Rachel's Spot

If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again: An Ethnographic Performance of Black Motherhood
by Evette Hornsby-Minor (film by Rachel Raimist)

“If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again� is a performance ethnography project that has matured over several years since its inception as part of my doctoral thesis, which dealt with the lived experiences of four generations of African American women and the impact of racism, sexism, classism, and stereotypical images on the maternal connections among generations. It is based on the premise that to fully appreciate the issues that influence Black women as mothers, we must examine the images of the idealized mother and of Black womanhood in U.S. culture and how these contradictory images are burdensome for Black women. Asserting that Black women should express and define their own experiences, the thesis used the lens of Black feminist thought and theory to address the lived experiences of Black women as women and as mothers. This multi-media performance ethnography is about death, grief, and mother-loss in the Black community, and embodies my claim that to adequately tell the narratives/stories of Black women as mothers, we must move theory into narrative and performance.

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