Travelling with Strangers

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a reflection on my book, Strange Encounters, 20 years after its original publication. It considers 'travelling with strangers' as a way of thinking of my own research trajectory as I deepened my thoughts and understanding of how strangers are recognised as strangers in a range of institutional as well as national contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Strangers
• bodies
• spaces
• racism
• surveillance
• complaint

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A revised version of my PhD was published as my first book entitled Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism. I refer to the experience in the firth chapter of the book (1998: 194–195).

2 In fact, I do not mention the experience that led me to write about ‘strange encounters’ until chapter 6, page 128. My later book, Living a Feminist Life (2017) brings my own experiences forward as a way of bringing ‘feminist theory home.’

3 This is the only reviewer comment I can remember, probably because it annoyed me at the time (now I would say, well yes). Unfortunately I threw away my research materials for Strange Encounters when I left Lancaster for Goldsmiths. I also lost the disk with my email archive. So I do not have copies of the reader reports.

4 It is not surprising that I began heading in that direction by following the figure of the stranger given that Alfred Schutz’s (1944) classical study of strangers came from the phenomenological tradition. The book was also informed by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as work by feminist phenomenologists such as Gail Weiss, Iris Marion Young and Rosalyn Diprose as well as Frantz Fanon's work (2008 [1967]). All of this work is referred to in chapter 2, ‘Embodying Strangers.’ I have travelled with Fanon's work for many years. I had begun a much closer reading of the corpus of Frantz Fanon’s work around the time Strange Encounters was published. I had been introduced to Fanon quite early on as an undergraduate student but primarily in relation to postcolonial theory and in particular through Homi Bhabha’s use of ‘The Fact of Blackness.’ I also refer to Fanon in chapter 2 of Strange Encounters, but it was not until subsequent books that I engaged with Fanon more deeply. His work was crucial to The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Willful Subjects (2014). In terms of my engagement with phenomenology, it was not really until I read Husserl’s work (and found a table in his writing!) and began to write more directly about orientation that I started to think of myself as doing a kind of queer phenomenology.

5 The Promise of Happiness (2010) and What’s the Use? (2019) both consider the relationship between utilitarianism and empire and thus engage more directly with postcolonial studies then any of my other works.

6 Cited in Aina Khan (2020), ‘Why are ethnic minorities more vulnerable to coronavirus?’ https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/ethnic-minorities-vulnerable-coronavirus-200417115216263.html. Last accessed May 4 2020. See also https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-deaths-doctors-inquiry-government-labour-marsha-de-cordova-a9460871.html. Last access May 5 2020.

7 To quote from a recent and powerful anti-racist poem performed during the coronavirus epidemic, ‘You cheer when I toil.’ For the full performance see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXGIt_Y57tc. Last accessed November 19 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She recently completed a book Complaint! which is forthcoming with Duke University Press in September 2021. Her previous publications include What's the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998).