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Hold On or Let Go: A Review of Blackness Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality by Jennifer C. Nash. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019, 170 pp., $23.95 (paperback), 978-1-4780-0059-iv.

By Wei Si Nic Yiu

Jennifer C. Nash's field irresolute book Black Feminism Reimagined: Subsequently Intersectionality lovingly engages with the concept of intersectionality and asks readers to resist the lure of holding onto intersectionality as "an commodity of faith" (67). This book is daring and unafraid to sway the waves of discussion around intersectionality, Black feminism, and the politics of intellectual labour. Information technology proposes new paths for relating to ane another as feminists, and in so doing it advances a new form of intimacy for the discipline of women'due south studies that enables loving engagements with forms of scholarship and analysis that many perceive every bit being embodied by, equally Nash puts information technology, "a particular racially marked subject" (83). Nash opens with a host of questions generated by her observations on the proliferation of discussions on intersectionality in the context of Black women's intellectual production, women's studies, the corporate university, and in popular culture. Looking at how intersectionality as an analytic often described "as something that had been stolen" from Black feminists in academic conversations, Nash questions the implication of the Black woman's body that "haunts the analytic…even if she is not ever explicitly named" (2). She demonstrates the allure of intersectionality that imagines holding on as a form of Black feminist agency. Nash describes Black feminist theory'south proprietary claims to the analytic of intersectionality equally a exercise of holding on. By correcting who "owns" intersectionality, the analytic then itself becomes a term to be claimed as holding (40). Correcting, rather than clarifying, becomes Black women'south main intellectual labour in the academia. From the rectification of intersectionality's "true" genealogy to the correction of intersectionality's misuse, Black women, Nash argues, are positioned to have on a defensive position. This narrative imagines intersectionality as a territory that requires protection and defence by Blackness feminists, via a well-rehearsed and often atypical genealogy of intersectionality à la Kimberlé Crenshaw. Furthermore, in these iterations of origin stories, the labour of intellectual production shifts from imagining disquisitional practices to the work of defense force. The labour of critics become one of producing counter origin stories and correcting the misuse of intersectionality as an analytic (48).

Focusing on the fraught relationship between intersectionality and women'due south studies, Nash argues for a dissimilar form of appointment with intersectionality that does not require Black women to hold onto the analytic and perform the labour of care equally a guardian and protector. Instead, she develops a project of letting become, which unsettles the set of practices that defensiveness brings along, "particularly the proprietary claim to intersectionality" (3). She stresses that her intention is to critique (and I am using her words here) "the proprietary impulses of Black feminism in an endeavour to reveal how the defensive bear on traps Black feminism, hindering its visionary world-making capacity" (three). This gesture, however, does not intend "to diagnose individual Black feminists every bit defensive or to pathologize Blackness feminist feelings" (3). Rather, in opening upwardly intersectionality, Nash pushes Blackness feminism forrad and draws from an annal of Black feminist theory that includes not-Blackness scholars. This political and intellectual move disassociates Black feminism and Black feminist theory (modes of intellectual production) from the bodies of Black feminists by expanding the terrain of Blackness feminist theory to include claims made from "unlike identity locations" (5). This reorientation offers a indicate of deviation and steers the states abroad from defensive postures that initiate a boundary and "treats Black feminism non simply as an intellectual political, creative, and erotic tradition simply also a way of feeling" (28).

In re-imagining the ways in which Blackness feminists can relate to the "critic" and the practice of "critique" by letting go of the territorial concord over intersectionality as an analytic, Nash highlights the danger of collapsing critique into a singular figure and the labour of Black feminist rescue that oft "presumes the critics' attendance yet refuses to name specific critics" (50). Reading sideways, Nash argues, is a strategy that could provide "a new genealogy that neither rejects nor accepts intersectionality merely instead sidesteps it entirely" (55). Hither reading sideways let u.s. to engage in a citational practice that does not call for intellectual originalism. Nash describes reading sideways every bit "a performance of ambivalence made manifest through silence" (55). Nash makes a provocative claim by arguing that "Black feminists produce the critic rather than expose the critic" (56) by casting them as an outside to the field of Black feminism. In this rhetorical motion, she invites u.s. to care for the critic equally a loving, generous figure who offers a different way of approaching Blackness feminism.

In the starting time chapter of the volume "A Dearest Letter of the alphabet From a Critic, or Notes on the Intersectionality Wars," Nash mines the potential of the critic by situating critique equally loving, rather than destructive. Here, she examines how intersectionality has imaged the critic equally a singular effigy who is dangerous and outside of the field of Black feminism. Tracing the word "critic" inside a Black feminist theoretical annal in the United States, Nash lovingly and carefully unpacks the diverse meanings encoded in the term "critic." Nash argues that a singular story is being told most intersectionality by Black feminists and this story has "a moral imperative: intersectionality must be saved, and Black feminists must defend intersectionality" from the critic (34). This defensiveness reinscribes Black feminists' role every bit "relentless, demanding, policing disciplinarians," which unwittingly reasserts territorial claims to intersectionality (34). Nash argues that this defensiveness over the territory of intersectionality holds the analytic captive due to the fear of the imagined critic. Interrupting this disavowal of the atypical critic haunts Black feminist engagements with intersectionality, Nash instead celebrates the "spectral figure of the critic [who] might provide an opportunity to encompass precisely the letting go" (35).

