Alys Eve Weinbaum’s Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery is a Black feminist meditation on time, one interested in “historical constellation, epistemic endurance, echoes and hauntings” (19). Drawing on the field-defining work of Black feminist historians who theorize what Saidiya Hartman terms the “afterlife of slavery” and the imbrication of present and past, Weinbaum asks readers to think about how slavery has produced a kind of temporal collapse. The book, then, refuses seductive narratives of progress, historical completion, or linear time. Instead, Weinbaum argues that there are “two periods in modern history during which in vivo reproductive labor power and reproductive products have been engineered for profit: during the four centuries of chattel slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean and now, again, in our present moment” (2).
This conception of history, Weinbaum argues, is fundamentally Black feminist, because it “retrieves images of the slave past and recognizes them as present concerns...
