African American Midwifery in the South Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory pptx

[...]... about race and gender, the relationship of medicine to society, and the status of the South in the nation’s political and social economies These ideas reflected the world as these authors knew it and established a way of ordering that world in the face of the dramatic transitions that were under way Remembering and Forgetting I am drawn to the nature of remembering and forgetting in the histories and cultures... privacy of birth, on the one hand, and the of cial sanctions against traditional midwifery, on the other, one begins to glimpse the dimensions of the struggle over the “said” and the “unsaid” in the recollections of my informants The contestation about what is acceptable to talk and remember about the history of birthing and midwifery in Green River County’s African American community may appear bewildering... therefore, is inscribed in the history of midwives and birthing in this African American community It is part of the dialogue listened to and intiated Methods and Setting The people I spoke with on the preceding topics were African American men and women in their late fifties through their nineties who were bearing and raising children at some time during the fifty years covered by this study These individuals... phrase African American midwives” and then when necessary specify the level of training or path to expertise Memory, Political Speech, and Ethnography Dialogues of memory in this book title refer to the ways in which older members of the African American community in Green River County speak about the history and experience of childbirth and midwifery Unlike the approach taken in other works on midwifery, ... showed striking and sympathetic images of the midwife attending a young woman through labor and delivery, nursing the sick and shutin, offering a postnatal check to a poor white mother of twins, helping poor African American residents negotiate business transactions, teaching lay midwives, and assisting the local white physician While highlighting the competence, caring, and heroism of Mrs Callen, the Life... the University of Virginia In these senses, I am enormously privileged, trained at elite academic institutions and having achieved the dreams of my immigrant parents who came to the United States from Jamaica in 1970 My interest in midwifery and birthing in the South grew out of academic and personal reasons At Johns Hopkins, I developed an interest in health and healing traditions in the African diaspora,... birthing babies and attending pregnant and laboring mothers in their communities? In always asking why the South gave up on African American midwives, I wanted to remember that the erasure of these women’s roles and skills in birthing should not be taken for granted as an inevitable outcome of medical progress and professionalization The book points out other paths that had been cleared, but then abandoned,... aspect of the national movement toward rationalization of birthing and dying, seated initially in the mandates surrounding vital statistics and the eugenics of race The basic analytic frame of the three bodies shapes the structure of this work Parts I and II focus on regulation and surveillance the body and polity Part III takes up the issues of the social and individual bodies as remembered and experienced... in contexts where the idea of southern African American culture remained an intellectual abstraction My parents understood the dynamics of race and racism, which joined the interests of African Americans and Caribbean folk At some level, however, the black Americans,” as they called nonCaribbean blacks, remained elementally unknown and unknowable Then again in academic settings, there was always an... Green River The ethnography of memory, of reproduction, and of the body that I had initially expected proved absent, but in its stead remained a much more nuanced perspective on what had been gained and lost in the transformation of birthing in the community and in Virginia By working in the field, we are really asked to think about what we hold as the center, what we consider the peripheries of cultural . alt="" African American Midwifery in the South