Book Review: The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood by Sara Kaplan

As the global Movement for Black Life (BLM) resurges and calls for Black liberation, a growing body of studies have emerged on the ongoing legacies of the Transatlantic slave trade and US chattel slavery in the present. Linking police brutality to histories of lynching and modern incarceration to plantation regimes, the field of Black studies has named and documented the many ways Blackness and its subjugation has been essential to the founding of the U.S. Empire. ¹ Sara Clarke Kaplan's The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood (2021) enters this political and academic milieu and revises traditional understandings of Black subjection and subjectivities. Rather than focus on iconic scenes of hetero-masculine oppression and resistance, Kaplan shifts the focus to the exploitation and resistive capacities of the domestic, intimate, sexual and procreative realms of chattel slavery and its afterlives.

Kaplan turns to what she names the Black reproductive, an analytic that encompasses ‘the constellation of national discourses, state policies, and individual practices through which Black reproductive acts, capacities, and labor have been imagined and administered in the United States for some 350 years’ (p. 3). Deploying feminist and queer theories of reproduction and temporality, Kaplan proposes three premises: that the ‘expropriation, administration, and imagination of Black procreation, reproductive labor, and sexuality’ (p. 3) have been essential to the functions of U.S. biocapitalism; that the instrumentalisation and regulation of Black reproductive labour is central to Black abjection; and that the arena of contemporary cultural production by Black artists revises Black history through their multiple renderings of the past.

Kaplan demonstrates the continuities of slavery and the centrality of Black reproduction over time by juxtaposing late twentieth and twenty-first century texts and images alongside historic and literary archives from the pre-emancipation era. Kaplan treads familiar territory here. Iconic figures Aunt Jemima and Sally Hemmings receive substantial attention. Kaplan's critical analysis of each showcases the cultural work of ‘idealized subservient Black maternalism’ (p. 31) and the material significance of enslaved women's labors in the kitchen and bedroom to the making of U.S. political economy and the white heteropatriarchal family. Explorations into legal and news accounts of enslaved women's infanticide alongside the canonical novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison further shores evidence of the primacy of Black maternal dispossession to both the legal and economic reproduction of chattel slavery and the possibility of its unravelling through enslaved females’ claim to ownership and community. Close readings of antiblack rhetoric found in family planning records from the Division of Negro Service (DNS) of the Birth Control Federation of America, the antecedent to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, alongside Lee Daniels's film Precious (2011) attest to the ongoing national anxiety and state management of Black reproduction through neoliberal discourse of individual choice and responsibility in the twenty-first century. As such, Kaplan's monograph contributes to the growing body of research exploring the critical linkages of gender and sexuality to the U.S. racial project, such as Alys Weinbaum's The Afterlives of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism's Philosophy of History (2019) and Priya Kandaswamy's Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform (2021).

If reproductive exploitation has been central to sustained Black unfreedom, so too has it functioned as a site of Black freedom. Kaplan suggests that the possibilities of Black freedom lie in the moments of contradictions and undecidability in her reading of cultural texts. Aunt Jemima wields a gun and demands liberation in the arts of Betye Saar. Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) points to the alternative practice of Blues as a mode of remembrance rather than reproducing biological generations. Barbara Chase-Ribaud's Harriet in The President's Daughter (1994) burns her fingertips after becoming classified as white according to census records. Each moment strays from the traditional intelligibilities of freedom in African-American political thought such as the quest for emancipation and civil rights. They are, writes Kaplan, ‘aporetic instances of the contingent and ephemeral, the unsustainable and the ruptural, the still-not-achieved yet not-quite-impossible, that the generative potential for Black freedom lies’ (p. 25).

While Kaplan emphasises the necessity to tend to the fleeting and uncategorisable in parsing out practices of Black freedom, ample ground remains for its continued exploration. The meanings and mechanisms of Black reproductive unfreedom are well-fleshed in the text. Yet, questions remain. For instance, if Black unfreedom remains enduring and intractable – if it ‘cannot be stripped away, escaped, or transcended’ without potential psychic and/or physical destruction of oneself – then when, where, and what is the ‘elsewhere’ of Black liberation that Kaplan suggests (p. 163)? How do critics locate the collectivity of Black freedom practices that Kaplan earlier references in the individual experiences of fugitivity, jouissance and death? Kaplan begins tracing lines toward answering these questions. The paths, however, remain faint and leave an opening for sustained meditations to imagine what exactly a liberatory living and Black sociality looks, sounds and feels like.

As scholarly and public attention to reform and abolition of prisons and police in the U.S. continues to mount, Kaplan's monograph successfully illuminates the necessity to also contend with the private and intimate spheres of living and dying to plotting the birth and demise of racial capitalism. Kaplan's work exemplifies that the black reproductive and the black female body in particular must be essential to any critical conversation about slavery, empire, biopower and necropolitics as well as resistance and insurgency.