Revolutionary Mothering and Black Queer Ecological Care

• In Event: Black Sexual Ecologies of the Americas

Description for Program

Scholars of Black Geographies assert that creative works contribute to our understandings of environmental relations (Wright 2021, Moulton 2022). In this paper, I analyze Black Caribbean feminist literature to understand experiences of Haitian-descended migrant sugar cane laborers in the Dominican Republic. As Black feminist scholars (Alagraa 2019; Thomas 2013; Tinsley 2008) note, Caribbean literature allows us to engage with both violence and Black radical possibility in spite of the censored imperial archive. I examine two novels—Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt—for their representations of Black women’s experiences following the United States’ occupations of the island nations. I analyze the environmental expansiveness of Black queer motherhood, as the Massacre River becomes a site of matrilineal ritual and cane plantations carry medicinal care. I position these novels as part of the archive of Haitian migrant labor in the Dominican sugar economy and argue that Black feminist literature portrays ethics of care absent from state archives. Through centering queer and feminist kinship, I demonstrate how fictional retellings of women’s lives on sugar cane plantations illuminate possibilities of care, moving beyond archival supplementation and allowing us to reimagine community healing.

Author

• Suzanne Nimoh, University of Texas at Austin