TO LEARN TO LET THEM GO: BLACK FEMINIST ARCHIVING AND THE CREATIVE REVIVALS OF BLACK MOTHERHOOD

Abstract

Public discourse on the Movement for Black Lives often maps a connection between the captive black children who did not survive the journey across the Atlantic ocean and those today who do not survive their journey into adulthood. Black mothers endure a unique precarity of motherhood and an archival erasure of mother–child separation fraught by enslavement and by the vastly unequal treatment they receive from the modern child-welfare and justice systems. Overlooked in these discourses are the linked generations of mothers left behind to mourn their loss, leaving the stories told through black women’s creative production untheorized. My project, “To Learn to Let Them Go: Black Feminist Archiving and the Creative Revivals of Black Motherhood” is an arts- and material-based inquiry into the lives of black mothers. By deploying a transdisciplinary methodology of scrap theory, a black feminist orientation toward theorizing archival material otherwise thought to be inconsequential, fragmented, or unimportant, I argue contemporary black women’s cultural production as a robust source of documentation on the particular horrors of black mother–child dispossession. This project names this documentation process as a “black feminist archival praxis” in which black women creatives privilege the body, the visual, the literary, and the performative to practice a form of memory work as they construct intergenerational, multi-modal responses to living without their children. The primary research questions are: How do black women’s creative arts document past and present experiences with motherhood and separation? and, How can arts-making be conceptualized as self-documentation? These questions are guided by the creative work of novelists writing since the archival turn such as Toni Cade Bambara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Edwidge Danticat; the critical writing of Patrisse Khan-Cullors; and material art work by Samaria Rice and Elizabeth Catlett. In recent years, emerging Humanities approaches to archival study evoke “the archive” as a broad space of impossibility, in order to respond to the assumptive power relations that erase the interior lives of black mothers. This project intervenes in this discourse by staging a direct conversation between archival studies and black feminism, providing an indispensable scholarly contribution which revives the archival praxis of black women made hidden by the originary blind spots of the archival turn.