Women of Color

Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature

Elizabeth Brown-Guillory

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780292708471
  9780292708464
• eBook ISBN:
  9780292791695
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Interest in the mother-daughter relationship has never been greater, yet there are few books specifically devoted to the relationships between daughters and mothers of color. To fill that gap, this collection of original essays explores the mother-daughter relationship as it appears in the works of African, African American, Asian American, Mexican American, Native American, Indian, and Australian Aboriginal women writers.

Prominent among the writers considered here are Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Amy Tan. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory and the other essayists examine the myths and reality surrounding the mother-daughter relationship in these writers' works. They show how women writers of color often portray the mother-daughter dyad as a love/hate relationship, in which the mother painstakingly tries to convey knowledge of how to survive in a racist, sexist, and classist world while the daughter rejects her mother's experiences as invalid in changing social times.

This book represents a further opening of the literary canon to twentieth-century women of color. Like the writings it surveys, it celebrates the joys of breaking silence and moving toward reconciliation and growth.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• The Problems of Reading: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Indian Postcoloniality
• A Continuum of Pain: A Woman’s Legacy in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy
• “I was cryin’, all the people were cryin’, my mother was cryin’”: Aboriginality and Maternity in Sally Morgan’s My Place
• “My mother is here”: Buchi Emecheta’s Love Child
• (Re)claiming the Race of the Mother: Cherríe Moraga’s Shadow of a Man, Giving Up the Ghost, and Heroes and Saints
• The Poetics of Matrilineage: Mothers and Daughters in the Poetry of African American Women, 1965-1985
• The Mother as Other: Orientalism in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
• Love and Conflict: Mexican American Women Writers as Daughters
• Mother-Daughter Relationships as Epistemological Structures: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Storyteller
• Disrupted Motherlines: Mothers and Daughters in a Genderized, Sexualized, and Racialized World
• Voice, Mind, Self: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife
• To Make Herself: Mother-Daughter Conflicts in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Tar Baby
• Index