This needs responses at different levels. The idea of a book about feminism from the perspective of black women resulted from three of us being strategically positioned—at different points—in writing/ publishing worlds: Gabeba [Baderoon] as a poet and academic, myself as an academic with various other writer-editing interests, and Roshan Cader as a commissioning editor at Wits University Press. I’d been thinking about a collection of my own essays on feminism, intersectionality and assemblage, and discussed this with Roshan from the end of 2014. With the explosion of black feminist thought in public debate and especially among students in the context of the Fees Must Fall (FMF) Movement (from 2015), Gabeba, then a research fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), began a conversation with Roshan about the value of a black feminist collection. Roshan felt that this would be politically important and commercially viable. The outcome was our meeting and committing ourselves to a collection at STIAS. The STIAS is in many ways a bizarre space to think about this particular book’s conceptualizing. But it’s also possibly symbolic (if one wishes to be optimistic about “storming a bastion of hegemonic knowledge production”) or dismally prophetic (if one is being cynical about centers appropriating margins).

A second and hugely important level had to do with the timing of work on the book. A first conceptualizing meeting took place in the wake of the start of the FMF movement when young black South African feminists were speaking out extremely bravely about misogyny and homophobia within FMF and anti-racist movements generally. The wide circulation of their views—especially through social media, images and the mass media meant that black feminist thought was dramatically thrust into the public domain. One aim of the book was to demonstrate how black feminist politics and thought energized (and didn’t simply “add on” to) critical race theory, decoloniality and anti-racist politics. Another was to participate in the discussions, arguments and interventions among young black feminists at the time. And to signal that  black feminist thought has a long legacy in South Africa. What could be called the editors’ generation may seem like “a first.” because we went to university around the time of South Africa’s transition to democracy and wrote and circulated our thoughts in almost “mainstream” ways. But, as I hope the collection indicates, Gabeba and I wrote and grew in the wake of generations of southern African feminist thinkers and activists before.

As radical teachers and women who are active in worlds of knowledge-making, the two editors felt it was important to archive certain voices between the covers of a book, and the challenge of course was where to draw the line. The collection probably contains twice as many contributions as what we initially envisaged and discussed with the publisher.

At yet another level, South African publishers have tended to focus on black women’s fictional and autobiographical writing, or on poetry. This tends to be symptomatic of a publishing and reading/marketing stereotype about black women in the public sphere being “interesting” mainly as entertainers, storytellers, or so-called “creatives,” rather than as knowledge-makers and critical thinkers with writing to offer a broad audience. One aim of the collection was to collapse the usual distinction between fiction/autobiography and non-fiction, to focus on the collection as being “knowledge,” and to be provocative about which forms of knowledge are considered to be authoritative. Hence the choice of the personal essay, whose force the introduction discusses.

First and foremost, Patricia McFadden. And in relation to that, several Zimbabwean-based feminists including Rudo Gaidzanwa and Ruth Meena (who were very immersed in the hub of black southern African intellectual activism based in Harare, especially in the 1980ss). The radical focus of intellectual activist work at Southern African Political Economic Series (SAPES) in Zimbabwe was actually huge for me, and of course the radical women especially so because they were speaking about what many of the admired male scholars were, while also flagging attention to gendered dynamics. Ultimately their takes on, for example, postcolonial nationalism were for me much richer than those of Ibbo Mandaza, Sam Moyo, or Brian Roftopolous, for example. Second,  my peers. A number of black feminists were starting to publish in the mid-1990s, so people I studied with or connected with socially and in groups (for example, Yvette Abrahams started an important collective in the 1990s called the “women of colour consciousness raising group”) included Elaine Salo, Gabeba of course, Pumla Gqola, Zimitri Erasmus, Zine Magubane, Mary Hames (who has a chapter in the book), and many others. All of us were grappling with our positionality relative to white-centric academia and masculinism.

But another important influence for me, and I suspect for very many other young and older South African feminists, were fiction writers, especially Bessie Head, Yvonne Vera and Zoe Wicomb, among others. What was remarkable was their attentiveness to so many levels of social and psychic experience. Theoretical frames require us to categorize power quite technically to explain it, hence our use of stolid terms like “intersectionality”. Writers like Head, Vera or Wicomb (who I interview in “Surfacing”) plumb depths of racialized and gendered human experience in ways that defy clinical categorization, and that are so much richer. African-American feminists, because they have been hypervisible, were definitely an influence, as is the case for many young feminists today. Retrospectively I realize I leaned on them mainly as sources of authority, because African-American feminists had more conventional “clout,” and not necessarily because they were as useful to what I was trying to explore as, say Patricia McFadden or Bessie Head.

