Blackness at the Intersection: Intersectionality and the Black Diaspora

A ground-breaking collection applying Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality to the black diasporic experience in Britain.

In the 1980s, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term ’intersectionality’. Since then, the concept has spread across national and disciplinary boundaries, and has had a transformative impact on the way in which we understand identity and the experience of discrimination. But outside the US, the application of intersectional theory has largely been disconnected from any analysis of ’Blackness’, despite intersectionality’s origins in critical race theory (CRT).

Curated by Crenshaw, Andrews and Wilson as well as several of the leading scholars of CRT, this collection bridges that gap, and is the first to apply both these concepts to contexts outside the US. Focusing on Blackness in Britain, the contributors examine how scholars and activists are employing intersectionality to foreground Black British experiences. Its essays encompass key issues such as gender and Black womanhood, issues of representation within contemporary British culture, and the position of Black Britons within institutions such as the family, education and health. The book also looks to the role intersectionality can play in shaping future political activism, and in forging links beyond ’Blackness’ to other social movements.

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, USA. She is a pioneering scholar of critical race theory, who coined the term ’intersectionality’.

Kehinde Andrews is Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, UK. He is author of Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century (2018), Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality and the Black Supplementary School Movement (2013) and The New Age of Empire (2021).

Annabel Wilson is a PhD student in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK.