Postcolonial Black Motherhood: Dismantling Controlling Images in Jesmyn Ward's Bois Sauvage Novels

Abstract

Abstract Centering on Jesmyn Ward's two recent novels, this article begins with the literary through line from Toni Morrison's early novels to Ward's constructions of Black mothers in the twenty-first century of a fictional rural Mississippi. As Morrison before her, Ward archives Black women's lived experiences to reconfigure not only an American literary imagination but also the past itself to explore Black women's oppressions from the slave era to our contemporary moment. Ward's novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing express the social constructions that have burdened Black women, especially mothers, since the slave era. Through the social framework of controlling images as defined by Patricia Hill Collins, this article dissects U.S. social hierarchies that discriminate against Black mothers’ intersectional identities while theorizing how Black women feminist writers have strived toward self-definition and liberation. Implicit in the construction of these dominant social hierarchies is the postcolonial condition of Black mothers and women who have contested the colonial project of slavery, the imperial project of expansionism, and the postcolonial project of mass incarceration and lynchings. Most importantly, Ward illustrates how these controlling images and social constructions of racialized motherhood have concealed the structural oppressions experienced by Black women every day. Thus, I argue these two novels dismantle the controlling images surrounding Black mothers while examining how motherwork and othermothering constitute radical interventions that disrupt our racist, sexist culture and society. By reappropriating their past and self-defining their present, the Black mothers in Ward's novels uncover structural oppressions and reveal the critical connections between enslaved mothers and contemporary Black mothers.