Bio: Collin Xia is a PhD student at York University in Toronto.. His research focuses on settler colonialism, Black/Indigenous solidarities, and Caribbean history.
Abstract:
This essay explores Black motherhood as a site of resistance in the pre-emancipation British Caribbean. Under Atlantic chattel slavery, Black mothers were designated as the source of “blackness” and legal enslavability. Effectively, slaveholders claimed the children of enslaved mothers as property, in theory enslaving all future generations of unborn children. In reality, Caribbean slaveholders consistently inhibited the reproductive capacity of enslaved women by enforcing brutal work/living conditions on plantations. However, begining in the 1780s, enslaved women’s reproductive labor emerged as the vital stopgap for British Caribbean plantocracies confronted with the imminent specter of slave trade abolition. Dominant narratives based on British legal history and colonial archives reveal that both proponents and opponents of the slave trade foresaw a future where Caribbean plantocracies could be rescued through slave-breeding programs centered on an industrialized Black motherhood. These narratives center on escalating colonial control over Black reproductive capacities and reveal ambitions to sustain Caribbean plantocracies as factories of both agricultural and human “commodities.”
By employing Black feminist and maternal theory, this essay will interrogate the practical and often clandestine strategies employed by enslaved mothers, including lying, masking, marronage, and Afro-centric motherhood ideologies. The essay reveals that these forms of “maternal resistance” defied the plantocracy by slowing down or outright ending the (re)production of Black “flesh” under slavery. In doing so, this essay understands Black motherhood as a site of heightened colonial domination while also serving as a crucible of revolutionary resistance.
Black Motherhood and Resistance in the Pre-Emancipation British Caribbean
- JourMS - 