Black Feminist Self-Help: Or, Notes on the Genres of Contemporary Black Feminist Political Life

This article turns attention to the contemporary Black feminist trade book, which I argue introduces a new, highly visible, and highly profitable genre: Black feminist self-help. This article thinks critically about Black feminist self-help, tracking the exceedingly narrow conception of the political that it advances. If all feminist work might be understood as a form of self-help, as championing “the personal is political” and suggesting that political transformation begins with the self, Black feminist self-help insists that the entirety of political transformation is self-improvement, that self-work is synonymous with political work, that feeling better is political and politically radical. The idea of the radical promise of self-improvement permeates this archive, from the transformative promise of self-love in Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not An Apology to the resistant potential of simply lying down in Tricia Hersey’s manifesto Rest Is Resistance. And the idea that feeling better is radical permits the reader to heed the call of these books, to take on the labor that their authors demand even as the authors often hide the fact that their books ask their readers to work. Further, this ideas allows the authors to claim that the acts of reading, working, and thinking differently are political tasks that remake both the self and the world.

Duke Scholars

Author Jennifer Christine Nash Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies