Other Names for Love, Or, Black Feminism Differently

Black Feminism, Differently

In Birthing Black Mothers, Jennifer Nash is interested in how Black mothers can enter American culture and politics differently. For the past decade, across now three monographs, a range of editorial projects, and some dozens of articles, Nash has cultivated a singular voice within the intellectual and institutional project of Black feminism. At its heart, Nash’s project is interested in suspending any rendering of Black feminism as an orthodoxy. The impression points marked by her monograph projects—on Black women and racialized pornography, on the institutional lives of intersectionality, and now on Black motherhood—lay out more than the story of a research agenda, but the cultivation of a writerly practice. Birthing Black Mothers blurs the line between academic and trade publishing, combining theoretical insight with reportage and cultural critique with political analysis.

The text’s abiding intervention challenges the reduction of Black women and Black mothers to symbols deployed as forms of political currency. As practitioners in the overlapping fields of Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies, we know well the historical and contemporary reduction of Black maternity to pathology and deviance. Nash augers a different path by further challenging the reduction of Black women to heroic symbols of strength, resistance, and resilience. She explores the limits for thought and for politics of narratives about Black mothers that mark their maternity as a crisis or as in crisis, including narratives deployed by Black feminists.

Nash’s project rejects any intellectual or political project that reduces Black women to “symbols and metaphors,” that “fail to contend with either our fleshy materiality or our complex needs and desires” (176). Early in the work, Nash puts it like this: “Birthing Black Mothers traces how the crisis frame has transformed Black mothers into a distinct form of Left political currency during the era of Black Lives Matter (BLM). Black mothers become political currency when the category ‘Black mother’ comes to refer not to a form of relationality, a set of practices, a form of labor, or an embodied experience, but instead to a political category that is a synonym for pain” (4). The work of the book is to find ways to reclaim Black motherhood as a form of relationality, as a set of practices, as a form of labor, and as an embodied experience. Further, the book is interested in pursuing all of these aspects of the Black maternal against what Nash calls a narrative of crisis, the reduction of the complex lifeworlds of Black mothers to crisis. For Nash, it is a project of demonstrating that crisis is not the entire story, that Black life exceeds a crisis narrative. Taking it a step further, the project of the text, and the project Nash has elaborated in recent work outside of the book, is an exploration of how love moves within and beyond crisis.1

The project of Birthing Black Mothers explores the manifold and conflicting forms of power that intersect the lives of Black mothers. Nash’s introduction establishes what she calls the crisis narrative around Black maternity in the present and the ways it has been mobilized for political projects that have not reaped benefits for Black mothers. The first chapter examines breastfeeding campaigns developed by Black feminist public health professionals and activists directed toward Black mothers. In the context of the crisis narrative surrounding Black maternity, Nash argues that “crisis rhetoric often performs its work by treating Black children as the site of crisis and by positioning Black mothers as the agents who must mitigate and resolve that crisis, who must ‘save’ Black children” (68). Nash tracks the ways that Black feminist projects can, counterintuitively, discipline Black mothers, placing constraints on their bodily and sexual autonomy in the name of protecting Black children. Nash’s second chapter turns to birthwork and the vicissitudes of institutionality, examining both the ways women of color (WOC) birth workers are deployed as a palliative against systemic inequalities affecting Black mothers, and the ways WOC birth workers participate in politically fraught forms of institution-building. Here Nash elaborates a Black feminist commitment to institutionality that challenges a tendency to render Black feminists as always and already fugitive figures beyond a will toward institutionality. Nash describes it as “a refusal of the ongoing feminist romanticization of Black feminism as an anti-institutional practice and of Black women as quintessential (and always radical) outsiders” (100). The third and fourth chapters of Birthing Black Mothers turn toward more specifically cultural texts. One examines the cultural text of celebrity Black maternity in the persons of Serena Williams, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, and Michele Obama. In their examples, Nash shifts Black maternity from the register of crisis and outlines a Black maternal aesthetics “that centers abundance, sensuality, friendship, and the interplay of the ordinary and the glamorous as intrinsic to Black maternal life” (130). The other chapter, to which I will return, turns to the genre of the maternal memoir and the ways Black mothers’ life writing is narrowed into a specific type of literary commodity. Through her readings of a range of maternal memoirs, Nash “challenges the foundations of a market that hails Black women as tragic agents authorized by grief” (138).

