LITERATURE REVIEW

Don’t be scared, literature review is dope💪, let me show you what scholars have to say!  
In “Thick Love”, L. Barzey and Michele A. assert that “Toni Morrison's portrayal of Sethe and the other mothers in Beloved demonstrates how social context affects the way women mother.” They assert that by writing a story which places motherhood in slave conditions, Morrison complicates motherhood. The three slave mothers in Beloved, Ma'am—Sethe's Mother, Baby Suggs—Sethe's Mother-in-law, and Sethe herself, reflect the presence of an oppressive slave system that takes away motherly agency. Although motherhood becomes difficult for the three women, their shared experiences show that although slavery denied them the right to genuine motherhood, they still found way(s) to assert their will in some situations.  For instance “Ma'am refused to mother those children who were forced on her by rape. Baby Suggs refused to let herself love children who could be taken away from her.” In Sethe’s case, she loved enough kill her, by slitting her throat rather than let her be taken back into slavery. Barzey and Michele’s main point is that the social position of a woman affects how she mothers.

On the other hand, Terry Caesar’s “Slavery and Motherhood” demonstrates how slavery serves as the appropriate condition to complicate the hopes and fears of motherhood. He asserts that motherhood in the context of slavery testifies to maternal subjectivity—a position which affirms how motherhood is itself slavery. Both words, “mother” and “slave” he says, are convertible terms, which illustrates how a mother could feel like she is a slave to her child and the child a slave to her mother. Caesar adds that Sethe may have killed Beloved to protect her own self-possession—a deliverance from maternal slavery, which motherhood has subjected her to. His analysis does not only show how slavery contaminates motherhood, but shows how Morrison’s story moves from being a story of motherly love to that of motherly preservation. he argues that Sethe owns herself by disowning Beloved which is a strategy for self-preservation not love. Caesar's perspective defers from other scholars because he invites us to scrutinize Sethe's motif. 

Meanwhile, in “Mothering Slaves” the argument is that “motherhood is a site of conflict in slave societies because it compounded exploitation of women’s labor with oppression through the most intimate aspects of their lives, while also providing space for the building of relationships that could enable survival.” Aspects of this complexity according to the authors include, the highly contested space of sexuality and sexual violence against slave mothers, and the politics of wet nursing—since the slave mother is taken away from her own children, while her milk is feed to her mistress’s baby, her children are neglected. In this research enslaved women’s motherhood is considered as a site of trauma, loss, and grief; as they frequently experience the death of their children, and slavery recklessly damages their bodies as often, they are unable to carry their foetuses to term. This perspective adds the politics of wet nursing as another method of  oppression.  

Finally, Kimberle Crenshaw, serves to tie all the other articles together, she claims that black women are doubly oppressed by an intersection of multiple oppressive system of race, sexism and elitism, which can be traced to slavery. Crenshaw differs in a unique way from the other scholars who examine motherhood and slavery. She carves the multidimensional oppression of black woman into a theory of thinking that illustrates the oppressive system (slave) women and mothers are forced to survive in. Crenshaw differs from other scholars as she shows ways in which multiplied oppression still works beyond slave era to post-slavery America. She also provides a framework for articulating this complex phenomenon.