Birthing Black Mothers

by Jennifer C. Nash

In Birthing Black Mothers Black feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the “Black mother” has become a powerful political category. “Mothering while Black” has become synonymous with crisis as well as a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, and support. Cast as suffering and traumatized by their proximity to Black death—especially through medical racism and state-sanctioned police violence—Black mothers are often rendered as one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism. In contrast, Nash examines Black mothers’ self-representations and public performances of motherhood—including Black doulas and breastfeeding advocates alongside celebrities such as Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama—that are not rooted in loss. Through cultural critique and in-depth interviews, Nash acknowledges the complexities of Black motherhood outside its use as political currency. Throughout, Nash imagines a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of locating the precarity of Black life in women and instead invites readers to theorize, organize, and dream into being new modes of Black motherhood.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Academic

264 pages, Hardcover

Published August 20, 2021

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

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Birthing Black Mothers looks at Black mothers in the US and how they have become (spectacularly and dangerously) visible through the frame of crisis. Black women and mothers are seen as symbols. They have become a political category mobilized by the US left. Nash probes a moment where the conditions of the ordinary have been framed as a crisis and where Black motherhood has become a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, support and benign regulation by the political state and Black feminists. One of the things she does is advances the term "Black maternal politics" by looking at how Black Women have used motherhood as a platform for activism.

My favorite quote is "Crisis - the primary frame through which Black mothers and Black motherhood become visible - has affective, temporal, and aesthetic dimensions that collectively conjure up an image of black mothers occupying a nontime and non-place, one that is thought to be qualitatively different from the here and now of the contemporary United States."

Nash invests in naming, describing, and analyzing what she calls the feminist birth industry. > spotlighting the newfound place of Black motherhood in the construction of that industry and the centrality of Black feminists to that industry. Treating Black feminism and Black women as the vanguard of the institutional efforts, Nash unfolds to center the transformative and life-affirming work of doulas.

Nash does a few things in this book. She (1) explores a particular iteration of the crisis facing Black mothers and grapples with efforts to support, encourage and bolster Black breastfeeding by claiming that Black breast milk is Black gold; (2) Turns to the labour of women of colour doulas in Chicago tracing how they are increasingly positioned as on the front lines of the way to preserve Black life; (3) Turns to a trio of Black female celebrities who rewrite Black mother's relationships to crisis; (4) Turns to an archive of Black maternal memoirs, examining how contemporary Black maternal life writing both sits with and against crisis reframing the figure of the Black mother and her psychic and political capacities; and (5) Considers the place of Black mothers in the 3rd pandemic terms used by activist to describe the intersection of COVID 19, Black people by the police, and Black maternal morality.

Nash is very theoretical and this work has a LOT of theory in it. I enjoyed that, but it also takes to read, digest, and understand this book. It does make me think a lot of Black motherhood and everything that encompasses and draws from it.

[Viviana Valle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Birthing Black Mothers expands the limited media and politically produced understanding of the Black maternal experience. We are often flooded with statistics about Black death and violence both within the institution of medicine/hospitals and through police brutality and racist laws. Jennifer C. Nash aims to construct an understanding of Black maternal experience that is outside of this framework of “crisis” which she details in painstaking detail throughout the whole book. She argues that the use of crisis and constant states of grief that Black mothers embody are not the only ways of feeling Black motherhood and in reality this narrative is pushed as a way to symbolize the Black mother as a political strategy. In doing so it limits the ways to fundamentally change institutionalized neglect of Black life overall as she says here, “In this moment, simply noticing the racial disparities that mark Black perinatal life is treated as political work invested in ameliorating those inequities.” (12)

[Ife · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois asks, “how does it feel to be a problem?” This question functions in a double sense. One: how does it feel to be the malignant problem – the thieving and raping problem, the problem dragging down the economy, the problem littering the streets but also, newly, the Post-Reconstruction benign problem – the problem in need of integrating, helping, and saving from itself. The Negro Problem.

