Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The Black Reproductive is a stunning work of theory and criticism. Sara Clarke Kaplan skillfully shows us how the appropriation, management, and policing of Black procreative, domestic, and quotidian reproduction has been a key mode of anti-blackness and, at the same time, a site of possibility for the articulation and practice of Black freedom. With keen attention to a wide range of policies, practices, and Black feminist refusals of the Black reproductive, Kaplan unfolds a moving story of the Black woman’s body and its reproductive labor as the scene of death and theft but also defiance and fugitivity. This brilliant elaboration of the Black reproductive not only challenges our concepts for analyzing anti-black terror but also reveals how Black women writers and artists effect a glitch in the machine of the Black reproductive, the very machine of terror. This is deep, urgent, moving scholarship for our time."—Erica R. Edwards, Rutgers University
"If the control of Black reproduction has been central to conditions of Black subjection, Sara Clarke Kaplan’s The Black Reproductive argues that a vision of Black freedom requires contending with the reproductive. She stages provocative readings of literary and cultural texts that emphasize the urgency of reading Black freedom through the lens of reproduction. Ultimately, Kaplan offers a vision of Black feminist theory that points us toward imagining collective freedom."—Jennifer C. Nash, Duke University
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Toward a Black Feminist Politics of Freedom
1. Ain’t Your Mama on the Pancake Box?: Aunt Jemima and the Reproduction of the Racial State
2. Love and Violence/Maternity and Death: Enslaved Infanticide and Monstrous Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
3. Hysterical Bodies as Embodied History: Corregidora’s Genealogy of Resistance
4. Our Founding (M)Other: Sally Hemings and the Problem of Miscegenation
5. “A Picture of Me and my Mother”: Planned Parenthood, Precious, and the Rationalization of Black Reproductivity
Coda: Lest We Forget: A Litany for Survival
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
