Search

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Feminist Review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version BRAH, A. and CLINI, C., 2018. Contemporary feminist discourses and practices within and across boundaries: an interview with Avtar Brah. Feminist Review, 117 (1), pp.163–170 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0079-2.

On 3 August 2012, Shafilea Ahmed’s parents were convicted of her murder, nine years after the brutal ‘honour’ killing. The case offers important insights into how ‘honour’-based violence might be tackled without constructing non-Western cultures as inherently uncivilised. Critiquing the framing devices that structure British debates about ‘honour’-based violence demonstrates the prevalence of Orientalist tropes, revealing the need for new ways of thinking about culture that do not reify it or treat it as a singular entity that can only be tackled in its entirety; instead, it is important to recognise that cultures consist of multiple, intersecting signifying practices that are continually ‘creolising’. Thus, rather than talking purely about culture, debates on ‘honour’-based violence should explore the intersection of culture with gender and other axes of differentiation and inequality.

Avtar Brah (AB) was interviewed by Les Back (LB) on 3 July 2009 at a colloquium held to mark her retirement where, inter alia, her work was discussed. The interview is a reflection on her politics, activism and scholarship. It touches on some key moments of her life.

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lott's recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mother's suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lott's discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of ‘race’ are all but absent, and the racialized ‘commonsense’ that pervades the interviews with other local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the ‘diaspora space’ of London/Britain, interrogating essentialist ‘origin stories’ of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism, and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms – ‘ajnabi’, ‘ghair’, and ‘apna/apni’ – in constructing a non-binarized understanding of identification across ‘difference’.

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 negotiations through 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.

This simulation study investigated the effect on mean flow time and makespan of localized scheduling rules with dynamically established priorities in a flow shop with multiple processors. The study examined the effects of problem characteristics (number of jobs, number of machine stages and number of parallel processors at each stage) and the performance of priority rules using regression analysis. Although structural characteristics explained most of the variation in performance, priority rules also had an effect. The "shortest processing time first" rule was consistently superior; its superiority was greater for mean flow time than for makespan.

We are living in a period marked by profound changes. The political upheavals of recent times in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Central and South America to note a few examples and the aftermath of the Gulf War, signal major realignments in the structuring of the world political order. There has been a fundamental transformation in the political economy of late twentieth-century capitalism with a growing dominance of multinational capital, an increasing consolidation of global markets, the development of new techniques in production and distribution systems, the formation of a new international division of labour, and a revolution in the technologies of communication. In the cultural sphere, the homogenizing tendencies of mass cultural consumption across transnational boundaries are paralleled by a reassertion of the local aesthetic, political and ethnic tradition, and a call for a recognition of heterogeneity and cultural difference. In Western Europe, '1992' has come to signify a new phase in the relations between the twelve members of the European Community. On 1 January 1993, the internal borders of the twelve states officially came down with the intent of allowing the free movement of capital, goods, services and certain categories of people. The emerging configuration that is increasingly described as the 'New Europe' is as yet difficult to define. What will this new configuration be? Is the new Europe primarily a constellation of economic interests emerging in the face of growing competition, especially from Japan and the USA? To what extent will Eastern European countries become Western Europe's new colonies? What will be the impact of such realignments of European countries on the 'Third World'? What will be the place of Europe in the wake of the Gulf War now that the USA emerges as the dominant global