Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering
Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering

Author: Dorsía Smith Silva

Publisher: Africa Research and Publications

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781592219230

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"Mothering has been a recurring theme in the work of many women writers and Caribbean women writers are no exception. Furthering this dialogue, Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering not only accentuates the varied representations of mothering and motherhood but also challenges traditional interpretations of mothering. Thus, the volume comprises of a collection of essays, which examine the multiple definitions and images of mothering and motherhood--from childbirth as the initial site to surrogate, communal, and extended parenthood in the stories of generations of women that include grandmothers, godmothers, sisters and aunts. Writing out of their numerous cultural, political, social, spiritual, and economic worlds, these Caribbean mothers bring needed attention to their endurance of social class, language, cultural chauvinism, physical and psychological exile, racial politics, and colonial sovereignty barriers." -- Publisher's description.

Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature
Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature

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.

Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood Across Cultural Differences - A Reader
Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood Across Cultural Differences - A Reader

Author: Andrea O'Reilly

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 1927335779

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Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood across Cultural Differences, the first-ever Reader on the subject matter, examines the meaning and practice of mothering/motherhood from a multitude of maternal perspectives. The Reader includes 22 chapters on the following maternal identities: Aboriginal, Adoptive, At-Home, Birth, Black, Disabled, East-Asian, Feminist, Immigrant/Refuge, Latina/Chicana, Poor/Low Income, Migrant, Non-Residential, Older, Queer, Rural, Single, South-Asian, Stepmothers, Working, Young Mothers, and Mothers of Adult Children. Each chapter provides background and context, examines the challenges and possibilities of mothering/motherhood for each group of mothers and considers directions for future research. The first anthology to provide a comprehensive examination of mothers/mothering/ motherhood across diverse cultural locations and subject positions, the book is essential reading for maternal scholars and activists and serves as an ideal course text for a wide range of courses in Motherhood Studies.

Matria Redux
Matria Redux

Author: Tegan Zimmerman

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2023-06-23

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1496846362

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In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women. Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses. Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.

Caribbean Mothers
Caribbean Mothers

Author: Tracey Reynolds

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9781872767529

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Mothering and being mothered in a racialised society such as the U.K. continues to have an impact on the daily lives of Caribbean mothers -first, second and third generation. From their own experiences and through their own eyes this study documents the social realities these mothers face. In describing these women's experiences the 'silent' and often times 'invisible' voices of black and minority ethnic mothers in the mothering literature are reclaimed. Caribbean Mothers critically explores theories of racism, racial and gender identity, social class and generation divisions, relating the experiences of Caribbean mothers to wide issues of difference, exclusion, social divisions and coalitions. Themes around which a Caribbean mothering identity is constructed include the maintenance of cultural and kinship connections to the Caribbean; childrearing strategies to respond to racism; employment and the Labour Market; 'community mothering'; and the role and participation of Caribbean men in the family. The thematic issues of protection, advice, security and education form the central elements of these mothers' childcare practices. Caribbean Mothers provides accounts of historical and cultural patterns of mothering and family ideologies in the cross-national context of the Caribbean, U.S.A. and U.K. It presents an analysis of the relationship between black and white mothers, black men and women and mother and child in order to challenge and deconstruct stereotypical (and pathological) images of black mothers such as the 'babymother', 'welfare queen' and 'superwoman'. In doing so, the book raises essential questions about the homogeneity of the term 'mother' and conventional understandings concerning biology, gender and the family.

Good Enough Mothering?
Good Enough Mothering?

Author: Elizabeth Bortolaia Silva

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0415128897

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Lone mothers and their children currently comprise almost 20 per cent of all families with dependent children in Britain. Their numbers have nearly trebled since 1970. Politicians and the media have focused on them as a symptom and cause of a broader social breakdown, yet little is known about the causes, consequences and conditions of lone motherhood. Good Enough Mothering? provides accounts of historical patterns of mothering and ideologies of the family, cross-national comparisons of policies and experiences of lone mothers in developed and developing countries. It analyses recent social policies and legislative changes in family law, the Child Support Act and discourses about the creation of an underclass in Britain and the USA. This edited collection, with contributions from leading academics in their fields, builds on feminist scholarship on motherhood and 'the family' and contributes significantly to the feminist and social policy literature on lone mothers. Good Enough Mothering? will be essential reading for all students of social policy, women's studies and sociology.

The Routledge Companion to Motherhood
The Routledge Companion to Motherhood

Author: Lynn O'Brien Hallstein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 671

ISBN-13: 1351684191

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Interdisciplinary and intersectional in emphasis, the Routledge Companion to Motherhood brings together essays on current intellectual themes, issues, and debates, while also creating a foundation for future scholarship and study as the field of Motherhood Studies continues to develop globally. This Routledge Companion is the first extensive collection on the wide-ranging topics, themes, issues, and debates that ground the intellectual work being done on motherhood. Global in scope and including a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, literature, communication studies, sociology, women’s and gender studies, history, and economics, this volume introduces the foundational topics and ideas in motherhood, delineates the diversity and complexity of mothering, and also stimulates dialogue among scholars and students approaching from divergent backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. This will become a foundational text for academics in Women's and Gender Studies and interdisciplinary researchers interested in this important, complex and rapidly growing topic. Scholars of psychology, sociology or public policy, and activists in both university and workplace settings interested in motherhood and mothering will find it an invaluable guide.

Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature
Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature

Author: Joy Allison Indira Mahabir

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 041550967X

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This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.

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

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.

Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women
Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women

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.