Fantasies of Maternal Unity in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Diasporic Women's Fiction and Science Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation explores the power children realize in the past, present, and future from their real or imagined connections to their absent mothers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African diasporic women's fiction, science fiction, and film. Much of the existing scholarship on the diasporic mother focuses on her place in history, yet texts by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas, Nisi Shawl, and Julie Dash suggest through their depictions of the lasting links children create with their mothers that the power of the diasporic mother and, by proxy, the black family and community extends into the future. This project seeks to supplement the existing readings of diasporic women's texts by considering, first, how the mother-child bond affects the future lives of diasporic subjects and, second, how the potential inherent in the future shapes the mother-child relationship as well as the individual subjectivities of black mothers and children. By examining both children's remembrances of their past experiences with their mothers and their fantasies of unbroken mother-child connection, this dissertation traces the diasporic mother's movement across the borderlines that separate past and future as well as traditions and technologies. This future-focused vision of diasporic identity opens mothers and their children to new possibilities from which they can access and exercise more empowered subjectivities.