Contextualising the Black Mother

by: Olivia Robotham Carpenter , November 10, 2025

Three women grace the cover of Black Matrilineage: Photography and Representation, Another Way of Knowing, lined up together with each successive woman caringly styling the hair of the woman in front of her. It is a collage art piece, with the image of the women carefully extracted from a larger photograph, where they are then (re)presented to us with colourful embellishments. While the women appear in black and white, vibrant foliage in pink, yellow, cream, and green bursts forth behind and in front of them. Their bodies are also decorated with colourful beads, crystals, and shells, adding a touch of sparkle and three-dimensional detail. When we look inside the book, we learn why this is such an appropriate opening for the volume.

The image by Andrea Chung, titled Sula Never Competed; She Simply Helped Others Define Themselves, VII (2021), was originally presented on ‘paper handmade from traditional birthing cloth’ (Canossi and Lopez-Diago 2022: 334). It is particularly fitting for the volume’s cover because of its compelling beauty, innovative play with visual effects, and its surprising twist on material form, which points straight to the heart of what this volume’s essays and images do. Like this cover image, individual contributions to the volume are all committed to deep and rigorous intellectual, creative, and even spiritual engagement with questions of what it means to be, or to know, or to see, a Black mother. Chung’s title for the collage, itself a quote from Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, invites us to explore the meaning of Black motherhood and matrilineage in all their nuances. An enormous range of metaphors emerges—acts of care, the flourishing of a garden, embellishment and joy. For that matter, the concept of the maternal also springs to life as the intertextual, as an exchange of ideas, as acts of writing back and thinking with Black women who come before and after the reader’s own moment.

The introductory essay by sisters Salamishah and Scheherazade Tillet joins in this line of thinking by presenting a meditation. Titled ‘Our Mother, My Muse,’ the text dictates a crucial writing strategy for the rest of the volume to blend the creative and the critical. Abstract and theoretical concerns appear alongside meditations on lived experiences, as the personal and the political go hand in hand in this essay and all the following chapters. Reflections on photographs of the authors’ mother lead to meditation on her life, down to the very personal—the kinds of violence she survived, the moments of vulnerability and loss that would have been most painful. These reflections take place, however, alongside something perhaps more challenging to capture immediately, the reaction of her two young daughters to glamorous photographs of her physique, the twinkle in their eyes when they imagine their mother not as an amalgamation of tragedies that they have not witnessed or cannot yet understand, but as her own fairytale heroine. This is what we, too, have the privilege of seeing in the included pictures. The Tillet sisters share with us beautiful images of their mother, another family member, and eventually one of the authors, Salamishah herself, photographed by Scheherazade. This strong opening chapter reflects a broader dynamic at work in the rest of the volume: the tendency to include sudden and disorienting, but ultimately necessary, shifts in perspective—from mother to daughter, from then to now, and eventually from one family to a broader movement. The essay ends with a reminder of the complexity of mothers so often photographed as part of the Black Lives Matter movement in moments of profound grief, mourning their murdered children.

Editors Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago explain the impetus for the volume and how it is organised, as well as its purpose as an epistemological project:

By situating photographs and contemporary scholarship made by and/or about Black motherhood at a critical intersection that supports the heritage and legacies initiated by Black women and their female ancestors, we bear witness to and help bring forth a wider and richer expression of motherhood—in essence, another way of seeing and knowing’ (Canossi and Lopez-Diago 2022: 32).

Even as we are invited to learn and grow in our understanding of Black motherhood, its history, implications and meaning, we are also prompted to question where such knowledge, history, and meaning come from in the first place.

The whole collection is divided into five sections. Part One, titled ‘More Black and More Beautiful: Social Media and Digital Culture in the Rewriting of the Self,’ contains four essays meditating on photography and images of Black motherhood specifically intended to be shared with a wide audience online. Each essay delivers timely criticism of some of the biggest questions at stake when considering this topic. Brie McLemore considers how and when social media can present an ethical minefield for the representation of Black life and experience, especially for Black mothers, paying special attention to phenomena such as viral videos of Black mothers suffering or grieving. Jennifer L Turner explores the prevalence of what Patricia Hill Collins famously dubs ‘controlling images,’ especially for Black women online, and she asks real Black mothers to respond with their own narratives about who they are. In an interview, Kellie Carter Jackson joins writer and blogger Tomi Akitunde in a conversation about cultivating a virtual community for Black mothers in Akitunde’s blog, Mater Mea. The section closes with Marly Pierre-Louis’ meditation on Black motherhood and sexuality titled ‘Thotty Mommies,’ which asks when and how social media can be a unique tool for a liberatory, sexually fulfilling space of self-creation and representation for Black mothers.