Birthing Black Mothers ends twice. In the Conclusion, Nash challenges the recent shift away from cultural narratives of Black maternal pathology toward Black maternal resilience. It is the intensity of the cultural narrative, not whether it moves in a “good” or “bad” direction that tells us something about the moment we inhabit. “To inhabit a moment when Black mothers are imagined as heroines rather than pathological feels like an important shift,” Nash cautions. “The consequence of these varied forms of marking Black women is to render us symbols and metaphors, to fail to contend with either our fleshy materiality or our complex needs and desires” (176).

The book then ends with a Coda that situates the crisis narrative surrounding Black motherhood within the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the weeks of protests against antiblack violence that began in the late spring of 2020. Within this confluence, Black mothers gained visibility through the various forms of their proximity to tragedy—the disproportionate effects of a viral pandemic, police violence, and the violences of maternal health services. In that context, Nash asks “what it means for a Black feminist theoretical project and politic to be undergirded by a desire to understand the variety of Black mothers’ political needs and the multiplicity of their affects ranging from grief to rage, from trauma to ecstasy” (185). This capacious Black feminist theoretical and political project might create a space where Black mothers can enter the scene as “more than a political category mobilized to signal either pathology and deviance, or compassion and support,” and be “far more than a Left credential conferring political virtue on those who utter their names” (185).

The Politics of Black Maternity

Nash explores the ways Black women are dehumanized by projects that flatten really-existing Black women into symbols of political possibility—radical, liberal, conservative, or reactionary—and she insists on the contradictory, quotidian humanity of Black women as political and cultural subjects. Echoing Nash’s own engagement with the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement,” the project of Birthing Black Mothers follows the desire written into their line, “To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough” (Combahee, 274). There are strains of the Black feminist tradition that augment the desire to be “levelly human” with an analysis of the ways the figure of the human, as an ontological project, or as a political, philosophical, and cultural project, seems to require the exclusion of a Blackness fixed around the absent center of a Black femininity. If Black women were to be levelly human, then, the most essential parameters of what it means to be “human” would have to change.2

Nash insists on the importance of not reducing Black feminism, in its necessarily imprecise relationship to Black women, to this tradition or to any specific political formation or historical iteration. Her work is skeptical of the pleasures that come from imagining Black women as intrinsically and a priori heroic, fugitive, or radical. “Much as I seek to disrupt a conception of Black women as heroines,” she writes, “I also aspire to trouble the notion of Black feminism as a fugitive tradition, an account that relies on a romance about the tradition” (176). Against these seductive romances, and against the forms of sentimentality that mark much work on the maternal, Nash insists on a different relationship to Black feminism and different forms of relationality for Black women. Ultimately, for Nash, “the consequence of these varied forms of marking Black women is to render us symbols and metaphors, to fail to contend with either our fleshy materiality or our complex needs and desires,” and “the political thrust of this book . . . is to imagine a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of making Black women into symbols of any kind, that can be as attentive to the pathologization of Black women as to their romanticization” (176).

If this is the political thrust of Birthing Black Mothers, it is a provocative one. And one that Nash does not go on to elaborate. In this formulation, she broaches the question of what it would mean to pursue any politics without recourse to symbols and metaphors. A politics shorn of metaphor and metonymy would be a politics beyond representation. It would be a politics counter to both representative or radical democracy, that disrupts a tradition stretching from Aristotle to Antonio Gramsci. It disrupts the forms of meaning-making thought to be necessary for what we call politics.

In point of fact, the political project Nash gestures toward is not unlike the project articulated in Frank Wilderson’s “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” There, Wilderson follows a chain of citations through Cornell West to the Richard Wright of “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” where the latter wrote that “the Negro is America’s metaphor.” This is an essential insight for Wilderson, who offers that “a metaphor comes into being through a violence that kills, rather than merely exploits, the object so that the concept might live” (231). And this is precisely the violence that concerns Nash in Birthing Black Mothers. In a rejoinder to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—an aspect of Wilderson’s project that has garnered little commentary in elaborations of the project of afropessimism—Wilderson cautions further that “struggles over hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifying—at some point they require coherence, they require categories for the record—which means they contain the seeds of anti-blackness” (232). Birthing Black Mothers ends at the edge of the cliff of political signification, it does not venture to name what a politics on the other side of coherence might consist of. But both Nash and Wilderson articulate a critique of Left politics that rely on metaphors of Blackness and of Black motherhood for their coherence, or for what Nash refers to throughout the text as “currency.” Like an economy without a medium of exchange, Birthing Black Mothers demands a politics outside of representation and hegemony.

