Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia edited by DeborahGabriel and Shirley AnnTate. London, UK: Trentham Books/IOE Press, 2017, 164 pp., £24.36, ISBN10-185856848X, ISBN13-978-185856848.

Abstract

Women of colour (WoC) working in British academia have been waiting a long time for a book like Ivory Tower to be published by a British publisher. Since, for far too long, our stories, experiences and marginalization have been ignored or left unattended to by the university sector we work in. In the post‐feminist post‐race university (Tate & Bagguley, 2017) women have been encouraged to identify only one area of difference that determines their marginalization by structures of power — their sex (Lorde, 1984; see also Liu, 2018). This narrow focus on sex permits a sector‐wide fictionalization of WoC's career trajectories that occludes Whiteness and class from an analysis of why WoC in academia are the most bullied, precarious, underpaid and junior workers in a given faculty (Runnymede Trust, 2017). By centering and drawing on Black Feminisms, Ivory Tower, as an edited volume of ten chapters written by ten British women academics of colour,supplies multiple counter‐narratives to the post‐feminist post‐race fictionalization. Drawing on similar projects from across the Atlantic (e.g., Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2012), these narratives are published in the hope that they may spark critical consciousness among their readers who can then take the steps of informing others that WoC exist in British academia and that they are needed (Wilson, 2017). To this extent, Ivory Tower is much more than a book, writes Gabriel (2017, p. 3) in her introduction, it is a ‘collective research project centred on discursive activism’.