ruthless dispossession and extermination of civilian populations. This is not the nuclear holocaust that the peace movement has campaigned against in recent decades, and there is confusion on the left about how to formulate a political response. But are the practices of this war, in all their terror, substantially different from other relatively low-technology civil wars and inter-ethnic conflicts in other parts of the globe? The main point of this brief reference to a wider context is to draw attention to questions about the extent to which the civil war in former Yugoslavia relates not only to its own specific history but is also an example of the complex structural problems. These concern moving from a centralized authoritarian political system to multi-party democracy in circumstances that are marked by worsening economic crises aggravated by external debt. There are also general wider questions about the powerful draw of nationalist/ethnic/religious identities and an associated dynamic of exclusions, in times of political and economic turmoil. Basil Davidson, drawing comparisons between the Balkans and some states in Africa, and Misha Glenny, considering post-communist trends within the former USSR and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, suggest that underlying structural issues such as these are crucial (Davidson, 1992; Glenny, 1993). Yugoslavia through the 1980s The immediate crises leading to the destruction of Yugoslavia accumulated throughout the 1980s. Two aspects will be emphasized in this section. Firstly, the anticipated and realized impact of Tito’s death in 1980. Secondly, the state of the economy. Tito held Yugoslavia together both symbolically and practically. In the years leading up to and immediately following his death something of an apocalyptic culture emerged (predictably amongst Western observers outside the country, but also within); all were obsessed with questions about Yugoslavia’s survival after Tito and the future of Yugoslav socialism (Ramet, 1985). Symbolically, Tito represented the link with the past, the wartime partisan struggle, the victory of the working class over fascist and nationalistic enemies. Practically he combined the posts of Head of State, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the leading member of the League of Communists. After his death, the already prepared, collective systems of leadership were put into place which were designed to maintain a system of balances between the republics (a presidency made up of eight, with one representative from each republic and autonomous region; a party leadership similarly made up of eight representatives

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plus a representative of the Yugoslav National Army). Would this collective structure preserve and develop Yugoslavia and the interdependence of its republics, or would it become the site of conflict and stalemate, strained to breaking point and beyond? The political developments will be considered below. First I want to emphasize the importance of economic failures in reducing the chances of positive achievements for the new collectivities. There were pressures from without—the impact of the oil crisis of the mid 1970s, rising foreign debt and the policy restrictions associated with that; and from within—ineptitude of the heavily bureaucratized economic system and the failure of regional policy to overcome the uneven development of the different republics and regions. These combined in the creation of an economic crisis which tangibly effected people’s lives. The crisis was manifested in rising poverty and unemployment, racing levels of inflation (from 40–100 per cent annually through most of the eighties), an inability to ensure stable supplies of such basic goods as coffee, cooking oil, everyday medicines, etc., in the shops, and the consequent drastic deterioration in the living standards of those on average incomes or below. The improvements in living standards of the sixties and seventies were disappearing fast; the trends were visible and demoralizing. They were compounded by the growing inequalities between the richer and poorer areas of the country, with, for example, rates of registered unemployed in 1989 of over 250 per thousand people in employment in Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro, with 583 in Kosovo, compared to 35 in Slovenia, and 86 in Croatia (Hashi, 1992:65). The inequalities between republics fostered resentments everywhere. In the most developed regions of Slovenia and Croatia this was expressed as the dissatisfied belief that they gave more to the federation than they received from it (conveniently ignoring gains through trade with the other republics). In Serbia the complaint was that its economic development was held back, while the growing poverty of Macedonia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo focused their concerns. There was growing disparity between the republics about the direction and priorities of economic reform. The disappearance of the democratic moment There has been limited experience of parliamentary democracy and little space for civil society in the history of the region of former Yugoslavia. From a long and complex history of colonial contests, repression and divide-and-rule manipulation, ending with the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the first Yugoslavia emerged in 1918 as the Kingdom of the Croats, Serbs and Slovenes. At that time national leaders in Croatia and Slovenia saw the future for their nations’ identities in joining the already independent state of Serbia. In its early parliamentary system, political parties (with the exception of the Communist Party) were largely nationally or regionally identified. At the same time, the constitutional relationship between the nationalities was not clarified. The state slid into Serbian domination and away from democratic

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pretensions, becoming a military dictatorship in 1929. The Nazi invasion in 1941 brought the end of the first Yugoslavia and in this context Croatia became for a period an ‘Independent’ state under the fascist ustaše regime of Paveli . It was Paveli ’s intention to create a pure Croatian Catholic state and this led to repression, terror, forced religious conversion and extermination of those who did not fit—mainly Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia, also Jews, Gypsies and political opponents. The war against the occupying forces was thus also a bitter and complex civil war. In southern Serbia, Montenegro and parts of Bosnia, the etniks, a Serbian extremist group, were based. They aimed to unite all Serbs in one state and directed much of their violence and terror against Croats and Muslims in pursuit of that aim. The partisans under Tito drew support across the divisions of nationality and ethnicity; they gained Allied support; they opposed the Nazis, the etniks and the ustaši. The eventual victory of the Partisans under Tito led to the creation of the second Yugoslavia as a socialist federal republic, giving recognition and rights to the national groups and republics on the one hand, while establishing the leading role’ of the Communist Party on the other. In the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia the adoption of selfmanagement seemed to promise a decentralized system of decision-making, a form of democracy. But its democratizing potential was undermined by the failures of economic policy and strangled by the overbearing and authoritarian power of the Party—the Yugoslav League of Communists (YLC)—which sucked information from the base and pushed instructions down from the centre (according to centralist practice). Slavenka Drakuli describes the experience of self-management that had declined into a system of self-blame ‘invented to make you believe that you—not the government—are to blame. It was the most perfect system among the one-party states, set up to internalize guilt, blame, failure or fear, to teach you how you yourself should censor your thoughts and deeds and, at the same time, to make you feel that you had more freedom than anyone in Eastern Europe.’ (Drakuli , 1992:6) In the rejection and collapse of this system of control, where was the basis of democratic development to come from? Writing in July 1991, Slavenka Drakuli observed, ‘Democracy is not like an unexpected gift that comes without effort. It must be fought for. And that is what makes it so difficult…. We may have survived communism, but we have not yet outlived it.’ (1992: xvii) Yet the 1980s were marked by a sometimes chaotic ferment of ideas, which included expressions of irreverence against the sacred objects of the socialist order, revivals and new writing in nationalist literatures. Debates about democracy and the future of the political system included the possibility of a multi-party system with or without the leading role of the YLC, besides the contributions of both liberals and communist hardliners. In this context, feminism, which had begun to emerge during the seventies, developed into a more identifiable form with groups and networks especially in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb. An all-Yugoslav umbrella group, the Independent Women’s Association, was set up in April 1990. SOS telephone lines were

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established to respond to women suffering rape and violence (Anti , 1992:174– 8). As political parties began to develop, a group of women in Belgrade attempted to form a Women’s Party and drew up a Charter of Intentions (Cockburn, 1991:155–60). Other social movements surfaced too—peace groups, an ecology movement, writers and poets, youth, a subversive music subculture, especially punk, gay and lesbian groups, and New Age spiritualists, for example. This trend reached its fullest and most promising expression in Slovenia, where the youth wing of the Party was amenable to many of these developments in the mid-eighties, and this flowered into the Slovene Spring (Kova , 1988; Thompson, 1992:39–44). In the midst of these hopeful developments, nationalism was growing everywhere too. Even in Slovenia, nationalism threatened to obliterate this creative burst of interest groups and social movements, these precious precursors to democracy. By the time of the first multi-party elections, held in Slovenia and Croatia in spring 1991, the democratic moment was sliding away. (Zizek, 1992: 73) But the rise and rise of nationalism already had established a frightening momentum before 1988/9 and the ending of communism in Yugoslavia. Nationalism in the second Yugoslavia Throughout the Tito years, nationalism was repeatedly denounced as one of the main internal threats to the Socialist Federal Republic. During the Second World War the Yugoslav Communist Party drew support for the Partisans across national groups, counterposing the interests of working-class solidarity to the divisions of nationalist identities. The federation of the second Yugoslavia was based on political equality between the constituent republics and rights for national and minority groups. Yugoslavism represented the idea/ideal of encompassing the coexistence and mutual respect of all the national and ethnic groups within the framework of a socialist state. Yet there was some ambivalence about Yugoslavism in the Party. Perhaps the status of Yugoslav as an identity illustrates this, as it was offered as one option among others (ie, Macedonian, Croat, Slovene, etc.) in recording national identity. In the 1981 census, 1,216,000 citizens took such an identity, an increase of 943,000 over the 1971 census. Was it difficult to identify as—for example—Yugoslav and Slovene? Yugoslav and Albanian? Was Yugoslav a refuge for those of mixed ethnicity/nationality rather than an identity for the future? Might it even have become a hiding-place for Serbs, or even some Croats living outside their nation’s republic? Such questions suggest a certain confusion bordering on mistrust. And yet, for many, of different backgrounds, Yugoslav was an important identity and its loss as a potentially inclusive category is a significant part of the turmoil and damage of the present civil war. It seems impossible to overemphasize the complexity of the multiethnic, multinationality composition of the country and the intricacies involved in trying to create a coherent new order at the end of the Second World War. On the new

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map of the second Yugoslavia the republican boundaries each enclosed significant minority populations (although Slovenia was much more homogeneous). Moreover the different national and ethnic groups have carried their separate histories which attach different meanings to various locations and boundaries. All of this added to the lived complexity of Yugoslavia and was vividly represented in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina. It might suggest the necessity of coexistence and inter-dependence, or the potential for misunderstanding, prejudice and conflict. There were other dilemmas and anomalies. Of these Kosovo has proved to be a most salient example. With its majority population of Albanian (non-Slav) origin, bordering on to the nation-state of Albania, Kosovo gained autonomous regional status in 1974, with language, educational and other cultural rights, etc. This arrangement stopped short of equal status with the six republics and the main national groups. It reflected residues of the wartime Party’s reluctance to fully support the principles of national self-determination in relation to Kosovo/ the Albanians and the collapse of plans for a possible Balkan federation including Bulgaria and Albania (after the split with USSR) which might have offered a different resolution to the future of Kosovo. Bosnia-Hercegovina is another significant example. Constitutionally, it is the republic of Muslims, Serbs and Croats, with its centuries of mixed traditions and religions—Islam, Orthodox and Catholic Christianities, as well as Sephardic Jews, Gypsies and other minorities, but with no officially recognized Bosnian national identity. The Muslims of Bosnia are Slav descendants of the Bogomils, a heretic Christian sect, persecuted by both Orthodox and Catholic churches, who converted to Islam under the Ottoman Empire. With Bosnia as their homenation, they were identified as Muslims, a secular category recorded since the 1971 census, and one of the nations of Yugoslavia. This was not intended to be a Muslim identity in a religious sense and did not link to Muslims of Albanian, Gypsy, Turkish or other national or minority origin. The identity of Bosnian, therefore, was without any constitutional validity but was in practice an inclusive identity, used by Croats, Muslims, Jews, Serbs and other minorities living in Bosnia. For some of today’s Serb nationalist extremists the idea of Slav Muslims as a national category, and of Bosnia-Hercegovina as a republic or state, has been an artificial creation which has obstructed Serb interests by constitutionally blocking access to territory which should belong to a Greater Serbia. Some Croatian extremists seem drawn to a similar logic in laying claim to ‘their share’ of Bosnia. The historical tension between Serbian and Croatian nationalisms should be mentioned here as it has appeared to become increasingly prominent in the present stage of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. Croatia and the Croats suffered the repressiveness of Serb domination in the first Yugoslavia and the brutality of the etniks was directed against Croats and Muslims in the Second World War, together laying a historical basis for Croatian fears of a Greater Serbian

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The consequences of war: an ‘ethnic Albanian’ being taken to hospital to give birth

nationalism. On the other side, memories of the slaughter and repression of Serbs by the ustaši during the Second World War have been revived to feed fears of Croatian nationalism and especially in relation to the rights and safety of Serb minority populations of the Krajina, within Croatia.

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Macedonia represents other complexities of the region as well as of Yugoslavia itself. The geographical area of Macedonia is at present divided between Bulgaria, Greece and (former) Yugoslavia and has a history of competing claims for its loyalty and territory. This has meant that its population suffered at different times oppressive control under Serbia/the first Yugoslavia and under Bulgaria. The (ex-Yugoslav) republic of Macedonia (still awaiting recognition as a state in its own right) was created by Tito and in the early years also contained the hope that it could be linked into that Balkan federation which faded from view by 1949. In establishing the new republic, a written form of the Macedonian language was created which distinguished it to some extent from Bulgarian, and a history of the Macedonian nation was devised. This was the republic of the Macedonian people and the Turkish and Albanian minorities; since 1989 amended to ‘a nation-state of Macedonian people’. In 1992/3 the refusal of Greece to recognize a new state named Macedonia indicates the unresolved status of the question of Macedonia (greater or lesser) (Poulton, 1991: 46–56). Through the Tito era the contradictions around nationalism were increasingly pulled between ‘the bureaucratic stifling of nationalism and the equally bureaucratic extension of rights’ (Samary, 1992:35). Nationalistic ideas and groups were projected as the most dangerous internal enemies of the regime. Through successive political purges and trials, nationalist ‘elements’ (real and imagined) were expelled from the Party or imprisoned. Some examples: in 1966, Rankovic, repressive chief of the state security police, lost power, criticized for Greater Serb nationalistic tendencies. Widespread purges in 1972/3 took a generation of liberals and reformers out of the Party; in Croatia this followed a period of liberal debate which had some nationalist components, and those expelled were officially condemned as nationalists; in Serbia they were denounced as technocrats. It is interesting that among the present postcommunist national and political party leaderships are several who had been imprisoned for their nationalist writings and influence at an earlier time. Tudjman, president of Croatia, and Izetbegovi , president of the Bosnian government, are notable examples; as is Sešelj who was acclaimed for his sharp criticisms of the local communist bureaucracy in Sarajevo in 1984 and who now leads the extreme right wing of Serb nationalism. There are questions here which need further exploration into the paradoxical evolution of the relationship between various political critiques of the regime on the one hand and nationalist and nationalistic politics on the other. Such a process has evolved most weirdly in Serbia, where left-wing critical intellectuals who were under attack from the Party in 1974 became forceful defenders of the Serbian Party’s nationalist trajectory after Tito’s death, through the 1980s. (Magaš, 1989:14; 1993:49–73). Thus members of the former Praxis group defended the necessity for Serbia’s violent suppression of protest in Kosovo and have had a powerful influence on the legitimation of the Serbian leader Miloševi .

