brah-travels in negotiations

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Communications Journal of Creative

DOI: 10.1177/097325860700200212 2007; 2; 245 Journal of Creative Communications

Avtar Brah Travels in Negotiations: Difference, Identity, Politics

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Journal of Creative Communications 2:1&2 (2007): 245–256SAGE PUBLICATIONS Los Angeles � London � New Delhi � SingaporeDOI: 10.1177/097325860700200212

Travels in Negotiations: Difference, Identity, Politics

AVTAR BRAH

There are three parts to the article. First, it addresses the figure of the Asian in British cultural formation,charting the major changes in its configuration since World War II. Second, it considers negotiationsthrough the terrain of feminism, with particular reference to the debate between ‘black’ and ‘white’feminism. And third, it addresses certain debates and issues across the field of difference and identity.

I have lived on four of the five continents of the globe—Africa, Asia, America and Europe.These experiences of displacement and dispersal have rendered questions of difference, solidar-ity and identity central to my work. During the 1970s I came to Britain from the USA whereI had been an undergraduate studying agriculture. It was in Britain that I switched to thesocial sciences. This was the heyday of political movements such as socialism, feminism andanti-racism. I was influenced by these movements and the insights gained from this politicalactivity fed into my academic work. In America the civil rights movement, feminism and theanti-materialist ethos of the Hippy movement held sway. In Britain the 1970s and the 1980swere marked by class politics, feminism and anti-racism. Engagement with these involved allmanner of conceptual and political navigation and negotiation. Today I address three strandsof my work. First, I think through the figure of the Asian in British cultural formation. Second,I consider my negotiations through the terrain of feminism. And third, I address certain de-bates and issues across the field of difference and identity.

FIGURE OF THE ASIAN IN BRITISH CULTURAL FORMATION

I began my academic career at Bristol University and completed my Ph.D. part-time. In myPh.D. I addressed inter-generational change among South Asian and white groups. Amongother things, my thesis entailed interrogating stereotypic representations of young Asiansand their parents. The media, professional and political opinion of the 1970s and 1980s—alltended to depict Asian youth predominantly as the object of ‘culture clash’ or ‘inter-generational conflict’. It was argued that a young Asian growing up in Britain is exposed totwo cultures, one at home and the other at school, and as a result, the young person experiencesstress and identity conflicts. This argument was problematic on several counts. First, to posit



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Journal of Creative Communications 2:1&2 (2007): 245–256

a notion of two cultures is to suggest that there is only one ‘British’ and one ‘Asian’ culture.Yet, as we know, there are some significant differences in the upper-, middle- and working-class cultures of Britain, with each further differentiated according to region and gender.Similarly, ‘Asian cultures’ are differentiated according to class, caste, region, religion and gender.Therefore, theoretically at least, there would seem to be as many possibilities of intra-ethnicas of inter-ethnic ‘clashes of culture’. To think in terms of a simple bipolar cleavage, then, isuntenable.

Second, the caricature invoked by terms such as ‘between two cultures’, ‘culture clash’ and‘identity conflict’, which portrayed young Asians as disoriented, confused and atomised indi-viduals, was not supported by the evidence. This is not to deny that some young Asians mayindeed experience conflicts, and that some aspects of this dissonance could well be associatedwith specific cultural practices. The problem arises when this explanation becomes a centralparadigm for addressing Asian people’s experiences.

Another variation on the theme of ‘cultural clash’ came into play when uncertainties oflife cycle transitions were explained primarily by attributing them to the effects of inter-generational conflict. The argument was presented along the lines that young Asians growingup in Britain internalize ‘Western’ values that are at variance with the ‘traditional’ world-view of their parents; and in the process of emulating Western forms of behaviour, youthcomes into conflict with the parental generation. Undoubtedly, the potential for conflict be-tween generations is always there. But, inter-generational difference should not be conflatedwith conflict. The emergence of conflict cannot be predicted in advance, not least because inter-generational relationship might easily have been negotiated and managed in such a way as tofavour understanding and shared perspectives. The parental age group may not always beas inflexible as is sometimes assumed. The great majority of post-War Asian immigrantswere themselves quite young and impressionable when they first migrated to this country.They too have been subjected to new influences. That is to say that they are not always obliviousto the cross-pressures that bear upon their children. Indeed, the incidence of ‘conflict’ maybe no higher than amongst white young people and their parents.

