Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women

Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women PDF

Author: Simone A. James Alexander

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 082626316X

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"Focusing on specific texts by Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Conde, and Paule Marshall, this study explores the intricate trichotomous relationship between the mother (biological or surrogate), the motherlands Africa and the Caribbean, and the mothercountry represented by England, France, and/or North America. The mother-daughter relationships in the works discussed address the complex, conflicting notions of motherhood that exist within this trichotomy. Although mothering is usually socialized as a welcoming, nurturing notion, Alexander argues that alongside this nurturing notion there exists much conflict. Specifically, she argues that the mother-daughter relationship, plagued with ambivalence, is often further conflicted by colonialism or colonial intervention from the "other," the colonial mothercountry." "Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women offers an overview of Caribbean women's writings from the 1990s, focusing on the personal relationships these three authors have had with their mothers and/or motherlands to highlight links, despite social, cultural, geographical, and political differences, among Afro-Caribbean women and their writings. Alexander traces acts of resistance, which facilitate the (re)writing/righting of the literary canon and the conception of a "newly created genre" and a "womanist" tradition through fictional narratives with autobiographical components." --Book Jacket.

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

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

Author: Cristina Herrera

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2015-08-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1772580279

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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.

Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature

Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature PDF

Author: Geneva Cobb Moore

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2017-03-31

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1611177499

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An in-depth examination of Black women's experiences as portrayed in literature throughout American history Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries. Moore traces black women writers' creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature from the colonial-era work of Phillis Wheatley to the postmodern efforts of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Through their characters Moore shows how these writers re-created the identity of black women and challenge existing rules shaping their subordinate status and behavior. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and other social science theory, Moore examines the maternal iconography and counter-hegemonic narratives by which these writers responded to oppressive conventions of race, gender, and authority. Moore grounds her account in studies of Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. All these authors, she contends, wrote against invisibility and powerlessness by developing and cultivating a personal voice and an individual story of vulnerability, nurturing capacity, and agency that confounded prevailing notions of race and gender and called into question moral reform. In these nine writers' construction of feminine images—real and symbolic—Moore finds a shared sense of the historically significant role of black women in the liberation struggle during slavery, the Jim Crow period, and beyond. A foreword is offer by Andrew Billingsley, a pioneering sociologist and a leading scholar in African American studies.

Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature

Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature PDF

Author: Abigail L. Palko

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-25

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1137600748

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Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature undertakes a comparative transnational reading to develop more expansive literary models of good mothering. Abigail L. Palko argues that Irish and Caribbean literary representations of non-normative mothering practices do not reflect transgressive or dangerous mothering but are rather cultural negotiations of the definition of a good mother. This original book demonstrates the sustained commitment to countering the dominant ideologies of maternal self-sacrifice foundational to both Irish and Caribbean nationalist rhetoric, offering instead the possibility of integrating maternal agency into an effective model of female citizenship.

Mother, She Wrote

Mother, She Wrote PDF

Author: Yi-Lin Yu

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780820469003

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In this enjoyable and insightful book, Yi-Lin Yu takes the heated and ongoing feminist debate over motherhood and maternal subjectivity onto a new plane - in search of a new synthesis. With its specific focus on the three-tiered matrilineal narratives, Mother, She Wrote is distinguished by its complex and innovative deployment of psychoanalytic subject-relations theories, and a meticulous and detailed discussion of various literary texts, which calls forth a powerful reformulation of these narratives. One of the main strengths of this book is this simultaneous and tactful command of theory and literary practice. Apart from advocating the burgeoning development of women's writing of matrilineal narratives, the author also sheds new light on further research in the area of feminist motherhood and mothering.

The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature

The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature PDF

Author: Claire Westall

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-07-01

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 3030659720

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This book analyses cricket’s place in Anglophone Caribbean literature. It examines works by canonical authors – Brathwaite, Lamming, Lovelace, Naipaul, Phillips and Selvon – and by understudied writers – including Agard, Fergus, John, Keens-Douglas, Khan and Markham. It tackles short stories, novels, poetry, drama and film from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Its literary readings are couched in the history of Caribbean cricket and studies by Hilary Beckles and Gordon Rohlehr. C.L.R James’ foundational Beyond a Boundary provides its theoretical grounding. Literary depictions of iconic West Indies players – including Constantine, Headley, Worrell, Walcott, Sobers, Richards, and Lara – feature throughout. The discussion focuses on masculinity, heroism, father-son dynamics, physical performativity and aesthetic style. Attention is also paid to mother-daughter relations and female engagement with cricket, with examples from Anim-Addo, Breeze, Wynter and others. Cricket holds a prominent place in the history, culture, politics and popular imaginary of the Caribbean. This book demonstrates that it also holds a significant and complicated place in Anglophone Caribbean literature.

Sexual Feelings

Sexual Feelings PDF

Author: Elina Valovirta

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2014-08-15

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9401211027

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The present book offers a reader-theoretical model for approaching anglophone Caribbean women’s writing through affects, emotions, and feelings related to sexuality, a prominent theme in the literary tradition. How does an affective framework help us read this tradition of writing that is so preoccupied with sexual feelings? The novelists discussed in the book – chiefly Erna Brodber, Opal Palmer Adisa, Edwidge Danticat, Shani Mootoo, and Oonya Kempadoo – are representative of various anglophone Caribbean island cultures and English-speaking back¬grounds. The study makes astute use of the theoretical writings of such scholars as Sara Ahmed, Milton J. Bennett, Sue Campbell, Linden Lewis, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Lizabeth Paravisini – Gebert, Lynne Pearce, Elspeth Probyn, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Rei Terada, as well as the critical writings of Adisa, Brodber, Kempadoo, to shape an individual, focused argument. The works of the creative artists treated, and this volume, hold sexuality and emo¬tions to be vital for meaning-production and knowledge-negotiation across diffe¬rences (be they culturally, geographi¬cally or otherwise marked) that chal¬lenge the postcolonial reading process. Elina Valovirta is a Post-Doctoral Fellow employed by the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) and stationed in the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. She has published on Caribbean women’s writing in English, feminist pedagogy, and cultural studies.

Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic

Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic PDF

Author: Emilia María Durán-Almarza

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-30

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1136656987

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This book brings together a complete set of approaches to works by female authors that articulate the black Atlantic in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender. The chapters provide the grounds to (en)gender a more complex understanding of the scattered geographies of the African diaspora in the Atlantic basin. The variety of approaches displayed bears witness to the vitality of a field that, over the years, has become a diasporic formation itself as it incorporates critical insights and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, thus exposing the manifold character of (black) diasporic interconnections within and beyond the Atlantic. Focusing on a wide array of contemporary literary and performance texts by women writers and performers from diverse locations including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the US, and the UK, chapters visit genres such as performance art, the novel, science fiction, short stories, and music. For these purposes, the volume is organized around two significant dimensions of diasporas: on the one hand, the material—corporeal and spatial—locations where those displacements associated with travel and exile occur, and, on the other, the fluid environments and networks that connect distant places, cultures, and times. This collection explores the ways in which women of African descent shape the cultures and histories in the modern, colonial, and postcolonial Atlantic worlds.

Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction PDF

Author: Sarah Knor

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1000824705

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Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.

Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History

Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History PDF

Author: Marie Drews

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-05-05

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1443810479

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Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century offers a critical valuation of literature composed by black female writers and examines their projects of reclamation, rememory, and revision. As a collection, it engages black women writers’ efforts to create more inclusive conceptualizations of community, gender, and history, conceptualizations that take into account alternate lived and written experiences as well as imagined futures. Contributors to this collection probe the realms of gender studies, postcolonialism, and post-structural theory and suggest important ways in which to explore connections between home, motherhood, and history across the multifarious narratives of African American and Afro-Caribbean experiences. Together they argue that it is through their female characters that black women writers demonstrate the tumultuous processes of deciphering home and homeland, of articulating the complexities of mothering relationships, and of locating their own personal history within local and national narratives. Essays gathered in this collection consider the works of African American women writers (Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Audre Lorde, Lalita Tademy, Lorene Cary, Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sherley Anne Williams) alongside the works of black women writers from the Caribbean (Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau), Guyana (Grace Nichols), and Cuba (María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno).