Abstract

This essay introduces the special issue with a critique of Cedric Robinson’s heuristic, “racial capitalism,” and a discussion of our titular intervention: “reproductive racial capitalism.” The essay is necessarily grounded in the reproductive crisis of the present day. It centers the histories and afterlives of hereditary racial slavery and the radical contestations and refusals of its logics. Overall, it argues that contemporary racial capitalism is always already reproductive. Reproductive labor and the experiences of conception, gestation, parturition, and childrearing are the heart and engine of both slave racial capitalism and contemporary forms of reproductive racial capitalism. They are also the sites from which reproductive racial capitalism and its exploitative conditions were contested under slavery, are being challenged in the present moment, and yet might be altogether refused in the future.

We cannot consider the question of the relationship of race to reproduction, or the relationship of both race and reproduction to capitalism, isolated from our current reproductive crisis. The June 2022 United States Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the context in which we write this introduction and meditate on the connections across the contributions that are included in this special issue on reproductive racial capitalism. In its ruling, the court rescinded the bodily autonomy of pregnant persons and pitted them against their fetuses. As the feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts illustrated over two decades ago, it is hereditary racial slavery that first inserts the idea of a maternal/fetal conflict into the reproductive cultures and politics that shape the Atlantic world. As we argue in this introduction, hereditary racial slavery subsequently places the battle over reproduction at the heart of modern racial capitalism. Mobilizing the disturbingly iconic image of a hole dug in the ground for a pregnant woman to lay her belly in while being flogged, Roberts graphically crystallized the conflict on which slavery’s foundational ideological and material logics rest (39–41). Here we argue that it is from this conflict that the commercial imperatives of modern racial capitalism emerge and henceforth shape the social and economic organization of race, gender, and sexuality in slavery and in what Christina Sharpe has influentially metaphorized as its wake (Sharpe).

In placing the pregnant belly of the enslaved woman in a hole in the ground while flogging the woman’s body, the slave owners’ interest in financial futurity wrenches reproductive labor and kinship away from her. Her exposed back is lashed while her belly and her fetus—the objectified “flesh” that the slave owner treats as his property (Spillers)—lay beneath the earth, supposedly protected. As the enslaved woman endures this specifically reproductive torture, violence that comes on top of all the myriad violations to which she has already been subjected prior to this moment, her futurity is reshaped. She comprehends the profound limits imposed on her capacity to situate a potential child in her future, to identify herself as a mother in relation to the life gestating in her body, and she senses the looming impossibility that steals labor from her womb and potential kinship from the world. As Hortense Spillers has written, under slavery “the captive female” emerges as both “mother and mother-dispossessed” (80). As Saidiya Hartman has observed, building on Spillers and others (Morgan, Laboring Women; Weinbaum, “Gendering”), under slavery the birth canal becomes a middle passage (“Belly” 169).

The notion that a person’s reproductive processes and children are the human biological commodities on which the entire system of hereditary slavery relies, and that the commodification of reproduction and its living products together negate kinship, are the twinned logics that are set in motion by what Walter Johnson has called “slave racial capitalism” (“To Remake” 14). Here we both specify and expand on Johnson’s concept by introducing the new term reproductive racial capitalism. Our term resonates with concepts like slave racial capitalism and colonial racial capitalism (Koshy et al.) insofar as it too attempts to add to and at once reveal something new about the workings of racial capitalism. Specifically, reproductive racial capitalism is capitalism that is inclusive of slave racial capitalism and colonial racial capitalism but is not restricted to either. Like both, it is at once a pervasive form of racial capitalism and a specific vantage point on racial capitalism. What it underscores above all is that all forms of racial capitalism are predicated on ongoing reproductive extraction, dispossession, and accumulation. Reproductive racial capitalism is, in our view, most visible in hereditary racial slavery, but it is also, we argue, alive and well today. As we elaborate below, just as all capitalism ought to be regarded as racial capitalism, we propose that all racial capitalism ought to be regarded as reproductive. Our new term captures this reproductive truth and attempts to bring it to light.

