Africana Mothering: Shifting Roles and Emerging Contradictions

Deidre Hill Butler (butlerd@union.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Union College in Schenectady, NY. She is the guest editor of this edition of The Journal of Pan African Studies, and presently at work on a book titled African American Stepmothers. This special edition of The Journal of Pan African Studies, a peer reviewed publication, explores mothering throughout the African Diaspora. The authors examine social, historical, and cultural constructions and reconstructions of mothering; a range of mothering roles; cultural motivations for mothering; and ideologies of mothering. This edition is part of a larger discussion on mothering throughout the Diaspora--or, more appropriately stated, on how mothers enact their roles within contemporary family structures. Historically, African American mothering has taken place both inside and outside of blood relationships, and been intertwined with community and political commitment. Our cultural values are derived from African traditions and the pivotal environmental forces of slavery and global migrations, as well as ensuing economic challenges. Relying on fictive kin or nonblood relations as close-knit family has long been a defining characteristic of family in the African Diaspora. "Community mothering," which is linked with the fictive kin model, combines Patricia Hill Collins's idea of "othermothering" and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes's description of mothering as a form of community-based political activism (Collins 1990; Gilkes 1980). Collins explains that othermothering "consists of a series of constantly renegotiated relationships that African American women experience with one another, with black children, with the larger African American community, and with self" (Collins 1990: 176). Othermothering is defined as accepting responsibility for a child that is not one's own in an arrangement that may or may not be formal. Othermothering is a foundational component of the black feminist standpoint. This edition enriches conceptions of the black mothering experience, highlights the diversity of Africana mothering, and sheds light on areas that are rarely studied. In "The Lakou System: A Cultural, Ecological Analysis of Mothering in Rural Haiti," the authors explore the cultural response to environmental changes that have moved Haitian mothers away from multiple mothering, where several women in the lakou shared in the caring and supervision of young children, to individual mothering, where single mothers are now the sole caretakers. "Mothering Children of African Descent: Hopes, Fears, and Strategies of White Birth Mothers" addresses the contributions of non-African mothers of African-other children, adding an important dimension to discussions about the complexity of postcolonial and Africana hybrid identities. This article also explores the responsibility of non-African mothers in fostering children's dual (or multiple) racial and cultural identifications, regardless of their feelings about the fathers of their children. The process of revisionist Africana family research engages staple definitions of Africana mothering as the glue that holds black families together. However, as Patricia Hill Collins acknowledges, motherhood is a contradictory institution experienced in diverse ways by different women (1990). …