Diane Abbott, misogynoir and the politics of Black British feminism’s anticolonial imperatives: ‘In Britain too, it’s as if we don’t exist’

Abstract

This article argues that it is remiss to understand the acute intensification of White supremacist politics in contemporary Britain without paying close attention to how this racism is inherently gendered and sexualised. This will be discussed in relation to the gendered racism of ‘misogynoir’ as experienced by the British Member of Parliament Diane Abbott. The article uses Shirley Anne Tate’s powerful analysis of the Sable-Saffron Venus in the English imaginary to argue that forms of British, and more explicitly English, national identity have been worked out on the back of systemic efforts to erase the material and epistemic presence of Black women in Britain from the British body politic. It further argues that the politics of erasure extends to the epistemic elision of Black British feminist theorising within the field of social theory. What then are the consequences and interplay of both the lived and epistemic acts of violence? I explore these issues by mapping Black British feminism’s anticolonial politics to argue that we should bring this tradition to bear in our analysis of this most recent iteration of racism in our contemporary times.