Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination
Autor Mali D. Collinsen Limba Engleză Paperback – 11 iun 2025
Reproductive justice debates have often focused on the right to not have children, but rarely do they address the right to remember children lost to violence. Turning her attention to visual and written works by Black women documenting mother–child separation, Mali D. Collins invites us to deploy a theory of “scraps” to understand the ways that the lives of Black mothers and children are documentations of centuries of racialized and gendered torment. Focusing on creative works from the late twentieth century through the present, including the writings of Toni Cade Bambara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Edwidge Danticat; the critical activism of Erica Garner; and visual/material art by Samaria Rice and Elizabeth Catlett, Collins argues that Black women’s creative work should be recognized as memory work that plays a crucial role in the cultural processing of racial and maternal trauma. By centering creative scraps—interstitial, fragmentary, or discarded elements—of maternal dispossession, Scrap Theory brings together theories of archival injustice and reproductive injustice to illuminate how the archival erasure of Black motherhood is an urgent concern for the movement for reproductive justice.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259474
ISBN-10: 0814259472
Pagini: 192
Ilustrații: 3 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814259472
Pagini: 192
Ilustrații: 3 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Through deep archival research, literary analysis, and cultural critique, Collins launches the conversation around black maternal health and well-being into a new stratosphere—moving it beyond biological reproductivity and into the psychic space of cultural dispossession. Scrap Theory will have a long life on any black feminist theory syllabus.” —Zenzele Isoke, author of Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance
“Scrap Theory speaks to Saidiya Hartman’s call to formulate a ‘history of the present’ by linking the dispossession of generations of Black mothers with the contemporary moment of racial reckoning and centers texts by those previously considered outside the range of legitimate historical scholarship.” —Sandra Patton-Imani, author of Queering Family Trees: Race, Reproductive Justice, and Lesbian Motherhood
Notă biografică
Mali D. Collins is Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at American University. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Souls, and the Black Scholar. Collins is a certified full-spectrum doula and a reproductive rights activist.
Extras
The Black Maternal Superbody
How can a theory of scraps help us understand Black women’s praxis for coping with death? I have set out to plumb this question in the preceding chapters to ultimately conclude that the question of praxis and death is unresolvable in the ongoing specter of state violence. Where Black women’s memory-making practices are shaped by this violence, they refuse to be underdeveloped by the registers of violence that attend them. Black mothers refuse to document practices that reproduce their children’s deaths and to capitulate to the violences of institutional navigation around these deaths and their documentation practices. In sum, a new strategy has manifested the material, spiritual, and cultural memoriesof slain, unborn, and too-soon-gone children.
The History of the Superbody
Deirdre Cooper Owens’s term of the “medical superbody” isolates the Black woman’s reproductive body as an originary site of obstetric violence. Owens’s work argues that Black women’s bodies were outside the perceived parameters of humanness, thus constituting the lack of ethical medical treatment Black women experienced during the early formations of gynecological practice. Owens also argues that the “medical superbody” may have been deemed unhuman despite being a prone subject for medical experimentation. The violence Black women experienced benefited larger society because their bodies served as the literal testing material for advances in reproductive health.
Garner and some of her contemporaries through a formation of Owens’s term. The Black maternal superbody returns the “medical superbody” to a scene of reproductive justice within the contemporary Movement for Black Lives. I see this term as part of a reproductive justice analysis of the Black feminist archive. It at once de-centers and centers Black women’s lives and bodies in the Movement of Black Lives. It also reveals the ways that maternal bodies converge with other definitions, such as “Black activist mothering,” or “Black women as mothers who are engaged in community work and are intentionally living in the margins and do so as acts of resistance and transformation,” to show how political action impacts the maternal body and Black mothers’ daily lives in such bodies.
The concept of the Black maternal superbody and an analytic of reproductive justice work together to allow for a space to experiment messily with identity formation in the social, medical, and public activist spheres, through the aperture of the reproductive body.
One of the primary thrusts of this book is that Black mothers’ activism and memory-keeping form a counternarrative to the assumption that activism is an inherently patrilineal affair. The assumptive logic that the most potent activism is practiced and instituted by male-identified people erases not only the myths that have long affected Black women’s bodies, but also the ways that our activism is embodied. Rather than taking Black women’s struggles for bodily autonomy and safety as central to our activism, they are too often portrayed in public discourses as mere coincidence. The Black maternal superbody as a framework derives from the superwoman myth that Michele Wallace formulates. Wallace also finds origin, as does this book, in Patricia Hill Collins’s “controlling images,” or images manufactured to “control” imagery rooted in the juxtaposition of white Victorian womanhood. The superbody-as-myth overdetermines the formulation of activism-as-cultural-memory as a masculine story, and thus Black mothers are inherently oppositional to the supremacies of whiteness and womanhood. This explosion leads to a conceptualization of the archive of activism as multimodal. This “grammar of Black feminist futurity” hones imaginative expression as consequential to forming lasting historical narratives around Black women’s bodily liberation from destructive myths. If we are to critique the social, legal, and cultural injuries that shape Black women’s bodies, relationships, and identities, we must also undertake these injuries as wounds to Black women’s imaginative and activist labors. Tina Campt’s grammar of Black feminist futurity outdoes its own bounds of the optical to other senses, as well as the kinetic. The process of Black futurity in motion also perceives activisms through the body politic, such as giving birth or the simple refusal of a Black body to rise from a diner counter. Black feminist futurity accounts for the ways that Black cultural expressions of Black maternity enact their own vision of “living the future now,” where Black women express maternity viably, and without fear of dispossession. It in no way conflates the future, let alone the now, as a utopia. This grammar I enact views Black maternal activism as compulsory inclusion when imagining the foundations of cultural activism.
