A really great little book combining movement history and radical analysis. The goal seems to be to clarify some current debates by creating a resource to allow a more robust understanding of the Combahee River Collective, whose famous statement from the 1970s is both a crucial document in the Black feminist tradition and also foundational to an increasingly common range of politics that are taken up by a much wider range of people and that draw strongly on Black feminism even while often drastically misreading and even erasing that heritage. Today, many of the proponents and opponents of what you might describe as “intersectional” politics (particularly those who do not themselves come out of the long Black radical tradition, and whose political education and/or work has a basis primarily in the academy rather than in movements) often treat identity and struggle very differently than the revolutionary Black feminists of Combahee. This book combines an introduction by the author, oral history interviews with three core members of Combahee, an interview with one of the founding Black Lives Matter organizers who situates her own work in that tradition, and a closing piece by a Black feminist historian who was not in the collective but who is a contemporary and political ally of those who were. The book provides a fascinating window into movements in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly as experienced by Black women with feminist politics. And it presents their politics in a way that makes very clear that their understanding of identity was very different than that in the reified neoliberal wing of identity politics today, that it was grounded in struggle and in politics that prioritized solidarity (while refusing to erase the specificity of Black experience and struggle), that saw analysis of interlocking relations of domination as a way of broadening politics rather than narrowing them, and that saw opposition to capitalism as inherently part of this mix. Easy to read, fascinating, and politically useful and important for engaging with current debates.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.