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Kosovo has been a focal reference for the rise of Serb nationalism over the past decade. Student protests in Kosovo in March 1981, over the inadequate conditions in student hostels in Priština, the capital, quickly expanded to encompass criticism of the high levels of poverty and unemployment in the region and to include a demand that Kosovo should become a republic. Police, army and paramilitary forces were called in to suppress the protests, leaving 12 dead and 150 injured according to official (under) estimates (Lee, 1983:63). The other Yugoslav republics kept their distance from this process, an internal Serbian affair. In Serbia these events were presented as evidence of a dangerous and extreme Albanian nationalism which would seek to take Kosovo out of Yugoslavia, posing a mortal threat to its minority Serb population. In this atmosphere even the high Albanian birth rate was presented as a plot against the Serbian nation rather than a result of the extreme poverty and underdevelopment of the region. It was indicative of the very effective propaganda campaign to convince the Serbian nation that it was in danger that both its history, as mystically symbolized by Kosovo Polje (where Serbian warriors had been defeated by the Turks in 1389), and its future, were in danger. Within the Communist Party in Serbia a political struggle between liberals and conservatives developed, coming to a head on the issue of nationalism in 1987, and ending with the defeat and expulsion of liberal critics of the nationalist trend whose ‘departure marks the date of the Serbian Party’s open endorsement of nationalism’ (Magaš 1989:16). Later, strikes led by miners in Kosovo in 1989 were harshly suppressed, and the Serbian government followed this up by withdrawing autonomous status from Kosovo (and Vojvodina) and imposed direct rule over the region. Through the 1980s the failure to resolve the Kosovo question was a primary ingredient in the resurgence of Serbian nationalism. Within this paranoid mindset Serbia’s enemies were everywhere, surrounding the Serb minorities in Croatia as well as in Kosovo, threatening Serbia, threatening Yugoslavia. The Serbian media increasingly reflected these obsessions, the room for alternative views diminished rapidly. The end of Yugoslavia But Yugoslavia as a federal republic was coming to an end. Through the later 1980s, nationalisms were gaining credence in Slovenia and Croatia, encouraged and validated by the failures of the socialist system, reclaiming and reconstituting earlier histories and further activated in defensive response to Serbian nationalism which they also fed. By the time the (last) all-Yugoslav congress of the Party met early in 1990, Communist parties were being pushed out of power across Eastern Europe. In Yugoslavia the first multi-party elections were held during that year, bringing non-communist governments to all republics except Serbia and Montenegro where only the Party’s name was changed. Tension between the republics was

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tightening. Could a looser confederal structure of relationships between the republics be negotiated? The spectre of war already hung above these arguments through 1990. In Serbia the confederal idea was represented as the end of Yugoslavia, impossible to accept. In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia each declared itself an independent sovereign state. The Yugoslav National Army moved into Slovenia ‘to secure the borders’ of the federation, and was rebuffed. The war had begun. By early 1993, this has become a many-sided war, spiralling out of control, threatening to spill beyond the borders of former Yugoslavia. I am making no attempt here to bring these notes up to date, and I want to acknowledge that it has been impossible to cover many of the dimensions and processes which have contributed to the violent ending of Yugoslavia. For example: What has been the role of the army (which has ended up in support of Serbia/the shrunken remnant of Yugoslavia)? And what of the media war between republics and nationalisms which has been waged aggressively between the separate states since before the fighting began? I have focused attention on the political defeat of the more democratic forces in Serbia because its impact on the political disintegration of Yugoslavia has been so great. But there are further questions to be faced about the development of narrowing nationalisms throughout the (former) country. With the war, the dynamic has accelerated which pushes towards an extreme politics of exclusion. This is most horrifically expressed, as we have seen, in ‘ethnic cleansing’ which, in unequal degrees, is being practiced by all sides in Bosnia as they fight for territory. The Vance/Owen peace proposals accept the logic of this process (or at least the ‘reality’ which it has achieved) in their division of Bosnia into ten areas allocated on ethnic lines. And yet against these pressures, there remain pockets of resistance to this exclusivist process; for example—in parts of Sarajevo and in the determined struggle to maintain the production of its daily paper Oslobodenje (Little, 1993:12– 13); in the Istrian peninsula in Croatia where a regional rather than nationalistic politics has held the ground (Thompson, 1993:13). In Serbia, opposition to the war persists. In the early stages of the war in Croatia, women demonstrated against the military and for their soldier sons and husbands to be able to return home. There have been successive peace demonstrations, and student strikes in Belgrade in 1992. Despite growing intimidation against them, the feminist and anti-war groups persist, campaigning recently against support for nationalist candidates in the elections at the end of 1992. Feminists in Belgrade have raised issues of rape and violence against women as war crimes first of all against women, and then secondarily as crimes of one nationality against another. Feminist writers in Zagreb who similarly spoke out against rape as a war crime against women have been viciously accused of ‘raping Croatia’, betraying their nation. These struggles of women in former Yugoslavia to sustain a feminist politics in the context of war and nationalistic conflict sharply reveal the practical dilemmas (and dangers) of claiming a position outside of the embrace of nationalism.

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Notes Meg Coulson has been working recently as a researcher, writer and also teaching in Women’s Studies in the north of England. For regular analysis of developments in former Yugoslavia see: Balkan War Report, Bulletin of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 1, Aukland Street, London SE11 5HU. (For example no. 19, April/May 1993 includes a useful briefing on ‘The Bosnians: A War on Identity’ by Anthony Borden.) With thanks to Gail Lewis for discussions, and to Pearlie McNeill for her always apt comments and support. References ANTI , Milica (1992) ‘Yugoslavia, the transitional spirit of the age’, in CORRIN (1992). BENNETT, Catherine (1993) ‘Ordinary madness’ The Guardian 20 January. COCKBURN, Cynthia (1991) ‘A women’s political party for Yugoslavia: introduction to the Serbian Feminist Manifesto’, Feminist Review No. 39, 155–60. CORRIN, Chris (1992) editor, Superwoman and the Double Burden London: Scarlet Press. DAVIDSON, Basil (1992) The Black Man’s Burden—Africa and the Curse of the NationState London: James Curry. DAVIDSON, Basil and MUNSLOW, Barrie (1990) ‘The crisis of the nation-state in Africa’ African Review of Political Economy No. 49, 9–21. DENITCH, Bogdan (1990) Limits and Possibilities, The Crisis of Yugoslav Socialism and State Socialist Systems Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DRAKULI , Slavenka (1992) How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed London: Hutchinson. —— (1993) Balkan Express London: Hutchinson. GLENNY, Misha (1993) ‘Loss of Innocence’ BBC Radio Four. HASHI, Iraj (1992) ‘The disintegration of Yugoslavia: regional disparities and the nationalities question’ Capital and Class 49, Autumn, 41–88. HAUG, Frigga (1991) ‘The end of socialism in Europe: a new challenge for socialist feminism’ Feminist Review No. 39. JANCAR, Barbara (1985a) ‘The new feminism in Yugoslavia’ in RAMET (1985). —— (1985b) ‘Environmental protection: “The tragedy of the republics”’, in RAMET (1985). KOVA , Miha (1988) ‘The Slovene Spring’ New Left Review 171. LEE, Michelle (1983) ‘Kosovo between Yugoslavia and Albania’ New Left Review 140, 62–91. LITTLE, Alan (1993) ‘Producing the truth in the basement’ New Statesman and Society 19.2.93. MAGAŠ, Branka (1989) ‘Yugoslavia: the spectre of Balkanization’ New Left Review 174, 3–31. —— (1992) ‘Lessons of history: war returns to Yugoslavia’ Capital and Class 47, 25–32. —— (1993) The Destruction of Yugoslavia London: Verso.

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POULTON, Hugh (1991) The Balkans-Minorities and States in Conflict London: Minorities Rights Group. RAMET, Pedro (1985) editor, Yugoslavia in the 1980s Boulder and London: Westview Press. SAMARY, Catherine (1992) ‘The Yugoslav crisis, neither forced union nor ethnically pure state’ in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe Issue 43, No. 3, 34–40. SNYDER, Paula (1992) The European Women’s Almanac London: Scarlet Press. THOMPSON, Mark (1992) A Paper House—the Ending of Yugoslavia London: Vintage. —— (1993) ‘The peace peninsula’ The Guardian 8 January. WEST, Rebecca (1940/1982) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon London: Macmillan. ZIZEK, Slavoj (1992) ‘Thanks but no thanks: the unhappy fate of reform communists’ East European Reporter Vol. 5, No. 6, 63.

PERSONAL REACTIONS OF A BOSNIAN WOMAN TO THE WAR IN BOSNIA Indijana Hidovic Harper

I am, or was until recently, a fairly typical product of the Bosnian Muslim middle class. Brought up in a small town in Bosnia, with both parents working, looked after by my grandmother, cocooned in the safety of a large extended family and a small-town, closely knit community, a European with the distinction of belonging (albeit in a secular way) to a unique religious minority, I was raised to enjoy all the privileges of financial affluence, good education, and the tolerant liberal environment of my social class. Three generations of working women in my family, my personal choices wide and all mine, with few pressures exerted by my social milieu, I was to be a woman of my own making, taught to influence rather than just obey the society around me. I was to move boundaries, my mother and my grandmother thought, further than they had managed (my grandmother had to do it with singlemindedness bordering on eccentricity, against the tide of her time, and at a price; my mother, at a lesser personal cost, still had to battle against male-dominated culture and frequently lost). The world that took from them was to be for taking by their granddaughter and daughter. Or was it? At the end of the nineteenth century, twenty years into Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia, the Muslim community was faced with a historic choice which was seen as decisive to its cultural and political future. On the one hand the Muslims could turn inward (the way Eastern European Jews did), distancing themselves from Western culture and creating their own rules within their community, thus preserving the way of life and social identity to which they were accustomed under Ottoman rule. On the other hand, they could try to integrate into European society by secularizing and Europeanizing themselves socially and politically while preserving their Muslim religious identity, playing a balancing act between the two worlds, both of which they now belonged to. Both choices had their pros and cons and were hotly debated. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the liberal, pro-European stream in the Muslim church in Bosnia won the argument, and the road was paved for integration into a Europe dominated by Christian values. This was to make Bosnian Muslims unique both in the Muslim world and Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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in Europe. At the time it was seen as an advantage (though there were many misgivings) and enjoyed popular support in Bosnia. The benefits were to be most felt by the new generations of Muslim women whose parents were actively encouraged by the Church hierarchy to allow them equal education with boys and an equal role in the working environment. Soon, first Muslim women doctors, teachers and lawyers appeared in Sarajevo, then other cities; and by the 1930s it even became a source of pride to Muslim families to have women with professional qualifications. In this, Muslims went ahead of the Christian communities (Serbian and Croatian) which surrounded them. Muslims, already feeling closest to the Bosnian Jewish community, felt their choice justified as the Bosnian Jews took the same course, and the two communities became even more interdependent. (Sephardic Jews, fleeing the persecution in Spain, settled in Bosnia in the sixteenth century, at the time of the conversion of the majority Bosnian population to Islam.) Muslims sought integration through education, but it inevitably brought them further advantages (Muslims were the majority landowners and middle class), and with them, further isolation from the Serbian community in particular, already made up predominantly of the poorest peasant classes in Bosnia. The economic advances of the newly emerging Serb middle class were persistently offset by the constant influx of poor immigrants from South Serbia and Montenegro, thus keeping Serbians pinned down as an ethnic group at the bottom of Bosnian society. The end of the First World War saw a new country formed in the Balkans, under the tight rule of Belgrade, in which the previously rapid economic and social progress of the Bosnian Muslim community was halted in a corruptionridden and heavily centralized economy controlled from Belgrade. Dissatisfaction among Muslims grew, and the Church, still led by the liberal fraction and worried by growing signs of religious persecution of Muslims by the new state, encouraged further pro-Europeanism among Muslims, which inevitably brought greater secularization. Disenfranchised fundamentalists and traditionalists in the community allied themselves with the similarly disaffected Croatian ultra-right (with the accent on conservative Catholicism, which the traditionalist Muslims sought to emulate), thus forming the foundation of the fascist forces that would wreak so much havoc among the Serb population in the Second World War. The liberal fraction, heavily supported by the leading Muslim intellectuals, allied itself with the socialist left, and in the war made a significant contribution to Tito’s partisan forces. Their ultimate victory justified the course Muslim liberals and pro-Europeans took, and from then on, helped by the communist suppression of all religious life, secularization became the order of the day for Bosnian Muslims. Born fifteen years after the war ended, I belong to the second generation of the post-war Bosnian Muslims, for whom our Muslim identity was a quaint aspect of family heritage, something to marvel at, rather than be immersed in. Islam as a religion became our past rather than present or future. I identified myself as

