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Race & Class
Copyright 2014 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 55(4): 1 7
10.1177/0306396813519941 http://rac.sagepub.com
On lived theory: an interview with
A. Sivanandan
AVERY F. GORDON
Abstract: For a panel discussion on the work of the Institute of Race Relations
(IRR) and Race & Class, at the Historical Materialism Conference 2013, Avery
Gordon talked to A. Sivanandan as to what had guided his politics, thinking and
writing on Black struggle, racism and globalism, over the last forty years.
1
He
describes how the IRR reoriented itself to relate to subject peoples experiences,
how new theory was developed by him and IRR to speak, not to other theories,
but to ongoing struggles for equality, and the importance of being flexible and
addressing racism as it changes with larger societal changes.
Keywords: Council of Management, ethnicism, Institute of Race Relations, Race &
Class, race relations, xeno-racism
Avery Gordon: You and the staff took over the Institute of Race Relations in 1972 after
a protracted struggle with its Council of Management. First in a pamphlet and then
later in an article telling the story of the Institutes transformation, you used a phrase
that I took as the title of our panel because it seems to me to capture so well the stand-
point of your collective work.
Avery F. Gordon, Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has been
connected to the IRR for many years and serves on the Editorial Working Committee of Race &
Class.
519941RAC0010.1177/0306396813519941Race & ClassGordon
research-article2014
2 Race & Class 55(4)
You wrote: race relations demands a holistic approach a reappraisal of the whole
of society, its value systems and its political and economic structure since such an
apprehension is fraught with strategies of change, race relations comprehends both
thinking and doing, be-ing and becoming. It restores, that is, the continuum between
existence and politics: the experience and the power to change it.
2
So, lets start at the
beginning with the guidelines that you developed for working after the takeover and how
they were different from what had gone on before?
A. Sivanandan: Quite simply the guidelines came out of the struggle. The
Institute had been set up as an independent think-tank, as an objective research
body, but its work was becoming increasingly partisan carrying out policy-
oriented research which supported the racist acts of successive governments,
particularly over immigration. In the course of which, we came to the conclu-
sion that this kind of research was defining the problem as one of racialism not
racism, i.e. personal prejudice not structured injustice. Policy-oriented research
inevitably pandered to the concerns of government, not its subjects. It was not
relations between races that needed looking at but power relations on the
ground. And that meant research which would speak to the needs of the sub-
jected to overcome oppression and injustice. That in turn meant that the research
had to translate their authentic experience into action. And that necessitated not
taking away their authority over their own experience through either high the-
ory or ideological orthodoxy. (For between the experience and the meaning
falls the interpreter.)
We learnt that there has to be an organic relationship between the experience
and its meaning for it to lead to action. In other words there has to be an organic
relation between theory and practice a relationship that takes in the general
(state, society, economy etc.) and the particular (the individual, the community
etc.) both at once, moving between the two levels seeing the general in the
particular and the particular in the general the wood and the trees and the trees
in the wood. This is especially so in the fight against racism because it combines
the existential and the political, oppression and exploitation, race and class.
One of the things our struggle at IRR taught us was to break with orthodoxies,
change the terms of debate the political culture if you like. For example, we
challenged the academic race orthodoxy of push and pull factors as the reason
for immigration from the colonies and showed that colonialism and immigration
were part of the same continuum that we were settlers and not immigrants, citi-
zens not aliens. The purpose of my aphorism we are here because you were
there was to capture the idea of the continuum in a sentence intelligible to all.
Thats what theory should do.
Similarly, we contested the Marxist orthodoxy that the race struggle should be
subsumed to the class struggle because once the class struggle was won, racism
would disappear. That did not speak to the lived experience of the black working
class. Racism had its own dynamic. Black and White unite was a goal to strive for,
not the reality on the ground and therefore required that White
Gordon: An interview with A. Sivanandan 3
and Black workers had to traverse their own autonomous routes to the common
rendezvous. And in the course of the last forty years we have fought the official
and academic versions of ethnicism (which divided communities and replaced
the fight against racism with a fight for culture), racism awareness training (which
personalised racism and made it a white disease), identity politics, who we are
politics (which created hierarchies of oppression our take was that who we are
is what we do), Lord Scarmans remedy of positive discrimination to counter
racial disadvantage (which was like breaking our legs and handing us crutches
our take was dont break our legs in the first place i.e. outlaw racism),
Macphersons definition of institutional racism (which stopped short of the state
racism that gives the imprimatur to both popular and institutional racism), the
idea that racism was an aspect of fascism (our take was that racism was fascisms
breeding ground), the idea promoted by Black professionals that anti-racism
should primarily address the glass ceiling (our take was that there were two rac-
isms: the racism that discriminates and the racism that kills and our priority was
with the racism that killed), we were not in the business of ameliorating the prob-
lems of the Black middle class.
