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In this Epilogue, Anderson returns to the questions outlined in the Introduction. She also calls for further study, especially with regards to scholarship that engages intersectional analysis, where multiple identities complicate and enrich the depth of our understanding of oppression. She concludes with comments on her own experiences finding a voice to respond to and challenge racism.

This chapter investigates how narratives of oppression and the resistance postures that Kurds adopt play into notions of identity. For Kurds day-to-day and political life is infused with instances of ‘resistance’. The chapter highlights three threads that emerge from the Kurds’ experience in Turkey: first, the Turkish government’s attempts to assimilate Kurds, which had the paradoxical result of highlighting Kurdish differences; second, how instances and narratives of oppression led to a sense of solidarity emerging in Kurdish circles; third, specific instances of resistance, to the oppression that Kurds claim to endure. It examines the ‘Kurdish intifada’ (serhildan) of the 1990s, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and electoral strategies as different iterations of resistance to Turkish state initiatives. Data is drawn from interviewees lived experiences of state oppression and every-day resistance and is examined from Antonio Gramsci’s perspectives of ‘war of position’ and ‘war of manoeuvre’.

The Deleuzian critical ethos is ineliminably entwined with the ideas of a violent paideia or cultural and moral training. The education of desire critique undertakes is the genetic principle of the experience of encounter, doubling the violence constitutive of freedom. The question is whether this sense of culture as a violent paideia undercuts the liberationist aspirations of critique, particularly because violence is so often used for the imposition of ways of thinking and acting that are met with resistance from minor and minority voices. Violence is a force for oppression, coercion, and bullying more often than for freedom and dogged self-evaluation. There are no easy answers here. A critical ethos does not, as Deleuze says, make history any less bloody. Even when the critical ethos is lived through an embrace of limitations, it does not make life less violent. It does, however, make it more free – and more celebratory. The emphasis in the ethical life of critique thus, most practically, moves from the protection of bare life to a dare to live life. That does not mean that preservation is unimportant, but that the conditions of creativity, meaning, and living be afforded the ethical weight they merit in producing a space of freedom.

Confessions are commonly viewed as determinative of guilt. Psychological research and documented miscarriages of justice, however, show that confessions are not always reliable: some are induced through oppression, whilst some feel a pressing need to admit ‘guilt’ despite bearing no responsibility. The implications for truth-finding are obvious – ascribing ‘guilt’ to the wrong party leads to an unjust outcome for the confessor and may result in the guilty party evading detection. The legal response recognises a need for protection, both from factual miscarriages of justice and from oppressive or unfair investigatory practice. Here another limitation on truth-finding will be discussed; namely where a truthful confession is excluded because of how it was obtained.

This chapter applies our understanding of covert exercitives to an example of sexist speech. The nature of oppression is clarified. Two models of oppressive speech are identified. The first model is authoritative and involves a standard exercitive speech act. Instances of this sort of oppressive speech must satisfy the felicity conditions of standard exercitives. The second model of oppressive speech involves a covert exercitive. With the second model, it is shown that an offhand sexist remark can be oppressive even though the speaker does not intend to oppress, the speaker does not have any particular authority, and the remark is not aimed at the persons oppressed by it. The chapter concludes with an exploration of various objections to the model of covertly oppressive speech developed here.

Influenced by Che Guevara’s writings on revolution and self-transformation, the Young Lords launched the “revolution within the revolution”— a deliberate struggle to name and challenge manifestations of power dynamics, racism, sexism, and homophobia in their ranks. The trademark slogan of second wave feminism, “the personal is political,” articulated the challenge. Among the Lords, an increase in female membership propelled a fierce struggle against male chauvinism that well-positioned women to have their voices heard, leadership respected, and demands met. To that end, the group edited its program and platform; drafted rules against sexism; Denise Oliver was appointed to its formal leadership; and formed men’s caucus and women’s caucus to discuss gender oppression internally. Influenced by Franz Fanon, the Lords also challenged anti-black racism in the psyche of the oppressed, including widely used language that devalues curly hair, dark complexion, African facial features and the tendency among Puerto Ricans and Latinos to deny their ethnicity and blackness and distance themselves from black Americans. The Young Lords prioritized Afro-Latino leadership, including that of Felipe Luciano; theorized race ideology in Latin America; and made public a conversation about race that had been confined to hushed whispers among Puerto Ricans and Latinos.

Between 1927 and 1930, African diaspora radicals, based in the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, came together to mount radical and transnational challenges to colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy around the world. Black radicals like George Padmore and Richard B. Moore traveled to participate in the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism organized by the Comintern in Brussels in 1927 and worked to continue international organizing against imperialism in all its forms afterward. These radicals showed enthusiasm, for a time, about working with an international communist movement that appeared pledged to an anticolonial program. However, they struggled to build and maintain their agency as black people committed to black liberation in the face of the uncertainties and shifts of state policy.

Sugar plantation work in this early period, into the 1930s, was harsh and unprotected by unions or effective legal enforcement. Field overseers were demanding and sometimes cruel. Picture brides who had never met their husbands in person were disappointed in spouses and living conditions, often worse than the poverty they had fled. But workers, including women, confronted despair with various forms of personal and collective agency, defying powerful forces, whether overseers and bosses with strikes or husbands with desertion.

Against all the odds, and within a highly restrictive production context, women have been and continue to be the most politically engaged filmmakers in Syria. While feature‐length fiction films by women are rare or non‐existent, documentary maker Halla Alabdallah is working across different genres with obvious degrees of resistance. Trained by Omar Amiralay (Syria’s foremost documentary maker), her style is singular and experimental in nature. Her first film, I am the One Who Brings Flowers to her Grave (2006) was the first documentary made by a woman in Syria. It is a lyrical portrait of solidarity between women across the ages that experiments with ‘representation’. In As if We Were Catching a Cobra (2012) she looks at the art of cartoon and other politically inspired art forms, in Egypt and Syria, immediately before the start of the revolution in Cairo. She uses documentary as a weapon, she says, because it is necessary to negotiate the oppression and taboos in order to find an avenue for self-expression and dissidence. Women’s identity struggle and self-expression are addressed directly in her films, and there is an immense trust in her global spectators’ ability to empathise, as vocal and aural communication methods are explicitly used to express dissent.

Drawing on literatures from gender, race, disability and queer theory, this chapter identifies shared themes and aims to develop a generic understanding of discrimination. Discrimination can be understood as misrecognition, raising questions about where identity comes from – whether characteristics originate in biological make-up or are externally created and attributed - how it is conveyed and what could be done to increase accuracy. Negative attitudes create distortions; diminishing (Thompson 1998) or demonizing. Oppression can be understood as enforced identity distortion; a cause of exclusion or requirement for inclusion. Identity may be understood via indicators of having, being and doing as well as contextual factors. The case for and against social categorization is explored, along with scope for cross-group alliances offered by multiple characteristics. Using different discourses, the literatures argue that inequalities arise consequent on the structure and culture of society as defined by dominant groups (social model). They refute biological/genetic explanations (individual/medical model). An interactive model draws attention to the process through which individuals interact with their environment. This suggests 3 sites for ‘adjustment’ to maximize social inclusion: the removal of social barriers, increasing individuals’ resources and reducing scope for misrecognition within distributive processes.

Offers a brief international history of black oppression, exploitation and misrepresentation. The significant gains born out of the freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s are noted and reflected upon in the context of the persistent injustices and discrimination experienced by African-descended peoples around the world today. Parallels are drawn between the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech and the rise of right-wing populism across Europe in the early twenty-first century. The recent police killings of African-Americans are discussed in order to highlight the continuation of the black struggle in a post-civil rights USA. A broad overview of the contents of volume is then provided. Subjects and themes outlined range from the dynamics of the struggle against racism in a transnational context, to the disruption of socially constructed discourses on blackness via artistic and religious performativity, and the lesser known struggles of the Civil Rights Movement.