Jennifer Christine Nash | "Writing From Home"

Building on my work on beautiful Black feminist writing (e.g. my most recent book, How We Write Now), this talk considers the centrality of experimentation with voice to contemporary Black feminist theory. Thinking alongside Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, and Elizabeth Alexander, I mark an archive of contemporary Black feminist academic-popular writing that is distinct in its commitment to forging a closeness, both with its reader and with its objects of study. In the second half of the talk, I turn to my own transition from writing in a conventional academic voice, to writing personal essays. I share excerpts from some of my forthcoming essay collection (Memory Care, forthcoming Duke University Press) as a way of thinking about multivocality as a form of curiosity. I am particularly interested in how these personal essays offer the promise (and maybe the fiction) of finding and forging home on the page.

Jennifer C. Nash is the Jean Fox O'Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of four books (all published on Duke University Press): 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); Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (awarded the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize by the National Women's Studies Association); Birthing Black Mothers (awarded an Honorable Mention for the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize by the National Women's Studies Association); How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory. She is also the editor of Gender: Love (Macmillan, 2016), and a co-editor (with Samantha Pinto) of The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities (Routledge, 2023). She co-edits (with Samantha Pinto) the Black Feminism on the Edge book series on Duke University Press. She is the Editorial Director of Feminist Studies.