Birthing Black Mothers looks at Black mothers in the US and how they have become (spectacularly and dangerously) visible through the frame of crisis. Black women and mothers are seen as symbols. They have become a political category mobilized by the US left. Nash probes a moment where the conditions of the ordinary have been framed as a crisis and where Black motherhood has become a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, support and benign regulation by the political state and Black feminists. One of the things she does is advances the term "Black maternal politics" by looking at how Black Women have used motherhood as a platform for activism.

My favorite quote is "Crisis - the primary frame through which Black mothers and Black motherhood become visible - has affective, temporal, and aesthetic dimensions that collectively conjure up an image of black mothers occupying a nontime and non-place, one that is thought to be qualitatively different from the here and now of the contemporary United States."

Nash invests in naming, describing, and analyzing what she calls the feminist birth industry. > spotlighting the newfound place of Black motherhood in the construction of that industry and the centrality of Black feminists to that industry. Treating Black feminism and Black women as the vanguard of the institutional efforts, Nash unfolds to center the transformative and life-affirming work of doulas.

Nash does a few things in this book. She (1) explores a particular iteration of the crisis facing Black mothers and grapples with efforts to support, encourage and bolster Black breastfeeding by claiming that Black breast milk is Black gold; (2) Turns to the labour of women of colour doulas in Chicago tracing how they are increasingly positioned as on the front lines of the way to preserve Black life; (3) Turns to a trio of Black female celebrities who rewrite Black mother's relationships to crisis; (4) Turns to an archive of Black maternal memoirs, examining how contemporary Black maternal life writing both sits with and against crisis reframing the figure of the Black mother and her psychic and political capacities; and (5) Considers the place of Black mothers in the 3rd pandemic terms used by activist to describe the intersection of COVID 19, Black people by the police, and Black maternal morality.

Nash is very theoretical and this work has a LOT of theory in it. I enjoyed that, but it also takes to read, digest, and understand this book. It does make me think a lot of Black motherhood and everything that encompasses and draws from it.