Abstract
The summer of 2020 was marked by an increase in protests on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations and individuals opposing the ongoing state-sanctioned violence experienced by Black people in the United States and across the world. Amid this, national and global denouncement of racism was a widespread corporate trend to publicly apologize for racist atrocities. Companies included Quaker Oats apologizing for its use of Aunt Jemima. In June 2020—initially influenced by a viral TikTok video—Quaker Oats released an announcement stating that they would discontinue the name and image of the 130-year-old brand. The racist trope of the “mammy,” cultural icon of (white) domesticity, and successful consumer brand, Aunt Jemima has literally and figuratively been reproduced several times over. Aunt Jemima, Sara Clarke Kaplan argues, is part of the Black reproductive.
In The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood, Sara Clarke Kaplan encourages readers to use an alternative lens—a Black reproductive lens—when reading the story of Aunt Jemima. Kaplan constructs the genealogy of the Black reproductive using a wide array of sources, defining it as “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). Read through this framework, Aunt Jemima, then, and other stories of Black women—particularly of Black women who eschew seemingly stable and dichotomous categories—the “enslaved concubine,” the “enslaved infanticidal mother,” and the “welfare queen” show that the Black reproductive body has been crucial to the construction and maintenance of the modern and postmodern white patriarchal racist capitalist state that is the United States.
Kaplan’s primary claim in The Black Reproductive is that “attending to how the surveillance, exploitation, and criminalization of Black procreation, reproductive labor, and sexuality have been necessary to maintaining Black unfreedom offers crucial insight into the nature and practice of Black freedom” (pp. 23–24). It is important to note that Kaplan does not locate freedom in legalized emancipation, equal rights, or eternal liberation, but in the “fleeting moments of expression . . . engendered in moments of heightened contradiction” (p. 25). In other words, it is by using a Black reproductive framework when reading Black women’s cultural narratives, by attending to how seemingly stable categories and distinctions are raced, gendered, and classed (and how they are constructed and maintained), that we see the generative possibilities of freedom. For example, the “hysterization” of white women’s bodies is as much raced as it is gendered. That is, the medicalization of hysteria, Kaplan notes, was a rearticulation of discursive strategies that labeled Black women as pathological, hypersexual, and unintelligent. The Black woman “hysteric” or the “enslaved concubine-cum-hysteric” is a constitutive absence (p. 125), existing at the limit of humanity. Through a Black reproductive reading of Corregidora, we see a family of Black Brazilian women whose very existence represent the intimate racialized sexual violence and coerced labor that not only constructed their existence but constitutes their existence. One woman realizes that reproduction of her family’s history—either through knowing or telling—brings no solution. It is this “moment of heightened contradiction” that engenders new crises and contradictions and that we see the possibilities (and limitations) of an embodied resistance.
Sociologists studying the body and embodiment, Black radicalism, Black feminism, gender and sexuality, or race and racism, who are somewhat familiar with theoretical concepts such as social death and abjection, will immediately appreciate how these concepts are rearticulated (or reproduced) in The Black Reproductive. The rearticulation at times may feel convoluted; however, Kaplan alleviates this by using a myriad of examples to construct and represent the Black reproductive. Moreover, Kaplan reads historical, dramatic, legal, fictional, non-fictional, cultural narratives and texts of Black women’s unfreedom through literature, art, and plays. Kaplan traces across historical periods (e.g., slavery), geographies (e.g., Brazil), and academic fields (e.g., Black literary studies) to construct a rich genealogy of the Black reproductive. Throughout the book, Kaplan consistently uses a Black reproductive framework for multiple iterations of the same narrative. For example, Kaplan analyzes the novel Push and its movie counterpart Precious, providing a rich, Black reproductive analysis of Precious’ narrative.
The impact of The Black Reproductive is far-reaching and can contribute to both scholarly and popular discourses. First, The Black Reproductive is an example of how social death and abjection can be rearticulated to make meaning of the relationship between white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Second, The Black Reproductive encourages scholars to think about Black reproductivity as a site of contestation that engenders new possibilities of a freedom of politics. In other words, to find freedom in the unfreedom.