Finally, the emphasis on ‘culture clash’ disavows the possibility of cultural interaction andfusion. There is no a priori reason to suppose that cultural encounters will invariably entailconflict. Conflict may or may not ensue and, instead, cultural symbiosis, improvization andinnovation may emerge as a far more probable scenario, as has been the case with South Asiangroups. Media now talks about ‘Asian Cool’ and Asian cultural innovations are increasinglyviewed as simultaneously Asian and British. But back in the 1970s and the 1980s there seemedto be an implicit assumption in much of this debate that cultural transmigration is a one-way traffic. Hence, the centuries of cultural contact and mutual influence between Asian and




Travels in Negotiations: Difference, Identity, Politics 247

British cultural forms was rarely acknowledged. Indeed, South Asia’s earlier cultural andcommercial links with ‘Europe’ extend back to the Greek and Roman times when the Westernhemisphere was not yet known as Europe, and Greece and Rome freely acknowledged theirindebtedness to the East and to Africa (Hiro 1971). Hence, indirectly, Britain has carried theimprint of Asia, Africa and the Middle East for at least two millennia. The point is that inter-cultural travel across the globe is an ancient phenomenon, and Britain is constituted out ofthese multifarious influences. The more recent, post-War cultural interactions and reconfigur-ations within Britain have their own historically specific features, but the influence remainsirreducibly multi-directional.

The period since the 1990 has been hugely eventful with wars, genocides, traffic in people,and political resurrections all over the world as its mainstay. The reconfiguration of the globalbalance of power following the demise of the Cold War, the attack on Twin Towers in NewYork, and the two Gulf Wars– have all combined to create a global crisis. As is increasinglyacknowledged even by sceptics, the contemporary world is being reinvented through a newform of imperialism. The figure of the ‘Asian’ has been impacted upon by these global changesin a particularly acute way. The publication of Salaman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the sub-sequent fatwa of 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issuing death sentence on Rushdieconverted a relatively local British event into a global incident of major proportions. For yearsthe ‘Rushdie Affair’, as it came to be known, sharply divided public opinion. There emergeda simplistic and dangerous binary through which opponents of the book became representedas deluded, backward and uncivilized in contrast to the supposedly enlightened liberal sup-porters of Rushdie. This binary became a prime site for mobilizing anti-Muslim opinion inBritain and abroad. The figure of the Asian was now fractured in a new way across religiouslines creating a post-colonial positionality of Muslim/nonMuslim.

One significant outcome of the wide circulation of this binary was that among Muslims itbecame the basis of a new consciousness of a pan-national Muslim political identity. There isnow the powerful discourse of the ‘terrorist’ that can pounce on and instantly criminalize awide variety of ‘suspects’. Among these, the young South Asian- or Middle Eastern-lookingyoung men, especially Muslims, are assumed to be prime suspects. The ‘them’ and ‘us’ divisionhas been fuelled by circulating racist discourses, including gendered discourses thatpathologize the lives of Muslim women. Indeed, the figure of the ‘veiled woman’ is a significanticon that is mobilized both locally as in places such as Blackburn, and globally in the WhiteHouse by the president of the USA and his colleagues, and indeed at No. 10, when they claimto have gone to war in order to free the ‘veiled women’. Unveiling the Eastern woman is, ofcourse, a long-standing fantasy of Orientalist discourses. But rarely have we seen her made



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into such an overt centrepiece of transnational politics. The image of veiled woman is seen asthe epitome of Eastern backwardness and unreason.

Orientalism is a key dynamic within current political regimes. For instance, on a visit tothe British forces in Basra in Iraq, Tony Blair, the British prime minister, described the soldiersas ‘the new pioneers of soldiering’ who were there to deal with the threat of ‘rogue states andthe virus of Islamic extremism’ that could reduce the ‘world system to chaos’ (Guardian 2004).Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Eric Hobesbwam discusses the dangers of this new imperi-alism with the USA at its helm. The British empire, he says, was probably the only one thatwas global insofar as it operated across the planet. But it saw its purpose as that of championingBritish interests. The new empire on the other hand sees itself as having a universal purposeand, as Hobesbawm argues, ‘Few things are more dangerous than empires pursuing theirown interest in the belief that they are doing humanity a favour’(Guardian 2003). All this hascreated a ‘state of siege’ climate amongst South Asian Muslim communities. In contrast tothe 1970s’ and 1980s’ image of young Asians, especially those with higher education qualifi-cations, as being supposedly more ‘Westernized’ and by implication somehow less ‘traditional’,the educated young people of today are more likely to be viewed as posing a threat. This ispartly due to the backgrounds of the young men who are supposed to have mastermindedthe attack on Twin Towers as well as the suicide bombers of 7 July in London. Asian Britishidentities are in flux and whatever form these political and cultural identities, take they areclosely interwoven into the British social and cultural fabric

