Knowledges

This chapter highlights the linkages between the ideas at work in the politics of knowledge production and the social movements out of which they emerged. The Combahee River Collective emerged in part in response to the failure of second wave feminism and some elements of the Black radical tradition to account for the lived experiences of Black women. For the Combahee River Collective, identity politics meant that one’s identity and lived experience could be a source of political radicalisation, and could become the grounds of confronting one’s oppression. Drawing on a long tradition of Black feminist and radical thought, the sub-field of Black geographies has challenged radical geographical knowledges, inviting the discipline to consider the relationship between the categories it deploys, the questions it asks, and the work those knowledges do in the discipline and beyond.