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Muslim by nationality, which meant I had no ties to either Serbia or Croatia, but saw my social and cultural identity as a part of an ethnically mixed Bosnian tapestry, from which I drew all my cultural and emotional experiences, and to which I belonged together with all other non-Muslim Bosnians. Bosnia, ethnically mixed, culturally integrated and interdependent, was a source from which I emerged into the wide spaces of the outside world and my own inner adult being. To identify myself only with the Muslims in Bosnia would have seemed an act of betrayal, not just of my own land, but my very identity. Nothing in my life, in any of my experiences, was solely Muslim. Being a Bosnian, I used to say to my European friends, was like being one of the three kinds of meat and a dozen kinds of vegetables that made up the Bosnian pot, the only Bosnian dish ever to make it into the Western cookery books. To me, it was a poignant parable about what Bosnia and being a Bosnian was about and how I came to claim a part in the European identity. The war in Bosnia initially caused in me a paralysis of mind and a turmoil of previously unexperienced emotions. That the JNA (Yugoslav army) would send tanks into Bosnia was not a surprise. I had seen them do it in Slovenia (when I ceased being a Yugoslav, and rejected the concept I once passionately believed in, in deep personal shame and pain at seeing the army of my country go against its people). I had seen them thus lay waste to a third of Croatia, bomb Dubrovnik, destroy Vukovar. These were, I kept saying to myself, hardline communist generals clinging on to power at all costs, not the Serbian people. When the war in Bosnia started, I believed again that the people shelling Sarajevo were rabid Serb nationalists imported from Serbia and Montenegro, not Bosnian Serbs. The city belonged to them as well as to us, it was a symbol of their culture and identity, more so than Belgrade. The stories emerging from Bosnia bounced off the armour of my old beliefs, on to which I clung for sheer life and sanity. As the weeks rolled on, and the horrors of the Bosnian war multiplied, my armour was pierced bit by bit, allowing in despair, a sense of betrayal, anger, bitterness. Beliefs, one by one, were shattered. It was, and it is, Bosnian Serbs that are committing the atrocities, and not a minority of them. The Serb purge of Muslims through ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, even slaughter, has been overwhelmingly supported by Bosnian Serbs (this is a fact corroborated by many ethnically cleansed Muslims and, recently, some released camp inmates I have personally spoken to). The worst and most abhorrent acts of violence are committed by yesterday’s s neighbours and friends. So, Serbs were in the grip of mass hysteria, I told myself. That still leaves us with Croats, victims of Serbian aggression like us. But the Croatian government’s betrayal of Bosnia by increasing degrees, in its bid to divide it from its arch-enemy Serbia, has dispelled the last shreds of illusions that there was somewhere a guilty party which, once identified and defeated, would then leave all the rest of the good people to build peace and a future in a civilized manner. Croats were just playing musical chairs, determined to be on the winning side, whichever one it was, and

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whatever cost for us Muslims. To our Serbian neighbours we became unacceptable, to our Croat neighbours simply dispensable. The Western indifference and refusal to act to save my people has left me increasingly wondering if our victimization is not acceptable to our Christian neighbours on the grounds that we are Muslims, and therefore undesirable in their midst. The word fundamentalism is thrown in at all occasions, even inappropriate ones. A young Croat in London, who attended as an observer a recent meeting of various charity groups working in the UK for Bosnia, complained loudly of the overwhelming Islamic presence (of the eight groups present two were led by Bosnian expatriates, two by the British and four by Muslims in the UK, whose aid contribution was by far the largest). I tried explaining that this was a meeting for those collecting funds for Bosnian refugees, and if Muslims were a strong presence, that’s just how it is. Not good, said the young Croat, there was an unacceptable fundamentalist tone, (a Muslim aid worker asked if the meat at a charity dinner for Bosnia was halal to know whether he could sell the tickets in his community). I listened patiently, my eyes fixed on two-inch-long silver earrings, Jesus on a cross hanging from each earlobe, and a three-inch wooden cross proudly adorning her friend’s bosom. Is Christian fundamentalism ever mentioned in a negative context? And why is a Muslim who adheres to the orthodox rules of Islam a fundamentalist, and his Christian counterpart just a good Christian? What good to me as a Muslim are Christian values, if they are killing me, or legitimizing my victimization? The message that the Serbian nationalists in Bosnia so successfully sold to the West has been that the war was an ethnic conflict, between Christians and Muslims, and it was bought readily. After all, Muslims, with their way of life, are a threat to our kind of society, free, democratic, emancipated. Just the kind of society we Muslims in Bosnia tried to build with our neighbours. But we found that in that society, there was no place for us, an unacceptable religious minority. A British minister recently opposed sending British troops to Bosnia saying that he could not say to parents of the British soldiers killed that their sons died trying to prevent Serbs killing Muslims. Try replacing the word Muslim with Christian and see if it then sounds an acceptable thing to say. Or, for that matter, replace it with the words innocent civilians, people, human beings. Do Muslims not qualify for those? Genocide is a European model, as is crusade. We Muslims in Bosnia, recognizing our position as a minority in Europe, tried hard to steer an accommodating course throughout history to secure our precarious existence. From being persecuted Bogomils (also known as Manicheans or Albigensians), seeking rescue in Islam and the protection it offered, we have become persecuted Muslims. No age seems to leave us in peace. I have found myself, as an individual and a member of my ethnic group, lost at sea, without charts to show me the way to land. Values in which I believed proved nonexistent, and my belonging to the society and culture I thought I belonged to, doubtful and disputed. The reality of facts has confronted desires, my

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The consequences of war: girls gathering cardboard in Sarajevo

own and those of my community. We have been viewed not as what we wanted to be, what we have been, but what the surrounding world wants to see us as.

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And when that vision is marred by misconceptions, prejudice, ignorance, the world in which we believed remains unapologetic. It is the right of that world and only that world to decide on truths, on right and wrong. If it chooses not to cast a glance over the wall to see what it looks like, what it is that is on the other side, it does it righteously. Perhaps we should have kept our eyes firmly on our feet too. For the sake of spiritual sanity, I am bound on a journey totally unknown, with no idea how it will end. Having lost what I thought I was, I have to search for myself and my nation. The cultural climate that brought me up is casting me away (undesirable, dispensable, irrelevant —any of those things). Where I shall finally find myself will be inextricably linked to the fate of my people. My individual choices, once so limitless, have been brought down to precious few. I am identified as a part of my community and will be viewed in whichever way it is viewed, treated in whichever way it is treated. And that will depend less on my community than on those around us. Having been finally denied the basic right to be as we are, we have to decide what to be in future, or it will be decided for us, maybe even against us. And what are we to be? Muslims or Europeans? The two are irreconcilable, as both Europeans and the Islamic world seem to agree. Yet we belong to both. But only one is now killing us. When faced with extinction, a scarf is infinitely preferable to a slow death from cold and dysentery or a pitiful existence in a refugee camp. Are these the only choices the world will allow us? If so, which one do I choose? And will the choice I decide on for myself, if against the tide of change among my people, be yet another betrayal of my people, and my own identity? Yet another illusion about myself that some future events will shatter?

SERBIAN NATIONALISM: Nationalism of My Own People Maja Korac

How can one be objective in confronting abstract nationalism without facing the nationalism of one’s own people? Moreover, in the case of former Yugoslavia, to be a Serb means to face the burden of the greatest responsibility for what has happened within the country. To be a Serb, to live in Serbia nowadays, and not to be nationally obsessed, means to be accused of betraying your nation, and labelled as a ‘bad’ Serb. Distinctions between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ Serbs have become very important to our national mythology which is a warrior mythology, extrapolated from Serbian history, overburdened as it is with liberation wars. Through their history, Serbs have been brave soldiers, fighters for their national liberation and the liberation of their ‘brother’ nations of South-Slavs. They have been glorified as honest and fearless soldiers, constantly at war, suffering terrible losses, regarding themselves as the greatest victims of the ‘violent cauldron’ of Balkan history. Always, at some point, they come to feel ‘betrayed’ by their ‘brother’ nations during or after these wars. In truth, Serbs have certainly suffered privations in their difficult history. That, no one can deny. The current manipulation of Serbian national pride is based on tragic memory and deeply rooted fear, especially among Serbian communities in neighbouring republics. They fear becoming victims of their ‘brother’ nations, as has happened before in their history. Our nationalistic leaders, ‘fathers of their nation’, ‘invented’ the slogan that ‘Serbs were always winning the war, but always losing the peace’, in order to mobilize our people to fight for their ‘national pride and historical justice’. Due to this shameless manipulation it became possible to mobilize Serbs mainly living in more or less homogeneous communities in some regions of Croatia, to start to fight for their ‘national rights and liberation’. Actually, they became the first victims of the radical national policy of the Serbian leadership in Serbia. Yesterday’s ‘powerful national policy’ became today’s ‘destiny’, the only way, I would say, for most Serbian politicians to survive politically and individually. They became hostages of their own politics and desire for power. Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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Due to its history and mainly rural tradition, Serbian national identity became extremely patriarchal in its basis, leaving women on the margin of their national history, as well as on the margin of their own history. They are regarded as ‘caretakers’, guardians of their children, men and homes. Although important for the nation, their role is passive and static. In the recent period of ‘Serbian national revival’, based on early nineteenth-century cultural patterns and spirit, strongly linked with the lack of democratic structure in the society, aggressive nationalism has shown its violent male face. I don’t want to argue that nationalism is predominantly a male sentiment. Women, indeed, share that sentiment and may become nationally obsessed and ‘active’ in raising national chauvinism. But I am arguing that even when they are ‘active’, their roles are predefined and deeply rooted in the patriarchal order and basic male-centred power structure within society. Thus women may become ‘heroic mothers’, who devoted the lives of their sons to the great historic goal of their nation, appearing in public and in the media, celebrated as shining examples of national pride. Serbian women mainly accepted that role as a ‘natural’ product of Serbian warrior history. Aggressive nationalism, such as the Serbian model, always leads to the use of force. Its ideology and war machine is based on the manipulation of the values of masculinity as defined in patriarchy. Moreover, its intrinsic ingredient is violence embodied in militant masculinity. Its main victims are ‘others’. Could we say just other nations? No. All those who think, behave or act differently are the victims. But who are constantly present ‘others’ in day-to-day life? Women. According to a survey made by a women’s volunteer group working on the SOS shelter hotline in Belgrade, figures on increasing violence against women are frightening. Calls from women whose partners had severely beaten them or threatened them with murder increased by 100 per cent, compared with the previous year. Above all, this survey shows significant correlation between the media, especially television, aggressive pro-war propaganda and male violence towards women. Data shows that even men who were not violent towards their partners before, became seriously aggressive after watching Belgrade Television News. Actually, through the media, Serbian people/men have been constantly ‘raped’. The brutality of media coverage has been shameless; strongly oriented to provoke aggression and hate, to mobilize Serbian men to fight. To motivate them to identify their manhood with a collective entity such as the nation and its historic aims. There are numerous horrifying and sad stories, collected by women volunteer groups in Belgrade, of women who scarcely recognize their men when they return from the front. They act differently, they talk differently, they walk around in full uniform, they even sleep with their Kalashnikovs. And they are completely psychologically destroyed. They, in turn, then destroy the lives of their partners, wives and families.

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We live in a sick society. Nationalism is a horrible disease. In practice, aggressive nationalistic strategy gives ‘freedom’ to the suppressed need for violence. Although violence and cruelty are justified as the ‘defence’ of ‘our’ national identity and survival, once the Pandora’s box is open, violence is everywhere, on the battlefield, at home, in the bedroom, in politics, on the street. Violence does not need strictly defined territory, just victims. Men are victims as well. Most men are practically pushed and made to become violent. Due to such pressures they have started to kill each other on the battlefield. They have started to rape and kill their enemies —wives, daughters, sisters and mothers. Even when they are tragic victims during wartime, women are regarded as a tool to humiliate, to demoralize the enemy. The enemy is identified primarily with men. Everyone and everything else is regarded as ‘their’ supporters or ‘their’ property. In the patriarchal order, women are regarded as both powerful supporters and, most important, property. Thus, there is no more powerful tool for aggressive nationalistic ideology, than to victimize ‘their’ women. But under the surface of this war, there are many tragic stories and examples of men psychologically destroyed by having to take part in this war, and to give themselves up to violence and hate, to prove themselves as ‘good’ representatives of their people and nation, patriots, and above all, ‘real men’, men with ‘guts’. Is there an end? One does not have to be a pessimist to see that the end of this war will not bring relief to any side. There will be no winners. We are all losers. It doesn’t matter how much territory Serbia can gain out of this war, Serbian leaders will have to face the responsibility for the greatest tragedy in the history of their nation. A great number of Serbian intellectuals will have to bear the burden of a guilty conscience, because they took part in the rising madness of aggressive nationalism. The Serbian people will have to face tragic losses, the misery of their everyday life and the questions of their children, whose future they have destroyed. Above all, they will have to face and overcome the hell of their own violence and bitterness of disillusionment. The outcome for almost all ‘other sides’ in this tragic conflict will be quite similar, I am afraid. Hundreds of thousands of refugees across the region have lost everything already, except the misery of their day-to-day existence. Approximately 30,000 young, educated people left Serbia in order to escape military service, without the possibility of returning. According to our law deserters can be imprisoned for more than ten years. They and their families have lost everything. There are also over 200,000 educated and highly skilled people between the ages of twenty-five to forty-five who left the country. This war is not their war, this leadership is not their leadership. They have lost their country and their future in it. Among numerous problems they have to face, as a result of their volunteer’ exile, is the psychological burden of being labelled as one of ‘them’,

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the most savage, aggressive and cruel nation in the region. As a matter of fact, they have to overcome many ‘levels’ of guilty conscience. First, because they ‘let’ all these horrible things happen while they felt and were so helpless. Second, they are constantly facing questions: do they have the right to choose between their own lives, their well-being and the future of their country? Which country? With the splitting up of Yugoslavia many of its former citizens had to face the problem of their own disintegrated identities; many Serbs, at least. They became double victims of the chaos of Balkan ‘nationalistic interests’. Accused by their nationally obsessed compatriots as ‘bad’ Serbs, traitors to their nation and country, and at the same time accused by other ‘brother’ nations as the last representatives of ‘hard-line communism’, ‘titoism’, or simply ‘imperialism’. ‘Volunteer’ exile was the only possible answer to the present political situation for a great number of former Yugoslav citizens, the only chance to remain human and above all to be an individual with the essential right to feel and think differently. Despite nationalistic/chauvinistic totalitarianism and authoritarianism which threatens to ‘freeze’ the last signs of life and democracy in Serbia, voices of resistance and ‘common sense’ do exist. Feminist groups in Belgrade were among them from the very beginning. Not very large and politically marginal, they mainly initiated and took part in different peace initiatives in Belgrade and Serbia. Even under strong political and public pressure they keep going. Other larger political groups and parties, some of significant importance, were on the verge of real political power, at least before the imposition of UN sanctions. Can we expect radical changes soon? How powerful can any democratic political response be in a society which has destroyed or heavily suppressed every sign of civil society? The deep concern and growing impatience of the international community is understandable. But who will sanctions affect? Who will become the real target? Lunatic leaders, war criminals, or ordinary people? Can we realistically expect a raising of awareness and rational political behaviour on a large scale, overnight? When people are forced to fight for their everyday existence, to feed their children, just to survive; when they fear coalitions between official state institutions and war criminals, there is not much energy left for political thought and behaviour. There is a danger that signs of civil resistance in Serbia may disappear, even before they have had a chance to prove themselves. Note Maja Korac has an MA in sociology and teaches sociology at the University of Belgrade, in what was Yugoslavia. She belongs to the European Forum of Left Feminists Network. She is currently in England on a scholarship, working on a Ph.D.

