richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Ethics, Affinity and the Coming Communities 185Dua and Robertson 1999: 321; italics added). The key move here iscontained in the reference to anti-oppression, which expands thefield of anti-racist feminism to include a stand against hierarchicalorderings as such. This could lead to what Sedef Arat-Koc hascalled a ‘more engaged feminism’, which would be interested inissues of equality and justice, both nationally and internationally,‘whether women may appear to be implicated in the issues or not’(2002: 63).What, exactly, would this kind of feminism be like? One possibilityis that it would be guided by what Gloria Anzaldúa calls a ‘mestizaconsciousness’. Living in between cultures and races, the result ofa ‘racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollenization’(Anzaldúa 1987: 77), la mestiza has ‘a plural personality’ and isunable to ‘hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries’. She is acreature for whom ‘nothing is thrust out, the good the bad andthe ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned’ (79). At first glancemestiza consciousness looks very much like the nomadic subject ofpostanarchism, which I have argued suffers from its claim to animpossible purity. But another aspect of mestiza consciousness ishighlighted in Anzaldúa’s contributions to This Bridge Called My Back(Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1981 2nd edn 1983) and This Bridge CalledHome (2002). In these collections it becomes clear that Anzaldúais more interested in crossing borders than she is in eliminatingthem, that she understands, because she lives, the dual dangers ofintegration and exclusion. In her preface to the second anthology,she notes that the first was limited to the voices of women of colour,many of whom viewed it as ‘a safe space, as “home”’. But there areno safe spaces, Anzaldúa argues, adding that it is necessary to leavehome and its illusion of safety if one hopes ‘to bridge … to attemptcommunity’ (2002a: 3).Thus, in the follow-up collection there are articles from contributorswho are not women of colour, who have been included in a selfconsciousattempt to further the creation of what Anzaldúa calls ‘ElMundo Zurdo’, the left-handed world composed of those who ‘donot fit’:Not all of us have the same oppressions … we do not have the same ideology,nor do we derive similar solutions …. But these different affi nities are notopposed to each other. In El Mundo Zurdo I with my own affi nities and mypeople with theirs can live together and transform the planet. (2002b: 233)