In advancing an argument about reproductive racial capitalism, we build on arguments that Jennifer L. Morgan (Laboring Women, Partus Sequitur Ventrem,”,Reckoning, “Reproductive Rights”) and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Wayward Reproductions, “Gendering,” Afterlife, “Reproducing Racial Capitalism,”,“Slave Episteme,”,“Ungendering”) have each advanced elsewhere about the importance of studying reproduction in both slavery (Morgan, Laboring Women) and in the subsequent decades that constitute its afterlife (Weinbaum, Afterlife). We also build on a rich tradition of work by feminist scholars of reproductive dispossession in past and present, including contributions that have been made by many of those whose work is included in this special issue (Briggs, Johnson, Solinger, Turner, Vertommen). While we cannot speak for all contributors, at least for the two of us, slavery is not simply one among many important examples of reproductive racial capitalism. Rather, we regard slavery as both exceptional and exemplary because it is underpinned materially, decisively, and so incredibly visibly (when we choose to see it thus) by reproductive extraction, dispossession, and accumulation. Indeed, we regard reproduction in slavery as the paradigm case, as an ür-text, and as an episteme that must be studied if we are to understand how and why reproductive racial capitalism works and is able to continue to expand. This is because in our view it is only when we center reproduction in slavery that it becomes possible to come to a full account of reproductive racial capitalism at both its inception and as it unfurls across time.

Reproductive exploitation fueled Atlantic slavery. And, as enslaved women and men pushed back against slavery regimes, reproductive contestation was part and parcel of the many forms of opposition that they mobilized. Because the legacies of slavery live on in both the material and ideological organization of reproductive racial capitalism today, it is imperative that we learn to track both the forms of exploitation and the forms of refusal that continue to power it. A full and historically accurate account of racial capitalism must center reproduction in slavery and keep it in view. While not all contributions to this special issue are principally focused on slavery, all share a common interest in the constitutive relationship between reproduction and racial capitalism, and all in one way or another explore the refusal of reproductive racial capitalism—albeit through analysis of historically and geospatially distinct events, spaces, and places.

How did enslaved women reconcile the world-changing conflict established between their reproductive bodies and the fetuses growing within their wombs with their efforts to protect their most intimate bodily experiences, their potential children, their existing families, and the larger communities to which they belonged from the violence of hereditary racial slavery? The archives of slavery yield any number of stories regarding the efforts that enslaved women made as they sought to wrest pregnancy or children from the maws of slavery. Their actions stand as testimony not to the existence of an ahistorical idea about the power of mother love; rather, they reveal to us the extent to which slavery fundamentally transformed all aspects of human reproduction—including procreation, conception, gestation, parturition, and childrearing—into a multifaceted experience that was and remains saturated with economic conflicts and contradictions. Women’s resistant actions also testify to their desire to challenge or altogether refuse the logics of an emerging global marketplace predicated on the use of the reproductive body and its products as both an economic engine of valuable commodities and as a source of raw materials.

We begin from the conceit that enslaved women simply could not have been ignorant of the demands that hereditary racial slavery placed on them. Indeed, from the vantage point of reproductive racial capitalism, procreation, conception, gestation, parturition, and childrearing together constitute the crucial reproductive sites from which enslaved women built their understanding of their situation, and thus the sites from which scholars must build our understanding of the Black radical tradition. This scholarship traces a genealogy of women’s complex challenge to the extraction and exploitation of their reproductive capacities, and it is thus what we must learn from as we attempt to catalyze an insurgent response to ongoing reproductive dispossession. It is from this vantage point that we understand the actions of enslaved women to remove their reproductive potential and children from the account books of slave owners as acts of contestation that straddled the social and affective space of kinship, and at once imagined refusal of the material violence of reproductive racial capitalism.1

Our resolutely and unapologetically feminist understanding of the Black radical tradition as inclusive of women’s reproductive insurgency has only really begun to take hold in recent years, mainly in the work of scholars focused on reproduction in slavery and in that of a handful of scholars focused on reproduction in contemporary racial capitalism. The latter have sought to theorize the “enslaving” dynamics of reproductive dispossession as these have been recalibrated across time and forwarded into the present. In this special issue, we have gathered the work of a number of these scholars together to situate an extended and collaborative rumination on the ways in which reproductive racial capitalism develops from and then moves beyond the period of hereditary racial slavery alongside an extended account of specific ways that reproductive racial capitalism was contested, challenged, and refused beginning in the slave past and extending into the present moment. Indeed, as implicit and explicit dialogue among contributors to the present issue makes apparent, the essays collected here are the product of an intensive series of exchanges that took place in workshops held remotely in 2021 and 2022 in which contributors and interlocutors focused on reproductive cultures and politics across time and place so as to map reproduction’s travels in slavery and beyond.

