How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory(Black Feminism on the Edge)

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 preoccupation: 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.

Table of Contents:
Preface: Beauty, or All about My Mother  ix Acknowledgments  xiii 1. Beauty, or All about Black Feminist Theory’s Mothers  1 2. Staying at the Bone  25 3. An Invitation to Listen  48 4. Picturing Loss  69 Conclusion: New Furniture, or All About Black Feminist Theory’s Fathers  91 Notes  99 Bibliography  117 Index  127

About the Author :
Jennifer C. Nash is Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and author of Birthing Black Mothers, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, and The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, all also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
“Jennifer C. Nash's brilliant monograph embraces what Christina Sharpe described as ‘beauty as a method,’ through which she delivers with stunning erudition and heart-rending intimacy what it means to theorize Black life in the twenty-first century. Nash provides an essential Black feminist rejoinder to the orthodoxy of Afropessism by insisting that Black women refuse to be defined and dehumanized by Black death. Rather, their long history of cultivating beauty, intimacy, care, and affection is a fierce and rigorous practice of Black survival and enduring humanity.” - Tina M. Campt, author of (A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See) “Goodness, what a book: Jennifer C. Nash has managed to create work that is both urgent and also slow, ferocious, and quiet-which is to say that she has written a book that holds the world of ordinariness. Compellingly smart and beautifully written, How We Write Now is a transcendent read and an astonishing accomplishment that builds sublimely on Nash’s singular consideration of Black feminism’s affective work.” - Kevin Quashie, author of (Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being) "Nash not only examines the beauty of Black women’s feminist writing about loss but expertly demonstrates it with her loving, personal and poignant prose." - Karla Strand (Ms. Magazine)