Professional mothers: female domestic workers in Talia Smith’s Umama and Mahasweta Devi’s “Breast-Giver”

Most multidisciplinary scholarship on female domestic workers in and from the global South features the real-life stories of such workers across the world, highlighting storytelling’s important role in supplementing social research. As compared to purely quantitative or theoretical paradigms, stories are better able to grasp, in particular, the ambivalence that inheres in the relationships between female domestic workers and the women who employ them. With regard to this topic however, storytelling as a creative mode of discourse and intervention has been largely understudied, especially in its fictional and fictionalised forms. In response, this article studies filmic and literary representations of female domestic workers in two global South countries, South Africa and India. Deploying a transnational, South–South feminist framework, it presents close and comparative readings of South African filmmaker Talia Smith’s short film Umama (2020) and Indian writer Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Breast-Giver” (1979, translated by Spivak in 1997). In doing so, the broader purpose of the article is to explore how artistic forms such as film and literature might be mobilised towards producing transcultural feminist solidarities and dialogue in the global South.