ABSTRACT
I began by outlining the parameters of an approach to theorising subjectivity which viewed subjects, whether self-defining or constructed by dominant others, as being organically generated out of social conditions prevailing at the time of their emergence. Having decided to theorise the particular subjectivities of black women in post-colonial Britain, I then detailed the social and political context of the study I carried out with other black women in the London of the early 1980s and identified the main intellectual influences on my approach: black political activism and the black women’s movement, feminist politics and theory, psychodynamic theory and, subsequently, the broad philosophical shift now known as post-structuralism. I take the view that post-structuralism, in
decentring the intellectual universe, also cracks open the hegemony of westerncentred grand theories and offers not just new theories but new ways of theorising.
