Charting the Journey: 37 Years Later’, The Feminist Library, July 2025
By Sarah Howard
This event remembered and celebrated the publication of Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, published in 1988 by Sheba Feminist Press, with contributions from four of the five co-editors of this seminal Black Feminist text: Shabnam Grewal, Liliane Landor, Gail Lewis and Pratibha Parmar. Chaired by Lola Olufemi on 16 July 2025, it was part of a programme of events to celebrate the Feminist Library’s 50th anniversary.
Copyright: The Feminist Library.
Journalist and documentary-maker Shabnam Grewal, an early member of Southall Black Sisters and active in Black women’s publishing from the early 1980s, started proceedings by producing the original letter sent out to women’s centres in January 1984 that was the genesis of the book. Writer, academic and psychotherapist Gail Lewis, member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), recalled that the impetus for the project was in part to redress the predominance of US-based Black women’s experiences in debates and in print, and to have the space to speak about the specificities of Black experience in the UK. She mentioned the negative experiences at the first feminist book fair in 1984, in which Black British voices were overshadowed and excluded – a discussion about which appears in Charting the Journey, in an interview by Jackie Kay and Pratibha Parmar with Audre Lorde.
‘Speaking from the margins, but not staying in the margins’; including and reclaiming internationalist and Third World perspectives and resistance was another foundational motivation for the book, according to journalist and broadcasting executive Liliane Landor, who in the early 1980s was co-founder of feminist newspaper Outwrite, which ran from 1982-88. Filmmaker Pratibha Parmar – whose contributions were read by Vera Khan – talked about how the Sheba Feminist Press, a publishing collective launched in 1980, shifted through the decade from its foundation by White women involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement to a predominately Black and Asian organisation committed to Black, working class and lesbian publishing.
Discussions around the political context of the time brought up both what Gail Lewis called the ‘highly tense condensed moment’ and Pratibha Parmar a time of ‘dissonance and fracture modes of resistance’, in which the Thatcher government attempted to rework state-citizen relations, linked to ideas about race, immigration and employment, and the simultaneous burgeoning of social protest movements. Gail Lewis described Charting the Journey as an intervention, announcement and analysis of that moment and its attack on women, Black and queer communities and the working class.
Liliane Landor discussed reclaiming internationalism, and how the book was an intervention in solidarity and linking the experiences of women of colour in the UK with Third World women, in the parlance of the time, and anti-colonial movements. She describes the project as about disrupting narratives of colonial ‘rescue’ of ‘passive’ and ‘oppressed’ Third World women from traditionalism by the more ‘enlightened’ women’s movement, and ‘creating intersectionality before the word was heard of’. Gail Lewis said that it ‘fills me with joy to hear “Black” being used in the ways we used it then’, as inheritors of the anti-colonial struggle and as a way of teasing out links beyond the African diaspora; ‘this was what differentiated us from the Women’s Liberation Movement.’
Various of the panellists brought up the spaces of joy, care, nourishment and connection that feminist organising produced. Shabnam Grewel described the excitement and exhilaration of making connections with a wide range of women, and having the time and space to gather, dance and hang out – a freedom that has been curtailed for subsequent generations facing precarity, lack of affordable housing, high costs of living and increased police intervention; on the latter, Lola Olufemi mentioned the Feminist Library’s own history of occupation and squatting.
Discussions and questions about the legacy of the book in contemporary feminist activism and organising covered more ground than this short resource page can cover with any justice. From generational differences among feminism, especially on transgender issues, to Palestine as the litmus test of global solidarity, and to maintaining mobilisation in the era of social media and the ideological formation of neoliberalism, the event showed that debates provoked by Charting the Journey remain live 37 years later. Instead of attempting to sum up the wide-ranging discussion, I will finish with some powerful final words from Gail Lewis (slightly condensed):
Don’t count me in to the generational divide, when it comes to that incredible fault line around trans, that is used against progressive thought, that is used against imaginations of freedom. Don’t count me in my age group. I refuse it. … Black feminism brought an absolutely probing idea that what is called woman is not a singular thing and you want me to align with something that promotes a particular vision of womanhood? You are mad… We were at the forefront of understanding into the violence of boundary closures. Our mission was to trouble gender categories and a binary divide – because we, as Black women, were excluded as women. We have laid the ground and people have picked it up and travelled with it.