Disobedient Bodies Book Club: Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality by Jennifer Nash

The next book we are going to read in DB book club is Feminism Reimagined which I'm currently reading myself. I know it sounds v. niche but honestly this is a must read for everybody ! Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality is a groundbreaking text, -and with the ubiquity of intersectionality today- I cant overstate how important both the questions it addresses as well as the nuanced answers it provides, are ! 

In Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality  Professor Nash identifies what she terms as a territorial aspect that is pronounced in many contemporary iterations of “black feminism”

This territorial posture “objects to a critical regime created by and for Black women being "appropriated" for the struggles of other marginalized groups”.

This territoriality “threatens to make intersectionality into PROPERTY to be defended and guarded” a logic completely at odds with “black feminism's longstanding anti-captivity orientation, and the tradition's deep critiques of how logics of property enshrine boundaries and ensure that value is communicated exclusively through ownership"

This is brilliant scholarship that complicates and interrogates terms often uncritically accepted as liberatory even as versions of them begin to embody and reproduce the very forces they evolved to overcome in the first.

Although slim and elegantly written, it is still an academic text, and imo best read slowly so that one can read passages, re-read them and digest (that is certainly what I do). I will fix a date in September for us to come together to discuss. I will also set some questions/prompts after I have finished it myself to help you structure your engagement with the text and to guide our conversation  when we come together to discuss it.

The following text for October will be Olufemi Taiwo's Elite Capture. How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else), another brilliantly subversive text from the Black Radical Tradition. 

Lots of Love, 

Emma x