Mmmmm. I hope the “quarrel” as you put it doesn’t seem like an incidental or contrived intervention of the book. The various chapters make the case implicitly since it’d be pointless for each individual essayists to invoke the problems of hegemony in global black feminism; they speak to and about their locations in colonial legacies and global knowledge economies against the backdrop—so to speak—of the authority of certain strands of black feminism. The introduction establishes why the need for a regional geopolitical focus is important in the identification and appreciation of positioned knowledge. What’s often understood as global or diasporic black feminism has drowned out certain voices, not only South African (though the case is made about this). But also, for example, black British writers. I started reading the work of the black British feminist Gail Lewis only after meeting her at a conference somewhere fairly recently, and found (still find) her wide-ranging work extraordinary, especially because of its connection to activism. (Much black South African feminism bears similar evidence of connectedness to activism). The introduction’s point about black American feminism isn’t that it’s set out to be insular or dominant of course, but that it has become so because of the weird operation of the global knowledge economy, which elevates what is Euro-American, and mainly North American. It irks me terribly when certain black American feminists are incessantly quoted for saying something that southern African feminists may have said in much more compelling or relevant ways. The essays certainly don’t talk about this, because the introduction frames the essays. But they do implicitly demonstrate that, for example, intersectionality (that word again!), for example, can be thought about differently and in ways that resonate for many readers in southern Africa compared to North America. What I do hope that readers of the book recognize is the distinctiveness of voices that are attentive to race and gender, and also the politics of region and standpoint epistemologies.

Mmmm. An ongoing South African story. To start off with, the inclusive Black Consciousness definition of black is shared by the editors, and determined our approach in finding and selecting writers. It may not be shared with all the contributors, but I think it is with most. As editors, we wanted to develop a collection that countered the sorts of claims to identity that ultimately mirror South Africa’s colonial and apartheid era chauvinism, prejudice, and hatred. The book seeks to draw together writers who have neglected but radical ideas about South African experiences and senses of self. And this meant they shared experiences of being othered in gendered and racial terms. We didn’t want it to mean a shared or collective effort to claim or celebrate any essentialized identification—whether gendered, racialized, national, or ethnicicized. The claims to identification that you refer to are, of course, very real for many South Africans, in recent social movements as they have been in the past. We hope that readers of the book will value or at least find meaningful and important the senses of being black (the use of the present continuous was meant to signal identification, rather than a fixed identity). This would be a very different response from trawling the book in desperate search of an expression of identity that a reader wishes to claim for various political or existential reasons—and only when this is found deem the book satisfying. In this sense, we could be said to have deliberately excluded writing that insisted on, for example, celebrating being coloured, or affirming the significance of entitlement to South African citizenship and belonging by virtue of birth or national origin. What we call South African culture and writing is profoundly affected by regional and continental figures and trends.

South African society thrives (and has always thrived) politically, economically, and culturally because of the flow of ideas, bodies and things across arbitrary borders created by colonialism. Many of the contributors to the book would—to some—not be South African. But they belong to this place in many ways; they have invested their intellectual excellence, their creativity, their passions in people, places and activities in this country and have been inspired by and inspire these. It is hard to understand how many South Africans truly believe that “the rest of Africa” has nothing to offer, which is a sad and tragic colonial legacy at the heart of many South Africans’ sense of exceptionalism; Stuart Hall’s ironic use of “the west and the rest” is very real in the fixation among South Africans with “us” and “Africa”. It was encouraging that a sense of South Africa’s inextricable connectedness to the rest of the continent surfaced at moments in the FMF struggle. But the curiosity about and interest in African politics, literature, and academic knowledge still hasn’t really taken off, whether among students or established scholars. Clearly a groundswell of feeling around this  —among an intellectual elite and people in general—has not begun to go far enough, as we see in the recent spate of politically orchestrated and rationalized attacks by South Africans on black African foreigners in the form of the social media campaign, Operation Dudula. Not, of course, on white “foreigners.”