“Sneaking the Scraps Out the Back Door.” On Black Feminist Traditions of Memory Keeping

There is already a Black feminist tradition of using the arts as historical preservation. A dynamic sampling of contemporary literature and art created by Black women considers the forms of poetry, novel, memoir, book arts, visual arts, and memorial to interrogate Black women’s reproductive lives. Such an innovative, yet traditional method of memory-keeping requires a unique method of investigating scraps, or what I articulate as scrap theory, to search for traces and fragmentation of Black reproductive life that exist within both artistic and traditional institutional archival documentation.

The artists I discuss revive a Black feminist methodology of communing with scraps, what I call scrap theory, to write this story. Radical approaches to what is precious and what is worthless, or appraisal, have always been more than the inversion of that which is useless made priceless, what was originally meant to be ephemeral made timeless. Black feminist approaches to memory work create an intertextual production of memory, time, and space to scale the meaning of scraps as foundational to Black memory work across disciplines: For instance, food studies scholars have traced the predilection for chitterlings through a gastro-genealogy of enslaved people’s access to the kitchen scraps.

Sneaking the scraps out the back door for their children showed that those working in the enslaver’s home gave value and meaning to leftovers for our children. Those who received the “40 acres and a mule” after Reconstruction quickly found that the forty acres were uninhabitable scraps of land that white locals did not want or at least mind consigning to the “ownership” of Black locals. Another dimension of scrap theory calls for the theorization of forced migration of Black Americans who materially haunt the spaces they escaped. Some left small locks of hair that would be enough to remember them by but would remain unfound when a mob came knocking on their door. If someone was caught, and murdered, scraps of their body were circulated as souvenirs and passed down through generations of white families as heirlooms.

Scraps make up the collage through which our lives are quilted together while at the same time reminding us that fragmentation is our legacy.

Historically, Black people also have symbolized scraps: We are who is left for dead or left behind in social and governmental programs, while also being deemed the “excess,” the “too many mouths to feed” and those who leech off the government.

Blackness is what is “scrapped” from admissions rosters and course listings, we are the last to be hired and first to be fired. Material scraps are what we must remember each other by, that which we use to construct a semblance of the whole of who our loved ones were and are. Black ancestors are the ones who scrapped pieces of stone and rubble to literally build our statehouses, which hold some of the most prized archival treasures. We conjure scraps and draw community from them to challenge these archival collections. Scraps make up the collage through which our lives are quilted together while at the same time reminding us that fragmentation is our legacy.

I use scraps as a quintessential figuration of what is (un)seen as erasure (dispossession) on top of another erasure (motherhood). I am driven by communing with those whose greatest fear was realized in a social stratum that refused them the categories of mother or child.

In enacting scrap theory, I situate the process and product of Black women artists’ personal papers, archives, and materials which they create on and around themes of dispossession as intermingled and inseparable. I coin scrap theory as an invitation for us to see the ways Black women creatives generationally collect materials and memory of the lost, hidden, and forgotten to tell intrapersonal stories of their own experiences with mother, child dispossession as well as those of their foremothers. I approach fragmented and refused materials that may appear to be otherwise inconsequential or miscellaneous to one’s life as scraps. I draw from scraps not to make a semblance of a family that may have been torn apart, and especially not to reassemble a family that I know may have never been reunited. I instead read with what is left behind and around separation to observe what contours one’s subjecthood without directly constituting it.

In a sense, scraps allow us to theorize the silhouette of a mother-dispossessed in its/her/their own right. It does not deny the time spent together between a mother and child as any less significant but poses an opportunity to further explore the unbreakable bond between mother and child. My demands of scraps are that they open new formations of visuality and materiality, as well as the affective and medical humanities approaches to yield the haptic consequences of living under the threat of dispossession. A radical approach to the intimate spaces of Black lives invites us to imagine how we document Black mothers’ experiences over time, and how their affective and creative lives substantiate the very archive of Black motherhood and its fragmentation.

This approach to archival material thus wrestles with a disturbing present in which family dispossession is both normalized and pathologized in the media every single day. In sum, scrap theory best serves this project in underlining the four-hundred-year holocaust that “wrenched” Africans from their “biological mothers as well as their Motherland” and what this “wrenching means, not only then, but now” for Black women creatives and their audiences.

Scrap Theory intervenes in the fields of Black archival studies, motherhood studies and feminist studies, and literary studies by asking how Black women deliberately document their experiences with dispossession through artistic engagement. My transdisciplinary approach of scrap theory and documentation encourages a collapse in disciplinarian discourses on the levels of documentation and practice, making it a much-needed complementary text to move forward the conversations around the status of Black women’s documentation under the politics of dispossession. To date, there is a failure across fields to fully discuss Black women’s artistic work as a form of archival labor.

I can save them from the violences that caused these wounds.

Yet, contemporary arts practice is an archive rife with the experiential evidence of mother-ancestors’ experiences with dispossession. I drive this interdisciplinary conversation forward by asking what forms of radical documentation, animated by theorizing with scraps, must be considered so we might contend with maternal dispossession in all its discursive forms (for example, mother tongue, motherland) for a more capacious image of dispossession itself.

In total, I define Black motherhood as the social location of African diasporic femmes or women or self-identified mothers who care for, protect, and prepare children for adulthood through the conditions of dispossession. African diasporic people’s contentious history with these formations of motherhood create specters of separation as reproductive injustice. Literary, visual, and performative art of the African diaspora iterates separation as a literal separation of the bodies of mothers and children.

I also undertake maternal dispossession as the separation from motherlands (lands of origin) and the figurative separation from mother tongue (language of origin). An all encompassing definition of maternal dispossession scales the degrees to which Black mothers are victimized by the enduring projects of capitalism and colonialism. Thus, a capacious undertaking of maternal separation includes an analysis of the high maternal and infant death rates of Black people and the child welfare system that disproportionately affects Black mothers’ potential to raise Black children safely without state-sanctioned permanent and/or semi- permanent dispossession. My intention in undertaking such a capacious view of Black maternal separation is not to find new ways to highlight the wounds of Black mothers. I am also not interested in naming these violences so that

I can save them from the violences that caused these wounds. This definition of Black maternal dispossession simply aims to examine the many ways that Black motherhood is obscured and rendered an archival impossibility for research in my attempt to define it. This impossibility invites us to reimagine and revive cultural production as a site to theorize the many experiences of Black motherhood. Such an invitation also creates the opportunity for us to revel in the ingenious ways Black mothers antagonize our nationalized notions of belonging and remembrance in their arts making.

I also expand the notion of motherhood so as to mobilize Black motherhood beyond gendered and racialized forms of embodiment. At many points, this project investigates mothers who are men or nongendered, but who care for other Black people, especially in the pursuit of liberation from oppression.

Framing Black motherhood outside the gender binary, we are disabused of categories of similarity through which we assume a homologous “Black community” experienced enslavement. This approach locates Black mothers as queer in their historical relationship to the diaspora and the history it will not or cannot keep, as well as within their intramural relationships to members of the diaspora.

I qualify the term “queer” in Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s offering of “queer in the sense of marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connecting in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections that counteract imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths.”

Thus, the cisgendered body and heterosexuality are a dynamic instead of a foundation to our conceptions of Black motherhood. The definition of Black motherhood is an expansive one when drawn from the creative archive of Black feminist thinkers.

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From Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination. Used with the permission of the publisher, The Ohio State University Press. Copyright © 2026 by Mali D. Collins