How We Write Now: Living With Black Feminist Theory by Jennifer C. Nash (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), 152 PP, $94.95 HD, ISBN: 9781478026235

In the landscape of contemporary feminist studies, Jennifer C. Nash positions herself as a key feminist academic through her work, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory . This work represents an epistemological and methodological intervention rooted in the convergence of personal narrative and theoretical analysis. The intellectual project is framed by Nash ’ s autobiographical experience of facing the gradual loss of her mother to Alzheimer ’ s, a condition she describes as “ losing her in slow motion ” . This experience serves not only as an affective point of departure but also as a fundamental analytical framework for examining the modus operandi of contemporary Black feminist theory. Thus, the book functions not merely as an analysis but also as a performance of the very mode of writing that is its object of study. The central thesis articulated by Nash is that a distinctive mode of writing has crystallized within contemporary Black feminist theory, which she conceptualizes as “ beautiful writing ” . For Nash, this is not merely an aesthetic style but an ethical method: a deliberately intimate and affectively saturated voice deployed to make readers feel what Black loss is like from the inside. However, Nash ’ s project is ultimately a critical one, aimed at examining the limitations of this very mode. This mode, characterized by poetic prose, self-disclosure, and the creation of affective proximity with the reader, serves as the primary apparatus for navigating the field ’ s central preoccupation, loss . Nash ’ s critique of this paradigm is twofold. First, a critique of its dominant focus: Nash argues that “ beautiful writing ” , though powerful, tends to reproduce and consolidate a dominant paradigm of loss — namely, the spectacular death caused by state violence. Consequently, other forms of loss — those that are gradual, durational, and non-spectacular, such as chronic illness or cognitive decline — tend to be marginalized or unread as legitimate “ Black loss ” .