The scholarship on reproduction and racial capitalism that we allude to above (and which includes our own) has been adjacent to and at times has intersected with the veritable boom over the past two decades in scholarship coincident with the republication of political scientist Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. As a range of scholars, situated across the disciplines, have sought to understand exactly how capitalism works, to theorize its mechanism, and, above all, to review its history and the history of resistance to it through an expressly racial lens, they have found Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism especially instructive. Racial capitalism allows for consideration of the constitutive nature of racializing processes, racial formations, racial projects, and racialized geographies in capitalism’s global expansion. By following Robinson’s lead, scholars have been able to develop fascinating arguments about the periodization of the history of capitalism that center slavery and colonialism rather than viewing these ongoing systems of accumulation as singular precapitalist events (Baptist; Beckert; Johnson, River; Smallwood). They have also sought to reconceptualize how the process that Marx and Engels labeled “so-called primitive accumulation” not only existed at capitalism’s inception but also persists into the present. Not least, those who have built on Robinson’s work have offered richly detailed studies of how a variety of racialisms have been and continue to be mobilized within and among nations to make capitalism go (Day; Haley; Jung; Lowe).

Although many of Robinson’s central insights about how racial capitalism works and how Black Marxists lay the groundwork for its theorization have been taken up, we find it notable that scholars have tended to pay less attention to Robinson’s primary reason for urging us to contribute to the ongoing theorization of racial capitalism and to understand its longue durée in the first place. Namely, so that we might learn from both the individual and collective struggles against racial capitalism that have taken place in the past as we figure out how to struggle against racial capitalism in the present. For us it is therefore important to pause and to emphasize that there are two parts of Robinson’s project that we take heed of here: (1) that which offers scholars ways to rethink the racializing processes, racial formations, and racialized geographies that make capitalism go, and (2) that which proffers concrete examples of refusal that enable understanding of the complex forms of opposition to racial capitalism that have taken place in the past and might yet take place in the future. In short, with this issue we seek to expand on the most truly radical aspects of Black Marxism. To this end, contributions included here take up existing discussions about how racial capitalism works by advancing an understanding of its reproductive mechanism, and they explore how racial capitalism has been and may yet be refused at the site of reproduction. At stake in bringing these two parts of the project together, in our view, is what we know today as reproductive justice. As Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger explain, reproductive justice always includes three crucial pieces: “(1) The right to not have a child; (2) the right to have a child; and (3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments” (9). In our reading, reproductive justice is by necessity a feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist theory and praxis that pursues truly substantive reproductive freedom and sexual autonomy for everyone regardless of race or gender.

In recalibrating how we discern and make meaning of the forms of refusal of racial capitalism that have existed in the past, Robinson sought to attend to challenges to capitalist hegemony that have too often been overlooked by traditional analyses that focus exclusively (and thus myopically) on organized social movements, overt manifestations of class consciousness, and expression of political solidarities that assume that all historical actors must be conscious of their belonging within insurgent groups in order to act and in so doing make meaningful individual contributions to larger collective struggles for freedom. What remains missing from Black Marxism is express attention to the ways in which racial capitalism mobilizes the language of the body, intimacy, sexuality, and specific racialized and gendered identities. Consequently, Black Marxism is largely silent on the ways in which racial capitalism creates sites of contestation, challenge, and refusal that are corporeal, intimate, and complexly lived by individuals who most often do not recognize themselves as members of organized social movements or of large self-conscious collectivities.