On the international level we saw racism and colonialism as symbiotic. The
struggles for Third World independence against colonialisms racial oppression
and class exploitation made for common denominators of struggle in the mother
country. And the joint struggles (of Asians, Africans and West Indians) that
occurred in the 1960s and 1970s defined us as a people and a class and a people
for a class and had made Black not the colour of our skin but the colour of our
politics.
Hence the academic journal Race subtitled a journal for race and group relations
was turned into Race & Class, subtitled a journal for black and Third World libera-
tion. And the Editorial Working Committee was chosen to reflect that political
line with the help of scholar activists and radical thinkers. And the basic prin-
ciples that guided and still guide us were that the function of knowledge was to
liberate, that we should think in order to do, not think in order to think, that the
writing should be simple and direct and free of jargon because the people we
were writing for were the people we were fighting for again the aphorisms that
signposted the direction Race & Class would take and pass on to our
contributors.
AG: The dynamic of moving from the general to the particular and moving from the par-
ticular to the general, authority over ones own experience and the well-being of the
aggrieved as the critical measure of theory and practices adequacy: these seem to me to be
the key components of your and the Institutes method. How did this sensibility or these
guidelines translate into the way the IRR worked?
AS: The boards we had around the journal and the organisation were composed
of hands-on people, not absentee landlords from multinationals like Barclays or
4 Race & Class 55(4)
M&S or Booker McConnell as before. They were people who had been involved
in liberation struggles in Palestine, Africa, the Americas like Thomas Hodgkin,
Basil Davidson, Malcolm Caldwell, Ken Jordaan, Eqbal Ahmad, Jan Carew,
Orlando Letelier, Edward Said. Later, those involved in Black radical struggle
such as Cedric Robinson, Manning Marable, Barbara Ransby, Colin Prescod, and
radical insurgent thinkers and creative writers or journalists such as John Berger,
yourself, Victoria Brittain, Nancy Murray, Barbara Harlow, David Edgar, Neil
Lazarus et al. They were not traditional, ivory tower academics and they were
keen in the early days to help us thrash out our perspectives and later saw the
value of working alongside the staff on new ideas. Similarly the Council of
Management has, ever since 1972, been composed of those connected to commu-
nity struggles or working to further causes of social or racial justice. And they not
only work alongside the staff now, but tacitly understand that the line on an
issue comes from the staff because it is they who are involved on the ground with
the communities under attack. They consult the staff on key topics of the day.
In a sense the IRR is an inverted pyramid. For the strength of IRR, what allows
us to make the occasional conceptual leap, lies in the fact that every member of
staff is committed and connected to real struggles and campaigns on the ground
about deaths in custody, racial violence, against the English Defence League,
justice for detainees, stop and search, the anti-terror laws, anti-Muslim racism etc.
It is that connectedness, groundedness that allows us to gather a picture of what
is happening across the country, to take new facts and move, as I said before,
from the specific to the general and the general to the particular to make sense of
them, within the system as a whole.
Most of my own thinking has come out of the workaday discussions with my
colleagues. The IRR, after 1972, broke down its internal hierarchies and also divi-
sions of labour well we are tiny, between three to six staff members at any one
time. If anyone goes out to speak, they report back to everyone at daily staff meet-
ings around the lunch table. Those who eat together fight together. The issues
they found, the questions they were challenged by are the grist to the mill taking
our thinking further. It was in such a discussion that some years ago with Liz
[Fekete] our European desk on how to conceptualise the discrimination against
foreigners who are not colour-coded that the concept of xeno-racism was born.
AG: I am particularly interested in how those new ideas emerge. Youve been equally
critical of the abstractions and reductions of high theory, of positivism, and of dogma-
tism. How would you describe what you do, your method, if you like?
AS: I suppose I am what academics abhor: an empiricist and eclectic. But if there
is a method in my madness it is firstly to contextualise a problem in the larger
scheme of things. Second, my thinking is constantly being fed or being chal-
lenged by our immersion in the facts on the ground. Third, my thinking does
not come from an abstract wish to engage with another theory but to answer
Gordon: An interview with A. Sivanandan 5
directly to a problem being thrown up on the ground. For instance, my attack
some years ago on the New Times Marxists in The Hokum of New Times was
because they endangered the struggle against racism and fascism by over-bal-
ancing into culturalism. For example, today, the problem might be someone
coming back from a conference in Europe and asking, what do we do with
these new theorists who are into cumulative extremism, who see any extrem-
ism, including that of the Left as the problem, and not fascism? Twenty, thirty
years ago, it was me going to conferences in Europe being troubled by the limi-
tations of the world systems theorists like Wallerstein, Samir Amin, who did
not speak to new realities of the technological revolution, for example what was
happening in the new free trade zones, and the new resistances that this threw
up. From that encounter I went on to think about imperialism in the silicon
age, new circuits of imperialism, the difference between globalism and glo-
balisation and later the nature of the market state and the failure of the Left to
what I term catch history on the wing.
