Losing Black Mothers, Finding Revolutionary Mothering

My mother is losing her mother to Alzheimer's disease. Although my mother feels loss, I am connecting through my (maternal) grandmother to our ancestors, including a deceased father and paternal grandmother. I am also connecting to a daughter who has lost her mother, through a (maternal) grandmother who, through her loss of memory, is more open to kin networks than my mother. Through deepening connections to my maternal grandmother and to my daughter, I feel I am losing my mother. I look to revolutionary mothering as a way to reconnect shattered bonds and find lost mothers. This article honors the important work of Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, and countless revolutionary mothers.

Running a Family

Chapter 3 details why so many women wished to remain with their abusers and how it was they started moving toward the law despite their best efforts. Using interview and observation data, the author describes how women initially wished to avoid the law. They tried to “run a family” (sansar calano): work things out, make the violence stop, have a peaceful family life with people who had abused them. This chapter asks what it means to “run a family” and examines the social and institutional factors that shape women’s desires. It then goes on to show how, despite their commitments, in the process of seeking help women became enmeshed in kin networks that pushed them toward legal engagements.

The God Part of Him

This chapter explores the considerable, often insurmountable, constraints slavery placed on family and fatherhood, including sexual exploitation, forced pairing, breeding, and separation. Despite their adaptations, including abroad marriages and multilocal kin networks, enslaved people faced encumbered parenting regardless of their household arrangements. Although the emasculation of slavery imposed perverse dilemmas, enslaved men endeavored to act as caretakers and retained a sense of self, humanity, and manhood through love of family, religious faith, and their own definition of honor.

KIN NETWORK DYNAMICS OVER THE LIFE COURSE AND HISTORICAL TIME IN 19TH-CENTURY ORKNEY, SCOTLAND

Kin are important sources of social, instrumental, and financial assistance for older adults. Support from kin is associated with improved wellbeing and longer lives among this age group, yet few longitudinal studies examine information on the composition and structure of kin networks beyond dyadic relationships, such as those between spouses or parents and their children. This study examines the dynamics of non-dyadic measures of kin networks among adults over age 60 using multiple longitudinal linked data sources from North Orkney, Scotland, 1851-1911. Reconstructed individual life courses (N=4,946) and genealogies, in combination in spatial information concerning the proximity non-coresident kin, are used to examine change in kin availability and propinquity over the life course and across historical time. Orkney provides an interesting case study; as information is available on individual-level change in kin availability with a long period of follow up during a time of population change. The study period covers the early stages of population aging and depopulation of the islands, which began in the 1870s in this community. A descriptive analysis of kin network change is presented. Kin availability is associated with longer lives in this sample. The presence of co-resident kin is associated with economic status, after controlling for other factors. Older adults who receive poor relief are significantly more likely to live alone and less likely to live with kin, and the association is stronger for men than for women.

Love, Lebanese Style

This article draws on a year of fieldwork conducted in Lebanon to highlight the paradoxical entanglement of power with romantic love in Lebanon, evident in the intricate gendered, aged, classed, and sect-related negotiations that accompany courtship periods. In addition, the article highlights the inclusive and relational qualities that external kin relations conduce. Kin approval ought not be seen as either/or divisive/conditional. For many of the couples interviewed, kin relations constitute an arena in which they can disseminate their affective bond. Such analysis is threefold. In addition to embracing the multiple subjectivity of the interlocutors, it moves beyond the standard political-economic approach that generally informs marriage studies in the Middle East and dismantles monolithic perceptions of Middle Eastern kin networks.

Scattering Seeds in Las Orquideas

Globalization and mobility reconfigure families with historical continuities and modern innovations. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, parental emigration reveals the impact of historical rural-to-urban and international migration on current parental ethnotheories. This chapter discusses life in this global city through the description of a focal family that stays, the Mendozas. Their neighborhood, Las Orquideas, is a microcosm of family structure variations, egregious class disparity, the intransigence of aspirations, and the complexity of urban life. These factors influence the decisions to migrate and to stay that dually redefine families in Guayaquil. As parents emigrated and children stayed, the experience of dispersing and maintaining ties led to different developmental consequences. These qualitative representations encourage analyses of families in their kin networks, neighborhoods, and dynamic sociocultural settings while also building systematic connections between the cases for understanding parenting at a distance.