Our choice to center slavery and its afterlife in discussions of the relationship of reproduction to racial capitalism requires further explanation of how we understand both slavery and reproduction. In Robinson’s work and in that of other Black Marxist scholars, the history of Atlantic slavery is, of course, a key concern. Building on readings of what W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James (among others) wrote about the international slave trade, Robinson advanced an argument for recognizing Atlantic slavery as an early capitalist formation and for the interconnectedness of Atlantic slavery with both contemporaneous and ongoing processes of colonization, settler colonialism, empire building, and Indigenous genocide. However, even as Robinson recognized the importance of slavery to capitalism’s global expansion, in our reading we acknowledge that Robinson did not treat the reproductive exploitation, extraction, and accumulation that fueled and thus ultimately enabled racial capitalist expansion. In this way, Robinson leaves out of his story of racial capitalism a discussion of the visceral and biological engine that made racial capitalism go, namely, the human sexual and reproductive labor that was first performed by enslaved women over several centuries and subsequently performed by a range of laborers both paid and unremunerated. In this issue we center questions of reproduction, sex, and motherhood in slavery, and treat the enduring impact of specifically enslaved forms of reproduction, sex, and motherhood on what Weinbaum (Afterlife) has elsewhere called “the afterlife of reproductive slavery.” Our goal in doing so is not only to add to the existing scholarship that has taught us that all capitalism is racial capitalism but also to demonstrate that reproduction is racial capitalism’s condition of possibility in both the past and present.

Treating racial capitalism from the vantage point of reproduction is an expressly feminist undertaking that builds on the work of a range of feminist scholars who have come before us. From the scholarship on reproduction in slavery we know that women navigated newly shaped identities as they confronted and responded to the foundational logics of reproductive racial capitalism in the Americas and the Caribbean, even if reproductive racial capitalism has not heretofore been the language that the scholarship on enslaved women has employed. In the New World, enslaved women were forced to consider their implication in the embodied violence on which the economies of Atlantic slavery depended, and thus we must comprehend their efforts either to avoid making kin or to mount and maintain relationships of kin that were denied them as efforts to dislodge the stranglehold of reproductive racial capitalism. As richly detailed studies demonstrate, enslaved women’s efforts are nothing less than an open invitation to consider the highly conflicted relationship that existed among reproduction, motherhood, kinship, and racial capitalism. Likewise, from emergent scholarship on the reproductive afterlife of slavery, we know that slavery’s racializing and sexualizing logics persist in the present, even as they continue to be recalibrated in specific locations and markets. From this scholarship, especially that which focuses on the plight of reproductive laborers in contemporary capitalism—here we are thinking of surrogates, egg vendors, creators of stem cells and of babies —we learn that as people sell reproductive labor and products and navigate newly shaped identities as participants in a global marketplace, they both confront and respond to the foundational logics of reproductive racial capitalism. Indeed, contemporary reproductive laborers, like enslaved women before them, both acquiesce to and challenge their dispossession and disposability and in so doing express forms of insurgency and refusal of reproductive racial capitalism that have yet to be carefully studied. In sum, whether in the past or the present, when feminist scholars have focused on the range of reproductive activities in which human beings are necessarily engaged as they reproduce our world, they have made it clear that human reproduction is not a singular, isolatable issue or activity that can be simply incorporated into existing theories of racial capitalism. Rather, reproduction must be placed front and center so that it can do the work of fundamentally reorienting our study of racial capitalism and the long and ongoing history of its contestation.

The concept of reproduction with which we are working may not be common sense and thus may require further amplification. To be clear, we do not intend to treat reproduction as an economic abstraction, or as the name for a generalizable process that enables the maintenance of the relations of production (this is, by contrast, precisely what Marxist theory has already done so well). Instead, we mobilize the concept of reproduction in a narrower sense that we believe, perhaps paradoxically, widens existing theoretical frameworks and historical methodologies. We treat reproduction first and foremost as a bodily process, as a vital individual experience, and therefore as a visceral, biological, and highly intimate object of study. It is visceral because it is felt in the body and precedes mental processing; it is biological because it involves the body as a technology of production; and it is intimate because it happens inside individuals and involves their most private physiological and psychological sensations. In slavery, reproduction involves direct participation in the reproduction of chattel. In slavery’s wake, it involves direct participation in the reproduction of a range of commodities ranging from gestational labor to eggs, stem cells, and children.