I guess what distinguishes our thinking at IRR is that ability to stand things on
their head, challenge orthodoxies, our thinking is flexible because we are not tied to
long-term research projects but essentially addressing ourselves to problems on the
ground. And within that is the recognition that racism never stands still but changes
its shape, contours, impact, etc. according to changes in the political and economic
worlds. We are always keened to racisms new avatars as it were. But we never
essentialise racism, we never view it outside of the larger context, and the fight for
racial justice opens us out to all the other fights for justice and leads to solidarity.
AG: You have a gift that you have shared and passed on to other members of the Institute
for capturing the spirit of struggles and translating or transmuting that spirit into a
working knowledge that can be reinvested in them. I would call it lived theory.
AS: It is kind of you to say so (laughs).
AG: Well, yes, existence and politics, a comprehension both thinking and doing,
being and becoming, the experience and the power to change it. You said that!
Youve been talking impersonally so far and Id like to ask you if you would speak about
some of the experiences that informed you and your theoretical practice.
AS: First, the experience of poverty. My paternal grandfather was a tenant farmer
in the Tamil north of Ceylon and nothing grew on his land except children. My
father left school at 15 to be a clerk in the Postal Service so as to support his
brothers and sisters and was transferred from town to town. But my holidays
were spent in the village, so I grew up with a double consciousness, if you like, of
the village and the town, the peasantry and the working class. Later, after univer-
sity, I worked in the tea country, teaching the children of plantation workers,
indentured slaves, and came to understand the extreme hardship they faced at
the bottom of the pile.
6 Race & Class 55(4)
My parents were Hindu and my father was into Hindu philosophy. So he
would quote the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, Tagore and Gandhi. He was
a self-taught man and, as I would come to realise later, had an authority over his
own experience (which must have trickled down to me). And when he became
Chief Postmaster, he remembered to fight for the postal workers. My mother was
the soul of simplicity emotional and direct, which perhaps also trickled down
to me as passion. But the thing I remember my father most clearly for was the
way he pulled me up for wrong-doing. He wouldnt say what I had done was
wrong but that it was ugly (in Tamil unbeautiful) or beautiful (which in my case
was rare). That sort of gave me the feel and sense of morality, a moral aesthetic if
you like which later I came across in Keats writing about the holiness of the
hearts affection and the truth of the imagination and found its social resonance
later still in the Sociological Imagination of C. Wright Mills.
But as against that, I was educated, on a scholarship, in a Catholic Public School
where I learnt first-hand the meaning of bigotry and hated it with a visceral
hatred.
But what I made of my personal experiences and helped me to interpret them
in terms of the material reality of historic colonialism (Ceylon was occupied by
the Portuguese, Dutch and British for over 400 years) came when I studied for a
degree in Economics and Political Science at the University of Ceylon under the
influence of brilliant leftwing teachers (themselves influenced by socialist think-
ers at the LSE like Harold Laski, and themselves involved in the struggle for
Independence). And that is when I came across Marx and dialectical materialism
and it opened up the world for me, gave me the tools to interpret reality. In
dialectical materialism, I found a way to analyse my own society, to resolve my
own social contradictions, a way to understand how conflict itself was the motor
of ones personal life as well as the regenerating force of the society one lived in.
It was like a miracle and in Dylan Thomas words the moment of a miracle is
unending lightning.
AG: You often quote poets and write fiction too, of course why has poetry especially
been so important to you?
AS: Because the poets explain experience vividly and succinctly, in words that
wake. For example, my whole thinking around experience derives from T. S.
Eliots stricture about having the experience and missing the meaning, or his
lament, which is truer now than then, Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? But along
with poetry there were writers and novelists who influenced me deeply Fanon
with his quest to find the universal in the human condition, Amilcar Cabral on
culture not as a thing in itself but as the combusting force of revolution, Nyerere
on returning my education to the people who gave it to me, Richard Wright on
the violence of the violated in Native Son, Camus on the distinction between the
Gordon: An interview with A. Sivanandan 7
personal and the political when his erstwhile leftwing German friend joined the
Nazis: I want to destroy you in your power without mutilating you in your soul.
And so to the Upanishads and existentialism: He who sees himself in others and
others in himself is no longer alone.
AG: A final word on what youve called the thinking struggle for the conference
audience?
AS: The anti-racist struggle as we knew it is over. Weve got to fight new racisms
such as xeno-racism and anti-Muslim racism that globalisation and the war on
terror have thrown up within the larger framework of the fight against a grow-
ing state authoritarianism and its bedfellow fascism. And weve got to fight the
idea that there is a good capitalism, that the market state will give us a good
society. Weve allowed the Tories to dictate the political culture. Unless we on the
Left whatever is left of us begin to fight the political culture of neoliberalism
and change the terms of debate, we cannot get off the ground for a real struggle
to come together.
References
1 The panel entitled Existence and politics: the work of Race & Class and the Institute of Race Relations
was part of the Historical Materialism Conference and took place on 10 November 2013.
2 A. Sivanandan, Race and resistance: the IRR Story, Race & Class (Vol. 50, no. 2, 2008), p. 3.