Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality by Jennifer C. Nash (review)

What is clear to me is that Jennifer C. Nash cares deeply about the affective lives of Black women in the US academy. Over the course of Nash's body of work, she has demonstrated that she labors on behalf of, cares for, and at times even worries about Black women and Black feminist intellectual traditions. While Black women's sexuality and pleasure might be her first scholarly love, in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, Nash turns her scholarly attention to Black feminism as "a way of feeling" (28). Attending to the "felt life of Black feminism" and its theoretical, political, and creative traditions, Nash tracks the specific structure of feeling that intersectionality and its circulation in the academy produces (28). Betraying the subtitle's gesture—after intersectionality—that indicates a moving beyond, Nash makes the case that the promise of intersectionality has become even more significant for feminist practice in this (Trumpian) political moment (133). However, the academy, women's studies, and most importantly Black feminist scholars can no longer afford to engage intersectionality in the way that they have if it is to have any purchase.

According to Nash, "racially saturated fantasies and attachments" stick to and fuel the circulation of intersectionality as a form of Black women's service labor that the field of women's studies and to a certain extent popular feminism exploits to perform its virtue and relevance (138). Nash attempts to intervene upon and arrest this toxic cycle. Her focal point and site of intervention is where the book is the most provocative. Nash's through line and primary concern in the book is how Black feminists' "defensive" posture in the academy surfaces in response to the ways that intersectionality appears in the academy as a fraught site of both peril and promise (12). While the claim of defensiveness might rile certain readers, her careful "stewardship" of intersectionality is marshalled to establish trust between Nash and readers who may take umbrage with being called defensive (myself included at times). Before making her controversial claim, in the introduction to the book, Nash conducts an impeccably thorough genealogical treatment of Black feminist theorizations of intersectionality. The introduction alone serves as an important pedagogical tool for teaching a generation of millennial scholars who assume a certain level of intimacy and knowledge about intersectionality because it is a theory that they have grown up with and always known.

Because Nash has spent more than a decade thinking through the institutional life of intersectionality, her historical work is on par with scholars like Patricia Hill Collins (1998), Vivian May (2002, 2015), Sirma Bilge (2013), Devon Carbado (2003, 2013), and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991). In addition to covering critical conceptual terrain, the introduction also poses critical questions like, how is it that an analytic that once called attention to the invisibility of Black women's subjectivity can become a tool of institutional capacity building for women's studies programs and the corporate university? How is it that as "both women's studies and black studies" have deemed intersectionality passé, they have deployed intersectionality as a necessary investment (22)? The introduction to Black Feminism Reimagined also sets the stage to broach the sensitive issue of what Nash names as "Black feminist defensiveness" in the context of the "intersectionality wars" (5–6).

In chapter 1, "a love letter from a critic, or notes on the intersectionality wars," Nash maps the battlefields of the intersectionality wars and explains how Black women come to imagine intersectionality as a sacred object under attack. She argues that Black feminists often view intersectionality as under siege, which requires the production of a critic. In a deft rhetorical move, Nash resists the impulse to deflect accusations levied at her that she is a critic of intersectionality. Instead, she places her body on the line and embraces the term to better track—and assist the reader with tracking—the ways that Black feminists identify critics. As Nash...