Call for Papers — MLA 2027 (Los Angeles)

Black Motherhood in the African Diaspora: Narrating Care, Resilience, and Futures

Across African diasporic literary traditions, Black motherhood emerges as a crucial site through which histories of slavery, empire, migration, and racial capitalism are negotiated and reimagined. Literary representations of motherhood register both the intimate labor of care and the broader structural pressures shaping diasporic life, often producing alternative temporalities, ethical frameworks, and speculative futures.

This panel invites papers that examine Black motherhood as a literary, theoretical, and political problem in African American and global Black writing. We are particularly interested in how narrative form, i.e. realist, speculative, or hybrid, mediates questions of care, reproduction, embodiment, intergenerational transmission, and survival across diasporic contexts. Papers may consider how maternal figures function as sites of memory, futurity, refusal, or constraint, as well as how motherhood complicates dominant narratives of nation, citizenship, and belonging.

We welcome submissions grounded in close literary analysis and comparative methodologies, engaging texts from African American, Black British, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American, and African literary traditions. The goal of this panel is to foreground motherhood not as a metaphor alone, but as a critical lens through which Black diasporic literature articulates resilience, ethical responsibility, and imaginative futures.

Please submit a 250–300 word abstract and a brief biographical statement.