Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood

Identity, Belonging, and Displacement in a Global Context

Maria D. Lombard

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781978756250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The global landscape is dotted with border crossings that can be particularly perilous for displaced women with children in tow. These mothers are often described by their various legal statuses like refugee, migrant, immigrant, forced, or voluntary, but their lived experiences are more complex than a single label. Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood looks at literature, film, and original ethnographic research about the lived experiences of displaced mothers. This volume considers the context of the global refugee crisis, forced migration, and resettlement as backdrops for the representations and identity development of displaced women who mother.
Situated within motherhood studies, this book is at the interdisciplinary intersection of literature, life writing, gender, (im)migration, refugee, and cultural studies. Contributors examine literary fiction, memoirs, and children's literature by Ocean Vuong, Nadifa Mohamed, Laila Halaby, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Terry Farish, Thannha Lai, Bich Minh Nguyen, Julie Otsuka, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Shankari Chandran, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. The book also explores ethnographic research, creative writing, and film related to refugee studies. The border-crossings discussed in the volume are often physical, with stories from Afghanistan, Syria, Vietnam, Japan, Iraq, Canada, Greece, Somalia, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and America. The borders that displaced mothers face are examined through frameworks of postcolonialism, nationalism, feminism, and diaspora studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• ‌‌Introduction‌‌
• Representations of Displacement
• “We were born from beauty”
• Domesticating Displacement, Encounters with Refugee Mothers
• Tracing the Impacts of War in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls
• Writing about My Mother
• The Ghost Mother in Two Vietnamese American Refugee Novels
• Constructions of Identity and Belonging
• Embroidering Intergenerational Threads of a Roza
• Mothering on Enemy Land
• Guiding, Shaping, and Resisting
• Iraqi Mothers, Diasporic Sons
• (Un)inhabitable “homes” for mothers and daughters
• Index
• About the Contributors