To summarize and underscore the two principal arguments that we seek to advance by coining and using the titular concept, reproductive racial capitalism: (1) Reproductive labor and the experiences of conception, gestation, parturition, and childrearing are the heart and engine of both slave racial capitalism and contemporary forms of reproductive racial capitalism. (2) They are also, by necessity, the sites from which reproductive racial capitalism and its exploitative conditions have been contested in the past, are being challenged in the present, and might yet be refused in future.

To an extent, our focus on reproductive racial capitalism involves drawing on the long legacy of Marxist and socialist feminist theory generated over many decades that stretches back to early critiques of traditional Marxism that were initiated by nineteenth-century communist, socialist, and anarchist women (think of Emma Goldman, Alexandra Kollontai, and Rosa Luxemburg, among so many others), forwards to the Marxist and socialist feminists of the twentieth century (there are simply too many to list here, but we nonetheless begin by noting some of those most dear to us, including Claudia Jones, Silvia Federici, Maria Mies, Michele Barrett, Lise Vogel, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective), and advances into the present by way of social reproduction theory (here we are thinking especially of Feminism for the 99% by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, as well as work included in Social Reproduction Theory, edited by Bhattacharya).2 In short, there is nothing particularly new in our calling attention to the many ways in which reproduction and its links to maternity, sexual intimacy, and women’s care work have been associated with exploitation, extraction, dispossession, and accumulation throughout history. Prior Marxist and socialist feminist theorists have set up the terms for and have already made profound contributions to a collective and ongoing political discussion and struggle that centers women’s reproduction of workers, women’s sexual labor, women’s unremunerated labor in the private realm, and the “feminization” that characterizes the degradation of labor in globalization—in sum, all that women and supposedly “feminized” laborers contributed and continue to contribute each day to the reproduction of capitalism across time. As important to the present issue as is Marxist and socialist feminist work, is feminist scholarship on slavery. Here we are engaged with the watershed contributions that began to appear in the 1970s, including essays by Angela Davis and foundational studies by Darlene Clark Hine and Deborah Gray White. As the historical study of slavery expanded to encompass scholarship on the Caribbean and thus to include works by Lucille Mair, Hilary McD. Beckles, and Barbara Bush, among others, it clarified that analysis of both gender and sexuality must reside at the center of studies of the Black Atlantic writ large. On these groundbreaking interventions stand a growing body of historical studies of gender and sexuality under slavery that began to appear in the 2010s and 2020s. These are exemplified in books by contributors to this issue, including Johnson and Morgan, and in scholarship by participants in the workshops that culminated in this issue, such as Diana Paton, Shauna Sweeney, and Sasha Turner.

The intimate bodily process of reproduction in slavery and beyond opens up a space of possibility for those who are reproducers, and too for those who accumulate reproductive labor and its products. Under slavery, the explicit accumulation of reproduction and its products was rationalized by those who sought ongoing commodification of human beings. That specific and foundational notion of human bodily objectification is one that has been simultaneously extended and reworked in the aftermath of slavery such that it shapes new relationships to human reproduction that are manifest in the present moment. These new relationships include population control through mass sterilization, forced abortion, or, conversely, forced pregnancy. They also include the creation of markets in artificial reproductive technologies (or ARTs), surrogate labor, and the raw materials used in both surrogacy and assisted reproduction, including eggs, sperm, and frozen embryos. These new relationships inform state intervention, increasingly in the form of criminalization, into access to reproductive health care, including surgical and medical or pill-based abortion.

