Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives

Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction

Kristina S. Gibby

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781666909654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction examines four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. In this unique comparative analysis, Kristina S. Gibby explores the significance of female ghosts—specifically maternal figures, who haunt female narrators, inspiring them to transcribe the dead's obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. The author argues that these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures through a matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, inevitably broadening historical consciousness and asserting the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby contends that in form and content, these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology. They favor cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits' uncanny return), which underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Phantom Ache: Ghosts, Fiction, and Alternative Histories
• Chapter One: Ghosts in New World Literature
• Chapter Two: “Anthropology of the Dead”: Ghosts, Subaltern Knowledge, and Alternative History in Louisiana
• Chapter Three: Haunting and Affect: Ghosts and Nostalgia in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo
• Chapter Four: Haunting, History, and Imagination in Victoire
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• About the Author