Challenging Imperial Feminism

Abstract

Our task here is to begin to identify the ways in which a particular tradition, white Eurocentric and Western, has sought to establish itself as the only legitimate feminism in current political practice. We seek to address ourselves in very broad terms, to the theoretical and consequently political limitations of Euro-American feminism and the ways such analyses inform and distort white women's political practice. In challenging such feminist writings we not only look at the ways in which analyses of racism have been significantly lacking from that work but equally importantly we look at the ways in which we as Black women have been made 'visible' in such writings and the terms in which our experiences have been explained. The growth of the Black feminist movement in Britain in the last decade has forced the question of the centrality of Black women's oppression and exploitation onto the political and theoretical agendas. The political energy of Black women who have organized at the grassroots within our communities against the myriad of issues engendered by the racism of the British state has inspired and pointed to the urgent need to challenge many of the theoretical conceptualizations and descriptions of Black and Third World women existing within white feminist literature. Bell Hook's argument (1982) that racism in the women's movement in the USA has acted to exclude the participation of Black women is equally applicable to the British situation: