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Book Review: The Black Reproductive

Dr. Sara Clarke Kaplan
 

Dr. Sara Clarke Kaplan offers an exploration and critique of the interwoven politics of race and gender in the monograph The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood (University of Minnesota Press, June 2021). Through five essays in The Black Reproductive, Kaplan dives headlong into the miscegenation controversies surrounding Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, racial capitalism and the exploitation of stereotypes against Black women, policing of Black reproduction through anti-abortion campaigns, and white supremacist violence against Black motherhood. She offers insightful perspectives on gendered labor and “unfreedom” of Black women and their bodies through case studies of portrayals -- and erasures -- of the Black feminine in culture, literature and political posturings.

Kaplan's complex and nuanced arguments are research-based and rooted in her deep, scholarly knowledge of the elusive goal Black liberation in a liberal nation-state. The themes of reproductive labor, procreation and sexuality as defined and limited by heteropatriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy thread though Kaplan’s explication of theory and critique of racial and gender dynamics power and difference. She asks the persistent question: who benefits from the subjugation of Black bodies? The essays discuss confronting erasure in history, cultural co-optation, and “white racial fantasies on Black servitude. Readers also learn about persistent systemic and institutional actions to take agency away from Black women, denying choice and voice. The interplay of blackness, gender and reproduction makes this an important read for any student of history, Black feminism, as well as critical race, gender, and culture studies.

Kaplan's scholarship and teaching are focused on African American and African Diaspora literatures and cultures and Black/women of color feminisms. She notes that “liberation is ongoing and unfinished.” We are fortunate that the scholar and author is working on a second book titled Sites of Slavery: Black Feminist Geographies of Chatteldom. Watch this space for a review when Kaplan's second book is published. 

 

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