Jennifer C. Nash, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory

This review of Jennifer C. Nash’s How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory employs personal writing to reflect on the author’s concept of beautiful writing as a new form of writing marking contemporary Black feminist theory. Contemplating Black ordinariness as an archive for Black feminist theory, the author’s engagement with loss as constitutive of Black women’s lives is considered. This includes the use of the author’s own personal writing, and that of other Black women writers, as they attend to forms of loss that are non-spectacular and embedded in the conditions of the everyday. The review reflects on the relationship between writers and readers with a focus on what Black feminist writing aspires to offer, do to, and demand from, its readers. The author’s engagement with beauty as a Black feminist method and ethical method of Black feminist writing is brought into conversation with questions of the therapeutic.