In turn, the refusal to relinquish reproduction and kinship to the vagaries and violence of the market, the rejection of the attribution of pathology to Black family life and to impoverished family life, the reshaping of kinship and ideas of relationality, and the rise of the reproductive justice movement in the United States and related movements abroad together marshal a substantive challenge to reproductive racial capitalism, and signal to us the existence of both national and international insurgency against the forms of reproductive extraction, exploitation, dispossession, and accumulation that began in slavery and that persist to this day. Scholars of racial capitalism who follow in Robinson’s footsteps identify the effort to invalidate terms of relationality among the dispossessed and exploited around the globe as the driving force of racial capitalism. They argue that violent destruction of relationships (among human beings, between human beings and animals, and between all living beings and planet earth) constitutes the edifice on which racial capitalism rests (Melamed 78–80; Byrd et al.). Reclamation of relationality constitutes a response to this ongoing violence and destruction of ties that might otherwise bind. Here we build on this argument by regarding the efforts of pregnant persons and their allies to maintain and reshape reproduction, kinship, and other forms of relationality in the face of reproductive racial capitalism’s need to appropriate and enclose reproduction as insurgency. This form of insurgency lies at the heart of what we learn when we center reproduction, when we critically reexamine and then re-narrate the dominant story of capitalism.

It is because we treat reproduction as intimate, bodily, biological, and visceral that many of the articles included in this issue treat mothers and motherhood, both enslaved and supposedly free. This noted, contributors do so neither to reify motherhood as the centerpiece of feminist inquiry, nor to uncritically consolidate the equation of motherhood and femaleness that was set in place during slavery. Rather, contributors home in on mothers and motherhood in order to elaborate the stakes of reproductive racial capitalism as they have been historically experienced by those individuals who have been tasked with reproduction or who have elected to participate in kin making despite the negation of their status as mothers. What this means on a practical level is that some contributors to this issue treat “motherhood” as a contentious category that can be reasonably placed in quotation marks, parsed, and scrutinized (see Solinger, Vertommen, and Weinbaum), while others treat motherhood as a historical given, as an identity that was important to enslaved women and thus as an experience that affords specific forms of knowledge about the lives of individual historical actors that would otherwise be marginalized or altogether lost. Indeed, in some essays collected here (see Ashby and Johnson, Knapp, and Zhang) it is only as mothers that individuals become visible in the historical archive and capable of articulating their humanity and value to those who would deny it.

In following Robinson’s lead, we argue not only for recognition of the centrality of reproduction to racial capitalism (and thus for express study of reproductive racial capitalism) but also for recognition of reproduction as the principal site and stake when racial capitalism is contested, challenged, or radically refused by those whose reproductive labor and products are exploited, extracted, and dispossessed. In different ways, all contributors advance what we identify above as the largely neglected aspirational and liberatory part of Robinson’s project. In so doing, each makes an important methodological contribution either implicitly or explicitly. By employing new analytical practices, each contribution instructs readers, sometimes by way of historical example or case study, in how to examine cultural texts in order to locate and foreground reproductive content and thus in how to analyze the reproductive texture of racial capitalism and the myriad responses to it. This noted, contributions to this issue can be roughly divided into two groups: those that principally though not exclusively examine the reproductive mechanism of racial capitalist extraction and accumulation (Weinbaum, Vertommen, Briggs, and Solinger), and those that principally, though not exclusively, explore contestation and refusal of it (Johnson and Ashby, Knapp, and Zhang).

Overall, in bringing together a group of overlapping and at once diverse contributions on reproductive extraction, exploitation, dispossession, accumulation, and the myriad forms of contestation and refusal, we hope to leave readers with a number of overarching questions about reproductive racial capitalism. Among the most pressing: how does centering reproduction in slavery and in its wake force a rethinking of the dialectic of history? We know that from the vantage point of reproductive racial capitalism the distinction between the oppressed and the oppressor must not only be racialized, it must also be gendered and sexualized. Put otherwise, in centering reproductive racial capitalism, we seek to make it clear that we must not only move beyond the focus on historical actors and the conflagrations and insurgencies that have concerned both traditional historians and traditional Marxists and Marxist feminists. When reproduction in slavery is taken as the starting point, we can no longer tell the story of capitalism as a story about a conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or even as a story about a gendered and sexualized conflict between oppressed and oppressors. Instead, we must think about the role played by individuals and groups in reproductive labor, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, and accumulation—and consider how this relationship might organize the relations of (re)production as well as responses to it. Relatedly, when reproductive racial capitalism in the present moment is understood to be constitutively intertwined with reproduction in slavery, conventional ways of treating the gendered organization of productive versus reproductive labor and the distinctions between free and unfree labor are revealed to be far too rigid. Indeed, the usual categories of analysis become insufficient, and new ideas about the nature of what it means to labor and to be a laborer emerge.