How can a theory of scraps help us understand Black women’s praxis for coping with death? I have set out to plumb this question in the preceding chapters to ultimately conclude that the question of praxis and death is unresolvable in the ongoing specter of state violence. Where Black women’s memory-making practices are shaped by this violence, they refuse to be underdeveloped by the registers of violence that attend them. Black mothers refuse to document practices that reproduce their children’s deaths and to capitulate to the violences of institutional navigation around these deaths and their documentation practices. In sum, a new strategy has manifested the material, spiritual, and cultural memoriesof slain, unborn, and too-soon-gone children.
The History of the Superbody
Deirdre Cooper Owens’s term of the “medical superbody” isolates the Black woman’s reproductive body as an originary site of obstetric violence. Owens’s work argues that Black women’s bodies were outside the perceived parameters of humanness, thus constituting the lack of ethical medical treatment Black women experienced during the early formations of gynecological practice. Owens also argues that the “medical superbody” may have been deemed unhuman despite being a prone subject for medical experimentation. The violence Black women experienced benefited larger society because their bodies served as the literal testing material for advances in reproductive health.
Garner and some of her contemporaries through a formation of Owens’s term. The Black maternal superbody returns the “medical superbody” to a scene of reproductive justice within the contemporary Movement for Black Lives. I see this term as part of a reproductive justice analysis of the Black feminist archive. It at once de-centers and centers Black women’s lives and bodies in the Movement of Black Lives. It also reveals the ways that maternal bodies converge with other definitions, such as “Black activist mothering,” or “Black women as mothers who are engaged in community work and are intentionally living in the margins and do so as acts of resistance and transformation,” to show how political action impacts the maternal body and Black mothers’ daily lives in such bodies.
The concept of the Black maternal superbody and an analytic of reproductive justice work together to allow for a space to experiment messily with identity formation in the social, medical, and public activist spheres, through the aperture of the reproductive body.
One of the primary thrusts of this book is that Black mothers’ activism and memory-keeping form a counternarrative to the assumption that activism is an inherently patrilineal affair. The assumptive logic that the most potent activism is practiced and instituted by male-identified people erases not only the myths that have long affected Black women’s bodies, but also the ways that our activism is embodied. Rather than taking Black women’s struggles for bodily autonomy and safety as central to our activism, they are too often portrayed in public discourses as mere coincidence. The Black maternal superbody as a framework derives from the superwoman myth that Michele Wallace formulates. Wallace also finds origin, as does this book, in Patricia Hill Collins’s “controlling images,” or images manufactured to “control” imagery rooted in the juxtaposition of white Victorian womanhood. The superbody-as-myth overdetermines the formulation of activism-as-cultural-memory as a masculine story, and thus Black mothers are inherently oppositional to the supremacies of whiteness and womanhood. This explosion leads to a conceptualization of the archive of activism as multimodal. This “grammar of Black feminist futurity” hones imaginative expression as consequential to forming lasting historical narratives around Black women’s bodily liberation from destructive myths. If we are to critique the social, legal, and cultural injuries that shape Black women’s bodies, relationships, and identities, we must also undertake these injuries as wounds to Black women’s imaginative and activist labors. Tina Campt’s grammar of Black feminist futurity outdoes its own bounds of the optical to other senses, as well as the kinetic. The process of Black futurity in motion also perceives activisms through the body politic, such as giving birth or the simple refusal of a Black body to rise from a diner counter. Black feminist futurity accounts for the ways that Black cultural expressions of Black maternity enact their own vision of “living the future now,” where Black women express maternity viably, and without fear of dispossession. It in no way conflates the future, let alone the now, as a utopia. This grammar I enact views Black maternal activism as compulsory inclusion when imagining the foundations of cultural activism.
Cuprins
Contents List of Illustrations Preface Ida’s Story Acknowledgments Introduction Black Maternal Dispossession in the Age of Black Lives Matter Chapter 1 The Fictional Archive of Disappearance Chapter 2 Margaret Walker, Jubilee, and the Fight for Black Feminist Historicity in Walker v. Haley Chapter 3 The Corporal Archive of Separation in Contemporary Black Women’s Cultural Production Chapter 4 Pure Scraps: Refused Memorials and the Black Feminist Archival Praxis of Samaria Rice Conclusion The Black Maternal Superbody Epilogue The Infinitude of Black Motherhood Bibliography Index
Descriere
Examines works documenting Black mother–child separation, centering them within reproductive and archival justice movements to illustrate how creative work plays a crucial role in processing racial and maternal trauma.