Dr. Jennifer C. Nash is the Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She earned her PhD in African American Studies at Harvard University and her JD at Harvard Law School. Before joining Duke, Dr. Nash held appointments at George Washington University and Northwestern University. She is the author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association) and Black Feminism Reimagined (awarded the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize by the National Women’s Studies Association). Her third book, Birthing Black Mothers, will be published by Duke University Press in 2021.
Welcome Jen! You’re making the move to Durham during an incredibly unstable time and in your book, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, you mention that it was written during a series of delightful but disorienting moves—what you called “a long season of change.” Do you have any texts that you return to again and again to anchor yourself in your work and in the world?
The text that comes to mind is Patricia Williams’s Alchemy of Race and Rights. I have a copy that I bought in 1997 when I was a freshman in college. I enrolled in a women’s studies class on a whim. It was called Gender and Inequality, and it was taught by an economist named Juliet Schor. She told us to go down to the Harvard University Press shop and buy this book, which you could get for one dollar because they stocked remainders. So I marched down there and bought the book, and I’ve carried that copy with me for twenty seven years. It’s a book I teach pretty much every semester, and I think I could spend my entire life trying to wrap my arms around it and will never fully get it because she’s doing so many things simultaneously. She’s thinking so complexly about law, Black feminist theory, contract, theory, personhood, possession—she’s thinking about so much and also developing this writing style that she calls alchemical, which I think becomes the model for some of the Black feminist theoretical writing we see now that is now more experimental and personal and so on. So that’s the text that’s been an anchor.
There’s also this really beautiful essay by Jordy Rosenberg, “Reading Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day.” It’s a lovely essay and one of the things it talks about is what it means to spend a lifetime in conversation with a single text; What speaks to you in different moments as you come to a text that’s become an anchor? I remember reading Patricia Williams in law school, and I was excited that she was talking about commercial law. That doesn’t excite me in the way that it used to, but it’s been a way to measure my own shifting interests and investments as well.
Do you have specific writing rituals that you consistently practice?
My writing rituals are about a commitment to writing. What I always tell my graduate students is to prioritize yourself. Don’t start your day with emails. I try to practice that. So I’m usually up when it’s dark, and I start my day with doing my own work before I open outlook and see what other people demand of me. I try to be more intentional as the years go by and there are more demands made on my time. For me, the what and the where of writing is less important if I’m writing every day, and I can do it on my porch, or a café, or the waiting room at the dentist office, wherever.
In your work, you describe Black feminism as an affective project. Do you see writing as a component of this affective conceptualization?
So it’s funny you say that because the project that I’m working on now is a book called How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory that’s about writing and that’s trying to think about what I see as a post-2000 turn, whereby Black feminists I think become really centrally interested in writing itself and writing as being part of Black feminist theory-making and politics and particular kinds of writing. So I’m thinking about folks like Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Imani Perry, Elizabeth Alexander, Nicole Fleetwood, Tina Campt, a whole group of scholars who I see as having really transformed our conception of what academic writing can be and what Black feminist academic writing can do.
In part, I see their work really be interested in risk as an ethic. What does it mean to risk everything in your writing? So I’m trying to think about risk and vulnerability as central to a Black feminist writing practice and the beauty of being so close to the objects we write about and also what it takes from us, the tax, what it extracts from us. And it’s both.
In your work, you describe Black feminism as an affective project. Do you see writing as a component of this affective conceptualization?
So it’s funny you say that because the project that I’m working on now is a book called How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory that’s about writing and that’s trying to think about what I see as a post-2000 turn, whereby Black feminists I think become really centrally interested in writing itself and writing as being part of Black feminist theory-making and politics and particular kinds of writing. So I’m thinking about folks like Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Imani Perry, Elizabeth Alexander, Nicole Fleetwood, Tina Campt, a whole group of scholars who I see as having really transformed our conception of what academic writing can be and what Black feminist academic writing can do.
In part, I see their work really be interested in risk as an ethic. What does it mean to risk everything in your writing? So, I’m trying to think about risk and vulnerability as central to a Black feminist writing practice and the beauty of being so close to the objects we write about and also what it takes from us, the tax, what it extracts from us. And it’s both.
What are you most looking forward to about being at Duke?
I’m really excited to be in a space that both says it’s interdisciplinary and is actually interdisciplinary. Here, it feels like the university champions its commitment to interdisciplinarity and it’s easy every step of the way to collaborate across schools. I’m particularly excited about that as someone who was trained in law, as I hope to find ways to collaborate with colleagues at the law school interested in feminist legal theory and critical race theory.
The other thing I’m excited about is that my colleagues in GSF are deeply imaginative and forward-looking and ask questions like, what do we want to be in 10 years, how do we want to train our students, what is a feminist education? I’m excited to be a part of those conversations.
What do you think the goal of a feminist education should be?
Part of me thinks the goal is to unleash our students’ political imaginations, but because I have interdisciplinary training, I know what its promises and its pitfalls can be. So you’ve got a BA, and you’ve taken all these courses on different subjects, and then you go to a dinner party, and someone asks: What is Gender Studies? What is the history of the field? And you’re like: pfft, I don’t know.
So I have this desire for coherence and context. What I want for students is an unleashed, messy, radical political imagination, but I also want it to have a grounding.