In sum, when we center reproductive racial capitalism as we do here, procreation, conception, gestation, parturition, and childrearing quickly become the principal sites and stakes of historical struggles for hegemony. As a consequence, additional queries about the dialect of history proliferate: How does a focus on reproductive racial capitalism compel our reconceptualization of the conflicts and contradictions that drive historical change? How might a focus on expressly reproductive conflicts and contractions compel us to think in broader historical strokes than we tend to do and thus to re-periodize capitalism in fresh ways? How might a focus on reproductive labor require us to rethink the relationship between gender and labor, public and private, paid and unpaid work? Reproduction is a universal and omni-historical practice, and yet it has been experienced and treated in distinct ways by individuals, collectivities, capitalists, and nation-states as it has moved across time. How can we learn to track reproductive labor’s change and understand the historical antecedents to its ongoing transformation? At the very least, to contend with the salient facts and the questions raised, we argue here that the study of reproductive racial capitalism allows us to deepen our engagement with histories of capitalism before and after European industrialization—indeed, we are suggesting that it affords a nearly complete reorientation to the question of historical periodization that in turn will no doubt catalyze new understandings of historical continuity and rupture, and lead to the creation of new analytical categories, hermeneutics, and heuristic devices.

For scholars of slavery, in particular, the proposed focus on reproduction demands a radical rethinking of many of the categories that have long defined the discipline. Studies that concern processes of creolization, the emergence of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American identities in relationship to and in tension with the African past, for example, must treat reproductive practices and impediments as key nodes of engagement. The experiences of maroon communities, runaways or those who harbor them, those planning and participating in insurrection or rebellion—all these spaces of contestation of racial capitalism have for the most part been understood as ones in which women were marginal at best. By considering reproduction as a problem space that, in turn, generates the contestation of enslavement, new ways of understanding oppositional ideology and praxis emerge. Regarding enslaved women’s contributions to struggle not merely as social historical evidence of the importance of Black community to the enslaved but also as revolutionary allows us to reconsider not only which historical actors we ought to focus on but also which historical acts and events. It is through a focus on reproduction, in other words, that new capacities for theorizing enslaved opposition emerge.

For scholars of reproduction in the current moment, continuities exist with slavery that ought to compel deep concern. One such continuity is shaped by the existence of a multibillion-dollar transnational market in reproductive labor and products, including surrogate labor, human eggs, stem cells, and babies. Another continuity is found in the relentless devaluing of Black women’s reproductive health in the contemporary United States to the extent that today maternal and infant mortality among Black women and children occur at rates that outpace that of white women and children by 400 percent and 200 percent, respectively. Similar statistics reveal related inequalities for all women of color (Miller, Kliff, and Buchanan; Villarosa). Exploration of reproductive racial capitalism in the past and present allows for attention to how reproduction in slavery serves as an important historical backdrop to both current forms of reproductive extraction and dispossession, and to current forms of reproductive contestation and refusal. In the context of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs, which overturned the decision in Roe v. Wade that held sway for fifty years, an exploration of slavery as context is especially revealing. As we suggested in the opening to this essay, the justices’ arguments in Dobbs eerily echo arguments that were made in support of slavery. They allow us to apprehend the persistence of ideas about the reproductive body of the enslaved and about human beings as property that first took root in the Middle Passage and on New World plantations. Whereas the conflict in slavery was between the enslaved woman and her enslaver and manifests as a struggle for control over the reproductive body and its products, the conflict today is poised as one between the mother and the state and is manifest as a struggle over control of the maternal body and the embryo or fetus (both of which are mistakenly referred to as “the child” by anti-abortionists). We see the justices’ arguments as specifically curtailing the freedoms that were enshrined in both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Dobbs hinged on overt rejection, by the conservative justices, of the claim that the Fourteenth Amendment protects women’s access to abortion. The court, however, did not expressly consider the fact that a forced pregnancy amounts to involuntary servitude and that the Thirteenth Amendment’s freedoms entail the right of enslaved women to refuse to relinquish reproductive control over their own bodies so as to exit involuntary servitude (Goodwin). As concerning as the court’s failure to recognize the necessary connection between human freedom and bodily autonomy is the court’s consolidation of an ideology that centers the life of the conceptus over that of the woman in arguments against abortion. This ideology replays the misplaced concerns of nineteenth-century abolitionists whose primary sense of moral outrage took aim at the sinful taint of slavery on white people, rather than at the racism and racial hierarchies that powered the economic system of slavery (Greenidge). Mobilizing the identity of the savior dehumanizes the pregnant person through their reduction to a non-rights-bearing entity. And it simultaneously elevates the conceptus—like the suffering white slave owner—as a “person” who is deserving of legal protection, even that afforded by citizenship.