FEMINIST CONTESTATIONS

The second academic and political development that has impacted centrally on my work isfeminism. I now turn to a particular moment in feminist debate when attention was focussedon the question of how to address issues of race in relation to gender and class. Among otherthings, it entailed a particular intervention by ‘feminists of colour’. It is important to revisitthe main points of this debate as it has been critical to feminist transformations in Britainand the USA. It led to the emergence of ‘women of colour’ as a political subject.

Feminist theory has been at the forefront of new directions in political, social and culturaltheory. These developments are inherently indebted to the internal critique within feminismmade by ‘women of color’ who have been pivotal in raising questions of ‘difference’ aroundsuch social axis as class, racism, ethnicity, sexuality and the problematic of global inequities.The critique consists of debates that emerged through political contestation both within and





outside the women’s movement. They had a particular resonance in post-World War II NorthAmerica and Britain. Hence, my focus is upon the anglophone debate in these twogeographical locations.

Emergence of the ‘Woman of Colour’ as a Political Subject

The terms ‘women of color’ and ‘white women’ throw into relief the political nature of dis-courses and practices through which these terms emerged as political subjects and becameconceptual components of social, political and cultural theory. They show how seeminglyneutral words such as ‘colour’ may assume speciûc meanings in different contexts so that, asin this instance, the colour of ‘whiteness’ is placed into question. The political subject of ‘womenof colour’ decentres ‘whiteness’ as a modality of power.

In the USA political tensions in feminism surrounding the interrelationship between ‘race’and other factors such as class and gender date back to the anti-slavery campaigns. Duringthe decade of the1830s, for example, American women became increasingly active in theabolitionist movement where they learnt to champion their own right to engage in politicalwork and where their experience of relative marginalization compelled them to form separatewomen’s anti-slavery societies. The first female anti-slavery society was formed in 1832 byblack women in Salem, Massachusetts, followed by similar societies established by whitewomen in other locations. Paradoxically, when the motion for women’s suffrage was firstintroduced amid immense controversy at the Seneca Falls Anti-Slavery Convention of 1848,black women were conspicuous by their absence. This omission was surprising, especially asblack women already had brought into the arena of public debate issues such as women’seducation, which the Convention was only just beginning to address. In May of 1866, whenwomen decided to establish an Equal Rights Association incorporating struggles for blackemancipation and women’s suffrage into a single campaign, a number of eminent speakers,including the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, argued against it. In class terms, too, this waspredominantly a middle-class women’s movement. Whilst a few individual black women, asfor instance Sojourner Truth, were able to participate in specific events, nonetheless, themovement overall did not take on board the contradictory relationship between racism andclass, or the question of sexuality in any significant way. Nor was the plight of native Americanpeoples or non-European immigrants an identifiable feature of these debates and activities(Davis 1981).

In Britain, as in the USA, the early women’s rights movement and later the Suffragists failedto give sufficient priority to the needs of working-class women or the issue of ‘race’. This isnot to deny that there were some women as, for example, Annie Besant, who was active on



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the anti-colonial front as well as on gender issues, and Sylvia Pankhurst, who placed consider-able emphasis on the conditions of the working class. Nevertheless, the effects of racism andclass inequality did not become a major feminist concern at this stage. Such amnesia aboutissues of ‘race’ cannot be attributed to the lack of presence of people of Irish, Jewish, Africanand South Asian descent—the primary target of racisms of the period—because they werefar from absent in Britain. Moreover, the history of the discourse of ‘race’ is inter-linked withslavery, colonialism and the Holocaust of Jews, gays and gypsies. Racism, therefore, can besaid to be one of the key factors in the formation of Western societies. Yet a significant numberof early publications by ‘second wave’ feminists seemed to display a certain disregard of racismas an internal feature of Western patriarchal relations. This neglect drew critical scrutinyfrom anti-racist women, especially women of color. One of the first critiques was launchedby the Combahee River Collective, a black lesbian feminist organization from Boston, USA.In 1977 they produced a document that demonstrates the complexity of theorizing women’ssubordination when analysing experiences based on simultaneous inter-section of diverseforms of injustice: The Collective advocates ‘the development of inte-grated analysis andpractice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking’. Pointingto the global dimensions of gender, the text speaks of the impact of ‘political- and economicsystems of capitalism and imperialism’, and emphasizes the question of institutional racismas well as what they call ‘racism in the white women’s movement’. In taking a stance againstbiological determinism, this feminist discourse articulates a certain non-essentialism even asits notion of identity politics would seem to exemplify what Gyatri Spivak later defined as‘strategic essentialism’. This text challenges essentialist readings of skin tone or physical ap-pearance as inherent ‘difference’ and disrupts any notion of ‘woman’ as a unitary category.

