Gendered Returns: Exploring African and African Diasporic Women’s Reclamation of African Birthing and Wellness Epistemologies and Practices

In the US and global medical systems, research has shown that black women, generally, disproportionately experience higher rates of maternal and infant mortality due to implicit bias and systemic anti-black racism. Accordingly, black women, including doulas and midwives, continue to rethink alternative practices grounded in African epistemologies to advance birthing, healing, and wellbeing within black communities. This article conducts a transnational black feminist analysis of the birthing epistemologies and healing practices of African and African diasporic women (AADW) in the diaspora, particularly in the US. We frame birthing as a critical site of black feminist intervention for theorizing wellbeing as AADW return, physically and epistemologically, to Africa to reclaim and repurpose ancestral knowledge. Our analyses show that AADW use birthing as a radical site for: sharing knowledge reciprocally, enacting transnational communal black wellness, refusing epistemic erasure, trusting black women’s knowledge of their bodies, and reclaiming African ancestral identities.We argue that the multidirectional relationships between Africans and diasporans demonstrate the transnational exchange of gendered birthing knowledge, prompting new approaches to diaspora scholarship and rethinking gendered wellness in transnational Blackness. Theoretically, we draw from black and African feminist standpoint theories and African epistemological concepts such as Ubuntu and Omoluabi, which necessitate communal interconnectedness and responsibility. These frameworks allow us to frame “return” as multidirectional and shared epistemological encounters grounded in the oral histories and experiences of the AADW drawn from the US, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania. Within the discourse of return, our work offers new insights into how African birthing epistemologies are translated into contemporary wellness practices and emphasizes gendered reciprocal connections between African diasporic communities. It expands black and African feminist discourses by integrating birthing traditions and maternal wellness as critical yet underexplored sites of decolonial praxis.