BELGRADE FEMINISTS 1992: Separation, Guilt and Identity Crisis Lepa Mladjenovic and Vera Litricin: transcribed by Tanya Renne

Writing this paper about the feminist activities and our lives during the past couple of years, here we are, the three of us in the kitchen thinking about the most horrible facts about our lives, the war. Two million people have already been moved from their homes: many injured; many dead. A couple of million more have no food, heat, nor much hope to hold on to. And we are aware that citizens around us do not want to know that winter will kill thousands more people: that soldiers and other men will rape thousands more women: that rape is not a nationalist but a gender issue. One of us is nervous on and off, the other cannot even hear ‘s’, (e) ‘r’ or ‘b’ (i.e.Serb) in one place without being angry— it’s high time women should get out on the streets and scream. For the forty years of our past the ideology of the equality of the genders so well known to the entire Eastern bloc has masked the reality of everyday life for women. Still, a semi-autonomous women’s association, the Anti-Fascist Front of Women, was formed during World War II (1942) and many of our mothers were active in it. In 1953 it evolved into the Union of Women’s Associations and included approximately 2,000 small women’s units all over Yugoslavia. In 1961 these women’s organizations were abolished and the Party formed The Conference for the Social Activities of Women’, which was hierarchically organized and governmentally divided. The history of Yugoslav post-war feminism started with Belgrade’s International Feminists’ Meeting in 1978, which was the turning point for the rise of women’s groups. From 1980 on, two ‘Women and Society’ groups were formed, first in Zagreb and then in Belgrade. The Belgrade group provided an open forum for discussing women’s issues. But in 1986 women decided to call the group ‘feminist’, create ‘women-only space’ and start activities and meetings on a regular basis. At this time ‘The Conference for the Social Activities of Women’ was accusing the group of being an ‘enemy of the state’, ‘procapitalist’, and ‘pro-western’. Activities of the group included action research on the streets of Belgrade concerning violence, solidarity and housework; workshops and public discussions Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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on topics such as mothers and daughters, guilt, violence, abortion, sexuality, working rights for women, psychiatry, the medical system, cinema, etc. From the beginning the group has been without any institutional, financial, or any other state support and therefore worked completely independently. At that time there was a great deal of co-operation with feminists in Ljubljana and Zagreb, the result of which was the first feminist meeting of Yugoslav feminists in Ljubljana in 1987, when the ‘Network of Yugoslav Feminists’ was formed. Three similar meetings were held following this, in Zagreb and Belgrade, the last being in Ljubljana in May of 1991. In the summer of 1991 Yugoslavia disintegrated. In April 1992 the so-called ‘Third Yugoslavia’ was formed with a new constitution that, among other things, eliminated Article 191 (included in the Constitution of 1974) about ‘Free Parenthood’. The article protected ‘the human right to decide about the birth of one’s own children’. And now, its absence introduces the possibility of reducing access to abortion and reproductive rights. In 1990 the feminist group Women and Society disbanded and multiplied in several other women’s groups. The first of them was the SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of Violence, established 8 March 1990, and the second, the Women’s Lobby. That summer, in response to the first ‘free’ elections, women from different non-nationalist parties formed the Women’s Lobby in order to put pressure on political parties running for election. Then in the autumn of the same year the Women’s Party—ZEST—was born with the aim of improving the quality of women’s lives in every respect. In fact, it was formed with the intention of utilizing political campaigns for promoting consciousness about women’s issues. On 8 March 1991 the Women’s Parliament was formed as a response to a presence of only 1.6 per cent women in the Serbian parliament (the lowest percentage in Europe). The purpose of the Women’s Parliament was to observe and respond to all new laws that discriminated against women. On 9 October 1991 Women in Black Against War appeared on the streets in Belgrade in protest against the war in Croatia (later in Bosnia) and were afterwards joined by women in Pancevo. On 8 March 1992, after a year of preparation, a Women’s Studies group was formed to discuss feminist knowledge. The subjects include women’s perspectives on patriarchy, philosophy, lesbianism, family, socialism, literature, etc. The course is outside the university, free and open to all women. The lesbian and gay lobby, Arkadia, was founded in the winter of 1990 to work on the social visibility of lesbians and homosexuals. The group has organized public discussion; some activists have written a few articles. But student and youth institutions refused to offer space for the group meetings, and a few times even refused the proposal for public discussion. We would now like to give details of some actions of the Women’s Lobby and Women’s Parliament which we consider important.

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One of the first actions of the Women’s Lobby was a ‘Minimal Programme of Women’s Demands’ addressed to parties and movements. The demands concerned the field of work and unemployment, sexist education, reproductive rights, violence against women, health care and the change of certain laws concerning women. The final demands were for a ‘Ministry of Women’, a refuge for women and children victims of violence, the inclusion of a certain percentage of women in parliament and the parties themselves, the decriminalization of prostitution, the recognition of rape in marriage as a crime, and mandatory child support for all children of divorce. In September 1990 the Lobby issued an open letter to the public reacting to one of the leaders (Bulatovic) of the opposition nationalist party ‘Serbian movement of Renovation’ who urged Serbian women to ‘reproduce the greater Serbian nation’. Among other things the letter said, ‘One supposes that young Serbian foetuses will be immediately baptized, conditioned to hate and lead the war against the many Enemies of the Serbian nation.’ Just before the elections, on 5 December 1990, the Women’s Lobby issued an appeal to the public that reads as follows ‘Don’t vote for the Socialist Party of Serbia…don’t vote for their leader Slobodan Milosevic…don’t vote for nationalist, Serbo-chauvinistic parties (SRS, SPO, SNO, etc)…vote for the candidates of the civil democratic parties.’ At the beginning of 1991 a joint demand for the creation of a ‘Ministry of Women’ was handed to the Serb parliament signed by the Women’s Lobby, the Women’s Parliament, and the Feminist Group. One of the most important actions of ZEST was in organizing housewives in a few communities in Belgrade and giving public space to their voices. Other protests included: a petition regarding the Resolution of Population Politics in Serbia and a Law concerning family planning (June 1990) a protest against the representation of women in the 1990 census (in which women only were instructed to give their husband or father’s name) an appeal for the demilitarization of Yugoslavia (August 1990) support of the Mothers’ Peace initiative in Serbia and Croatia (August 1990) a protest against new textbooks based on nationalist, patriarchal, and sexist values (December 1990) protesting the discrimination against lesbians and gay men in derogatory political discourse (August 1991) a protest against the sexist behaviour of the members of the Serb parliament (1991–2) a protest against the document ‘Warning’ issued in the Serbian Academy of Science and approved by the leading party programme. Eight men who signed it condemn the high birth rate of Albanians, Muslims and Gypsies as being ‘deviant from rational human reproduction’ (1992) critiques of the sexist language used in the independent media (1992)

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A few other appeals have been made together with Women in Black, in which it was made clear that the feminist groups of Belgrade believe that the Serbian regime is responsible for violence, war and the absence of civil democracy and civil society. Women in Black consists of a very small number of women who have been coming out into the streets for a year now. Even though their number is small their vigil is important in maintaining the pressure and presence of women against war in the streets of Belgrade. They symbolize women’s condition in war: as refugees, as those who care for the refugees, as mothers and sisters of the dead, as those raped and forced into prostitution. In their appeals they point to the patriarchal and sexist essence of nationalism and war. Women in Black have become part of international women’s peace initiatives in Italy, Germany, Belgium and Great Britain. In their international meetings in Venice and Novia Sad, they opened a new space for consciousness-raising on specific themes such as women and fatherland, national and gender identity, women and the embargo, as well as providing an opportunity to experience the globality of sisterhood. The SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of Violence is run by about 30 women, and in the past two and half years more than 150 women volunteered and they responded to more than 3,500 calls. Women who call testified that 80 per cent of the perpetrators were either husbands, ex-husbands, sons, brothers or fathers. They also stated that in 30 per cent of the cases they suffered severe injuries and that in 60 per cent of the cases the violence has lasted more than ten years. The work of SOS has proved well-known facts about male violence against women, but in the last year new types of war-related violence have appeared Death threats increased from 30 per cent to 55 per cent of all calls The percentage of the presence of guns among violent men doubled Veterans of the war turned violent against their wives and mothers for the first time (machine-guns under the pillow, rape of wives, constant mental abuse, severe injuries) Violence in inter-ethnic marriage has increased The Post-TV News Violence Syndrome appeared. Men were violent against their wives after being exposed to nationalist propaganda. The wives in these cases are of every nationality. As a general conclusion, SOS proves that the war has led to an increase in all types of male violence against women; and beyond that, within the family men are using nationalist hatred as an instrument of violence against women.

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The new issues that Belgrade feminists have faced since the beginning of the war Separation When the war started, nationalist hatred increased drastically and the Serbian government began to produce propaganda and the notion of the Enemy. All of a sudden Slovenians became an enemy, then Croats, then Muslims, then Americans, Albanians and so on. Deep conflicts emerged in families, in workplaces, and women began to separate on that basis. Completely new questions appeared in women’s groups. Can a feminist be a nationalist chauvinist? Can a pacifist be a nationalist? Is a weapon an instrument of defence? Should the groups take clear attitudes toward nationalist questions (and therefore the war) and in that way lose some women? Should the groups avoid the issue of nationalism altogether? Should the women merely sit down and confront their beliefs about it and see what happens? Apart from Women in Black and Women’s Lobby, where the non-nationalist statement is clear, all the other groups had many problems. The most difficult situation, and the most often avoided, was a confrontation. Every time the nationalist question came up (usually by itself) there was no way to overcome the fact that a lot of women were being hurt. Women suffered but usually did not change their attitudes. There was a great deal of silence and crisis. For example, the Women’s Party was eventually not able to continue. The conflicts over nationalism were far too strong in dividing women and there was no way to go on. They decided to ‘freeze’ their activities until the war was over and then see. SOS Hotline had many problems as well. Despite the fact that the SOS group had a deliberately non-nationalist policy from the beginning, some volunteers were unable to keep their nationalist feelings out of their SOS work. Several attempts were made to reconcile the opposing viewpoints; after that some of the women left and some of them stayed and remained silent. So, nationalism made some women split within themselves. It also caused painful scars to Zagreb-Beograd feminist relationships. Nationalism brought in new discriminatory population policies. The reduction of available abortion is already true for Croatia and on the way in Serbia. Here we find ourselves in the unfamiliar process of the legitimation of hatred against women increasing daily. These new nation-states function over women’s bodies. They need their national body and women to reproduce them. They are fed with hate, and therefore with the separation of women. They are based on violence against Others, but everyone is a potential Other, neither the ‘sacred nationality’ nor ‘the sacred gender’ is a guarantee anymore. Nationalist policy brought in the war, the death, the war rapes, the refugees, then the punishment of the ordinary people with an economic embargo.

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Guilt Not all the feminists in Belgrade feel guilt about the ongoing war. They either do not feel guilt because they have anarchist orientations or because they have separatist tendencies. Some of the women do feel guilt, and it’s a guilt for what the government they haven’t voted for has done in their names. The others feel guilt for the fact that innocent women die and are being raped and they can do little or nothing about it. We came to a conclusion that some of this guilt can be stimulating but too much of it can overwhelm you and make you feel helpless. Moreover, the absence of guilt does not mean the absence of responsibility. How can I speak to a friend in Sarajevo? Just because I have electricity and food and she has not makes the gap sometimes unbearable to overcome, and what am I to do? Can peace activities lessen my feelings of guilt? Does my presence at opposition (chauvinist and male-oriented) demonstrations against Milosevic reduce my feelings of helplessness? If I tell her that I care and that I think of her and that my dreams are full of fear, will that help her? If I tell her that we stand here in black on the corner every week—and people spit on us, saying that we are ‘the bloody traitors of the Serbian nation’ and ‘idle whores of Tudjman and Izetbegovic’— if I tell her all this will she say I am a fool, that she risks her life every moment. If I publish an essay in which I express hatred of the war killers and rapist of all sides, and in which her suffering becomes the essay’s pulse and a value beyond telling, will that help at all? And if I say we’ve been in Italy, Germany and France and women are sending their loves and support from all around the world, will she even blink? If her windows are broken, if a litre of water costs 20 dinar, and her hair had gone white and her cheeks sunken. Seven months later she is speechless, awaiting the winter that could wipe them all out. Identity Many women in Belgrade have no ethnic identity problems, they always felt Serb. Others are able to feel ‘positively Serb’ as pacifists and feminists. Some of us, though a small group, cannot identify with the ‘Serbian nation’. Before we were ‘Yugoslavs’ and therefore never really identified with Serbs at all. At this point, when we are forced to take a Serbian nationality as our own, we see that there is nothing, nothing at all that can attract feminists to accept it as their own national identity. The ‘Serbian nation’, as the present government creates it, certainly has nothing in common with a ‘Women’s nation’. Our Yugoslav postSecond-World-War feminist movement has never done anything in the name of this/their Serbian nation.

