In Black Feminism
Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with
intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and
political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional
history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy,
Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality
to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast
intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence. As
intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash
argues that black feminism has been marked by a single
affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police
intersectionality's usages and circulations. Nash contends that only
by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the
desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine
intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory's
visionary world-making possibilities.