Issues that can be surfaced through analysis of Dobbs are clearly rooted in slavery, the practice of slave reproduction, and in the ideas about the reproductive body that have been passed forward in time out of slavery. The Dobbs decision thus reminds us—even urges us—to investigate the antecedents for what amount to “enslaved” and “enslaving” thinking about reproduction, the pregnant person, the womb, the conceptus, the possibilities of kinship, and the negation of the reproductive body’s autonomy. Elsewhere, we have named this persistence “the slave episteme” (Weinbaum, Afterlife) and “the DNA of the nation” (Livingston and Morgan). Just as we need to see the ongoing material and ideological work of slavery in the Dobbs decision, so too, we must learn to recognize how the protest against Dobbs now underway constitutes insurgency against reproductive racial capitalism. Such protests reveal the persistence of forms of specifically reproductive contestation that were pervasive in the context of forced reproduction in slavery. Here we are thinking about the long history of enslaved women regulating their own fertility through abstinence, emmenagogues, abortifacients, and self-managed abortions (Schiebinger; Schwartz; Fett; Latimer). We are also thinking about the ways in which a radical politics of abolition feminism remains to be realized.3 We have seen the perverse impact of the form of liberal abolitionism that was prevalent in the nineteenth century that used women’s reproductive capacities to hijack the control of formerly enslaved women’s reproductive labor beyond formal Emancipation (Turner). We have seen the end of the slave trade without seeing the end of slavery (Sharpe; Hartman, Lose). We have seen former slaveowners explicitly building a system of extractive labor based on women’s reproduction after 1807. Likewise, in the present, we can clearly see, if we are willing to think outside the box about the meaning of substantive reproductive freedom, that liberal ideas of “the right to privacy” have not and will not suffice to protect the basic human right to control one’s body.

For us, a politics of abolition feminism that is committed to a truly radical form of reproductive justice will need to learn from both prior failures of liberal abolition and recent failures of a liberal pro-choice movement that takes the right to privacy as its horizon.4 Can we be so bold as to suggest that all pregnant people deserve health care and bodily autonomy, the material resources to have or not to have a child, and the myriad forms of material and social support that enable personal decision-making? Is it possible that in our current conjuncture we might yet learn from the histories of enslaved women who yearned for, and sometimes radically appropriated, an insurgent reproductive future? Can we learn from historically contextualizing the present reproductive crisis that we find ourselves in today? Can we turn to history to turn the present crisis into an opportunity to create substantive reproductive freedom?

Notes

1

Throughout we seek to indicate through careful word choice that we have absorbed the critique of “resistance” (Johnson, “On Agency,”,“To Remake”) and therefore move toward the language of contestation, challenge, refusal, and insurgency. Our general preference is to use contestation for discussions of the enslaved, to use challenge when considering the present moment, and to reserve refusal for discussion of “freedom dreams” (Kelley) of a future yet to come in which racial capitalism is rejected tout court. Of course when referring to the work of other scholars we use their preferred language.

2

On early Marxist feminists see Boyce Davies and Hemmings; on the Marxism of Combahee see Taylor.

3

The term is elaborated in great detail by Davis et al.

4

Our thinking on the problem of holding out liberal rights as the sole horizon of justice is indebted to Melamed and Reddy; Lowe.

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