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In addition, some of us believed in some of the socialist ideas that were legitimated by former Communist governments; relative social equality, free education, free health care and access to abortion, inexpensive housing and cultural events. (We have always believed that class differences literally kill some people, especially women.) But we are facing the fact that the realization of our beliefs has come to an end. So for those of us who are not Serbians yet, who are not Yugoslavs anymore and feel the lot of women’s rights with the fall of Communism, there is a lot of identity work to be done. Women-identified women have a strong basis of identity to begin that work. We know that to overthrow the present government we have to vote for another one that will be against us, and we must take that responsibility; we know that if we are to manifest our disobedience towards the war and be noticed, we have to stand in the opposition’s street-crowds and feel awful among sexist, royalist speeches and songs; we know that if we stand on the streets as small women’s groups against war we expose ourselves to insults, but we still do that and feel brave; we know that if we are to deny the concept of national identity there is nothing else they’ll allow us to stand for in exchange; we know that white men are urged to die courageously for their nation. Raped, murdered women will never be considered brave, except by us; we know that if we are to say aloud who we are and what we want there will be no historically accepted political patterns for our experience of our language. And yet here we are.

REPORT ON A COUNCIL OF EUROPE MINORITY YOUTH COMMITTEE SEMINAR ON SEXISM AND RACISM IN WESTERN EUROPE Danielle J.Walker

It is estimated that over 17 million people (5 per cent) in the European Community are of non-European origin.1 Due to the age structure of migrant populations in Europe, over 9 million of these people are under the age of 30;2 and due to changing immigration rules, a sizeable proportion of these young people were born in Europe. In many countries, throughout Europe, many of these young people of non-European origin would like to exercise the same rights of citizenship as their counterparts of ‘European origin’ but are prevented from doing so due to structural and more direct forms of discrimination and racism. In 1984, an ad hoc Western European group on minority ethnic youth was established by ANKUR Support Group (an Asian youth organization) in London with the support of a number of statutory and voluntary agencies including the Commission for Racial Equality. Its goal was to establish a Western European network of minority youth groups capable of co-ordinating work combating the many forms of discrimination, racism and other manifestations of social injustice confronting minority ethnic groups in Europe. Thus the idea of the Council of Europe Minority Youth Committees (CEMYC) was born. In 1987, despite chronic under-resourcing and the general low priority given to the combating of racism in Western Europe by international agencies, ANKUR organized an international seminar in Strasbourg to establish the structures and set the agenda for the work of CEMYC; CEMYC was formally launched in September 1988 in Amsterdam.

The Women’s Seminar The impetus for the organization of a Women’s Seminar on Sexism and Racism also came from that original seminar in 1987. There, it was obvious that the vast majority of the delegates were male and that the concerns of female delegates about the effect of sexism were considered of secondary importance with respect

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to the ‘primary’ struggle—that of racism. A number of the women decided to try to organize a seminar for women to consider the joint effects of sexism and racism in the lives of minority ethnic women in Europe and to formulate concrete strategies to combat them, both within the structures of CEMYC and without. The seminar would also begin the establishment of a network of young minority women throughout Western Europe. The seminar was held from 1–8 December 1991 in Strasbourg, France, at the European Youth Centre under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Some nine hundred civil servants service the Council, Committee of Ministers and the Parliamentary Assembly’s work in the areas of education, culture, social welfare, health, environment, media, local government and justice. The seminar was a women-only seminar to allow women the space to set their own agenda for action, to encourage wider participation of women within CEMYC, and to foster free discussion of the issues without the interference or domination of men which characterized the previous conference. The seminar was structured around the consideration of a number of key points: the effects of sexism and racism on minority ethnic women the role of minority ethnic women within minority ethnic communities and within the wider society violence and black women mass media and black women social factors and black women The context within which these issues were set was 1992, the Schengen Agreement which will shape immigration and entry policies in a number of European countries and the rise of the extreme right in Europe. The Delegates For the most part, the UK and the Netherlands accounted for the majority of the seminar participants. All of the participants were from a minority ethnic group within the country in which they were now resident, all under thirty years old and all but five were students in higher education. The working languages were English and German. Our ethnic origins were Yugoslavian, Turkish, BlackCaribbean (Surinam and Barbados), Hindu-Asian, Christian-Asian, Black American and Arab. It is important to remember that the perspectives represented were very much expressions of minority ethnic groups from northern Europe.

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Discussion themes Over the course of the week, a huge amount of formal and informal discussion took place amongst the twenty-three participants, and we covered a number of recurring themes. Political participation The issue of political participation arose repeatedly. We agreed that there are basically four preconditions for participation in decision-making: motivation (desire to participate); access (to the process); competence (knowledge of one’s political position); and structure (systematic means for participation). Of these, two emerged as particularly relevant to CEMYC in general and to women in CEMYC specifically—access and structure. It became increasingly obvious that as minority ethnic people in Europe, we have no direct access to power. This was brought home to us during a visit to the Council of Europe where we spoke to a senior civil servant servicing the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Demography. She outlined a study proposed to the Committee on the situation of migrant women in Europe. Its general concerns were that migrant women often have no legal status in their destination country if they come as wives; by the same token, they often are not issued with work permits by that country; and with the death of or a divorce from their spouse, they can often be left with no support or recourse to the law. Agreeing with this analysis, we wanted to know how this information would be acted upon. We were informed that the Council has no legal instruments to enact or enforce anything, but can only make recommendations and resolutions. Many of the delegates felt anger at the huge scale of the resources a ‘powerless’ body like the Council of Europe could command. Similarly, despite the money spent on bringing us to Strasbourg, we were no closer to effecting change than in our own countries. Some delegates felt that we were being manipulated for a public relations ploy by the Council of Europe to enable them to cite us as an example of how much they were doing on our behalf. This may in fact have been true, however, many of us felt that we should attempt to use the opportunity of being in Strasbourg to CEMYC’s best advantage and to learn about the structures of the Council of Europe to find ways of gaining access to what was still being denied us—power. Self-definition and identity A second recurring theme in the seminar was the myriad ways in which racism and sexism is manifested in the lives of minority ethnic and migrant women in our respective countries. An important part of this discussion was how we personally defined racism and our roles and behaviour in a racist society.

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The issues touched on fundamental perspectives within minority ethnic communities within a north-western European context, perspectives which are often completely overlooked. They touched on concepts of personal identity, self-definition, and the overall perception of the boundaries or existence of ‘communities’. Are we a cohesive group which is self-defined or is the ‘minority ethnic community’ simply an academic construction with no basis in reality? We spoke about how minority ethnic women were often the ‘bearers of culture’ within minority ethnic communities. For instance, in many minority cultures women are meant to be virgins when they marry and to only ‘date’ and marry within our ethnic groups. We are all witness to the fact that similar behaviour is more acceptable for men within many cultures. In fact, men who do have relationships with women from other ethnic groups before marriage often still demand ‘traditional’ virtues of the women within their ethnic group. An example given was that of men from the Indian subcontinent who date and may have sexual relations with European women, but wish to marry an Asian woman who has been very sheltered and require her to be a virgin. This order is considered traditional and therefore ‘correct’ in their definition of culture: the men change their behaviour to be indistinguishable from that of their European counterparts, but require that the women of their ethnic group maintain the culture. And as women we are then expected to educate our children in cultural heritage, especially our daughters. In the course of the week we also discussed issues of tokenism and ‘selling out’ to achieve success within the wider culture; attitudes to religious ‘fundamentalism’; orientations to imperfect institutional organizations which attempt to address the issues (e.g., the Council of Europe and others), and ‘shades of blackness’ in terms of interracial and intercultural relationships. They were very difficult and emotionally exhausting discussions, both on a group and individual level. Perhaps not surprisingly, the issue of the use of the words ‘migrant’, ‘black’ and ‘ethnic minority’ or ‘minority ethnic’ was raised by the British delegation. We struggled to find words which would embrace all of us as ‘migrant’ did not and ‘black’ did not. There was some confusion over the use of ‘minority ethnic’ by some of the other delegates, but in the end we determined it was the best term. However, because the seminar had been arranged for the most part by non-UK delegates, many of the issues to be addressed often still defined racism within the context of migration, which was problematical for many of the British-born delegation. However, it must be said that some of the aspects of racism linked to migration do have some resonance within the UK (and USA) context. Namely, that of the racist assumption of the essentially inferior nature of the culture and lifestyle of minority ethnic peoples regardless of their birthplace.

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Our lives in Europe—everyday racism Another main element of the discussion was how we experienced racism and what forms of action against it we could take. Two academics who spoke on the third day of the seminar, Lucia Zeller and Sanchita Basu, representing Nozizwe, a migrant women’s organization in Berlin, Germany, provided a glaring example of the issues they had come to discuss in the problems they had experienced in trying to leave Germany to attend the seminar. Lucia is originally from Latin America and Sanchita is from India and therefore they had to obtain visas to leave Germany. They recounted the humiliating process to which the German immigration service subjected them, in making them prove time and time again that they had legal status to be in Germany and that they were only leaving for a short period and that they had no history of convictions for drug trafficking (!). They then took the train to Strasbourg, where they arrived very late in the evening at the train station. While they were waiting for a taxi, alone, Sanchita was sexually assaulted by a man who, after a struggle, was finally forcibly beaten off by a taxi-driver. They finally arrived at the European Youth Centre for the seminar where, during lunch the next day, they were verbally abused in racial terms by a member of the kitchen staff for having the wrong lunch tickets. A formal apology was issued by the Centre and the man was sacked, but the point was still the same—they were rendered virtually powerless in each situation, as ‘foreigners’, as women and as minority ethnic people. Each situation also undermined each woman’s personal confidence in her ability to function in the world. It was absolutely astounding that all of this happened in the space of four days and centred around their attendance of a seminar on racism and sexism! In her presentation, Lucia addressed the issues of the situation of ‘migrant’ women in Europe with special reference to Germany. She focused on the multiple expressions of racism in the legislative structure, the media, the German language, and the allocation of resources. In 1991 in Germany, a law for foreigners was introduced which clearly defines foreigners as entities to be controlled, monitored and expelled. Women are particularly affected by this new legislation. For instance, if women wish to seek asylum in Germany, they must testify that they are not pregnant. Entry may be refused if they are found to be pregnant within a set period after that testimony. Many of the issues Lucia outlined in her discussion of the treatment by the media, could also be said to apply to most of Western society. She spoke of the criminalization of Turkish youth by the media and the lack of positive images of minority ethnic peoples. There is also a marked lack of representation of the contributions that migrant and minority ethnic people make to German society. She also discussed the issue of how even the everyday verbal communication between Germans and minority ethnic peoples is polluted with tacit racist assumptions. She explained that minority ethnic people are often automatically addressed using the informal forms of words or those used to speak to children,

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rather than the customary ‘polite’ form. Minority ethnic people’s German is often not ‘understood’, even if it is of good quality. In addition, she indicated that aggressive non-verbal communication is becoming more and more commonplace. The least objectionable aspect of this being the general feeling of being under permanent observation and scrutiny at all times. In terms of the allocation of resources, minority ethnic groups in Germany are often given the very poorest housing and other services. Her assessment of the impact of the Single European Market was based on her and other minority ethnic women’s experience of the reunification of Germany: ‘The wall came down and with it came a boundary within which minority ethnic women could live.’ There has been a rapid rise in racist attacks and intimidation. Lucia also speculated that there was an upsurge in the acceptance of racist opinions under the guise of nationalism. Within minority ethnic populations, especially women, one response is overintegration, i.e., becoming more German than the Germans. Another response is fanaticism or the overvaluing of a construction of personal culture. A third, which particularly characterizes women’s response, is withdrawal from public life and avoidance of situations where they will be rejected or attacked. In a similar response some individuals ‘freeze’ in their current situation; they do not change jobs, apply for other jobs or in any way test their capabilities in order to avoid exposing themselves to the hostility they perceive all around them. In all these responses the individual is diminished overall as a person. A lively discussion compared variations in other European countries of the structural and cultural contexts in which racism is expressed and the results. Feminism and racism Sanchita Basu also focused on the situation in Germany. She affirmed that racism and racist violence were both increasing and gaining support from the silent majority. Much of this is being centred on asylum-seekers. She pointed out that migration as a phenomena and asylum-seekers specifically are not solely a European occurrence. In 1988, Pakistan accepted more asylum-seekers than Britain. Her account, however, focused particularly on the relation between feminism and racism in Germany. Within the German feminist context, Sanchita indicated that there is often a huge amount of racism and cultural chauvinism framing attitudes and approaches to minority ethnic women. Often white feminists assume that migration to ‘civilized’ Western Europe has precipitated the emancipation of minority ethnic women, with no knowledge of the struggles being undertaken by women in their country of origin. The assumption is fundamentally racist in that it assumes that any order other than the one framed in a Western European context is oppressive and fundamentally flawed. Sanchita talked of the problems that she and the other women from Nozizwe have found with the women’s movement in Germany. They generally never mention immigrant women in their work. If they are mentioned, it is primarily as

