Making a scene: performance and Black maternal remembrances

Abstract

This article draws attention to the oppositional critiques of History and Humanism four Black mothers performed as they (re)made public memories of their children who had been killed by state-sanctioned violence. Lacking sociolegal authority to protect their children's lives, Margaret Garner, Mamie Till-Mobley, Dr. Karla F.C. Holloway, and Lezley McSpadden nonetheless publicly staged embodied acts of care at and beyond the site of death that problematized their children's vulnerability to anti-Black violence and its unruly spectacles. Attending to these acts as reproductive labor, the article clarifies how Black mothering challenges the putative valuelessness of Black life in the material and discursive economies of racial capitalism. Although Black mothers can never dislodge the structuring logic of anti-Blackness that subtends the deathly acts of violence—a logic which has organized our episteme since the invention of modern Man—performative analyses of their production and reappropriation of public memory suggest that the scenes they make do undermine the insistent oversights that make Blackness (un)representable.