The impetus for this panel is an urgent public health crisis stemming from the alarming fact that “Black women in America are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women” (NIH). Institutional racism and systemic inequities drive these egregiously high maternal mortality rates for Black women and birthing people which have become a national sociopolitical concern within the last decade (“A Proclamation on Black Maternal Health Week”). Representations of the health, (dis)ease, and wellness of Black mothers in fiction and poetry reveal crucial questions around reproduction, labor, and justice in African American literature.

The panel builds on foundational works such as Carole Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994), Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Africa World Press, 1990), Cheryl A. Wall’s Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (University of North Carolina, 2005), Kimberly Wallace-Sanders’s edited collection, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (University of Michigan, 2002). Panelists are also in conversation with more recent critical works such as Jennifer C. Nash’s Birthing Black Mothers (Duke, 2021), Dána-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU, 2019), Zakiya Luna’s Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice (NYU 2020), Marie Jenkins Schwartz’s Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Harvard, 2006). More broadly, Erica R. Edwards’s The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire (NYU, 2021), Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York University Press, 2020), Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke, 2016), and Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Vintage, 2017). These interdisciplinary theoretical works at the intersection of Black feminist theory, medical anthropology, gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, public health, Black Studies, and literary studies will provide generative analytic frameworks for our discussion.

The three panelists will offer their work on Black Maternal Labor from different stages in their professional careers (graduate student, assistant professor, and full professor), and each presenter is affiliated with universities in different regions of the country. The papers cover a range of historical periods, and draw on multiple dimensions of Black motherhood in African American literature and poetry. Elaborating on the existing scholarship, these papers explore secrets, humor, the transforming pregnant body, feelings of ambivalence, ambiguity, joy, terrors of labor, delivery, racial identity of children born of Black mothers, intertexualities with slave narratives, and the significance of community for the Black maternal figure.

Amadi Ozier will open with “Nella Larsen’s Maternal Instincts” which focuses on the “ambiguous material” of Larsen’s Passing (1929) to explore the role of laughter as a “strategy for bourgeois female social belonging attached to feminine ideals like selflessness, cleverness, and self-moderation.” Ozier reads the connection between what they name “bourgeois racial authenticity” and Irene’s and Clare’s performances of “idealized mothers and socialites” within the context of racial passing, social belonging, and maternal fears around the racial identities and “detection” of their offspring. This paper will situate Black maternal social and familial performance, panic, and social belonging within the context of racial passing, and the visual (il)legibility of one’s racial identity within social settings.

Next, Bria Paige will discuss the notion of exhaustion, rather than death or negation, as the chief conceptual framework for the experience of Black women in the United States. Revisiting Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Paige argues that exhaustion frames the experience of the laboring Black enslaved women’s bodies, both what she is forced to produce and reproduce to maintain the economies of the plantation system. Following Zora Neale Hurston’s “Black woman as mule” formulation and Sara Ahmed’s concept of “use” in relation to the overburdened Black woman’s body, Paige reads Williams’s suggestions for other ways of “existing and resisting” in the world.

Finally, Kathy Schultz will provide analysis of Claudia Rankine’s book length poem, PLOT (2001), centering on the visual elements, aesthetic play around the idea of form and transform as related to pregnancy, labor, and motherhood. Schultz provocatively argues, “The new form emerges in the attempt to create a truce between two identities that cannot be reconciled—mother and artist—and the violence of this attempt leaves a mark, a bruise.” This analysis will lead us to a fascinating discussion of the Black mother as artist, and artist as Black mother and the concomitant bruising between the two often warring identities.