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non-emancipated victims. It was within this context that a Muslim woman expressed her discomfort with some of the movements against fundamentalism, particularly Islamic fundamentalism, which she felt were framed and defined within a European feminist context. She indicated that she felt that European women should look to their own freedom before defining other women’s captivity. Compounding the invisible or victim portrayal of minority ethnic women in European feminism, there is often no space allowed for minority ethnic women to present their own stories, it is either done for them or one woman’s experience is taken as representative of the whole —‘The Black Woman’s Story’. This is a phenomena Naomi Wolf described in the Guardian in 1991, in that the effect of this lack of space for a range of views results in a particularly virulent kind of self-censorship within groups. This is a particular problem for minority ethnic women in as much as the paradigm within antiracist work is often the one we found in CEMYC—a hierarchical definition of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ struggle defined by men—racism first, sexism second. Within the course of this seminar, the delegates began to look at how to translate a black feminist perspective of seeing racism and sexism as dynamic and interactive processes, into concrete strategies for functioning within CEMYC and within the wider context of Europe. Networking initiative The solution which Lucia and Sanchita put forward to combat many of the effects of isolation was through networks of women for action. They outlined the strategies employed by the Nozizwe project in Berlin. Through feminist education, it aims to create an understanding of the existing power relations and hierarchies among women of all nations and cultures. It undertakes research projects, runs courses and publishes material on the lives and situations of minority ethnic women in Germany. It also co-ordinates trade union and other training initiatives. The discussion of other practical applications of networking carried on for the rest of the seminar in a number of fora. A large proportion of the time toward the end of the seminar was taken up by the consideration of on what level our own network should operate. The choice was between the development of national objectives and plans for action followed by the setting of an international agenda or for an international agenda to be set with which national groups would operate specifically tailored programmes. We decided eventually on the latter which would give women the maximum support to resist possible sexist responses within the CEMYC maledominated structure. The final international agenda was set on the last day of the seminar. The last session was primarily devoted to discussing the ‘next steps’ for CEMYC following this seminar. It was resolved that communication was of utmost importance. This entailed setting up women’s newsletters to be distributed

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through the structure and resources of CEMYC, and incorporating our concerns into other CEMYC publications. We took great steps toward achieving the overall aim of the seminar, which was to form a network of minority ethnic and/or migrant women throughout Europe, in order to effect positive change in our lives and those of our communities—to create an instrument through which to voice our concerns. However, we found that in order to find our voice we had to write a new language. Beyond the relatively surmountable problem that we spoke different languages, we discovered that concepts and words, translated and expressed, had to be examined and re-examined, apparent trivialities suddenly assumed new significance. Some of the epistemological debates had to be relegated to the sidelines in the course of the formal sessions, but I feel it was a very important element of the seminar and a vital part of any action to initiate any change; the process of self-definition and self-examination must be ongoing and exhaustive. The role of men, ‘white’ women, colour, and violence as a form of political participation were also all addressed within the course of the seminar. In addition, we had to come to grips with concepts of power: within our communities, our communities within larger national identities and our access to power on a European level. Although the process was difficult, we knew it was an absolutely vital one. The issues with which we were grappling are factors which feed into our perceptions of ourselves—our identities. Although all of the issues were not explored fully and certainly consensus on everything was not reached (or even attempted), they were, at least, touched upon and identified as important. There is certainly fertile ground for the development of future seminars. Notes Danielle J.Walker is a demographer and a Research Officer in the Law Society’s Research and Policy Planning Unit. She is also a founder member of the Black Women in Research forum. Contact addresses for CEMYC: International Network International Secretariat c/o Emina Koc or Deborah Hooguliets P.O Box 9683 2003 KG HAARLEM Netherlands Tel: 31–2510–33 830 CEMYC Berlin c/o Tulay Ozgornen Exerzierstr. 12 1000 Berlin 65

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Germany CEMYC Germany P. O Box 1547 5804 Herdecke Germany Tel: 49–2302–60054/55 CEMYC-U.K Inderjeet Nijhar Southall, Middlesex UB1 1HN England 1 Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OECD), 1991. 2 Eurostat figures supplied by David Marsden, London School of Economics.

REVIEWS

Showing Our Colours: Afro-German Women Speak Out Edited by May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye and Dagmar Schultz Open Letters: London 1992, ISBN 1 85789 025 6, £10.99, 239pp Showing Our Colours is a welcome publication which, in keeping with the Open Letters philosophy, combines the warmth and intimacy of exchanges between friends with the vigour of issues publicly addressed. Lest the English readership jump to the conclusion that minority women in Germany are only just discovering themselves, it is as well to bear in mind that the German original, Farbe Bekennen, came out in 1984. This places it a year in advance of The Heart of the Race, the first non-fiction book to address the experience of black women in Britain (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 1985). Nineteen eighty-four was also the year in which the debate on racism within feminism led Feminist Review, at that time still an all-white collective, to hand its editorial authority over to an ad hoc group of black women (which included myself), invited to guest edit Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives. Showing Our Colours differs from these early British publications in several important ways. The Heart of the Race gestated in the belly of a self-defining, autonomous movement for many years, before finally coming out after a decade of black women’s organization and activism, which had given its authors a sense of politics, and of the need for presenting a collective analysis rather than merely revealing the scarified underbelly of black womanhood. Their insistent use of ‘we’ was a political decision, reflecting the authors determination to assert the unification of black women, and to celebrate the shared leap in awareness that black feminism signified.1 It paved the way for subsequent exploration of all the diversities that had been grouped— some less comfortably than others— within the term ‘black’. Farbe Bekennen does not have this strident assertiveness, presumably because it preceded collective action. In one of the introductions, Gail Lewis informs us that, just as its editors had hoped, publication led to the first national organization of black Germans, Initiative Schwarze Deutsche. It is

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a more exploratory book, and although there is an historical chapter, drawn from May Opitz’s Masters dissertation, the bulk of the book presents the stories of isolated individuals with an intimacy that is at once raw and engaging. It does seem as if the two supportively written introductions by veterans of the British (Gail Lewis) and American (Audre Lorde) black women’s movements, try to locate these very separate testimonies in an existing framework, an intention that is more worthy than necessary. They do not succeed in altering the fact that the strongest declaration of collectivity lies in the title; a title that signifies the birth of a new group identity, to be built out of the need to grow beyond the painful experience of German racism. The chosen term of identification—‘Afro-German’—differs too: black women in Britain tend to name themselves in ways which stress the non-British aspect of their authors: we have ‘Black feminists’ ‘Black women’ ‘Afro-Caribbean women’ ‘Asian women’ ‘African women’. Britishness appears to be regarded with some distaste, or at least with disinterest, even by those who really have no other place to go. Black women in Germany are not evading their Germanness in their self-appellation, despite the fact that at least as far as these accounts go, it is certainly no easier to be German and black than it is to be British and black. Perhaps it is due to the fact that the contributors have all been born and raised in Germany, most of them by white German mothers. Their experiences do not include any memory of migrating from a childhood location in the Caribbean, Asia or Africa, and few seem to harbour dreams of ‘returning’ to that source. These Afro-Germans are more locked in to Germany, and show little real identification with the places that their fathers came from; whether they were American soldiers or Africans. The one who did visit ‘home’ with her father gives an honest account of how unbearable she found it, distanced as she was by the language and culture of Ethiopia, doubly so because she was supposed to be one of them, but was not. Germany is not a place harbouring many notions of pluralism. National identity is racial identity— Aryanness, biology. It would seem that ‘non-Aryans’ are as much non-persons today as they were during the Nazi regime. Perhaps the hybrid nature of most of the contributors explains the depth of the feeling of rejection in these voices. Perhaps ‘impure’ Germans are abhorred in special ways, because they incarnate the fear of contamination, so central to the Aryan creed. Like many of the women’s publications in the ‘speak out’ genre, it is a cathartic speaking bitterness which makes rather bleak reading. Black women growing up in Germany have had a miserable time of it, if this book is representative of that whole experience. Or can we attribute the wholly negative impression that is conveyed to the birth pains of beginning to articulate, the necessary airing of pent-up unhappiness, that may one day clear the way, freeing Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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hearts and minds for fuller reflection? The enormous courage and forbearance that black women must have to survive at all does not change the fact that Showing Our Colours is a joyless set of testimonies. Reading it means opening up the buried hurts of childhoods spent in white-dominated countries, rupturing whatever scar tissue has held down the discomforts endured, and for those who have visited this space before, empathizing with a great deal of what is said by these women. Many black women raised in Britain will recognize what it means to live blighted with eczema and asthma, subjected to constant ridicule in the playgrounds. A great many here too have grown up in the children’s homes of a land that had no place for ‘half-caste’ children, and where their white mothers could not bear to pay the price of raising a brown child. Many will remember grannies who loved them, but were perpetually afraid of being embarrassed, who scraped back their hair and made sure they never wore colours that were too bright. However, not even the older black Britons will have survived the Nazi concentration camps, escaped from sterilization clinics, and, more remarkably still lived on in Danzig or Berlin. Black women in Germany were hunted down by ‘the watchdogs’ who were their neighbours, and spent their childhoods being hounded out of bible circles, gymnasiums, school outings, stigmatized as nonAryans in a state where this was official policy, where white supremacy was so total that the nightmares persisted well after the Nazi defeat, into adulthood. For the post-war generation, there was the new and additional hatred of being identified with the occupying American troops, some of whom were black, and who left tens of thousands of little ‘mulatto problems’ behind them, to grow up to the racist taunts of a defeated nation. These ‘Afro-German’ women do not mention anything positive that they may have derived from Germany or Germans, or any connexions with an aspect of German society that has rejected the fascist past, which challenges the rising tide of racism in the present. Isolated from one another, and despised by whites, they express the hope that the publication of their testimonies will bring them together. Then they may be able to begin to interrogate the society that has shaped them, and for which there are no expressions of affection. At best there is a resigned acknowledgement that ‘it is what I know, where I was brought up’, and this cannot be enough. I found myself wondering if all newly invented identities must either be forced out painfully, harking back to a history of suffering, or be so celebratory that they rely on glorification of a mythical, unified past? Perhaps it is only later, after the bitterness has been spoken and shared, that Afro-German women will be able to celebrate their identity, and then to recover, to speak of the things that have made/enabled them to stay/survive, to take hold of their future, and instead of being passive products of history and racism, to realize the dynamic growth that is born in those who have fought many battles, and lived on. But what can begin to grow in today’s Germany? Two thousand race attacks in the last year, a resurgence of open support for Nazism, calls for concentration

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camps to be reopened and non-Aryans deported en masse. What will Initiative Schwarze Deutsche be able to do for black people in such a place? Who will be its allies? British black feminists have tended to have their eyes on the other side of the Atlantic, on the impressive outpourings of American sisters, rather than on forging links with other black Europeans. ‘1992’ has been and gone, and Europe continues to close in on itself, locking Europe’s minorities in together, for better or for worse. Germany, and France, Switzerland, Italy and the others are all suddenly much closer, so perhaps it is time to turn the black feminist gaze closer to home. The availability of Showing Our Colours in English is a small but significant step towards opening up communications among black women in Europe. It has come at a time when national-level organizations of black women in Britain no longer exist. Perhaps the publishers harboured dreams of a renewed women’s internationalism, of new pan-European alliances and exchanges. International black women’s festivals in Munich, Dresden, Berlin—Amsterdam, Paris, London, Oslo and Stockholm? Exchanges between community groups, theatre groups, film collectives, scholars and activists—is there any shortage of possibilities, once the channels are opened? Amina Mama Notes The editorial group are sorry to learn that Open Letters has already ceased publication. 1 It provoked negative reactions amongst some (white) reviewers who felt alienated by this new, black, use of ‘we’, while others went so far as to argue that black feminism as a whole must be divisive because it made them feel left out.

References BRYAN, B., DADZIE, S. and SCAFE, S. (1985) The Heart of the Race London: Virago. FEMINIST REVIEW (1984) No. 17 Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives.

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Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 Billie Melman Macmillan: Basingstoke 1992, ISBN 0 333 46300 5, £45.00 Hbk Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism Sara Mills Routledge: London and New York 1991, ISBN 0 415 04629 7, £30.00 Hbk Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation Mary Louise Pratt Routledge: London and New York 1992, ISBN 0 415 06095 8, £11.95 Pbk ISBN 0 415 02675 X, £35.00 Hbk These three books all represent efforts to take on and develop Edward Said’s argument as to the discourse of ‘Orientalism’. Said argued in his seminal work, Orientalism (1985), that the Orient was almost a European invention and that Orientalism, a way of thinking about the Orient, provided ways in which the West was able to dominate, restructure and have authority over the Orient. As many feminists have pointed out in the last fifteen years, Said did not see gender as relevant to his analysis. The flowering of work inspired and stimulated by his rethinking of the relation between the West and the Orient, however, has included a certain amount of new scholarship from feminists. Oddly, Mary Louise Pratt never cites Said but it is hard to imagine that her analysis of travel writing could have existed without him. Sara Mills and Billie Melman are both quite clear about their debt to Said, and their challenge to his gender-neutral analysis. The three books share an interest in travel writing and the ways in which it has ‘produced’ other countries and cultures for domestic consumption. Travel writing is analyzed as a form of cultural imperialism from the different perspectives of two literary scholars and an historian heavily influenced by the ‘literary turn’, the turn to textual analysis. While the emphases vary, for Mills and Melman focus on women writers, Pratt on both men and women, all three are concerned to see gender as an important variable in the construction of colonial and imperial discourses. Sara Mills was fascinated to find ‘hundreds’ of women travel writers writing from the mid nineteenth century onwards and has focused her work mainly on the British. Having moved from an earlier position in which she maintained that women travel writers were outside of the colonial relation, she argues in this book that they ‘were unable to adopt the imperial voice with the ease with which