Tracing the slippages betwixt Black feminism and Blackness women, Nash reveals how intersectionality wars might "seem to be fights over intersectionality's meanings, circulations, origins, 'appropriation,' and 'colonisation,' merely these flights are actually battles over the place of the discipline'due south key sign — Black adult female — in the field imaginary" (37). Looking at the tone and the forms of the scholarly argue, Nash shows how criticism is constructed equally a violent exercise, rather than a loving one. She argues that the intersectionality war is ofttimes waged over "the genesis of intersectionality" that imagines intersectionality to have "a coherent, legible origin, describing a particular moment of intersectionality's creation" (39). Here, an origin story is "an insistence on intersectionality's place in Black feminist thought, thus correcting the widely circulating notion that intersectionality is the product […] of women's studies" (39). This corrective move, via the pinning of intersectionality's origin in Black feminism, is fascinating to Jennifer Nash considering of "Blackness feminist theory's own proprietary claims to the analytic" (40). This corrective labour that holds onto the merits of intersectionality every bit "ours" is a form of defensiveness. Nash argues that this form of defensive piece of work is a sign of scholars being "seduced by the narrative of singularity" (42). Signalling the lack of specificity in the business relationship of the critic, Nash traces how critics are often presumed to be monolithic. Often, critics are imagined to be performing similar or redundant work and the different labour is collapsed by the practice of parenthetical citations, "which clusters scholars whose work on intersectionality is actually quite complex and varied" (48).

Using Jasbir Puar's concept of assemblage as an example, Jennifer Nash interrogates how Puar is framed as the only critic and how that framing is "secured and sutured through both her trunk and her imagined identity" as outside of Black feminism as a not-Black scholar (53). She compares Puar's status to her own by showing how their "respective "critical" projects are differently described, circulated, and received in the field" (53). Naming her position every bit a Blackness feminist and a Blackness woman, she writes, "my critiques of intersectionality are imagined every bit practices of love and affection rather than hostility and are thus treated with a kind of generosity" (54). Nash wraps this chapter up by inviting the states to treat the critic as a loving figure that is generous and offers a unlike fashion of approaching Black feminism that does not lock the states into a proprietary human relationship with the analytic. This means reimagining the within and exterior of Black feminism, which pushes us to "interrogate how our anticaptivity project has get its own boundary-policing exercise" (58).

I securely admire Jennifer Nash's bold argumentation, which is informed by an extensive and conscientious date with key texts on intersectionality, care, Black feminism, and disquisitional legal studies. Bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines, she persuasively activates letting go equally a means to reimagine Black feminist'south intellectual production that opens upward new worlds and new possibilities. For example, in her 3rd chapter, "Surrender," she brings together transnationalism and intersectionality in the history of women's studies via the history of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) as women's studies' institutional dwelling. Nash imagines a new story for the two concepts, one where they are not antagonistic but rather intimately conjoined. In this context, Nash explores Blackness feminist surrender of intersectionality, proposing that a strategy of letting go can become a deliberate exercise of freedom. This practice of letting go "surrenders [intersectionality's] exclusive investment in Black woman and emphasizes the analytic'due south chapters to speak to 'women of color' broadly" (104), which "opens up new intimacies and locates political promise in a revitalized intimacy that is radical" (110). Doing so, we tin motion beyond defensiveness and tell different stories of what Black feminism tin can do, across cosmetic labour. While I believe in the potential of surrendering and deeply admire Nash's care-total engagement with the potential of letting go, I am hesitant to agree that defensive postures are not a grade of Black feminist agency or that there is simply one monolithic investment in Black feminists' investments in intersectionality. Furthermore, I must enquire – are we all equipped with the tools to let go? Should we all allow go or should some of u.s. concord on?

This book offers provocative and nuanced readings of texts and asks critical questions that button the boundaries of Black feminism. For instance, in her fourth affiliate, "Dear in the fourth dimension of expiry," Nash asks "what if the disavowed deathly archive of constabulary is reimagined as a home for Black feminism's loving practise" (113)? Posing love'south potential "equally a fashion frontward, as some other fashion of feeling Black feminism," Nash locates the juridical every bit a site of radical possibility "where we can unleash new ways of feeling Blackness feminist" (115).  Her book activates new questions for Black feminists and for scholars and practitioners who use intersectionality, while her examination of various Black feminist engagements with the analytic highlights how the celebration of intersectionality does not signify racial progress of the field of women's studies. Rather, she shows how intersectionality had become co-opted and marked by a single affective posture of defensiveness. Her examination of representations of intersectionality forces us to face up both the limits of defensiveness, cosmetic labour, and intersectionality equally well every bit the ability of singularizing critique effectually intersectionality, collapses a range of intellectual labour production that could be fruitful.

Wei Si Nic Yiu is a PhD student in Gender Studies and a Graduate Student Researcher at CSW. They were the recipient of CSW's Irving and Jean Rock Recruitment Fellowship in 2018.

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Source: https://csw.ucla.edu/2019/07/10/hold-on-or-let-go-a-review-of-black-feminism-reimagined-after-intersectionality/