Monstrous Mothers: The Womb as Grammar in the Francophone black Atlantic

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the womb functions as a structuring grammar in black Atlantic thought, not merely as a biological site of reproduction but as a conceptual mechanism through which blackness is produced, constrained, and resisted. Across Black Atlantic literature and theory, the womb has been figured as both a site of ontological negation—where blackness is inscribed through captivity, forced reproduction, and racialized dispossession—and a site of radical disruption, where black women refuse the logics of enslavement and biological determinism. The problem at the heart of this project is the tension between the womb’s metaphorization and its materiality. While theorists like Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya Hartman invoke the womb to describe the hold of the ship, the plantation, and the prison as sites of violent (re)birth, this abstraction risks erasing the lived realities of black women’s reproductive labor, maternal fugitivity, and refusal. This dissertation interrogates the stakes of this metaphorization while also examining how black women writers reclaim and disrupt the imposed grammar of the womb, refusing its reduction to a vessel of suffering. To engage this problem, the dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodology, drawing from Black feminist thought, literary analysis, and historical inquiry. The primary texts include theoretical works from Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Fabienne Kanor, and Achille Mbembe alongside historiographical literary texts from Marie-Célie Agnant, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Évelyne Trouillot, Fabienne Kanor, and Simone Schwarz-Bart which foreground black maternal presence and reproductive agency. Through close readings, I trace how the womb is rendered across these texts—how it is theorized as a space of extraction and control, but also as a locus of memory, resistance, and alternative forms of kinship. In analyzing both the metaphorical and material dimensions of the womb, I consider how the figure of the black mother has been simultaneously erased, commodified, and reclaimed within the epistemologies of the Black Atlantic. This dissertation ultimately argues that the womb operates not just as a metaphor but as a grammar—a structuring force that dictates how blackness is imagined, categorized, and lived. Black women’s literary and theoretical interventions unsettle this grammar, refusing the imposed meanings that tether their bodies to histories of racial capitalism and reproductive control. By pushing against the womb’s metaphorization while refusing its pure material reduction, this project illuminates how black maternal figures in literature and theory enact an ongoing, insurgent grammar—one that both haunts and rewrites the terms of black being, relation, and futurity.