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male writers did’, they were more tentative and less able to assert the ‘truths’ of British rule without qualification (p. 3). She suggests that there is textual unease around the contradictions between imperialism and femininity and that women’s texts constitute counter-hegemonic voices within colonial discourse. The book is divided between a critique of the prevalent responses to women’s travel writing and an argument for the importance of gender to the study of colonial discourse, a section on the production and reception of these texts, which mainly draws on Foucault, and three case studies of women travellers. The balance between the three is, to my mind, not quite right as the theoretical apparatus is rather too heavy for the short case studies. I would have preferred more analysis of the texts to demonstrate more fully the tensions that are claimed between imperialism and femininity. While it is of course true that some women have been involved in anti-imperialist and antiracist activities, there is never a guarantee that the more personal voice of the white woman, or her emphasis on individuals rather than ‘races’, or her own experience of subjection at the hands of men, produces a critique of colonialism. Billie Melman’s central focus is on the ways in which British women’s gender and class positions affected their perceptions and representations of the ‘others’ of the Middle East between the early eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Was there a specifically feminine experience of and relation to those ‘others’? Said, she suggests, has written both gender and class out of the Orient which became, in his imagination, a man’s place. Like Mills, she argues that women developed distinctive counter-discourses, and she emphasizes the plurality of those discourses, the lack of homogeneity. There was no single Orient, rather a variety of Orients. In her analysis, writing about the Middle East was in itself an emancipatory activity for women since it involved forms of travel which disrupted bourgeois notions of separate spheres. Furthermore, in their encounter with these other cultures some English women writers became critical of their own culture and were able to identify with difference. Melman traces the shifts in travel writing from the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley Montague through the embourgeoisement and evangelicalization which took place in the nineteenth century to the more secular writings of the early twentieth century. She suggests that ‘the most serious challenge to Orientalist and patriarchal authority’ (p. 16) was articulated in the genre which she describes as ‘harem writing’ which depended on a sympathy and familiarity with the ‘other’ which subverted the power relations of colonial discourse. Melman has been influenced by Raymond Williams and Bakhtin and she is interested in linking the structural interests of the historian with complex readings of particular texts. Her quantitative analysis of ‘the woman author’ across the period reveals that the typical writer was middle class and married, travelling with her husband and writing from home. The detailed analysis of texts, however, demonstrates how different the attitudes of these authors were at different times. In the mid eighteenth century Lady Mary Wortley Montague, with a tolerant voice accepting of difference, represented the harem, hitherto

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thought of as the locus of exotic sex, as a humanized haven associated with sexual liberty. Such ideas were banished by the Victorians who re-made the harem in the image of the middle-class home, a private feminine place where women’s morality could be exercised. A favourite harem image for Victorian writers was that of the slippers left by the door signifying a woman’s desire to be left alone, a powerful image for women who were preoccupied with women’s sexual subjection in marriage. The development of evangelical fascination with the Middle East and the revival of the concept of the pilgrimage brought a new focus, a conviction of the importance of the conversion of the Jews and the vital part which women could play in this. But evangelical Christianity was in part a response to growing secularization and Harriet Martineau’s Eastern Life (1848) was crucial in Melman’s view as an ‘anti-pilgrimage’ narrative which opened the way for other more secular forms of writing. One of the reasons for Western fascination with Middle Eastern culture, Melman argues, was that it offered women a kind of freedom impossible in their own country. ‘I wish to convey an idea of the life which an English woman can make for herself in the East’ wrote Isabel Burton (p. 306). That life was far removed from the lives of nineteenth-century middle-class women, structured as they were through the relations of gender and class. Like Mills, Melman suggests that the particular ways in which women writers were able to respond to the women they encountered and observed in the Middle East made possible the emergence of counter-discourses which challenged the dominant male version of Orientalism. The distinctive voices of these women were rooted in a capacity to compare cultures in ways which did not necessarily privilege the West, to empathize and feel solidarity with others. As Anna Bowman-Dodd remarked in 1903, at the end of a passage in which she was commenting on the relationship between free women and slaves in the high-class harem: ‘This love and attachment [between women] is sometimes as touching as it is sublime. For women must everywhere cling to women at certain moments, whether they be within or without harem walls. In the long life struggle there are times and crises when only a woman can be turned to for full and complete sympathy.’ (p. 310) Interestingly, Melman notes that the liberal feminists such as Martineau were often the least sympathetic, convinced as they were of the superiority of Western civilization and Western notions of progress. Melman’s core concerns are to insist on the importance of gender in the construction of the discourses of Orientalism, to demonstrate the ways in which the identities of women writers were constructed through the contemporary English languages of gender and class and to challenge the notion that the English all shared one view of the Middle East. These are important issues. In my view the book would have been strengthened by more comparison between male and female writers (there is only a short section on couples who wrote at the end) and by more focus on the ways in which English women were drawing on their understanding of ethnicity, of the singularity of Anglo-Saxon whiteness,

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as well as gender and class. But Women’s Orients is an important contribution to our understanding of Orientalism. If Melman’s work is characterized by a fruitful bringing together of the skills of the historian with a sensitive reading of British women writers on the Middle East, Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes is very much the work of a textual critic, trained in comparative work. Politically she situates herself in the longterm struggle to decolonize knowledge with its commitment to a decentring of the Western eye and a rethinking of the relation between centre and periphery. Her central questions concern the ways in which travel writing has produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist trajectory, how travel books by Europeans about non-European parts of the world went about creating what she calls, following Gayatri Spivak, the ‘domestic subject’ of European imperialism. To develop her analysis she has mobilized several concepts—the ‘contact zone’, which is the social space in which disparate cultures meet and clash in relations of domination and subordination; ‘transculturation’ which concerns the ways in which European constructions of subordinated others have been shaped by those others; ‘anticonquest’ which she defines as the strategies whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure innocence at the same time as asserting hegemony; and ‘auto-ethnography’, when colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizers’ own terms. Imperial Eyes is an exciting and ambitious book. The starting point for the account of new ways of producing the new worlds which were being colonized is the mid eighteenth century, the moment of a shift in European consciousness when bourgeois forms of subjectivity and power were consolidated and a new territorial phase of capitalist expansion began. One of Europe’s proudest instruments of expansion, argues Pratt, was the international scientific expedition which utilized new forms of natural history to bring the ‘new world’ into European patterns of global unity and order without needing to focus on the competition, exploitation and violence which were taking place. Her account of the place of Linnaeus in the construction of a new natural history is fascinating and in general I found her very illuminating on the ways in which travel writing intersects at different moments with other forms of writing and knowledge— whether the texts of landscape, of the sentimental mode or the discovery genre. While Melman and Mills both put their main emphasis on women, Pratt’s main emphasis is on the ways in which the colonizers represent the colonized and the differences associated with gender are a part of this. Like Mills, for example, she discusses Mary Kingsley and argues that she rejected the fantasy of dominance and possession which characterized so much male writing about Africa. Isobel Burton’s husband, the explorer Richard Burton, is cited as providing a classic example of the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ trope. In his descriptions of his ‘great discoveries’, Pratt argues: ‘the esthetic qualities of the landscape constitute the social and material value of the discovery to the explorer’s home culture, at the same time as its esthetic deficiencies suggest a

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need for social and moral intervention by the home culture.’ (p. 205) Burton could stand alone (at least in his imagination), reviewing the land and what he judged it needed, the monarch, indeed, of all he surveyed. Kingsley, on the contrary, with her irony, wit and multi-purpose umbrella, constructed ‘a monarchic female voice that asserts its own kind of mastery even as it denies domination and parodies power.’ (p. 213) Thus, despite her distance from the voice of male colonial authority, Kingsley was able to continue to locate herself within the project of empire. The strength of Imperial Eyes lies in its scope (from Africa to South America, from Humboldt to Didion’s recent Salvador), its intellectual clarity, its insistence on relations between ‘discoverers’ and ‘discovered’ and on the resistance and refusals of the latter, its attempts to look at, for example, Creole self-fashioning as well as the ways in which creole culture was shaped by Europe. Its weaknesses lie in its failure to demonstrate whether transculturation actually worked, how European thought was shaped in the contact zones, its tendency to take texts out of context and not think of the meanings they might have had for contemporaries, its undifferentiated notion of ‘Europe’. Still, it’s certainly a book that made me think and one that I shall return to many times. I welcome these three books— together they demonstrate the extent to which critical thinking about the relation between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ has moved towards taking gender as a crucial category of analysis in this debate, as in every other. Catherine Hall Reference SAID, Edward W (1985) Orientalism Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History Vron Ware Verso: London 1992, ISBN 086091 552 2 £11.95, 263pp. This is both an ambitious and a modest book: its theme is huge, while its approach is necessarily selective, and its conclusions for a future feminist antiracist politics are tentative and provisional. As Ware emphasizes, the book represents something of a path-clearing exercise, helpfully exposing blindspots of existing feminist history and politics, suggesting directions that future historical research could take. Ware’s book is divided into five sections. The first discusses a range of contemporary British images of white womanhood, exploring the racialized basis and ideological function of white femininity. The next three sections discuss aspects of white women and their relations to racism within history. The first of these examines the activities of white British women abolitionists in the early nineteenth century, and moves on to consider the

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shifting ideological relations between nineteenth-century feminists and the institution of slavery. This is followed by a reflection on the relationship between feminism and imperialism during the (late nineteenth-century) Age of Empire. The fourth section centres on the 1890s involvement of white British women in campaigns against the US practice of lynching, and the book’s final section returns to contemporary Britain with a consideration of the historical implications of many feminists in colonialism and the ways in which a future antiracist feminism could develop. The result is an important, if uneven, series of case studies. One of Ware’s most valuable, if ambiguous, contributions is her argument for the political necessity of analyzing whiteness as an ethnicity; as she points out, ‘white feminists have managed to avoid dissecting these cultural and racial components of white femininity, although they have become eager to hear what black women have to say about their racialized and gendered identities’. Another, ambiguous, contribution is her emphasis on history, and historical research, as a political resource for the understanding and transformation of contemporary ideological configurations. There is something of a conceptual split between the way history is used here. On the one hand, history’s usefulness stems from the ways it continues to inform present-day ideologies; on the other, it is valuable precisely because it illuminates for us the fact of the variability of the meanings of white femininity and the different ways in which white women situated themselves in relation to race and racism. We are led through the former strand to an expectation that direct connexions can be made between the past and the present, and that there are some immediate direct conclusions to be drawn from the historical material. But at the same time this is in tension with the ‘history as the principle of difference/variability’ line of argument, in which the series of case studies stand simply as ends in themselves, intrinsically interesting but arbitrary in selection, lacking any explanatory force and serving as images rather than arguments or analyses. Insofar as one can draw conclusions from the historical discussion, it would seem that relations, ideological and political, between white women and race/ racism, were more diverse in the early nineteenth century than in the late nineteenth century, when feminists were more constrained by or complicit in the imperialist codification of racist ideology. Across all this are some crucial issues: Ware lucidly considers the ways in which the construction of white woman as guardian/centre of civilization under sexual threat by black men served to legitimate racist and imperialist action, how for many white feminists as for racists, the ‘degraded’ black women were seen as an index of the lowly level of civilization reached by black society, in need of salvation by white women. Also important, and well-covered, is the range of ways in which white women articulated themselves through slave metaphors. Ware is thinnest when she is focusing on feminist-identified activism as such, as in her chapter on feminists in the Empire, and strongest when she focuses on

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women in antiracism and the gender implications of that involvement. The most interesting chapter is on the 1890s anti-lynching campaign, in which the analyses of and by nineteenth-century African-American antiracist campaigner Ida Wells contribute to a fascinating exploration of the complex and confused connexions of white female sexuality, racism and emergent socialism. The ambiguous use of history in this book is linked to a political and theoretical ambiguity in Ware’s approach, which has to do with how she views notions of cultural/ethnic ‘difference’, what her connexions between a ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ level of analysis are, and her notions of political organization. On the one hand, underlying the book’s organization, and its stated politics, seems a strong scepticism of any totalizing politics or analysis based on the redemption of grand narratives of history, feminism or socialism, as being destructive of the specificity or the validity of individual case studies, and, by extension, of the historical/conceptual specificity of culture/ethnicity; on the other, equally suggested by the book’s organization and argument, these specificities seem to serve as a key to these grand narratives, which, far from being abandoned, are constantly gestured towards. The implications, for a future feminist politics, are complicated. One is, as has already been said, a much-needed weighting of responsibility on the side of white feminism, to foreground analysis of the racialized elements of femininity and to strengthen its connexions with black and white antiracism. However, this weighting risks inadvertently equating black women with the politics of antiracism alone— rather as Ida Wells, the only black woman to feature strongly in the book, is associated with antiracism. The analyses and politics of black feminists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are not Ware’s concern, and need not be, except that the asymmetry of the discussion not only risks giving white-dominated feminism a monopoly on feminism, it also overlooks the success of existing political alliances made by women across ethnicities, based on what are perceived as common interests—as found, for instance, in Women Against Fundamentalism. At the same time, the very real political questions of cultural difference are raised, but then fudged, by arguments such as ‘white and black women can unite not so much in favour of women being able to wear headscarves but against the combination of gender, class and race relations that forbids cultural differences and fears that the dominant culture will be ‘swamped’ by an Other one’—the solution being to sidestep the thorny issues of sexist fundamentalism in favour of a relativist antiracist politics of cultural diversity? Critique of the ways in which white femininity is historically constructed and racialized in dominant ideologies seems at times in Ware to come close to an endorsement of the view of the insurmountability of racial and cultural difference, and the leaving of women enclosed in their cultural/ethnic specificity and ‘difference’, a difference implied to be as valuable as it is inevitable. But at the same time, she appears to suggest, the importance of this ideology critique is precisely to overcome these divisions.

