Whether dismissed as “mad-ness” in the short-term or diagnosed as a sign of congenital mental defect, when anger is uttered in the context of motherhood, its information is warped and its energy depleted.This multivalence of “madness”—as outrage, anger, “insanity” and alterity—allows us to approach Black maternal labor within its structural context, that is, as foundational to the survival of the economic system and state formations that simultaneously demand, exclude, and consume black mothers, caregivers, healers, and radicals. While classic interpretations situate mothering as a site of oedipal competition or reproductive instruction, we’re interested in moments where mothering “fails” or descends into “madness’ as poethic critiques of this maddening structural position as well as the cultural narratives that emerge to rationalize it. In so studying, our work will build off a cross-disciplinary range of influences from early black feminist theorists engaged with race-literate psychoanalytic thought such as Barbara Christian, to more recent grapplings with “madness” as taken up by texts situated at the intersection of disability/queer, and black studies such as La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad... (2022) and Theri Pickens’ Black Madness::Mad Blackness (2019). In the interest of privileging discussion, our three-paper panel will adhere strictly to a 13-15 minute format.

Our first presenter, PhD candidate and poet Rachael Uwada Clifford, will share her paper titled “In Her Nature: The Ecologies of Mothers and Daughters in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Tracing the mother-daughter relationship across Annie John’s childhood and adolescence—from the early, deeply intimate years to those of near-estrangement—Clifford will illuminate the complexity of maternal anger under the shadow of colonialism and tourism in the Caribbean. Tending especially to the characters’ thinking with/through nature and the novel’s configuration of the ecologies of Black mothers and daughters—of which colonialism, class and gender expectations, and their own vibrant imaginations are a part— Clifford argues that through these particular ecologies, Kincaid presents an alternative way of being in and making sense of nature that challenges economies of extraction and exploitation in the Caribbean and beyond.

Moving with and beyond colonial ecologies to black psychic geographies, Assistant Professor Rachal Burton will present her paper, “Black Mothers and ‘Madness’ in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” While much research has been conducted on Morrison’s portrayals of mother-daughter relationships, the relationship in Sula (1973) between Sula’s best friend, Nel, and Nel’s mother Helene, however, has often gone overlooked. Given how anti-Black racism leads both women to co-descend into forms of madness, Burton contends that Morrison’s characterizations of Nel/Helene delves into what, elsewhere, Morrison names “the trauma of racism” and what Jared Sexton describes as “a consuming violence leading to madness and the loss of bodily integrity.” Through an engagement with race, gender, and madness studies, then, Burton offers insight on the collective wounds of the Black psyche in the afterlife of slavery.

The third presentation, by PhD candidates Kiran Lam-Saili and Marah Nagelhout, will place Kincaid and Morrison’s respective articulations of madness in direct conversation by reading one of each author’s most enigmatic female protagonists-- Xuela Richardson and Sula Peace. Decidedly not mothers, these characters challenge the sacrificial imperative of Black women’s labor by embracing what we call an “abortive politics.” Premised on an acute understanding of the impossibility of emancipated carework within the ever-adapting machinations of colonialism and racial capita alla Joy Jamel, we argue that such a position – far from simply refusing reproductive futurity – functions to dramatize the destructive generativity of abolition and radical self-sovereignty in the Black feminist tradition. Tracking Morrison/Kincaid’s shared interest in the paradox of “omens” as that which is both inevitable and enabling (from Sula’s swarms of blackbirds to Xuela’s maternal mirages), we suggest that the omenic encounters in these texts mirror forms of intergenerational conflict/care characteristic of the mother-daughter relation and stand as cyphers for grasping sovereign power, otherwise denied.