Part Two, titled ‘“Turning the Face of History to Your Face:” Seeing the Real Self through Representations of Black Motherhood,’ includes five essays that turn to the history of photography and representation, reminding readers that the contemporary issues discussed in Part One have a complicated origin story. This segment of the book opens with Susan Thompson interviewing Deana Lawson about motherhood in Lawson’s photography work. It includes a special discussion of her use of epic and historical themes, such as the Garden of Eden, and explores photography as a commemorative act in the genre of the family portrait. Rachel Lobo’s essay on photographs of Black women in nineteenth-century Canada follows from this discussion by meditating in detail on a specific historical context. It explores what it means to use photography to address gaps in the historical record, especially with respect to the absence of Black mothers in the archive. Similarly, Emily Brady takes up analysis of a specific historical context in her essay on themes of motherhood in the work of early twentieth-century African American women photographers such as Eslanda Goode Robeson, Wilhelmina Pearl Selina Roberts, Elnora Teal, and Florestine Perrault Collins. Next, Atalie Gerhard discusses the revolutionary potential of portraits of incarcerated Black mothers who support each other and, in turn, pass on a de facto model of Black feminist resistance to their children. Sasha Turner’s work concludes Part Two with a mesmerising shift to poetry. Turner’s poem reflects the volume’s central theme of Black matrilineage in both form and content.

Written as if in call and response, Turner takes up one of the most haunting chants of Black Lives Matter protests: ‘Say her name.’ The beginning of the poem plays on the chant with ‘say its name,’ and the correct response is ‘Imperialist. White Supremacist. Capitalist. Patriarchy’ (2022: 171). With her intervention, Turner insists that in protesting violence against Black lives, it is crucial to say both the victims’ names and the names of the institutions and forces of systemic oppression responsible for Black suffering and death. However, the second half of the poem returns to a focus on Black mothers. In response to ‘say their names,’ Turner gradually reveals more and more women’s names, and sometimes a few details about them, stretching at one point as far back as the eighteenth century. This genealogy provides a powerful closure to Part Two, with a tribute to Black matrilineage that brings poetry and politics together.

The transition to Part Three, titled ‘“You Are Your Best Thing:” Self-Care as a Site of Resistance,’ also blends the creative and the critical with an interview and two hybrid essays that include elements of both memoir and academic analysis. To begin Part Three, Nicole J Caruth interviews Andrea Chung and D’Yuanna Allen-Robb, discussing the history of Black midwifery, public art about Black motherhood, and the power of photography in addressing issues such as implicit bias against Black women giving birth in hospitals. Next, Haile Eshe Cole looks both to personal experience and to the work of Black women photographers to argue that images play a pivotal role in poor maternal health outcomes for Black women. Images, therefore, carry liberatory and revolutionary potential, just as Caruth, Chung, and Allen-Robb discuss. Cole specifically cites the work of Cary Beth Cryor, Miranda Barnes, and Solana Cain, explaining that the most potent examples of this revolutionary potential cultivate an aesthetic of the erotic, as theorised by Audre Lorde. These images complicate how we define and celebrate the maternal. Like Cole, Rhaisa Williams also turns, in part, to the personal in her analysis of the history of twentieth-century nightlife in Cleveland, especially for Black mothers partaking in joyful experiences outside the home. Williams turns to her own family archive to think about spaces for Black mothers’ celebration and delight, both in spite and because of the precarity they were experiencing elsewhere.

