This dissertation argues that Black mothering is the re-creation of Black sociability in the African Diaspora in the face of the ways in which genocide attempts to eliminate black existence. Therefore, I argue for an approach to African Diaspora as creating, nurturing, resisting, and recuperative acts as an alternative to genocidal practices, which constitutes black mothering. Concerning genocidal practices, this dissertation focuses mainly on anti-black violence, specifically male-on-male and state-sponsored violence; although with an understanding that genocide also manifests itself through many other ways. The choice to focus on male-on-male and state violence is because I understand them as being the ultimate alternative to put forward genocidal ideologies when others fail. Thus, understanding the violent killing of the black population as the most visible expression of genocide in the African Diaspora, I want to confront them with their alternative, which is the given social, cultural, and biological significance of motherhood, i.e., to generate and nurture life. Therefore, my ethnographic project explores Black mothers’ experiences of violence in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest areas. Their struggle to survive encompasses not only their own fight against poverty, racism, patriarchy, and gender discrimination but also entails the consequences of violent acts perpetrated or facilitated by the state upon their families. Engaging with the analytical concept of Outraged Mothering, this dissertation builds bridges between African Diaspora Studies and the Anthropology of Emotions by applying a Black Feminist perspective in order to perceive Black mothers’ social-political insertion in society as well as their pedagogies of resistance. My research methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, oral histories, and documentary photography conducted in an extended period of seventeen months of fieldwork research between 2011 and 2012. This project embraces activism as a learning experience in the collaboration with the mothers in struggle, and employs auto-ethnography as a way to think critically through the researcher’s emotions while conducting and writing the project. This project aims to enhance developing literature on Black motherhood in Brazil and explores Black lives in the African Diaspora through an analytical framework that presents emotion as a catalytic stimulus for the rise of radical political projects. / text

This essay examines Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from the perspective of resistance theory. The essay uses the analytical framework created by Anna Johansson and Stellan Vinthagen in Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance': A Transdisciplinary Approach (2020) to concretize and understand different resistance methods and how black women resisted while navigating in society as slaves and as mothers. Resistance theory and methodology is a newer research area in literature studies, and this study attempts to add to that research field to broaden the understanding of Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography from a resistance perspective point of view. Johansson and Vinthagen’s analytical framework uses four different aspects to capture conceptual and situational combinations of everyday resistance and relationships existing between agents and powerholders. This study finds that motherhood and communal resistance motivate and influence Jacobs's will to continue fighting for liberty and explains how Jacobs’s everyday resistance actions create a feeling of meaning and agency in her life.

Through a content analysis of the maternal relationships in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, the author evaluates how southern black women writers construct black motherhood. This study is based on the premise that Eurocentric paradigms of motherhood confine black mothers to controlling images that continue to criminalize, distort, and devalue black motherhood. The researcher finds that the institution of black motherhood exists independently of Eurocentric paradigms. The conclusions drawn from these findings suggest that black women writers construct motherhood in terms of Womanist leadership. In the aforementioned memoirs, Womanist leadership is learned and defined in the black church. In summation, this thesis finds that southern black women writers use spiritual reconciliation as a form of Womanist leadership.