The Fourth Dimension: Kinlessness and African American Narrative

Bentley, Nancy

doi:10.1086/596643

Cited by 83 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Jennifer Morgan describes how White disavowals of Black women's interiority led to “legislative interventions that structurally denied African people the place of family while simultaneously rooting their enslavement in that very place” (Morgan, 2018, 15). The enduring legacy of these arrangements means that “kinlessness belongs to a history of biopolitics that might not be over” (Bentley, 2009, 272). Indeed, Samuel Martínez and Bridget Wooding (Martínez & Wooding, 2017) have described anti‐birthright citizenship in the Dominican Republic as a “biopolitical turn.”…”

Section: Racial Reproduction and The Nation‐statementioning

confidence: 99%

“…To be sure, the maternal inheritance of illegality inscribed in anti‐birthright citizenship policies recalls the reproducible kinlessness (Spillers, 1987; Morgan, 2018) effected under slavery. As Nancy Bentley (2009) argues, the kinlessness generated in the transatlantic slave trade was not genocidal, but purposely generative (270).…”

Section: Racial Reproduction and The Nation‐statementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These affects are not strictly biological. Although laws that produce kinlessness rely on “the facts of birth and descent” (Bentley, 2009, 271), the life‐giving reproductive work of non‐biological othermothers is difficulted by the inherited vulnerabilities of natal alienation. In Black communities, othermothers serve as the building blocks of resistance to the necropolitical state (Smith, 2016).…”

Section: Racial Reproduction and The Nation‐statementioning

confidence: 99%

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Engendering “Illegality”: Blackness, citizenship, and Dominico‐Haitian motherhood

Lyon

2023

J Latin Amer Carib Anth

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In 2013,the Dominican Republic's highest court ruled to retroactively apply the elimination of jus soli citizenship, commonly known as birthright citizenship. The ruling impacted more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent and culminated a decades‐long attack on territorially based citizenship in the country, which largely provided access to the children of Haitians, who make up more than 80% of the country's migrants. The intensification of anti‐birthright citizenship politics and the implementation of a host of restrictive measures since 2004 shifted focus from the male labor as the primary target of migrant control, to the “pregnant migrant.” This article examines how these policies shaped Dominico‐Haitian women's experiences of motherhood by drawing on interviews and participant observation undertaken from 2014 to 2018 in and around Santo Domingo. I argue that anti‐birthright citizenship politics target Black women's reproduction in a form of racialized violence that shares continuities with the nation's history of enslavement.

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Section: Racial Reproduction and The Nation‐statementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Racial Reproduction and The Nation‐statementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Racial Reproduction and The Nation‐statementioning

confidence: 99%

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Engendering “Illegality”: Blackness, citizenship, and Dominico‐Haitian motherhood

Lyon

2023

J Latin Amer Carib Anth

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“…In the Orator, Cicero's (1939) examples of translatio/metaphor and abusio/catachresis invoke this primitive state of being by employing names like "dread Africa" and by referring to people dispossessed of their homelands ("I am bereft of citadel and town") (1.27.93). As Nancy Bentley (2009) argues: "[B]y declaring siblings to be no more than strangers, by claiming a woman's children belong to 'no family, ' slavery enacts a willful misuse of language (abusio) congruent with its power over life and death" (276).…”

Section: Metaphor and The Secret Of Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Recanonizing Rhetoric: The SecretinandofDiscourse

Hallsby

2022

Journal for the History of Rhetoric

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Challenges to rhetoric’s canon often occur under the rubric of revising that canon and its foundational, shared meaning. Read through the strategies of deconstruction, the secret offers a common ground for recanonizing approaches by centering either a concealed quantity in ancient rhetoric’s granular archive (the secret in discourse) or an unfolding idea whose transformation has rendered it unrecognizable to its original version (the secret of discourse). This article draws on Jacques Derrida’s “White Mythology” (1974) and A Taste for the Secret (2001) before addressing how the secret’s registers in and of discourse animate de- and recanonizing readings of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. Its implications address scholars distressed by the durable forms of oppression ensconced in rhetoric’s ancient canon.

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“…simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined-as merely reproductive life-to the sphere of the oikos, 'home'" (1998,2). See also Habermas 1989 (3-4); and Dillon 2004. Bentley (2009 usefully glosses Robert Reid-Pharr's reframing of this issue as it pertains to nineteenth-century African Americans.…”

Section: Strangerhood After 1845mentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Am a Stranger with Thee”: Frederick Douglass and Recognition After 1845

Pratt¹

2013

American Literature

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Pratt’s essay explores how Frederick Douglass responded to the expanding racial segregation of the United States and the inhospitality to “colored” strangers that it represented by occupying and then refiguring the persona of the stranger. Douglass, Pratt notes, also asked his readers to become strangers in return. In this way Douglass constructed a virtual realm conducive to encounters among strangers that were predicated on mutual self-revelation rather than cross-identification. The variable extant meanings of strangerhood in this period meant that such gestures were not without their risks. Yet Douglass undertook to construct a new account of the human in which a reformed vision of strangerhood could found a revitalized democratic culture.

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The Fourth Dimension: Kinlessness and African American Narrative

Cited by 83 publications

References 2 publications

Engendering “Illegality”: Blackness, citizenship, and Dominico‐Haitian motherhood

Engendering “Illegality”: Blackness, citizenship, and Dominico‐Haitian motherhood

Recanonizing Rhetoric: The SecretinandofDiscourse

“I Am a Stranger with Thee”: Frederick Douglass and Recognition After 1845

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