Keywords
maternality
historical materialism
black feminism
negation
political theology
How to Cite
Abstract
Who comes first: the mother or the slave? Gil Anidjar’s recent On the Sovereignty of Mothers poses the question—a variation of the now perennial gender/race/class triad—even as it appears to answer it. Its answer comes, in the guise of the “sovereignty” of mothers, before asking after the (un)sovereignty of the slave.[1] This subsumption of slavery isn’t surprising. From Friedrich Engels (1978), we are told slavery arrives on the agricultural scene as a way to supplement limitations in production: because “the family did not multiply so rapidly as the cattle…use could be made of the enemies captured in war, who could also be bred just as easily as cattle themselves” (p. 118). Subsequent Marxist feminists have debated whether Engels’s causal link between the accumulation of wealth and the sexual division of labor should instead be reversed, such that the “exchange of women” (Lerner, 1986, p. 49) becomes the basis of private property. When it comes to slavery’s origins, however, there has been little movement beyond Engels’s consignment of the “invention” of slavery to the question of “breeding.” And it is here the question has largely remained, with slavery seldom far off from any discussion of mothers, but with one given priority and the other scarcely investigated. In Marx’s grounding terms, “slavery, bondage etc.” should be considered “always secondary, derived, never original” (1993, pp. 495-496).
[1] On unsovereignty, see Sexton (2014).
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