Much has been heard from Black feminists on the left hand of the Black Mother Problem. Black mothers, as everyone knows, are neglectful, castrating, and utilize their children for welfare benefits. Yet as Jennifer Nash argues in Birthing Black Mothers, there is a new rhetorical drive in the US left to turn Black mothers into a benign problem: the problem in need of being educated about the benefits of breastfeeding, the problem whose children have one foot in the grave, the problem for whom hospitals are a death-world. Put in her words, the modality through which we understand Black motherhood is through “crisis” which has flattened the affect and multivalent desires of Black mothers, turned Black mothers into a political currency that can lend speakers leftist credentials, and locked Black mothers into a position of constantly grieving Black men. This understanding that Black mothers are always mothering in a zone of crisis can feel like progress – certainly it feels preferable to the idea that Black mothers are the malignant crisis but she argues that it does not, as it is presumed to, always precede a bettering in the conditions of Black women. Her understanding of crisis is informed by Lauren Berlant who argues that crisis is not a state of exception that produces amelioration, but a long standing condition of certain groups which becomes spectacularized through its designation as crisis. So part of Nash’s project is examining the ways in which the spectacle of crisis has spurred Black feminist state and institutional collaborations which sometimes work “in, through or against the rhetoric of crisis” – Black doulas who work for private companies and Black maternal government programs are among some of the examples explored here. I truly cannot say it more powerfully than she lays it out:

To inhabit a moment when Black mothers are imagined as heroines rather than pathological feels like an important shift, one that can be seductive in much the same way as the rhetoric of “cite Black women” or “Black women did it first.” This is a rhetoric that hails Black women’s “magic,” insists on their genius, and celebrates their perseverance—and thus feels qualitatively different from narratives about Black women that condemn and denigrate. Yet, as I have argued throughout this book, the consequence of these varied forms of marking Black women is to render us symbols and metaphors, to fail to contend with either our fleshy materiality or our complex needs and desires. The political thrust of this book, then, is to imagine a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of making Black women into symbols of any kind, that can be as attentive to the pathologization of Black women as to their romanticization.

Nash is a strong reader, she is great at picking examples, deftly unpacking them, and moving on. Maybe too deftly here. Her two previous books are laser interventions into specific issues with broader implications – Black feminist discourses on pornography with bigger implications about race pleasures/race play and Black feminist discourses about intersectionality with bigger implications about the relationship between Black feminism and the university/women studies departments respectively. This book is far more ambitious – Nash wants to take on an entire Black birthing industry of sorts. Each chapter is an exploration of a different facet of that industry – Black breastfeeding interventions, doula birthwork, Black maternity celebrity aesthetics and Black maternal memoirs. Really each of these chapters could be their own books and yet the book is 185 pages without citations. So Nash occasionally misses the trees for the forest; the significance of some of her examples are not fully appreciated and in that sense at times it can read more like a research proposal and less like an academic monograph. There is a constant use of phrases like “I want to sit with…” or “How do we think about?” rather than her actually unpacking or leading us in thinking through those things. In some ways it is, like her other books, a counterreading which desires to open up other conversations rather than a forceful assertion in itself.

Some might bristle at me comparing it, as though it were fiction, to her previous works. Indeed some might even bristle at the idea of rating academic books, but I will take a Nashian turn myself and argue against the concept of theory in constant telos to praxis. Theory is more than that. It is for some people, their job, their hobby, or like me, one of their favourite genres of books to read (as counter-revolutionary as people might argue those things are). Reading theory, like reading fiction, inspires a multitude of feelings: hope, comfort, pleasure, frustration etc. They have favourite authors in theory and people whose academic monographs they count down on the releases for and expect a particular prose style within. Nash is certainly that for me. Her books give me hope in Black feminist epistemology to question its tools of knowledge production. This one certainly takes its place among the league of books that are Nashian in spirit. However, it left me wanting a bit more.

[Juana Derdoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for a final research paper– really insightful and well written but I found a few parts dragged and some points seemed a bit of a stretch.

[slumpeer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heatttttt