The Most Opaque Sands Make for the Cleanest Glass, and: Origin, and: At L’Express French Bistro My White Father Kisses My Black Mother Then Calls the Waiter a Nigger, and: Eunuch

2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-117
Author(s):  
Charif Shanahan
Keyword(s):  
Black Mother ◽  
White Father

Missing Ingredients

2019 ◽  
pp. 310-332
Author(s):  
Bernard L. Herman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Woman ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Complex Society ◽  
Eastern Shore ◽  
Black Mother ◽  
White Household ◽  
White Father

This chapter examines how an African American woman born in 1899 to a black mother and white father, taken by the father's family from her mother, and brought up in a white household, negotiated her place in the racially complex society of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The chapter begins with her recipe collection and moves to her most remembered speciality – yeast rolls. The chapter then explores the place of this bread in contexts of identity, reputation, remembrance, and race.

Vestiges of Motherhood: The Maternal Function in Recent Black Cinema

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rizvana Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Black Cinema ◽  
Black Mother ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Maternal Function ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Current Task ◽  
Film Genres

While the lack of black femme presence is theorized explicitly with respect to film genres and the canon of American cinema in the work of Kara Keeling, the ontological position of the black femme (whom Keeling understands to be both visually impossible and interdicted yet full of cinematic possibility) has long been a point of interrogation in Black Studies with an extensive critical genealogy. In Saidiya Hartman's book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, the loss of the black mother animates the historical imagination of transatlantic slavery, just as her loss is irreducibly felt in relation to its afterlife. In the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, there is an explicit rejection of the potential of the black woman within film, specifically the viability of her maternal function, insofar as the black mother remains categorically essential to the construction of black (masculine) subjectivity. In light of the contradictory arc of this genealogy, the current task is not only to theorize the black maternal as an extension of the black femme, but to bring that position into view as the unthought. The black mother tends to be dramatized as the singular figure through which the cinema cultivates a distinctly black visual historiography. Even when placed under narrative erasure or withheld from view, the mother crystallizes a cinematic black aesthetic that fashions and envisions diasporic culture and forms of black collectivity as tied to a speculative and fraught filial genealogy. The critical arc in black narrative cinema over the last ten years from Get Out to Pariah, to Mother of George, and finally to Moonlight insists upon black motherhood as integral to the aesthetics of form and the genre-making capacities of film. One could go so far as to claim that the elements of cinematic form that drive these narratives reflect aesthetic choices that have to do with coloration, shot position, and narrative flashbacks that are themselves bound up with and inflected through the haunting and cipher-like construction of black maternal figures. Furthermore, these films insist upon simultaneously marking and excluding the mother from the emotional drama of black subjective life and its complex and contradictory expressions of intimacy, which have as much to do with the breaking and splintering of familial bonds as bridging gaps. It is clear that the mother sutures these bonds; she is a scar, a visible reminder and remainder of a terrible historicity that cannot be assimilated into the idealization of the American family.

Goodbye, Great White Father-Figure

1971 ◽  
Vol 13 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
George W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Father Figure ◽  
White Father

scholarly journals Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Sula and A Mercy: Rethinking (M)Othering

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Natália Fontes de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Mother ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Biological Determinants

Motherhood tends to elicit strong feelings in women as well as a passionate rhetoric in our cultural discourse. Daughters have extensively been the focus of studies about mother-daughter bonds. Surprisingly, much less attention has been given to mother figures. By tracing the theme of motherhood in Sula (1973) and A Mercy (2009), I investigate how Toni Morrison rewrites the experiences of black mothers during slavery and its aftermath in the United States. Drawing mainly on feminist and black feminist theories, I explore, through literary analysis, how motherhood assumes various forms in both novels. The comparative analysis of Sula and A Mercy challenges distorted views commonly associated with the black mother and extends notions of mothering beyond biological determinants.

scholarly journals The monster in the dark: the monstrous maternal and abject black mother in Toni Morrison's Beloved

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikta Sadati
Keyword(s):  
Black Mother

The monster in the dark: the monstrous maternal and abject black mother in Toni Morrison's Beloved

scholarly journals The Voice of Silent Toxic Mothers in Morrison’s A Mercy and Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers

2022 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
Najlaa R. Aldeeb
Keyword(s):  
Social Systems ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Surrogate Mothers ◽  
Black Mother ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Mother Daughter Relationship ◽  
Maternal Voice ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Voice

This paper analytically compares Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) to Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers (2006) to explore the maternal position in Western and Middle Eastern literatures and give the silent mothers voice. These novels depict rudimentary social systems predicated on deep inequalities of class and gender; they highlight the commonality of mothers’ experiences regardless of their class, race, or nationality. In A Mercy, the black mother discards her daughter to protect her from a malevolent master, while in Hend and the Soldiers, the uneducated Arab mother arranges her daughter’s marriage to free her from the domination of the patriarchal society. The daughters consider their mothers as toxic parents and relate all evil in their lives to them. These novels are narrated mainly from a daughter point of view, and they share the themes of the disintegrated mother-daughter relationship and search for identity. This type of narration foregrounds the daughterly perspectives and subordinates the maternal voice (Hirsch, 1989, p. 163). Applying the elements presented in Marianne Hirsch’s Mother/Daughter Plot facilitates the deconstruction of the idea of silent toxic mothers and gives mothers the opportunity to speak for themselves. According to Hirsch, when daughters become mature enough to accept their problems and failures, they become not only real women but also part of their mothers’ stories by listening carefully. Thus, I argue that mothers’ voices are heard when their subjectivity is explored through their stories narrated in their daughters’ memories, in the mothers’ self-vindication, and by surrogate mothers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document