The Unfinished Work of Mourning

• In Event: The Mother

Abstract

Harriet Jacobs, rather than rejoice at the moment of her lawfully recognized emancipation from slavery, writes in the last pages of her 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a slave Girl, Written by Herself, of how she mourns the loss legitimized freedom costs fugitives from slavery. Her right to hold her daughter is still not hers to authorize in this moment. It can only be granted her by her captors, the owners of her body and its powers of reproduction. Thinking the limits of Jacobs’s claim to her daughter through Angela Davis’s essay “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation,” (1977) this paper asks “What authority can the maternal body hold in the unfinished work of abolition? An essential introduction to black feminism and critical theory Davis’s essay details how capitalism’s domination and domestication of economies of care and labor lead to their recurrent appropriation and alienation from the maternal body, rendering maternity a condition illegible, undeserving of protection, and suspect outside its use and value to the accumulation of capital. More than an appeal for inclusion within a cult of true womanhood, more than a demand for gender equality within the public sphere, Davis’s abolitionist politics of recognition begins at home and extends the bonds of kinship beyond the “line of the mother” to embrace the excesses of liberal embodiments of mothering, those that are fugitive, criminalized, queer, and contested. This paper argues that like Jacobs, Davis writes against her own isolation, against the alienation of her labor, against her removal from the public, against the carceral logics that hold her at a “safe distance” from the general population of women prisoners for over a year in solitary confinement and in so doing Davis authors an appeal for the radical possibilities and “revolutionary consciousness" histories of black mothering can contain.

Author

• Jasmine Syedullah, Vassar College