Sunday Quote: Pratibha Parmar

Writing has meant exposing myself, as well as grappling with theories that might enable a different kind of political discourse of identity; it has meant engaging critically with the categories of self-enunciation which many of us, as activists and theorists in the late black women's movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, had employed. Then I spoke and wrote from a position of marginality and resistance, but always strengthened by the collective consciousness of ourselves as black women, as feminists and as lesbians (albeit a small minority). Today...I still inhabit that position of marginality and resistance but in the absence of that collective force which momentarily empowered many of us and gave us the "power of speech."
--Filmmaker, critic and activist Pratibha Parmar, "Black Feminism: the Politics of Articulation," in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (Jonathan Rutherford, ed., London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990).