A personally reflective review of Avtar Brah’s Decolonial Imaginings: Intersectional conversations and contestations

Growing up in Britain, one can easily go from primary school to university and beyond without encountering many Black tutors. I use ‘Black’ here in its ‘political colour’ sense, which encompasses all Black and Brown people. Before embarking on an MSc in ‘Race’ and Ethnic Relations at Birkbeck College, University of London, I had been taught by two Black teachers – one Indian and the other Moroccan. One of my professors at Birkbeck was Avtar Brah, an East-African Asian. The Masters was a first of its kind in the UK, and she was one of its developers. The Masters programme is now called Culture, Diaspora, and Ethnicity, and Professor Emerita Avtar Brah has retired, having joined Birkbeck in 1985.

In this book of essays and interviews, Brah’s identity as an East African Asian – she was born in Punjab, India, and grew up in Uganda – is fundamental to her writing and research on decoloniality, anti-racist feminism and intersectionality. She writes that the book’s contents “highlight the imbrication of the personal with the political, thereby underlining the importance of the longstanding feminist slogan ‘the personal is political”’ (pg. 2). Given the theme of this special issue is ‘Resistant Knowledges,’ Brah’s work aptly fits this modality.

In 1972, Brah came to the UK as a refugee after the then president, Idi Amin, expelled all Asians. Before this, as an Asian woman in Uganda, Brah experienced a racial hierarchy, positioning White people at the top, Asian people in the middle, and Africans at the bottom. She explains how she came to academia ‘accidentally’ after having taken a research post at Bristol University requiring her two languages – Urdu and Panjabi.

The development of her sense of political consciousness started from her early teenage years when she read Malcolm X’s autobiography as well as the work of two radical intellectuals: the Panjabi male novelist, Nanak Singh, whose work was critical of British colonial rule in India; and a female poet, Amrita Pritam, who wrote the important poem on partition titled Aj Aakhaan Waris Nu (Today I Invoke Waris Shah). Brah’s other influences range from Gramsci’s concepts of common sense and hegemony to Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and postcolonial feminism. She also speaks of the tenets of her Sikhism with its commitment to gender equality, social justice, and anti-caste politics.

Brah describes her undergraduate days in the USA in the late 1960s, where she became involved with the Black Power movement (Leonard, 2021). Similarly, when she came to Britain in the 1970s, she became involved with the early feminist movement as well as various social movements. In 1979, Brah was one of the founding members of Southall Black Sisters (SBS), a seminal, secular, not-for-profit women’s organisation, which stills exists to this day. SBS was formed after a National Front (a White British neo-fascist, racist organisation) march on Southall – a predominantly South Asian neighbourhood in London – resulted in the death of an anti-racist protester and teacher, Blair Peach, who was killed by police.

Brah was one of the earliest thinkers to write about intersectionality and diasporas, which she sees as ‘intimately interconnected’. This was demonstrated in her book, Cartographies of Diaspora, Contesting Identities, published in 1996, which examined questions of gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, class, culture and belonging. Brah writes of her acknowledgment of the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement (pg. 104) – a US Black lesbian collective – seen as a major precursor to the intersectional debate.

In today’s world where the politics of the neo-right is on the resurgence and the movement of peoples is so politically contested, Decolonial Imaginings is an essential read from a thinker and scholar whose life and work are so closely intertwined. It traverses many aspects of Brah’s research and formulations on decoloniality, anti-racist feminism, migration, borders, and intersectionality. As someone who studied under Brah, I felt immensely privileged to have done so while reviewing this book, which highlights how relevant her thinking is in a fractured world. Brah’s teachings have aided my own writings and research as a politically conscious library worker and scholar-activist and my pursuit of intersectional justice over the course of my career in higher education libraries in the UK. Until we piece together the intersections outlined by thinkers like Brah and apply them to our decolonial social justice praxis, our struggles will not find their place in the politics of hope that we all crave as agents of change.