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The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality Annie Menzel A The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality Annie Menzel A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Christine Di Stefano, Co-Chair Jack Turner III, Co-Chair Naomi Murakawa Robert Mugerauer Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Political Science ©Copyright 2014 Annie Menzel University of Washington Abstract The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality Annie Menzel Co-Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Christine Di Stefano, Associate Professor Jack Turner III, Associate Professor Political Science The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality tracks the trajectory of black infant death as a political problem from approximately 1800 to the present. I argue that the overwhelming disproportion between black and white infant mortality rates over this entire period expresses a striking continuity in the devaluation of African American life in the U.S., even as official conceptualizations of black infant mortality have undergone radical shifts: from “proof” of African American degeneracy in the late 19th century to persistent diagnoses of black maternal pathology to today’s research on the epigenetic impacts of racism via lifelong stress on the maternal body. I frame these conceptualizations, and their associated interventions, as successive paradigms of what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics,” or attempts to optimize populations’ collective life in ways that entail racially exclusionary elements. I use a wide variety of sources, including Foucault, Orlando Patterson, “Afro-pessimist” scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, and Frank Wilderson III, Michel De Certeau, Bruno Latour, W.E.B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, racist statistician Frederick Hoffman, and historical accounts of antebellum mourning practices and Jim Crow-era and contemporary African American midwives, to describe and analyze a succession of biopolitical paradigms of black infant mortality, focusing in particular on the period from 1890 to 1940. I show both the repressive logics and practices of these biopolitical paradigms and some of the ways that African American political thinkers and actors have resisted and reworked these logics and practices. Highlighting the interconnections of political thought and public health research and policy, I argue that the antebellum political ontology of race issued in the enduring figuration of “true babyhood” as white, excluding black infants from later, formalized biopolitical concern; that Du Bois leveled a two-pronged rhetorical challenge to the prevailing turn-of-the-century biopolitical exclusion; and that the care practices of Jim Crow-era and contemporary African American midwives exemplify a potent politics of survival and affirmation of the value of black life. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………..iv Introduction: The Biopolitical Life of Black Infant Mortality…………………………………….1 Chapter 1: Infant Mortality and Social Death……………………………………………………49 Chapter 2: “Awful gladness”: The dual political rhetorics of Du Bois’ “Of the Passing of the First-Born”……………………………………………………………………………………...120 Chapter 3: The Midwife’s Bag: The Material of Racial Domination and Resistance………….194 Coda: Contemporary African American midwifery as an affirmative biopolitics of black infant mortality………………………………………………………………………………………...264 Acknowledgments As I have been working on the final stretch of this project, the disposability of African American life has been on especially blatant display, with the police murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Ezell Ford, the trial of Renisha McBride’s killer, and the militarized assault on almost entirely peaceful protestors that is still unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri. Of course, this is nothing new. According to the Malcolm X Grassroots project, 313 African Americans were shot and killed by police, security guards, and vigilantes in 2012—one every 28 hours. Needless to say, both this number as a background condition and these recent cases, rare in their degree of media attention, throw into relief the normalization of violence toward black life in this country. Every year in the last decade, however, roughly 4000 African American babies have died per year than would have if there were parity between black and white infant mortality rates—11 each day, and counting. I want, first of all, to acknowledge the midwives and birth workers of color who connect this staggeringly disproportionate but unspectacular visitation of death on African American communities to more overt forms of violence. I name some of these midwives and birth workers below, but I know that there are many more. Thank you for making this connection so clear. More broadly, given the historical persistence of this disproportion between black and white infant mortality rates, this dissertation is in great part an attempt to acknowledge a wide spectrum of African American thinkers and actors who have resisted this everyday violence, refused the devaluation of black infant life, and contested the conditions that allow its persistence. In particular, I would like to honor and to thank Racha Tahani Lawler, midwife extraordinaire, owner and operator of the Community Birth Center in Los Angeles, friend, inspiration, and fellow Maternidad La Luz alumna. Deep congratulations on your new and bigger location—may support for your amazing work keep expanding! I would also like to honor and thank Tehmina Islam of Madison’s Access Midwifery for your amazing work, your friendship, and your example of quiet and unflinching courage. I also want to express my deep appreciation and acknowledgment of the tireless work of Sherry Payne, Claudia Booker, Makeda Kamara, Jennie Joseph, Kathryn Hill-Trujillo, and Shafia Monroe, your dedication to eliminating maternal and infant mortality and morbidity disparities and to providing, in the words of Billye Avery, “exquisite care” for all pregnant and birthing people, and pregnant and birthing people of color in particular. This project is the culmination of a long and winding road through graduate school and, before that, midwifery school. So many people have helped, supported, contributed to, and inspired parts of this text big and small. My committee at the University of Washington was a dream team. Thank you to Chip Turner for turning my focus irreversibly to African American political thought, for being such a wonderful interlocutor, and for being a tremendously supportive guide in and to the world of political theory and theorists. Thank you to Christine Di Stefano for helping me to shape the project, and for your example as a reader, professor, and wonderful human being. Your political theory core graduate course is quite simply the reason that I am a political theorist. Thank you to Naomi Murakawa for your always insightful, though sometimes difficult, questions, for modeling the best kind of creative and thorough scholarship, and for much long-distance support. Thank you to Bob Mugerauer, mentor and dear friend, whose dedication to graduate students is astounding. You believed in me as a scholar in my pinball trajectory from one program to another, and for better or worse you are a big part of the reason that I stayed in graduate school. Thank you for reading and responding to my material and iv reading and discussing so much interesting stuff on your own time with me over the years, from Canguilhem to Actor-Network Theory. Your intellectual pawprints are all over this dissertation! I look forward to more books and more discussions. I am incredibly fortunate to have found wonderful political theorist friends and mentors. George Shulman, you have been an amazing interlocutor, mentor, and friend ever since our first meeting; your combination of intellectual seriousness and excitement, humor, attention to textual detail, huge heart, and unflagging grappling with the tragedies, dilemmas, horrors, impossibilities and possibilities of existence in the United States are a constant inspiration. Thank you for your insightful comments on Chapter 2. Jimmy Casas Klausen, beloved friend, extraordinary reader and analyst, and in many ways my shadow advisor while I have been in Madison, WI, has pushed my thinking and this project more than anyone else. Our readings and discussions of biopolitics, critical race, and queer theory in Madison over the last few years have broadened my horizons and also been immensely fun. You have also made me feel far more at home in the professional world of political theory than otherwise would have been possible. I count myself so fortunate to have been in the same graduate cohort as the immensely talented Rachel Sanders, extraordinary reader and eloquent and incisive writer, awesome person, and wonderful friend. Heather Pool has been an intellectual inspiration and a fantastic and generous guide to confusing world of the political theory job market. Thank you. Thanks also to Gregg Miller, Glenn Mackin, and David Watkins for checking in with me and sharing your own UW experiences as well as political theoretical insights. Thank you also to Keisha Lindsay for several important conversations. I would also like to thank Lawrie Balfour for your truly exemplary scholarship on W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, for generously reading and commenting on Chapter 2, and for your unstinting kindness around job market matters. Thank you also to Kathy Ferguson for your wonderful example, as a political theorist who really pays attention to the materials of political
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