Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text; Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing

Cristina Herrera, Paula Sanmartín

• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781772580273
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

While scholarship on Caribbean women's literature has grown into an established discipline, there are not many studies explicitly connected to the maternal subject matter, and among them only a few book-length texts have focalized motherhood and maternity in writings by Caribbean women. Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing encourages a crucial dialogue surrounding the state of motherhood scholarship within the Caribbean literary landscape, to call for attention on a theme that, although highly visible, remains understudied by academics. While this collection presents a similar comparative and diasporic approach to other book-length studies on Caribbean women's writing, it deals with the complexity of including a wider geographical, linguistic, ethnic and generic diversity, while exposing the myriad ways in which Caribbean women authors shape and construct their texts to theorize motherhood, mothering, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships.

Table of contents

• READING/SPEAKING/WRITING THE MOTHER TEXT: Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Poetics of Motherhood and Maternity in Caribbean Women’s Writing PAULA SANMARTÍN AND CRISTINA HERRERA
• I. ON BEING A MOTHER: CHALLENGING MOTHERHOOD AND THE MOTHER AS “OTHER”
• 1. Accepting a Daughter Gisèle Pineau’s L’espérance-macadam ABIGAIL L. PALKO
• 2. “Or Not to Mother?” Astrid Roemer’s Lijken op liefde (“Looks Like Love”) DORIS HAMBUCH
• 3. “My Destiny Was to Come to this Island” Maternal Rejection and Colonization in Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora CRISTINA HERRERA
• II. MATRILINEALISM AND MATERNAL LEGACIES
• 4. Memory, Myth and History in Shara McCallum’s Mother/Daughter Poems ADRIENNE MCCORMICK
• 5. From “Australian Whiteness” to Caribbean Self Maryse Condé’s Matrilineal Family Narrative of Identity Detection AMY LEE
• III. MOTHERLY, DAUGHTERLY VOICES AND HERSTORIES
• 6. “My Mama Had a Story” Mothers and Intergenerational Relations in Andrea Levy’s Fiction CHARLOTTE BEYER
• 7. Palè Andaki Genre, History and Mother-Daughter Doublespeak in Edwidge Danticat’s Fiction ANGELETTA KM GOURDINE
• 8. Sharing the (M)Other’s Text Mother-Daughter Relationships in Black Cuban1 Women’s Talking Texts PAULA SANMARTÍN
• IV. TROUBLING MOTHERHOOD: MATERNAL ABSENCE, REJECTION, AND VIOLENCE
• 9. “She Had Put the Servant in Her Place” Sexual Violence and Generational Social Policing between Women in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable AMY K. KING
• 10. Loss of Mother, Loss of Self Orphanhood in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother DANIEL ARBINO
• 11. Motherhood by Default Rethinking the Patriarchal Family in Gisèle Pineau’s Novels1 FLORENCE RAMOND JURNEY
• About the Contributors