Narratives of Black Maternity

The indeterminacy of the politics implied at this moment in the text mirrors the indeterminacy in Nash’s title. The “Birthing” of Birthing Black Mothers recurs throughout the text as both description and metaphor. It speaks to the text’s concern with birthing practices, and with the institutions that intersect the lives of birthing people (or, those pregnant and birthing people who become mothers). But it also speaks to the text’s interest in the tensions between how Black women make themselves as Black mothers and how the wider world constructs them.

Nash attends to this latter complexity when her text turns to the world around Black maternal memoirs. From the outset, Nash sets her attention on the work Black maternal memoirs perform in a publishing industry that has offered Black women writers, at different moments, the most lavish attention and the most intense indifference. Her chapter traces the racial and sexual politics of “the publishing industry’s recent creation of a maternal ‘boom’” (136). In the era of Black Lives Matter, “the Black maternal memoir . . . is imagined (and marketed) to show us” something different than white maternal memoirs as a genre that “is presumed to offer an account of ambivalence [that] actually gives us a rich glimpse into the rearrangement of the maternal self” (136). Instead, Black maternal memoirs are “texts thought to document the feelings of expected loss that attend to Black motherhood, that grapple with the simultaneous life-giving labor of motherhood and the terror of the life-stealing world of antiBlackness” (136).

The project of Birthing Black Mothers is concerned with what exceeds the expectation of loss, a narrative of crisis, and an economy of grief. Across the texts Nash reads, she finds a genre that “actually offers myriad grammars of ecstatic, creative, and spiritual mothering, of ‘natural’ mothering, that complicate monolithic visions of ‘mothering while Black,’ even as they necessarily contend with a marketplace where Black maternal grief is what gives Black motherhood, and Black maternal writing, legibility” (137). Across the text, Nash returns to ideas like narrative, visibility, legibility, categorization, representation, and the marketplace. The project aims at what disrupts these forms of meaning-making, while also paying careful attention to the ways that Black women and Black feminists invest themselves in projects of meaning-making. For Nash, the archive of Black maternal memoirs “challenges the foundations of a market that hails Black women as tragic agents authorized by grief, even as some . . . grapple with various forms of loss and trauma” (138). These texts “move alongside myriad kinds of trauma and pain” while they also, importantly, “complicate the notion of proximity to death—where death takes the form of a slain child—as the condition of Black maternal life” (138).

Other Names for Love

Years ago, the citation escapes me, I read a psychoanalyst who said that one reason parents are so troubling for children is that they embody the reality that, once, the child did not exist. And that non-existence is where we all return to. Birth and death adjoin each other as relations to non-existence. Birthing is as much a relation to non-existence as it is a relation to new existence. If the maternal is so often characterized by ambivalence, it is partly because the maternal is a relation that marks being and non-being as simultaneous and inseparable.

Motherhood is a kind of conversion. Reading between the maternal writings of Alice Walker and Rebecca Walker, Nash finds in the latter a story of becoming a mother by unbecoming a daughter. In her alienation from her mother, Rebecca Walker explores motherhood as a pleasurable and welcome disruption of herself. Her “conception of motherhood as a site of radical openness, of a form of care that alters the self by linking it to an Other, is . . . a deeply pleasurable transformation,” Nash writes. And Nash reads this “representation of ecstatic motherhood” as a mode or modulation of the ecstasy she explored in her first book: “a site of complex and corporeal pleasures that include the sense of being undone and remade, and feelings that are often thought of as apart from pleasure like worry and anxiety” (151). To become a mother is a complicated and ecstatic conversion. At once to become undone and unknown to oneself and to find a new form of being in relation to the Other of a child, or to what one imagines the child will be or become.