Black British Feminism

Black British feminism played a key role in this debate. In Britain during the 1970s the Americanterm ‘women of colour’ came to be figured as ‘black’. This was a consequence of coalitionpolitics among women of African, Caribbean, and South Asian descent who borrowed the‘black power’ vocabulary but re-signifed ‘black’ to embrace all ‘non-white’ people. The conceptof ‘black’ was designed to substitute the colonial term ‘coloured’. Black British feminism wasforged through the work of local organizations around issues such as wages and conditionsof work, immigration laws, reproductive rights and domestic violence. By 1978 local organ-izations had combined to form a national organization called the Organization of Women ofAfrican and Asian Descent, generally known as OWAAD. I was involved in the formation ofSouthall Black Sisters, a local organization in West London, and later a similar organization





in Leicester. Both were affiliated to OWAAD, and Southall Black Sisters is still very active infeminist politics. Intellectual and political conversations within OWAAD addressed issues ofclass, race and gender whilst remaining alive to the importance of cultural differences. Culturaldifference was acknowledged and worked through from a position of mutual respect. Thesedebates prefigured later theories of ‘difference’. The publications produced by black womenrepresent intellectual interventions through work that was the outcome of collective thinking.Their arguments marked a fundamental shift in feminist thinking and led to new directions.One major source of intellectual and political sustenance for me has been the journal FeministReview, which is produced by an editorial collective of which I am a member. Some of thekey debates on questions of gender, class and racism took place in the pages of the FeministReview.

Post-modernism and Feminist Theories

Feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980 were informed by conceptual repertoires drawnlargely from ‘modernist’ theoretical and philosophical traditions of European Enlightenmentsuch as liberalism and Marxism. The ‘post-modernist’ critique of these perspectives, includingtheir claims to universal applicability, had precursors within anti-colonial, anti-racist andfeminist critical practice. Post-modern theoretical approaches found sporadic expression inAnglophone feminist works from the late 1970s. But during the 1990s they became quite asignificant influence, in particular their post-structuralist variant. The encounter between anti-racism and post-structuralist perspectives provided some novel insights. For example, it wasno longer tenable to conceptualize ‘white feminism’ and ‘black feminism’ as if they were mutuallyexclusive entities, each carrying some unchanging trans-historical ‘essence’. Contrary toanalysis where process is reified and understood as personified in the bodies of individuals,these two distinctive yet overlapping sets of feminisms came now to be understood as repre-senting historically contingent relationships and contesting fields of discourses. The conceptof ‘agency’ was reconfigured through post-structuralist appropriations of psychoanalysis inorder to take account of psychic and emotional life. Post-structuralist insistence that meaningis relational, that subjectivity and identity are not products but ongoing processes, that powercan be both productive and coercive, that subordination can occur through inclusion as muchas exclusion—all this means that the post-structuralist paradigm has much in common withtheoretical interventions made by black feminism.

One feature of some recent work, including mine, is a concern with the potential of com-bining strengths of modern theory with post-modern insights. This work has taken several



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forms. Some developments are grouped under the rubric of post-colonial theory. Scholarsof postcolonial studies remind us that both the ‘metropolis’ and the ‘colony’ were altereddeeply by the colonial process, and that these articulating histories have a mutually constitutiverole in the present. Some scholars have attempted to combine post-structualist approacheswith neo-Marxist or psychoanalytic theories. A related development is associated with val-orization of the term diaspora. The concept of diaspora is increasingly used in examiningthe mobilities of people, cultures, capital and commodities in the context of globalization andtransnationalism. The concept is designed to analyse configurations of power in local andglobal encounters. In my work I use the concept of diaspora space as a Foucauldian genealogythat is reconfigured through psychoanalysis. Questions of identity and difference are centralto this framework, and it is to these that I now turn.

