ABSTRACT
In Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, Jennifer Nash clarifies that Origin stories work by presuming that intersectionality emerged not through debate or collaboration but through a singular voice, historical moment, or foundational text. The preamble of Southern Horrors is comprised of three parts: the author's prefatory comments written in New York in October of 1892, a dedication to those responsible for the pamphlet's publication, and a letter from Frederick Douglass. Wells privileges broad communal accountability over shallow racial or class unanimity. In the end, the chapter does not seek to install Wells as the sole harbinger of intersectional analysis, deposing all others. Rather than reducing Black womanhood to a peripheral entity within the lynching dialectic, Wells theorizes subjection determined by age, class, and region, recuperating meaning and value associated with Black communities that the nation-state would much rather forget.
