Otherworldly Mothering: The Maternal Grammar of Black Women’s Writing, 1970-1990

Otherworldly Mothering argues that literary works by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara reimagine subjectivity in processual and relational terms through a rewriting of maternal praxis, a technique that unveils the historical continuities between antebellum and neoliberal America. By refiguring materials drawn from the tradition of slave narratives, Black women’s literature of the 1970s and 1980s often conjures maternal otherworlds where it is possible to engage alternative modes of being.

In conversation with the work of Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Saidiya Hartman, Marika Ceschia analyzes how Black women writers find in the maternal a means of creatively reenvisioning the figure of the human. Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Naylor’s Linden Hills, Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, Lorde’s Zami, and Bambara’s The Salt Eaters each change the strictures that dictate how the human is performed. As these texts show, maternal praxis can have a transformative ontological effect: confronting the toll exerted by centuries of racial violence, these writers reclaim the maternal as a site of subject formation.

Otherworldly Mothering reassesses canonical works of twentieth-century Black women’s literature alongside theoretical debates around the ontology of the human, antiblackness, and Black motherhood. Ceschia proposes a reappraisal of maternal praxis that challenges neoliberal discourse and questions recent critical turns toward Afropessimism and posthumanism.

Marika Ceschia is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a PhD in African American literature from the University of Leeds.