How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory

by Jennifer C. Nash

In How We Write Now Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize their prose to ask readers to feel, undo, and reassemble themselves. These intimate invitations are more than a set of tools for decoding the social world; Black feminist prose becomes a mode of living and feeling, dreaming and being, and a distinctly affective project that treats loss as not only paradigmatic of Black life but also an aesthetic question. Through her own beautiful writing, Nash shows how Black feminism offers itself as a companion to readers to chart their own lives with and in loss, from devastating personal losses to organizing around the movement for Black lives. Charting her own losses, Nash reminds us that even as Black feminist writers get as close to loss as possible, it remains a slippery object that troubles memory and eludes capture.

Genres: Nonfiction, African American, Grad School, Theory, Writing, Literary Criticism

141 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 28, 2024

About the author

Jennifer C. Nash is Associate Professor of African American and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, also published by Duke University Press, and editor of Gender: Love.

Reviews

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another remarkable achievement by Nash on Black feminist thought. Here she draws our attention to the ways in which contemporary Black women writers demand their readers stay close to loss and to think on the myriad ways Black people in the US are shaped by it, and how they make this demand through beautiful writing. She centers Black mothers and the always potential loss of their sons (real or imagined) to state violence. What asks what it means to think about and write on Black maternal loss in a context (one that may have passed) when there seems (seemed?) to be a market demand for Black women’s writing about it. Chapters 2 and 3 were my personal favorites, especially as she writes about the letter as a genre mediating the witnessing of Black maternal loss by others. I took off a star only because it was a little short. It reads like a collection of some (brilliant) observations and insightful readings in preparation for a larger critical project. 4.5 stars.

[Jenn Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so grateful for Dr. Jennifer Nash and her commitment to continuing to explore Black Feminist theory so openly. This book is a gift.

[Needle To Narrative | Chantel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer Nash has done something beautiful with this text. She took the dense subject of loss and made it ordinary beyond the accepted physicality of the term. She asks early on “How might Black feminist theorize, represent, and describe forms of loss that are nonspectacular, durational, embedded in the conditions of daily life?” Loss being more than an object or person no longer present but an anticipated ache, an absence of time, a movement of place. Nash “stays close to the bone” in laying bare the weight of loss through writing the beautiful, personal story, and other Black feminist text. This work is one I plan to revisit often and I’m grateful to have come in contact with it at this present stage in my life as someone dealing with anticipated loss.

[Shannon Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent book

This book helped me rethink how black feminist theory can be used as a framework to understand and evaluate black loss and grief.