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  • Black Feminism Reimagined after Intersectionality by Jennifer C. Nash
  • Noor Ghazal Aswad
Black Feminism Reimagined after Intersectionality. By Jennifer C. Nash. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019; pp. xxv + 170, $24.95 paper, $94.95 hardback, $40.00 ebook.

Jennifer C. Nash's captivating book Black Feminism Reimagined after Intersectionality is the kind of book that leaves you reeling in its insightful interrogation of the "stories we tell" about contemporary U.S. Black feminism. Nash, a selfidentified Black feminist, grapples with Black feminism's fraught engagement with intersectionality and troubles the waters of its various permutations. In this canonical text, Nash uses historical analysis, affect theory, and auto-ethnographic methods to question intersectionality as the benchmark for intervening in systems of power and oppression. Her central claim is that Black feminism, as the standard of "good feminism" in the academy, has been problematically marked by the affect of defensiveness. She argues for an ethic of "letting go" concomitant with the contention that Black feminist academic practice is too policing of critiques of intersectionality (73). This "toxic" possessiveness latches on to the wild popularity of intersectionality and positions critics of intersectionality as without allegiance to Black feminism or even Black women (27).

After an introduction that provides a genealogical background of Black feminism's theorizations of intersectionality, Chapter 1 ("A Love Letter from a Critic, or Notes on the Intersectionality Wars") explores whether intersectionality is the exclusive territory of Black feminism. Nash insists her intention is not to pathologize Black feminists, but to reveal Black feminism's proprietary impulses. By delineating how "intersectionality slipped into black feminism slipped into black woman" (36), Nash presses for a separation of Black women's corporeal presence from intersectionality. She calls for a transcendence of entrenched understandings of Black feminism as attached to the embodied quintessential Black woman towards other modes of intellectual production. Intertwined within this is the acknowledgement that criticism is not necessarily a violent practice in which one's territory is colonized by outsiders but can be generatively rooted in loving practice. As an example, Nash queries the treatment of Jasbir Puar, whose criticisms of intersectionality have allowed her to be cast as a race-traitor due to [End Page 203] her imagined identity as a non-Black scholar, and hence as an outsider to Black feminism. To further amplify this point, Nash contrasts how her own status as a Black woman has allowed her critiques of intersectionality to be tolerated as practices of love.

Chapter 2 ("The Politics of Reading") then investigates how "intersectional originalism" masks the territorial labor of Black feminism, but more important, hinders Black feminism. In chapters 1 and 2, Nash makes the rhetorical move of articulating her own positionality as a Black feminist to permit others to vocalize their critiques of intersectionality, in particular those hesitant about encroaching on the territory of others. Nevertheless, when I first read this book in a graduatelevel feminist research methods seminar, there was a palpable resistance from those for whom intersectionality has been an empowering space of belonging. Their testimony to how defensiveness can be a liberating form of agency should be contemplated in future elaborations of this work.

In the second half of the book, Nash make a transition from a deliberation on the defensive posture of Black feminism to envisioning de-territorialized possibilities of allegiance and intimacy. This primarily hinges on the argument that a proprietary stance towards intersectionality prevents the unleashing of Black feminism's liberatory potential. As such, in Chapter 3 ("Surrender") she makes a compelling invitation for global feminist engagement. Nash argues intersectionality has paradoxically forgotten transnationalism, considering it a wholly separate analytic with its own racially distinct subject. In doing so, Nash proposes a path for Black feminism to become more capacious in its engagement with geopolitical difference. As a transnational feminist myself, this chapter was profoundly "felt," engendering a realization of the decolonial synergies to be recuperated with non-Western "women of color" in feminist theory. Throughout, Nash also eschews Black feminism's tendency to act as a disciplinarian of white feminism.

Chapter 4 ("Love in the Time of Death") draws on Tiffany Lethabo King to put forth intersectionality as necessarily existing...

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