Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction

by Maria Rice Bellamy

Overview

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 García'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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813937953
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	12/04/2015
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Maria Rice Bellamy is Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Trauma's Ghost 1

1 "A New World Song": Creating a Legacy Worth Preserving in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 17

2 "She's All Pain, My Grandmother": The Body in Pain in Narratives of African American Collective Postmemory 45

3 "She Will Remember Everything": Re-membering the Ancestral Past in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban 76

4 "The Voiceless Gave Me Voices to Speak Out": Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and the Construction of Korean American Feminist Identity 103

5 More Than Hunter or Prey: Duality and Traumatic Memory in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker 127

Conclusion 147

Notes 153

Bibliography 171

Index 179

Editorial Reviews

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

Through her feminist application of postmemory to contemporary ethnic American women’s fiction, Bellamy contributes a new and expanded application of Hirsch’s long-standing theoretical lens in order to analyze American literature of the past few decades.... [T]his study argues well for the inclusion of postmemory as a critical lens that can illuminate the fundamental role of trauma in contemporary ethnic American women’s fiction.

MELUS

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

" 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

"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

"Through her feminist application of postmemory to contemporary ethnic American women’s fiction, Bellamy contributes a new and expanded application of Hirsch’s long-standing theoretical lens in order to analyze American literature of the past few decades.... [T]his study argues well for the inclusion of postmemory as a critical lens that can illuminate the fundamental role of trauma in contemporary ethnic American women’s fiction. "—author of MELUS

From the Publisher