By the end of Birthing Black Mothers, Nash is concerned with the ways Black feminism has narrated Black maternity and the impact this has on Black mothers. She asks, “how do Black mothers navigate pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum life when their bodies and experiences are overdetermined by narratives of trauma? And given our new cultural awareness of the embodied and even molecular consequences of stress, how do we—Black feminists—contend with the material consequences of telling Black mothers again and again that they are close to death?” (177). This moment in the text troubled me. It presents itself in the register of the empirical. A question for the doing of politics and the stakes of Black feminist organizing. But the text does not pursue this point empirically. Nash “[encourages] Black feminism to be a theoretical and political project that can do justice to the violence that Black mothers experience and refuse to reproduce Black motherhood as a trauma category” (178). She is concerned with “the embodied and material experiences of Black mothers who navigate around the now-entrenched meaning of the category itself, a meaning produced as much by institutionalized medicine as by Black feminists working in the name of Black mothers” (178; emphasis added). What would we have to know and how would we have to know it to say, in an empirical register, that Black feminist writing and public health activism are as responsible as the institutions of American medicine for how the category of “birthing black mother” is experienced by Black women?

How do we come to this narration of the ways Black feminism impacts the world, and how the ways descriptions of Black life affect the matter of Black living? Writing on the ways wanting to change is always a way of narrating one’s life, Adam Phillips in On Wanting to Change offers the following: “It is not that our lives are determined by our descriptions of them; but our descriptions of them do have an effect, however enigmatic or indiscernible it might be. And there is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it” (xiv). Nash’s project in Birthing Black Mothers, as much as in her previous works, is about insisting on an open-endedness for Black women. On securing the widest possible aperture for experiencing and narrating Black women’s lives. In that moment, at the book’s first ending, Nash reveals an anxiety over the stakes of a Black feminism that narrates itself in the wrong ways. The desire for the widest possible freedom up against the fear of a subsuming incoherence in the figure of trauma. To be clear, this anxiety is not a failure of the text. The ambivalent coexistence of freedom and abandonment is irreducible in the experience of relation. The maternal is a privileged name for a relation that bridges being and non-being, and Blackness is modernity’s privileged term for the non-relation within every relation. Any genuine research at this intersection, such as Birthing Black Mothers, reckons with the complexes of anxiety and desire that mark our experiences of the intergenerational. Ultimately, Nash shows us, these anxieties and these desires are other names for love.

James Bliss is Visiting Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. He is currently completing his first manuscript project, ‘In a Field of Static: Missed Encounters with Black Feminism.’ His work has appeared in Palimpsest, Signs, Mosaic, Feminist Studies, and the Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities.

Notes

1. 1. Consider Nash’s recent essays, “On the Beginning of the World,” “Slow Loss,” and “Writing Black Beauty.” Understood in this context, Nash’s book belongs to a cohort of recent texts in Black feminist and queer studies that challenge what is seen as the collapse of Black life to the conditions of antiblackness. Much of this work is implicitly or explicitly a critical response to the interventions collected under the name of afropessimism. This latter term is taken to be exemplary of critical analysis that allows Blackness to be defined negatively, and from without, as the condition of living under social or civic death. For all the ways these tendences within Black cultural studies speak past each other, their deep intellectual and political affinities remain to be explored.

2. 2. A genealogy of this tendency would include the signal works of Sylvia Wynter and, among her contemporary readers, the works of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Patrice Douglass.

Works Cited

1. The Combahee River Collective. [1977] 2014. ‘A Black Feminist Statement.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3–4: 271–280.
2. Nash, Jennifer C. 2019. “Writing Black Beauty.” Signs 45, no. 1: 101–122.
3. Nash, Jennifer C. 2021. Birthing Black Mothers. Durham: Duke University Press. 
4. Nash, Jennifer C. 2022. “On the Beginning of the World: Dominance Feminism, Afropessimism and the Meanings of Gender.” Feminist Theory 23, no. 4: 556–574.
5. Nash, Jennifer C. 2022. “Slow Loss: Black Feminism and Endurance.” Social Text 40, no. 2: 1–20.
6. Phillips, Adam. 2022. On Wanting to Change. London: Picador. 
7. Wilderson, Frank B., III. 2003. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society.” Social Identities 9, no. 2: 225–240.