African-Caribbean women, (post)? Diaspora, and the meaning of home

ABSTRACT

Drawing on bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Carole Boyce-Davies, this paper develops an ethical framework to provide a gendered analysis of relative power inside and outside the home. In doing so, it considers the ways in which our view of home as African-Caribbean women, impacts our understanding of '(post) diaspora' (Dunn, Leith, and Suzanne Scafe. 2019. “African-Caribbean Women: Migration, Diaspora, Post-Diaspora.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 13: 1–16) in the UK. Insofar as home is central to the idea of diaspora, I suggest that home must be conceptualised as an interdependent 'adult's' home rather than a dependent 'child's' home. On this reading, in the context of global power relations, I caution that while offering a useful and necessary point of departure from diaspora, the use of 'post' could be deployed to undermine an unapologetically intersectional black politics. As such, I claim the (Post) Diaspora Network's methodology, rather than the term itself, best demonstrates the liberatory intent and importance of a (post) diaspora subjectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• African-Caribbean women
• (post) diaspora
• home
• black Britain
• power relations

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 BAME – is an acronym for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic used in public policy in Britain.