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Overall, this is an important and provocative contribution to anti-racism. Laura Chrisman The Sphinx in the City Elizabeth Wilson Virago: London 1991, ISBN 1 85381 282 X £9.99 Pbk In her recent book, Elizabeth Wilson argues ‘that we will never solve the problems of cities unless we like the urban-ness of urban life’ (p. 158). She is deeply critical of the anti-urban sentiment prevalent in British and American culture, and insists upon the liberating potential of city life for women. Although the lives of women in Western societies are necessarily bound up with urban culture, feminist work in urban studies has remained rather separate from other feminist concerns. Wilson’s book goes some way to bridging this gap, and in this review I endorse her emphasis on the significance of the city for feminism and of feminist perspectives for urban studies. At the same time I sound a note of caution in response to her optimistic appraisal of the prospects for women in cities. Wilson’s book is concerned with both the gender imagery of the city (and especially with the related oppositions of city/country and masculine/feminine), and peoples’ everyday experiences of urban living. On the former, she suggests that ‘male and female “principles” war with each other at the very heart of city life. The city is “masculine” in its triumphal scale, its towers and vistas and arid industrial regions; it is “feminine” in its enclosing embrace, in its indeterminacy and labyrinthine uncentredness. We might even go so far as to claim that urban life is actually based on this perpetual struggle between rigid, routinised order and pleasurable anarchy, the male-female dichotomy.’ (pp. 7–8) Wilson bemoans the tendency for the ‘masculinity’ of the city to dominate contemporary conceptions of urbanism. She implies that even feminist research on urban life falls into this trap, and, by focusing too narrowly on ‘issues of safety, welfare and protection’ (p. 10), promotes a view of women as victims of urbanization. In recovering the feminine imagery of the city, Wilson seeks ‘a new vision, a new ideal of life in the city—and a new, “feminine” voice in praise of cities’ (p. 11). She points to the possibilities for ‘alternative’ living arrangements in cities, to the advantages of anonymity and to the spontaneity and freedom associated with the city. While her historical account of the gender connotations of urbanism and urban form is certainly appealing, the book is weaker in its treatment of the practical realities of urban living. Two aspects of this merit consideration. First, the links between the gender inflections of our conceptions of the city and everyday urban life remain poorly specified. Secondly, Wilson underplays the deeply divided character of women’s experience of the city. I elaborate each of these criticisms in turn.

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Existing research on women and urban living, which Wilson so readily dismisses, actually illuminates some of the interconnexions between images of, and experiences in, the city. For example, feminist contributions to urban studies have drawn attention to a mismatch between the reality of women’s lives, especially the prevalence of a dual role as wage earner and homemaker, and the form of the built environment, especially the spatial separation of functionally differentiated land uses. If this tended to cast women as the victims of urban planning, it also showed how patriarchal ideologies, inscribed on the urban landscape through the practices of male-dominated professions, can become a means through which female subordination is enforced: the difficulties experienced by women negotiating a built environment based on the inaccurate assumption of complementary roles within nuclear families, help to ‘keep women in their place’. Thus, the notion that the built environment is man-made was given a new twist in these accounts and taken to signify hostility, or at minimum insensitivity, to women’s needs. Wilson is surely correct to draw out the feminine connotations of the city that coexist alongside the patriarchal stereotypes evident in planning, but we need to know more about how the sphinxlike qualities she identifies relate to women’s (and men’s) lives. Are the women (and men) who enjoy the city responding to its ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ attributes? If, as she argues, fear of the city is rooted in a male fear of unregulated female sexuality, how does this inform women’s resistance to the assumptions of urban planning and women’s behaviour in the city? Wilson is, I think, suggesting that cities offer possibilities for women to create their own spaces: how do these utilize or disturb the tension between ‘male and female principles’ that she diagnoses as central to the character of urban life? That Wilson’s book provokes these questions demonstrates her success in highlighting the mutual significance of feminism and urban studies, but she leaves the appetite whetted rather than satisfied. There is, of course, no unitary female experience of the city. Moreover, in many Western cities it appears that women’s experience of urban life is becoming more deeply polarized. On the one hand, women are increasingly visible among the urban poor whether as lone mothers, the elderly or the young homeless. And on the other hand, women are increasingly visible among the urban middle class, whether as members of two-career households or as single professional women. Although Wilson acknowledges the existence of the former groups of women, it is clear that her argument is coloured principally by the latter. The underlying difficulty here is that Wilson remains caught within the dichotomous structure she is examining. While she points to the gross inadequacies of a direct mapping of male/female on to city/country, she does not question the oppositions themselves. By relying on these dichotomies, gender appears to be the most fundamental social division and her qualifications about class differences among women fail to convince the reader otherwise. And, if a white professional identity looms too large within the category ‘women’, so too do New York, London and Paris within the category ‘cities’. The single chapter

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on Third World cities does not counterbalance the attention paid to the ‘control and command’ centres of the West. Despite these reservations, Wilson’s book succeeds in presenting a refreshing and original argument in an accessible manner. Most of us take the urban context of our lives very much for granted: the city is either the immediate backdrop for our daily activities or a none-too-distant entity which we cannot forget. This book reminds us that cities are rich human creations and, as such, the terrain of contested ideas about human life. While I remain sceptical about the possibility of a singular, pro-urban feminine voice, there is clearly an important place for feminist voices in the remaking of our cities. Liz Bondi

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The Feminist Archive The Feminist Archive in Bristol is run entirely by volunteers and urgently needs both more help and more funds. For £5.00 per year you can become a Friend of the Feminist Archive and receive their regular newsletter. Send £5.00 (more if you can afford it) to: Feminist Archive (Bristol), Trinity Road Library, St Philips, Bristol BS2 0NW. New Journal Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies Edited by Harriet Bjerrum Nielson and Torill Steinfeld, to be published biannually in English. First issue now available from: Scandinavian University Press, PO Box 2959 Toyen, 0608 Oslo, Norway. Calls for Papers Feminist Perspectives on Technology, Work and Ecology, 5–9 July 1994, Graz, Austria The conference aims at gathering women researchers from a multi-plicity of disciplines: to pool their knowledge for a deeper understanding of the major current developments concerning technology, work and the ecology with special emphasis on the interdependence of innovation and diffusion of technologies to present concrete analyses and practical solutions from their own culture and experience to engage in utopian thinking on how to redesign those socio-political structures that affect work and the environment

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Send your abstract to: Inter-University Research Center for Technology, Work and Culture (IFZ), Schlögelgasse 2, A-8010 Graz/Austria. Tel: +43 316 813909; fax: +43 316 810274. Gendered Narratives: Aspects of Cultural Identity in Ireland Friday 19, Saturday 20 & Sunday 21 November 1993, University of Ulster at Magee, Derry, Northern Ireland Conference aims: It is the aim of the conference to gather together feminist practitioners and theorists from different disciplines (arts, social sciences, historians, etc.) to facilitate a cross-disciplinary discussion on gender, cultural identity and women’s lived experience in Ireland both North and South. It will explore the political and discursive implications of the formation of gendered identities and will present discursive and social analyses of cultural representations of gender. For more information contact: ‘Gendered Narratives’, G.Honor Fagan, Sociology Department, University of Ulster at Magee, Derry, Northern Ireland. New Course There is a new MA in Psychoanalytic Studies starting in October 1993 at Brunel. It is for those who wish to study psychoanalytic theory and to explore its capacity to provide an analysis of a range of cultural and social issues around sexuality and gender, cinema and art, group psychology and war. For further information: The Course Convenor, MA in Psycho-analytic Studies, Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH. Tel: 0895 274000.

Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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ABORTION: THE INTERNATIONAL AGENDA: Whatever Happened to ‘A ‘Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia: Freedom, Church and State, Coleman. Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism—or Feminism in the Realm of Necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher. Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey 30 Capital, Gender and Skill: Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Talpade Mohanty. Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of Intercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agbabi. 31 THE PAST BEFORE US: 20 YEARS OF FEMINISM: Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y.Davis. To Be or Not To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret. Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of’ 88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill. 32 ‘Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead’: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Breugel. The ‘Dark Continent’: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott. Gender, Class and the Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the Pseudo-Pluralists, Gorelick.

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Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim & Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell. PERVERSE POLITICS: LESBIAN ISSUES Pat Parker: A tribute, Brimstone. International Lesbianism: Letter from São Paulo, Rodrigues; Israel, Pittsburgh, Italy, Fiocchetto. The De-eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys, Hunt. Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, Gomez & Smith. Lesbianism and the Labour Party, Tobin. Skirting the Issue: Lesbian Fashion for the 1990s, Blackman & Perry. Butch/Femme Obsessions, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Archives: The Will to Remember, Nestle; International Archives, Read. Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations, Lewis. Lesbian Tradition, Field. Mapping: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality. An interview with Cindy Patton, O’Sullivan. Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Theory, Hamer. The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film, Smyth. Cartoon, Charlesworth. Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing, Dunn. Campaign Against Pornography, Norden. The Mothers’ Manifesto and Disputes over ‘Mütterlichkeit’, Chamberlayne. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multi-National Reception, Mani. Cagney and Lacey Revisited, Alcock & Robson. Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Rolley. Deviant Dress, Wilson. The House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980, Ross. Women in Professional Engineering: the Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values, Carter & Kirkup. Identity Politics and the Hierarchy of Oppression, Briskin. Poetry: Bufkin, Zumwalt. ‘The Trouble Is It’s Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory, Minsky. Feminism and Pornography, Ellis, O’Dair & Tallmer. Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship, Rodgerson & Semple. Pornography and Violence: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say, Segal. The Woman In My Life: Photography of Women, Nava. Splintered Sisterhood: Antiracism in a Young Women’s Project, Connolly. Woman, Native, Other, Parmar interviews Trinh T.Minh-ha. Out But Not Down: Lesbians’ Experience of Housing, Edgerton. Poems: Evans Davies, Tóth & Weinbaum. Oxford Twenty Years On: Where Are We Now?, Gamman & O’Neill. The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstockings Movement, Walter. THEME ISSUE: WOMEN, RELIGION AND DISSENT Black Women, Sexism and Racism: Black or Antiracist Feminism?, Tang Nain. Nursing Histories: Reviving Life in Abandoned Selves, McMahon. The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State in Bangladesh, Kabeer. Born Again Moon: Fundamentalism in Christianity and the Feminist Spirituality Movement, McCrickard. Washing our Linen: One Year of Women Against Fundamentalism, Connolly. Siddiqui on Letter to Christendom, Bard on

Feminist Review No 45, Autumn 1993

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Generations of Memories, Patel on Women Living Under Muslim Laws Dossiers 1–6, Poem, Kay. More Cagney and Lacey, Gamman. The Modernist Style of Susan Sontag, McRobbie. Tantalizing Glimpses of Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, Fraser and Boffin. Reflections on the Women’s Movement in Trinidad, Mohammed. Fashion, Representation and Femininity, Evans & Thornton. The European Women’s Lobby, Hoskyns. Hendessi on Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran, Kaveney on Mercy. SHIFTING TERRITORIES: FEMINISM AND EUROPE Between Hope and Helplessness: Women in the GDR, Dölling. Where Have All the Women Gone? Women and the Women’s Movement in East Central Europe, Einhorn. The End of Socialism in Europe—A New Challenge For Socialist Feminism? Haug. The Second ‘No’: Women in Hungary, Kiss. The Citizenship Debate: Women, the State and Ethnic Processes, Yuval-Davis. Fortress Europe and Migrant Women, Morokvasic. Racial Equality and 1992, Dummett. Questioning Perestroika: A Socialist Feminist Interrogation, Pearson. Postmodernism and its Discontents, Soper. Feminists and Socialism: After the Cold War, Kaldor. Socialism Out of the Common Pots, Mitter. 1989 and All That, Campbell. In Listening Mode, Cockburn. Women in Action: Country by Country: The Soviet Union; Yugoslavia; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Poland. Reports: International Gay and Lesbian Association: Black Women and Europe 1992. Fleurs du Mal or Second-Hand Roses?: Nathalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the ‘Originality of the Avant-Garde’, Elliott & Wallace. Poem, Tyler-Bennett. Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading, Snitow. Qualitative Research, Appropriation of the ‘Other’ and Empowerment, Opie. Disabled Women and the Feminist Agenda, Begum. Postcard From the Edge: Thoughts on the ‘Feminist Theory: An International Debate’ Conference at Glasgow University, July 1991, Radstone. Review Essay, Munt. Editorial. The Selling of HRT: Playing on the Fear Factor, Worcester & Whatley. The Cancer Drawings of Catherine Arthur, Sebastyen. Ten Years of Women’s Health 1982–92, James. AIDS Activism: Women and AIDS Activism in Victoria, Australia, Mitchell. A Woman’s Subject, Friedli. HIV and the Invisibility of Women: Is there a Need to Redefine AIDS?, Scharf & Toole. Lesbians Evolving Health Care: Cancer and AIDS, Winnow. Now is the Time for Feminist Criticism: A Review of Asinimali!, Steinberg. Ibu or the Beast: Gender Interests in Two Indonesian Women’s Organizations, Wieringa. Reports on Motherlands: Symposium on African, Carribean and Asian Women’s Writing, Smart. The European Forum of Socialist Feminists, Bruegel. Review Essay, Gamman. FEMINIST FICTIONS: Editorial. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality, Makinen. Feminist Writing: Working with Women’s Experience, Haug. Three Aspects of Sex in Marge Piercy’s Fly Away Home, Hauser. Are They Reading Us? Feminist Teenage Fiction, Bard. Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction, Hermes. A Psychoanalytic Account for Lesbianism, Castendyk. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery, Ferguson. Reviews. ISSUES FOR FEMINISM: Family, Motherhood and Zulu Nationalism: The Politics of the Inkatha Women’s Brigade, Hassim. Postcolonial Feminism and the Veil: Thinking the Difference, Abu Odeh. Feminism, the Menopause and

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Hormone Replacement Therapy, Lewis. Feminism and Disability, Morris. ‘What is Pornography?’: An Analysis of the Policy Statement of the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship, Smith. Reviews. 44 NATIONALISMS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES Women, Nationalism and Islam in Contemporary Political Discourse in Iran, Yeganeh. Feminism, Citizenship and National Identity, Curthoys. Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland, Nash. Rap Poem: Easter 1991, Medbh. Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family, McClintock. Women as Activists; Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement, Thapar. Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities: Bellagio Symposium Report, Hall. Culture or Citizenship? Notes from the Gender and Colonialism Conference, Galway, Ireland, May 1992, Connolly. Reviews.