This panel proposes to reframe Black motherhood as a central site of theoretical, aesthetic, and political production within African diasporic literature and culture. While dominant critical frameworks shaped by racial capitalism, coloniality, and liberal feminist paradigms have frequently positioned Black motherhood as a locus of crisis, absence, or structural vulnerability, recent work in Black feminist theory has begun to rearticulate maternal practices as sites of relational knowledge, care, and survival. Building on these interventions, this session seeks to answer the question: how do Black maternal figures generate not only strategies of endurance but also new forms of relationality, aesthetic expression, and futurity across the diaspora?

The panel situates itself within and extends scholarship by Patricia Hill Collins, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and more recent work in reproductive justice and Black feminist care ethics. While this scholarship has illuminated how Black motherhood is shaped by racial capitalism and the afterlives of slavery, less attention has been paid to how maternal practices actively produce new epistemologies and imaginative possibilities. By bringing together work in sound studies, speculative fiction, and aesthetic theory, this panel demonstrates that Black motherhood is not only a response to structural constraint but also a generative framework through which alternative modes of life and thought are articulated.

This session is organized around a shared inquiry into how maternal practices move across different expressive and theoretical domains. The sequence of papers traces a movement from realist and aesthetic frameworks toward speculative and futurist imaginaries, highlighting how Black motherhood operates across multiple registers while remaining grounded in questions of care, embodiment, and survival.

Dr. Lenora Warren opens the panel by examining motherhood as an aesthetic and ethical practice in African American literature, arguing that acts of attention, beauty, and everyday creativity constitute forms of resilience within constrained domestic environments. Dr. Yates-Richard builds on this focus by introducing the concept of Black maternal sonority, demonstrating how sonic practices in African diasporic literatures function as modes of care, memory, and collective survival that extend beyond visual or textual representation. Dr. Googe then turns to Black speculative fiction to explore how science fiction reimagines maternal care in relation to technology, embodiment, and alternative kinship structures, positioning motherhood as a site of futurity and innovation. Finally, Dr. Barrett engages Black feminist and speculative frameworks to analyze how Black women and nonbinary artists reconfigure genre conventions to imagine new forms of embodiment, temporality, and relational life. Taken together, these papers trace a conceptual arc from lived and aesthetic practices of care to speculative reimaginings of maternal futurity.

The panel will consist of four presentations of 12 minutes each, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. This discussion extends the panel’s central concerns by inviting participants to consider how Black motherhood functions as a shared analytic framework across disciplines and archives. The session encourages audience engagement and fosters connections across fields including African diasporic studies, Black feminist theory, and literary and cultural analysis.

The panel brings together scholars across different career stages, institutional contexts, and areas of specialization, including doctoral candidates and senior faculty at research-intensive universities. No more than one participant is drawn from any single institution, ensuring a broad institutional range. These scholars center Black feminist scholarship and the work of Black women scholars, engaging questions of race, gender, and embodiment as both lived realities and critical frameworks. Their papers reframe Black motherhood as a critical site of intellectual and aesthetic production, demonstrating how maternal practices generate new forms of relationality and futurity across the African diaspora.