Anna Carastathis, Intersectionality: Origins, contestations, horizons

Abstract

Anna Carastathis' book starts with a gripping personal preface, a ''locus of enunciation'' that situates the story that is to come. In situating the book, this personal preface also tells the author's story, a journey of (un)belonging and lost rejected identities, illegible racialisation, and of ongoing contestation between unrepresented dislocation and privilege. It is a story illuminated by the author's reading of Cuban feminist professor Mirtha Quintanales' 1983 essay ''I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance'' (Quintanales, 1983). Carastathis asks: ''Which differences matter and which are immaterial?'' (p. xv). She presents the book as an act of gratitude to, and in solidarity with, black feminism as a political project and as an attempt to imagine new identities that challenge imposed classifications.The book is a call to decolonise intersectionality, return to its political roots, reclaim its provisionality and reimagine how feminism can challenge the power relations that use categories and difference to perpetuate oppression. Not doing so, argues Carastathis, can undermine the premise of intersectionality: ''the success of intersectionality may mark its failure, the wide travel of the concept its shallow apprehension'' (p. 3). It is thus not surprising that, other than the ontological quest of reimagining identities in coalitional terms, no fixed prescriptive horizons result from the author's examination, particularly in epistemic and measurement terms: Carastathis is asking intersectionality to go back rather than beyond; to recover, retrace and embrace (p. 5).The author starts by noting the move of intersectionality to the centre of feminist thought -to the point of becoming ''a cliche´, a commonplace'' -since it was initially theorised by Kimberle´W. Crenshaw in 1989, building on an earlier trajectory of black feminist work that can be traced back to the 19th century. On the first page, Carastathis makes a bold point that underlies a central premise in the book: Crenshaw has been most widely cited as an originator of intersectionality, ''if rarely closely read''.This book consolidates the author's previous work (Carastathis, 2008(Carastathis, , 2013(Carastathis, , 2014) centred on critically examining the concept of intersectionality by particularly focusing on Crenshaw'