How We Write Now

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.

“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)

• Preface: Beauty, or All about My Mother  ixAcknowledgments  xiii1. Beauty, or All about Black Feminist Theory’s Mothers  12. Staying at the Bone  253. An Invitation to Listen  484. Picturing Loss  69Conclusion: New Furniture, or All About Black Feminist Theory’s Fathers  91Notes  99Bibliography  117Index  127