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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until August 07, 2025

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Giving Birth to Blackness: The Black Biracial Daughter's Liberatory Future

Beamon, Deja Jontelle
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1658409323709798

Abstract Details

2022, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
“Giving Birth to Blackness: The Black Biracial Daughter’s Liberatory Future” centers the Black biracial daughter to explore how neoliberal multiculturalism changes understandings of racial inheritance and racialization following the legalization of interracial marriage in the United States. To do so, I examine how she appears alongside racialized motherhood to consider how white national memory attempts to fold her into linear progress narratives and how Black pasts provide her with tools for building Black futurity. I then demonstrate what I call slippery racialization, or how the racialization has become slippery as brownness becomes aligned with the neoliberal future. Through this brownness, the Black biracial daughter is further estranged from Blackness. However, I consider how slippery racialization ultimately reveals to her anti-Blackness while providing her with tools to build futures outside of white supremacy. “Giving Birth to Blackness” is organized into two parts. In the first section, I present a historical reading of racial inheritance through the position of the racialized motherhood. In my first chapter, “Ghosts of Reproductive Futurity: The Handmaid’s Tale and the Role of White Women in the Neoliberal Multicultural Future”, I critique how neoliberal multiculturalism depicts Blackness through a close reading of the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. I read Blackness into the color-evasive casting practice to show the representational consequences of violence against Black women within the narrative. I read her Black biracial daughter as ghostly within the narrative to question how the past is erased, but never completely absent, within white pursuits for futurity. In my second chapter “Commemorating Loving: Amending the National Memory through Time Travel”, I attend to the pivotal ruling in the 1967 Supreme Court Case Loving v. Virginia that overturned laws banning interracial marriage. While national memory commemorates the case through neoliberal logics of love being the cure to systemic injustice, I attend to the erasures in the cultural memory by reading Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, a neo-slave narrative that uses time travel to raise contemporary questions about Black memory, as a post-Loving novel that complicates the seamless progress narrative attached to the case. Through Kindred, I question what future exists for interracial married Black women when taking seriously the violence attached to interracial desire of whites and the reproductive exploitation of Black women. The second section of my dissertation demonstrates slippery racialization and identifies modes for resisting conflation into white futurity. Chapter Three “From Slippery Racialization towards Affective Belonging: Magnetic Blackness in the Poetry of Natasha Trethewey and Ariana Brown” demonstrates the relationship between slippery racialization and magnetic Blackness, or the pull Blackness has on the Black biracial daughter despite the racialization process. I then turn to poetry to observe this process. In chapter four, “Choreographed Futures: Horizontal Inheritances of Mind and Body in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time”, I bring racialized motherhood and slippery racialization together to consider how both entities segment the Black biracial daughter’s body from mind. I then present dance as one tool to combat this process and promote horizontal inheritance between Black biracial daughters.
Shannon Winnubst (Advisor)
Jian Chen (Committee Member)
Treva Lindsey (Committee Member)
165 p.
African American Studies; African Americans; American Literature; American Studies; Black Studies; Gender Studies

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Beamon, D. J. (2022). Giving Birth to Blackness: The Black Biracial Daughter's Liberatory Future [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1658409323709798

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Beamon, Deja. Giving Birth to Blackness: The Black Biracial Daughter's Liberatory Future . 2022. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1658409323709798.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Beamon, Deja. "Giving Birth to Blackness: The Black Biracial Daughter's Liberatory Future ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2022. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1658409323709798

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1658409323709798
© 2022, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.
Release 3.2.12