Amrit Wilson

Last updated
Amrit Wilson
Born1941 (age 8283)
India
Occupation(s)Writer, journalist and activist
Notable workFinding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (1978)

Amrit Wilson (born 1941), [1] Indian by birth and based in Britain, [2] is a writer, journalist and activist who since the 1970s has focused on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics. [3] Her 1978 book Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain [4] won the Martin Luther King Award, and remains an influential feminist book. [2] Her other book publications include Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2006), and as a journalist she has been published in outlets including Ceasefire Magazine, [5] Media Diversified , [6] openDemocracy [7] and The Guardian . [8] [9]

Contents

Background

Wilson grew up in India and came to Britain as a student in 1961. She became a freelance journalist in 1974, and was active as an anti-racist militant in the 1970s. [10] Wilson's book Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain, first published in 1978 and reprinted 40 years later, [11] has been described as "[c]hallenging the views of South Asian women as weak, submissive, one-dimensional stereotypes" and as having "cleared the space for Asian women to speak for themselves". [12] Wilson was a founder member of Awaz, the UK's first Asian feminist collective, and was active in OWAAD, the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (1978–82). [3] [13] She was formerly chair of Imkaan, a national network of Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee women's refuges and services for women facing violence, and is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group. [7] [14]

She also was Senior Lecturer in Women's Studies/South Asian Studies at Luton University, [15] and has carried an Overseas Citizenship of India. [16]

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

bell hooks American author and activist (1952–2021)

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She was best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. She used the lower-case spelling of her name to decenter herself and draw attention to her work instead. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, social class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.

Anarcha-feminism, also known as anarchist feminism or anarcho-feminism, is a system of analysis which combines the principles and power analysis of anarchist theory with feminism. It closely resembles intersectional feminism. Anarcha-feminism generally posits that patriarchy and traditional gender roles as manifestations of involuntary coercive hierarchy should be replaced by decentralized free association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class conflict and the anarchist struggle against the state and capitalism. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims that "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gloria Steinem</span> American activist and journalist (born 1934)

Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Hill Collins</span> African-American scholar (born 1948)

Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.

Asma Barlas is a Pakistani-American writer and academic. Her specialties include comparative and international politics, Islam and Qur'anic hermeneutics, and women's studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janet Biehl</span> American writer

Janet Biehl is an American author, copyeditor, translator, and artist. She authored several books and articles associated with social ecology, the body of ideas developed and publicized by Murray Bookchin. Formerly an advocate of his antistatist political program, she broke with it publicly in 2011 and now identifies as a progressive Democrat.

Janet Afary is an author, feminist activist and researcher of history, religious studies and women studies. She is a professor and the Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion and Modernity at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

Nellie Wong is an American poet and activist for feminist and socialist causes. Wong is also an active member of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Olive Morris</span> Jamaican-born British community leader and activist (1952–1979)

Olive Elaine Morris was a Jamaican-born British-based community leader and activist in the feminist, black nationalist, and squatters' rights campaigns of the 1970s. At the age of 17, she claimed she was assaulted by Metropolitan Police officers following an incident involving a Nigerian diplomat in Brixton, South London. She joined the British Black Panthers, becoming a Marxist–Leninist communist and a radical feminist. She squatted buildings on Railton Road in Brixton; one hosted Sabarr Books and later became the 121 Centre, another was used as offices by the Race Today collective. Morris became a key organiser in the Black Women's Movement in the United Kingdom, co-founding the Brixton Black Women's Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent in London.

The Silver Moon Bookshop was a feminist bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London founded in 1984 by Jane Cholmeley, Sue Butterworth, and Jane Anger. They established Silver Moon Bookshop to share intersectional feminist rhetoric with a larger community of readers and encourage open discussion of women’s issues. The shop served both as a safe space for women to participate in literary events and a resource center to learn about local feminist initiatives. The owners of Silver Moon Bookshop eventually expanded into the publishing field through establishing Silver Moon Books, as well as creating the store newsletter Silver Moon Quarterly.

Race Today was a monthly British political magazine. Launched in 1969 by the Institute of Race Relations, it was from 1973 published by the Race Today Collective, which included figures such as Darcus Howe, Farrukh Dhondy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Leila Hassan and Jean Ambrose. The magazine was a leading organ of Black politics in 1970s Britain; publication ended in 1988.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harsha Walia</span> Canadian activist and writer

Harsha Walia is a Canadian activist and writer based in Vancouver. She has been involved with No one is illegal, the February 14 Women's Memorial March Committee, the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, and several Downtown Eastside housing justice coalitions. Walia has been active in immigration politics, Indigenous rights, feminist, anti-racist, anti-statist, and anti-capitalist movements for over a decade.

