Black Death, Mourning and The Terror of Black Reproduction: Aborting the Black Muslim Self, Becoming the Assimilated Subject

Abstract

Engaging with the contingencies of white national belongings and recognizable human life within the welfare states of Canada and Sweden this article questions whether Black Muslim women have access to grievable existence. Theorizing through the dismissal of Black death and the dread of Black women’s reproductive capacities, this article considers how the Black Muslim woman who dissolves her Blackness and aborts the once-threatening parts of the self can conditionally enter into mournable life, as the assimilated suicidal subject.

Keywords:

• assimilation
• black reproduction
• black Muslim women
• Canada
• death
• mourning
• Sweden

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Lena Sawyer and Mara Lee Gerden for their enthusiasm and reflections

Notes

1 M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 17.

2 Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.), 7–8, 20, 86, 88.

3 Ibid., 86.

4 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009).

5 Jan-Therese Mendes, “The Affectivity of White Nation-Making: National Belonging, Human Recognition and the Mournability of Black Muslim Women” (PhD diss., York University, 2019).

6 Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to Present (Black Point, Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017); Achille Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity,” Radical Philosophy 200 (2016): 23–35.

7 e.g., Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

8 Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström, “Three Phases of Hegemonic Whiteness: Understanding Racial Temporalities in Sweden,” Social Identities 20, no. 6 (2014): 423–437; Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

9 Simone A. Browne, “Everybody’s Got a Little Light Under the Sun,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 4 (2012):542–564; Lena Sawyer and Ylva Habel, “Refracting African and Black diaspora through the Nordic Region,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 7, no. 1 (2014): 1–6; Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003).

10 Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 42 (2013): 7.

11 Delores V. Mullings, Anthony Morgan, and Heather Kere Quelleng, “Canada the Great White North where Anti-Black Racism Thrives: Kicking Down the Doors and Exposing the Realities,” Phylon 53, no. 1 (2016): 27; Monica Miller, “Figuring Blackness in a Place Without Race: Sweden, Recently,” ELH 83 (2016): 389.

12 e.g., Simone A. Browne, “Of ‘Passport Babies’ and ‘Border Control’: The Case of Mavis Baker v. Minister of Citizenship and Immigration,” Atlantis 26, no. 2 (2002): 97–108; Maynard, Policing, 180; Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017).

13 Sharryn Aiken and Sheena Scott. “Baker v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) and the Rights of Children,” Journal of Law and Social Policy 15, (2000).

14 Ibid, 217–8.

15 Jennifer Bailey Woodard and Teresa Mastin. “Black Womanhood: ‘Essence’ and its Treatment of Stereotypical Images of Black Women,” Journal of Black Studies 36, no. 2 (2005): 273.

16 Ibid.

17 Jenny Burman, “Deportable or Admissable? Black Women and the Space of ‘Removal,’” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2007), 186.

18 Charmaine A. Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 2010), 19.

19 Cynthia Wright. “Nowhere at Home: Gender, Race and the Making of Anti-Immigrant Discourse in Canada,” Atlantis 24, no. 2 (2000): 38–48.

20 Daniel Stoffman, “Dispatch from Dixon,” Toronto Life, August 1995: 40–4.

21 Wright, “Nowhere at Home,” 43, 45.

22 Wright explains that Stoffman’s suspicion that public assistance dollars are being used to clandestinely finance violence abroad is congruent with a similarly unsubstantiated and anti-Black racist report compiled by the Canadian immigration department’s intelligence unit and leaked to the public in 1993.

23 Karin Elebro, Mattias Rööst, Kontie Moussa, Sara Johnsdotter and Birgitta Essén, “Misclassified Maternal Deaths among East African Immigrants in Sweden,” Reproductive Health Matters 15, no. 30 (2007):158, 160.

24 Stefan Jonsson, Private Discussion, May 3, 2017; Irene Molina. Private Discussion. August 17, 2018.

25 Elebro et al., “Misclassified Maternal Deaths,” 153, 158.

26 Mekonnen Tesfahuney, Private Discussion, June 21, 2017.

27 Claudia Rankine, “On Racial Violence: ‘The Condition of Black Life is Mourning’,” The New York Times Magazine, June 22, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html.

28 Sharpe, In the Wake, 15.

29 Ibid., 15, 74, 80.

30 Rankine, “On Racial Violence.”

31 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26, (2008): 1–14.

32 Nelson, Representing the Black Female, 19, 20, 23–25.

33 Ibid., 30.

34 A heteronormativity hinted through the presence of her wedding ring. “High yellow” refers to a Black person with a light skin tone — A description that persists in the afterlife of slavery and the plantation.

35 Nelson, Representing the Black Female, 30.

36 Mendes, “The Affectivity.”

37 Miriam Cooke, “Saving Brown Women,” Signs 28, no.1 (2002): 468–70; Yasmin Jiwani, “Helpless Maidens and Chivalrous Knights: Afghan Women in the Canadian Press,” University of Toronto Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2009): 728–744.

38 i.e., considering that un-veiling continually appears as an assimilatory prerequisite.

39 Ify Chiwetelu and Trevor Dineen, “Meet the Somali mom of 5 who just started doing stand-up,” CBC Radio, January 26, 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/nowornever/fearlessly-funny-women-taking-the-stage-right-now-1.4499150/meet-the-somali-mom-of-5-who-just-started-doing-stand-up-1.4500713.

40 Jiwani, “Helpless Maidens”; Jasmin Zine, Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012).

41 Dale Hurd, “Ex-Muslim: Koran Revealed a Religion I Did Not Like,” CBN NEWS: The Christian Perspective, January 2, 2016, http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2015/april/ex-muslim-koran-revealed-a-religion-i-did-not-like.

42 Natalia Osten-Sacken, “‘Everyone Was Afraid to Be Branded as a Racist’ Interview with Mona Walter”. Gatestone Institute: International Policy Council, April 23, 2018, https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12065/mona-walter-interview.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Bob Taylor, “Mona Walter’s journey from Muslim to practicing atheist to Christian,” CDN: Communities Digital News, May 11, 2015, https://www.commdiginews.com/featured/mona-walter-journey-from-muslim-to-practicing-atheist-to-christian-41329/

47 Mattias Gardell, Private Discussion, August 31, 2018.

48 Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity.”

49 Ibid., 27.

50 Osten-Sacken, “Everyone Was Afraid.”

51 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 7.

52 Dionne Brand 38, in Christina Sharpe. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 122.

53 Mary Ann Doana, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 528.

54 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan-Therese Mendes

Jan-Therese Mendes is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought at York University, Canada.