The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood
 
Even as Black reproduction has been deployed to resolve the conflicting demands of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, Sara Clarke Kaplan argues that it also holds the potential to destabilize the oppressive systems it is supposed to maintain. She convenes Black literacy and cultural studies with feminist and queer theory to read twentieth and twenty-first century texts and images alongside their pre-emancipation counterparts. These provocative, unexpected couplings include how Toni Morrison's depiction of infanticide regenders Orlando Patterson's theory of social death and how Mary Prince's eighteenth-century fugitive slave narrative is resignified through the representational paradoxes of Gayl Jones's blues novel Corregidora. Offering new perspectives on Black motherhood and genered labor, The Black Reproductive gives vital insight into historic and ongoing conditions of Black unfreedom and points to the possibilities for a Black feminist practice of individual and collective freedom. 
 
Paperback
Author: Sara Clarke Kaplan
Published By: University of Minnesota Press, 2021
206 pages