Lauretta Ngcobo was a South African novelist and essayist. After being in exile between 1963 and 1994 – in Swaziland, then Zambia and finally England, where she taught for 25 years – she returned to South Africa and lived in Durban. Ngcobo's writings between the 1960s and early 1990s have been described as offering "significant insights into the experiences of Black women of apartheid's vagaries". As a novelist, she is best known for And They Didn't Die (1990), set in 1950s South Africa and portraying "the particular oppression of women who struggle to survive, work the land and maintain a sense of dignity under the apartheid system while their husbands seek work in the mines and cities."

Stella Dadzie is a British educationalist, activist, writer and historian. She is best known for her involvement in the UK's Black Women's Movement, being a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the 1970s, and co-authoring with Suzanne Scafe and Beverley Bryan in 1985 the book The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain. In 2020, Verso published a new book by Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance.

Lola Olufemi is a British writer. She is an organiser with the London Feminist Library, and her writing has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, and the co-editor of A FLY Girl's Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism.

Gail Lewis is a British writer, psychotherapist, researcher, and activist. She is visiting senior fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, and Reader Emerita of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. She trained as a psychodynamic psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic.

Leila Hassan Howe is a British editor and activist, who was a founding member of the Race Today Collective in 1973, having previously worked for the Institute of Race Relations. She became editor of the Race Today journal in 1986. Hassan was also a member of the Black Unity and Freedom Party. She is co-editor of a collection of writings from Race Today published in 2019.

Victoria Brittain is a British journalist and author who lived and worked for many years in Africa, the US, and Asia, including 20 years at The Guardian, where she eventually became associate foreign editor. In the 1980s, she worked closely with the anti-apartheid movement, interviewing activists from the United Democratic Front and the Southern African liberation movements. A notable campaigner for human rights throughout the developing world, Brittain has contributed widely to many international publications, writing particularly on Africa, the US and the Middle East, and has also authored books and plays, including 2013's Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror.

Kalpana Wilson is an author and scholar with a focus on South Asia. She is a founding member of the South Asian Solidarity Group. She has taught at the London School of Economics, SOAS University of London, and Birkbeck, University of London.

Daraja Press is a non-profit independent book publisher based in Québec, Canada, founded in 2006. It was founded by Firoze Manji.

References

  1. "Amrit Wilson". Women of Substance: Profiles of Asian Women in the UK. 1997. p. 152 via EBSCOhost.[ dead link ]
  2. 1 2 "South Asian women in Britain: Finding a voice, 40 years on". Media Diversified . 17 January 2019. Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  3. 1 2 Siddiqui, Sophia (30 October 2018). "'Reclaiming our collective past': Amrit Wilson reflects on 40 years of anti-racist feminist work". gal-dem . Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  4. Wilson, Amrit (1 October 1978). "A burning fever: the isolation of Asian women in Britain". Race & Class . 20 (2): 129–142. doi:10.1177/030639687802000203. S2CID   145473127.
  5. "Amrit Wilson". Ceasefire. Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  6. "Category: Amrit Wilson". Media Dversified. Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  7. 1 2 "Amrit Wilson". Open Democracy.
  8. "Speaker bios" (PDF). Islamophobia Conference 2017: The Rise of Nativism.
  9. "Amrit Wilson". The Guardian.
  10. Donnell, Alison, ed. (2002). "Seth, Roshan". Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. Routledge. pp. 323–4. ISBN   978-1-134-70025-7.
  11. "Event Report – 'Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain'". Islamic Human Rights Commission. 6 March 2019.
  12. Goodfellow, Maya (8 June 2019). "Review – Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain". Red Pepper . Retrieved 7 October 2020.
  13. "Amrit Wilson". British Library.
  14. "Amrit Wilson". The Strike at Imperial Typewriters. Archived from the original on 15 June 2021. Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  15. "Amrit Wilson". Pluto Press.
  16. "Hearing adjourned in journalist's revision plea on cancelled OCI card". The Indian Express. 2023-05-23. Retrieved 2024-03-22.