DIFFERENCE IN IDENTITY

Questions of difference, diversity and identity are central to examining diasporic spatialites.The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a plethora of critiquesthat served to interrogate the ways in which certain strands of Enlightenment thought couldlegitimate their highly particular and subjective outlook as a universal and objective world-view. Despite these critiques, however, this world-view continues to thrive. Indeed, it may beargued that it found its apotheosis in the Iraq war and we are still living with its fallout. Thestakes in the analysis and politics of ‘difference’ are indeed high. The problem is that the termmeans different things to different people, and its usage is beset with difficulties. In part theproblem is inherent in language itself, insofar as the words we use as concepts are simultan-eously used as part of everyday acts of communication. We tend to assume that we all knowwhat commonly used terms such as difference and identity actually mean. Of course, there isa sense in which this is partially true. These terms could not have become part of everydaylived culture if this were not the case. But it is important to bear in mind that by the time aword becomes part of what Gramsci calls our ‘commonsense’, it has already been refractedthrough multiple mediations and is not ‘transparently’ knowable; certainly, it cannot mean thesame thing to everyone in precisely the same way. Understandably, then, commonsense ter-minology is likely to become even more opaque when converted into theoretical concepts.

The notion of difference cannot be analysed within the confines of a single academic dis-cipline: its very complexity reveals the limits of disciplinary boundaries. Yet interdisciplinarystudy is not without its own difficulties, since the concept of difference is associated with variedand sometimes conflicting meanings within different theoretical frameworks and subject





disciplines. Bringing them together into conversation (a task that I have found singularlyproductive) may, however, lead to talking at cross-purposes unless the distinctive meaningof concepts within differing academic or political projects are clarified and spelt out.

In the fields of philosophy and political theory, for instance, the concept of difference hasserved as the site for developing a critique of the nature of modern Western thought with theaim of decentring the concept of identity. Within linguistics and literary theory, the concepthas played its part in the critique of structuralism. Post-structuralist theories of differencedraw upon insights from philosophy and theories of language in rethinking the process ofsignification. In anthropology and the emergent field of cultural studies, attention is centredon the problematic of cultural difference. In feminist theory the concept of difference has beenproductively utilized in interrogating differences within the category woman—differencesof class, ethnicity, generation and so on. In psychoanalysis difference signals the trauma ofseparation, an ongoing process throughout adulthood but one that is set in train during in-fancy. In post-colonial and anti-racist theory the idea of difference has been theorized as therelationship of ‘metropolis’ and ‘colony’ as articulating elements. On the other hand, there areessentialist constructions of difference. An example of this would be the discourse of race asa basis for dividing humanity into categories of inherent, immutable differences, the effectsof which may be witnessed in the multifarious processes of racism.

This partial and far from exhaustive list of different intellectual discourses of differencehas a special bearing on the analytical frame for the study of alterity with which I have beentrying to work, in that it draws on insights from these various sources. This frame operateswith a complex of concepts designed to address questions of subjectivity and identity in theirentanglements with socio-economic, political and cultural processes, which, in our era, entailencounters with late capitalist social relations.

How might we simultaneously hold on to social, cultural and psychic dimensions in ouranalysis of the problematic of difference/identity? I have tried to do this in part by analysingdifference along four intersecting axes:

1. theorized as social relation in the sociological sense;2. explored in terms of human experience;3. understood as subjectivity; and4. analysed in terms of social identity.

Of course, the problematic of difference is also the problematic of identity. Here, like manyothers, I have found Derrida’s singularly innovative concept of différance especially helpfulwith its simultaneous invocation of ‘differ’ and ‘deferral’. Identity, then, is always in process,



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never an absolutely accomplished fact, although experientially it may feel much more solidand finished than a process. Analytically, the issue is to tease out what it means when someonerefers to ‘having identity’. How is the term being used? Here it may be helpful to make a dis-tinction between social identity and identity understood as subjectivity. This distinction iscrucial even though the two facets of identity are far from mutually exclusive. Processes in-volved in the constitution of subjectivity are marked by contradictory processes of identifi-cation, projection, disavowal, desire and ambivalence. But when we proclaim a specific socialidentity, this is a conscious action seeking to make sense of ‘self ’ in relation to everyday life.To the extent that any conscious claim to identity is both socially and psychically contingent,the coherence and centred quality of self that is invoked is a deferral of difference, as StuartHall has so cogently and persuasively argued for many years. On the other hand political iden-tities are by definition attempts at creating shared, common goals through conscious agency.The two need to be distinguished in analysis even as they are virtually impossible to separatein life.