Part Four, titled ‘“In Search of My Mother’s Garden, I Found My Own:” Black Female Photographers and the Matrilineal Space,’ is the final section before the volume turns exclusively to presenting images. The chapter opens with a letter, which is followed by a more traditional academic analysis, and then two creative-critical pieces. Renée Mussai’s letter to Zanele Muholi reflects on the latter’s photographic exhibitions commemorating the Women’s March on Pretoria (South Africa) and Black women’s protest more broadly. Next, Jonathan Michael Square’s essay on the work of Nona Faustine Simmons discusses the act of photographing family members and the potential for creative practice in photography to unearth powerful (her)stories. Similarly, Grace Aneiza Ali turns to questions of storytelling in her creative-critical piece, reflecting on themes of photography, image-making and motherhood in the work of Guyanese artists. She meditates on Keisha Scarville’s self-portraits in Guyana, where she wears her mother’s clothes one year after her death, questioning how relationships between mother and daughter might help us understand a relationship with a ‘motherland.’ The final essay in the body of the volume, with the haunting title of ‘The Impossibility of Breathing When the Sun Covers Your Face,’ by Marcia Michael, is strikingly formally innovative. Writing in the first person, Michael reflects on powerful themes of Black creative matrilineage, such as the connection between Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. She also reflects on the creative potential of conjuring and the liberatory meaning inscribed in both her own body and that of her mother.

The final section is arguably the volume’s most magnificent contribution, though it is simultaneously the most difficult to summarise here. Titled ‘“The Assertion of the Life Force:” A Selection of Works Curated by Women Picturing Revolution,’ Part Five contains thirty full colour images created by Black women artists and photographers on themes of motherhood, mothering and matrilineage. The images comprise both traditional photos and more abstract collage art that includes photographic elements. All, though, share a commitment to photography as a medium for analysing, celebrating, or otherwise representing the maternal. Such approaches come in an enormous variety of forms. There are, for example, striking photographs of women in unforgettable poses, such as Mama Goma (2014), Deana Lawson’s photograph of a young woman in a blue dress specially designed with a cutout to embrace her pregnant belly (2022: 288), or The Girls Who Spun Gold (2016), Nydia Blas’ Edenic photograph of four young women and a baby posed in a field of wildflowers (2022: 290). There is also a variety of haunting collage art. By way of illustration, a photograph of a nineteenth-century woman appears to wear a gold-leaf representation of a multiplying uterus on her head in Andrea Chung’s Crowning I (2014) (2022: 299), and in two included pieces from vanessa german, photography provides a total or partial rendition of the subject’s face, while german’s use of elaborate beads, ribbons, and crystals makes up the rest of these colourful masterpieces. On the more disturbing side, Part Five also includes a selection of collages from Wangechi Mutu’s collection Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2006) (2022: 296), which melds photography of real human subjects with historic medical textbook images of painful reproductive maladies. These images mark another powerful response to one of the most important recurring themes in the volume, the problem of reproductive injustice and medical racism against Black women. Many of the images included are also unforgettably surreal, such as the final piece, Mary Sibande’s They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To (2008) (2022: 303), which features a photograph of a woman in a bright blue nineteenth-century style house servant costume, complete with white apron, collar, headwrap, and cuffs. With downcast eyes focused on her work, she appears to be hand-knitting a Superman suit in a matching shade of bright blue, with the iconic red and yellow ‘S’ logo visible at the bottom of her work.

The volume’s strengths lie in its deft ability to present both critical and creative material, as well as text and images, with care, style, deep appreciation and respect for its sensitive, powerful, and beautiful subject matter. While it is not easy to take up the task of analysing, representing, or paying tribute to themes of Black matrilineage and the potential of photography to tell its story, the texts and images in this volume succeed with grace. At times, the reader is left wishing there was more room to develop some of the discussions included. With over forty contributors, the volume simply does not have enough room for all the discussions to receive the extensive attention needed to present these nuances in even greater detail—that would, of course, fill multiple volumes. There is also not enough room for the volume to address every single potential nuance or complexity of a topic as vast and capacious as Black matrilineage. However, there are some notable absences—though the cover image takes its title from Morrison’s Sula, famously a narrative in which the mother-daughter relationship is painfully complicated and often quite challenging, none of the essays in the volume is dedicated explicitly to fraught or contentious relationships with mothers.

Still, the volume deserves much praise for including perspectives from a formidable group of scholars and creatives across a wide range of backgrounds and career stages. It is refreshing to see early-career scholars well represented among the contributors, alongside more established counterparts who have dedicated their entire careers to some of the book’s most important questions. In many ways, the volume’s greatest strength lies in the fact that it enacts its own most important values—a passage of knowledge from one generation to the next, from artists to viewers, and from writers to readers.