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".Second, a call for theoretical expansion: stemming from this critique, Nash issues a call to broaden the theoretical capacity of Black feminism.She questions how the tradition can be recalibrated to accommodate and provide theoretical articulation for losses that are "ordinary", quiet, and often lacking a clear narrative resolution.