Social and political identities entail bringing issues into the public arena. In saying this, Ido not wish to endorse the public/private binary that feminist scholars have so convincinglycritiqued. I merely wish to indicate that political identities are formed through social practiceand belong, in large part, to the arena of public action. I have come across opposition topost-structuralist notions of identity as decentred, fragmented and in process, on the groundsthat such a conception does not provide a basis for political action. I do not think that this isthe case. The idea of identity as fragmented refers predominantly to the processes of subject-ivity, and not to conscious political action, although conscious action is always marked by‘interior’ emotional investments, ruptures and contradictions. Jane Flax makes a helpful dis-tinction between a ‘sense of coherent self ’ that all subjects need for purposeful action, incontrast to the idea of an essential core that a human is born with and which merely flowersin the fullness of time. Unconscious life continually articulates with conscious action, makingvoluntaristic notions of agency problematic.

Conscious agency and unconscious subjective forces are enmeshed in the everyday ritualsof eating, shopping, watching television, listening to music, attending political meetings orother social activities. These rituals provide the site on which a sense of belonging—a senseof ‘identity’—may be forged in the process of articulating its difference from other people’sway of doing things. I have called this desire to belong a ‘homing desire’ (Brah 1996). But whatis socially important is the way in which these differences are understood. It depends onwhether such differences are simply accepted as unproblematic ways of doing things differently,or whether they are invested with negative value.





Identity may be understood as diasporzed time-space. In terms of our identifications, weare all diasporized across multiple social and psychic ‘borders’, and the homing desire is adesire for security and belonging. The political question is how we help create socio-economicand political conditions that are conducive to the nurture of caring and empathetic sub-jectivities. My thinking about diasporicity across space and time is embedded in the memoryof an incident in my undergraduate days in California when I was studying Einstein’s theoryof relativity alongside poetry. I was fascinated by common insights and thematics in thesetwo very different discourses of physics and poetry. Recently, I went back to the theory of re-lativity that I find fascinating but still hugely difficult to fathom. But this time somethingthat Einstein says made a different kind of sense: ‘I wished to show that space-time is not nec-essarily something to which one can ascribe a separate existence, independently of the actualobjects of physical reality. Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially ex-tended. In this way the concept “empty space” loses its meaning’ (1961: 2).

Space, then, does not exist outside of its conditions of existence, outside the meanings itassumes in discursive practices. Einstein is referring to physical objects, but his ideas seem toapply also to human subjects. If the metaphor of space-time is to serve as an analytical tool,it is necessary to specify the conditions under which designate spatialities and temporalitiesassume particular configurations of power. A focus upon the spatiality of global relations to-day, for example, draws attention to the varied discourses of globalization emanating from awide range of sources: from the high citadels of the IMF, World Bank and corporate capital,through political discourses of nation-states, to the voices of environmentalists and other cam-paigners, and to the narratives of displacement by refugees, asylum seekers and labour mi-grants. These different discourses have different consequences. As Doreen Massey argues, somediscourses of globalization ignore economic and political forces that treat people as disposablelabour, and subject large sections of the world’s population to poverty, hunger and dis-enfranchisement. Faced with the uncertainties unleashed by radical social change, peoplebecome increasingly susceptible to appeals to political discourses of identity such as nation-alism. It is not surprising, therefore, that appeals to essentialist forms of group identity leadto situations of conflict all over the world. Few of us are impervious to the emotional under-tones of the discourse of ‘my people’. So we need to be aware of our own responses as muchas those of others.

The need to address questions of difference and identity remains important for both pol-itical and analytical reasons. Politically, it is important that we challenge practices that sub-ordinate and oppress people deemed to be ‘different’.

We need an everyday politics geared to foster networks of solidarity and connectivitywithout erasing the uniqueness of others.



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REFERENCES

Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge.Davis, Angela. (1981). Women, Race and Class. London: Women’s Press.Einstein, A. (1961). Relativity: Special and General Theory. New York: Crown.Guardian. 2004. 5 January.Guardian. 2003. 14 June.Hiro, D. (1971). Black British, White British. New York: Monthly Review Press.



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