Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination

Reproductive justice debates have often focused on the right to not have children, but rarely do they address the right to remember children lost to violence. Turning her attention to visual and written works by Black women documenting mother-child separation, Mali D. Collins invites us to deploy a theory of ＂scraps＂ to understand the ways that the lives of Black mothers and children are documentations of centuries of racialized and gendered torment. Focusing on creative works from the late twentieth century through the present, including the writings of Toni Cade Bambara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Edwidge Danticat; the critical activism of Erica Garner; and visual/material art by Samaria Rice and Elizabeth Catlett, Collins argues that Black women’s creative work should be recognized as memory work that plays a crucial role in the cultural processing of racial and maternal trauma. By centering creative scraps--interstitial, fragmentary, or discarded elements--of maternal dispossession, Scrap Theory brings together theories of archival injustice and reproductive injustice to illuminate how the archival erasure of Black motherhood is an urgent concern for the movement for reproductive justice.

Mali D. Collins is Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at American University. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Souls, and the Black Scholar. Collins is a certified full-spectrum doula and a reproductive rights activist.