Mothering and Inter/Generational Trauma

Maria Lombard, Lamees Al Ethari

• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781772585551

This volume examines experiences and meanings of motherhood impacted by displacement and intergenerational trauma. The collection builds upon Marianne Hirsch' s concept of postmemory, which states that the " generation after [will] grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated" (Hirsch 22). The volume contextualizes concepts of postmemory through the perspectives of the mother, the mother/child relationship, and the mother/society dynamic. Through research, personal narratives, and creative and artistic reflections, the chapters construct diverse interpretations of postmemory in relation to mothering.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• 1.Packing an Identity
• 2. Cut the Cord and Stay Far from Home: The Trauma of Maternal Cannibalism in the Novel and Series The Haunting of Hill House
• 3. “This Is My Story Now!” Trauma and Postmemory in Two Swedish Illness Narratives about Mothers and Daughters
• 4. Hunger for Alternative Forms of Motherhood, Motherland, and Justice in Susan Abulhawa’s “Memories in an Un-Palestinian Story, in a Can of Tuna”
• 5. An Exo-Autoethnography of Adoption Trauma in Mother-Daughter Relationships
• 6. Motherhood in Crisis1
• Part II
• 7. Madness, Mayhem, and Motherhood: Matrilineal Misrecognition in Contemporary African American Fiction
• 8. Examining the Intergenerational Impact of Systemic Racism on African American Maternal and Child Health
• 9. Unearthing the Way Back: Ethical Relationality in Helen Knott’s Memoirs
• 10. In Their Own Terms: Reinterpreting Vietnamese Motherhood through Second Generation Narratives
• 11. Unbury the Voices of Adoptees’ Birth Mothers in Kaneko Kazuyo’s To Amy
• Part III
• 12. Modern Love; Mother Care
• 13. “Shot through with Holes”1: Pearl Clutching and Female-Led Families
• 14. Photographs Not Taken
• 15. Epitaph: Her Voice through a Photo
• 16. Where Am I?
• 17. Visualizing My Mother in Three Acts
• Notes on Contributors
• Deepest appreciation to Demeter’s monthly Donors