Birthing Black Mothers

“Viewing Black motherhood as a trending political site, Jennifer C. Nash boldly pushes Black feminists to reflect critically on their own embrace of crisis rhetoric that casts Black maternal bodies as mere symbols of state violence marked by suffering, trauma, and grief. While powerfully arguing we risk reproducing Black mothers as problems in need of intervention and relying on low-wage Black birthworkers to save them, Nash points to ways we can theorize new forms of Black maternal freedom that refuse confinement to a marketed crisis frame.”

~Dorothy Roberts, author of, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Investigating the fraught position in which Black mothers find themselves and the complex ways they engage with the discourse of crisis that is attached to them, Birthing Black Mothers will generate a wonderfully complex debate in Black feminism. The difficult conversations that Jennifer C. Nash’s arguments will incite are well worth the discomfort. This brilliant book is the most exciting piece of scholarship I have read this year.”

~Khiara M. Bridges, author of, The Poverty of Privacy Rights

"[An] essential examination of Black motherhood and its layered complexities of representation, performance, gaze, critique, precarity and politics."

~Karla Strand, Ms.

"Birthing Black Mothers is a highly relevant and accessible work that will appeal to students interested in various aspects of Black motherhood, as well as to a broader audience outside academia. Jennifer Nash's depiction of the contemporary crisis enriches ongoing debates around Black motherhood."

~Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo, E3W Review of Books