What Is Your Mother's Name
Maternal Disavowal and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women's Pain in Black Nationalist Literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3589646 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meina Yates-Richard (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 88 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 477-507 |
| Publication date | 2016-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00029831-3650211 |
| OpenAlex | W2523632991 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 14 |
Building on black women's critical negotiations of black nationalist discourse, this essay names the matrix of black maternal sounds, songs, and approximated womb-spaces as the site of production for black nationalist ideologies and black male identity. Listening to audible traces of black maternity in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative, Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), the essay unearths the sonic frameworks through which black male subjectivity and ideologies of black nationalism are formulated. Masculinist black nationalist texts use black women's sounds to enact the subjective rebirths of men, who then abandon black women, thereby erasing their labors in the constitution of black nationalist ideology. However, embedded within these texts are the resonant echoes of black women's pain, which both haunt and structure their respective nationalist discourses. The article reveals the extended history of maternal disavowal in black male-authored nationalistic texts, and counterpoises black women authors' critical responses to these texts in order to reveal that maternal sacrifice proves endemic to masculinist forms of black nationalism
Art · Black female · Black women · Ideology · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Law · Philosophy · Short Stories in Global Literature
To tell a free story
In the break
The black Atlantic
Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980
Riotous Discontent
Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic
Dislocating Race & Nation
Creative Conflict in African American Thought
Discourse on Colonialism
Poetics of relation
Civilizations Underneath
Resounding Souls
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,38 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2023 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |