Bridges to Memory
Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction
Will be published approx. on 4. December 2015
Book
Paperback/Softback
208 pages
978-0-8139-3796-0 (ISBN)
Description
Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities. Drawing on the concept of postmemory-a paradigm developed to describe the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have to their parents' traumatic experiences-Maria Bellamy examines narrative representations of this inherited form of trauma in the work of contemporary African American and ethnic American women writers.
Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy shows how cultural context determines the ways in which traumatic history is remembered and transmitted to future generations. Taken together, these narratives of postmemory manifest the haunting presence of the past in the present and constitute an archive of textual witness and global relevance that builds cross-cultural understanding and ethical engagement with the suffering of others.
Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy shows how cultural context determines the ways in which traumatic history is remembered and transmitted to future generations. Taken together, these narratives of postmemory manifest the haunting presence of the past in the present and constitute an archive of textual witness and global relevance that builds cross-cultural understanding and ethical engagement with the suffering of others.
Reviews / Votes
Bridges to Memory claims ethnic American women's writing as a space of trauma, memory, and postmemory. Shaped by the inheritance of past traumas of slavery and immigration, these powerful texts, discussed here with sensitivity and care, point us back to the legacies of violence and forward to a future that can practice recognition and imagine repair."" - Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust""Maria Rice Bellamy's Bridges to Memory chronicles how contemporary ethnic American women writers have creatively confronted the 'seething presence' of trauma and of trauma survivors, especially the 'female forebears' including mothers and grandmothers-but also motherlands and mother tongues. An arresting feature of this discussion is that the narratives of postmemory-of 'traumatic inheritance'-include African American, Cuban American, Korean American, and Haitian American narratives by women writers all variously seeking to 'create a new world song.' Much as Professor Bellamy puts these authors in conversation and community with each other, she herself is communing with them and with writers and scholars including especially Toni Morrison and Marianne Hirsch. The great result is that Bridges to Memory is one of the extraordinary literary studies that advances our thoughts -and creative energies-in many fields of inquiry and imagination."" - Robert B. Stepto, Yale University, author of A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Charlottesville
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
301 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8139-3796-0 (9780813937960)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Maria Rice Bellamy is Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA.