Introduction

The project of emancipation has long been central to a wide range of struggles against domination. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example, feminists drew a lot of their inspiration (Coole, 2015) from the anti-slavery movement's demand for the ‘elimination of oppression’ (Wright, 1993) as the basis for their emancipation. Inspired by Marx's (2000e) call for ‘complete human emancipation’, the labour movement also came to adopt it as a core aspiration. Under this guise, it became closely associated with the project of emancipating society from an oppressive capitalist system – from exploitation, alienation, and the oppressive power of the bourgeoise. But from the 1970s onwards, the project fell out of favour among critics of capitalism. With the rise of so-called ‘new social movements’ and poststructuralist and post-humanist approaches, the possibility and desirability of an emancipatory project came to be questioned. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), for example, declared the end of master narratives articulated around a collective vision for emancipation. Similarly, Anthony Giddens (1991) characterized the ‘late modern’ age partly in terms of a demise of emancipatory politics in favour of ‘life politics’, thereby marking a turn away from collective and universalizing forms of political demands and action directed at structural change.

But while ‘major sectors of the white-dominated left’ have been historically unable to articulate their emancipatory politics around a sufficiently robust analysis of interlocking systems of oppression (Dawson, 2013: 15), intersectionality theorists have continued to insist on both the possibility and desirability for such a project, emphasizing the distinctively emancipatory outlook of a theory aimed at developing a nuanced and complex account of capitalist domination (see for example Davis, 2012; Smooth, 2013; Collins, 2019). In this chapter I develop a conceptualization of emancipation based on some of the core elements of the story of intersectional capitalist domination offered in the preceding chapter. The aim consists in drawing the contours of the emancipatory project that will inform the socialist vision formulated in this book. I begin this task by explaining why emancipation is a more appropriate concept than, say, a politics of self-actualization, for capturing the essence of pluriversal intersectionality's critical outlook. I devote the rest of the chapter to exploring what a pluriversal emancipatory vision entails.