The figure of “mother” is a powerful and recurrent symbol in African-American literature and culture, particularly as a signifier of origins, tradition, family cohesion, strength and survival. Within the broader context of contemporary trans-racial political and social relations in the United States, however, the figurative “black mother” often signifies excess, pathology, victimization and monstrosity within hegemonic discourses of the family and the nation. While dominant groups have manipulated the latter symbolic economy as an ideological tool to enforce regressive and exclusionary practices along the lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality, African-American writers and artists continue to centralize black mothers and their critical concerns with issues of citizenship, decolonization, human and civil rights, social justice, and various nationalisms. With this framework in mind, my dissertation describes a transgressive maternal politics appearing in contemporary literature and culture that prioritizes black women as agents of transformative critiques of racial and gender hierarchies.

Specifically, I argue that as the promise of legislative and social reforms made during the Civil Rights era shifted in the late 20^th century, many narratives of “mother” in post-Civil Rights African-American literature and culture shifted toward mother figures who act as subjects through their disruption of gender categories and major claims to the American Dream. Through themes of sexuality, desire, fertility and militancy, these mother figures offer alternative lenses through which to consider contemporary depictions of racialized mothers. Recent representations of these black mother figures respond to hegemonic ideologies regarding race, class, gender and sexuality that have historically relied upon images of the “good mother.” Of course, these representations are not without problems; they may be seen as reinforcing negative stereotypes about black women. Yet, I argue that the politics of respectability and cult of femininity that haunt black women silence the subjective viability of marginalized mothers. A radical maternal politics that rejects wholly idealized or pathologized mother figures as well as normative gender performance can be seen as one of many critical perspectives available to all women to negotiate ideologies of national belonging, citizenship, freedom, and social justice.