Part Two. The Maternal ≠ {Mother + Child}: Relational Ontology and the Mattering of Black Lives (Planetary Futures)

Abstract

This chapter proposes that the 25 million slaves exported from subSaharan Africa and trafficked in and across the Atlantic brought with them a relational ontology conveyed through a bodily maternal imaginary and carried by the mSymbolic (Chapter 2). This ontology had earlier been transported to Eurasia and North Africa with the first wave of out-migration from the continent ~70,000 ago; in the Neolithic era, paternity-seeking violences emerged, prying apart the relationality of the bodily maternal to grow itself its own Symbolic, one imagined through an ontologizing of possession {Mother + Child}. It is through these ontological contradictions that white supremacy and racialized capitalism would find itself nearly five millennia later. While those enslaved in Atlantic and transatlantic slavery lost access to the cultural geographical particularities of the mSymbolic they had known (e.g., specific material ecologies of a language), the relationality of subSaharan linguistic and life-making practices remained legible, especially call and response, the embodied artfulness of different cultural forms of speech, and an appreciation of maternal-social practices (the mSymbolic). Beyond language per se, new trans- and meta-modalities of life-making spoke themselves into existence, producing an mSymbolic of post-Anthropocenic proportions.