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

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.

About the Author :
Cristina Herrera is Associate Professor of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno. She holds a PhD in English from Claremont Graduate University and specializes in contemporary Chicana/Latina literature. She has published in journals such as Chicana/Latina Studies, Confluencia, and Journal of Caribbean Literature and is the author of Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script (2014). Paula Sanmartín is an Associate Professor of (Afro)Spanish American and (Afro)Caribbean literatures at California State University, Fresno. She holds a Licenciatura from Complutense University (Spain) and an M.A and a Ph.D. in comparative literature, specializing in African American and Afro–Latin American women’s writing, from the University of Texas at Austin. Her previous publications have appeared in journals such as MaComère and Revista Iberoamericana, and as part of a book on African American and Afro-Caribbean women’s literature. She is a member of the editorial board of Cubanabooks, which publishes works by Cuban women authors, and she is the author of Black Women as Custodians of History: Unsung Rebel (M)Others in African American and Afro-Cuban Women’s Writing (2014).

Review :
?We expected it because we needed it and, finally, it is here?an engaging book on the poetics of motherhood and maternity in Caribbean women's writing that gives mothers in Caribbean culture not only the voice they have been denied, but also fuller-clearer reflections in the mirror of Caribbean culture. The absence of both voice and visibility birthed the poetics which the book explores with brilliance. A mustread, the book inspires a second-read and will give birth to new books. That the book is finally here is cause for celebration.? ?Gloria Wade Gayles, Founding Director, The SIS Oral History Proj- ect and RESONANCE in LEADS, The Center for Leadership and Civic Engagement ?Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text provides an important intervention in Caribbean women's literary scholarship by focusing on maternal writings from the region. The diversity of authors, nations, cultures, and linguistic groups covered is an asset that makes this work useful for scholars and in the classroom. This book begins an overdue conversation about how representations of motherhood and family in literary works by Caribbean women connect issues of history, race, memory, nation, and violence.? ?Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan ?Insightful and thoughtful, this collection fills the maternal void left by recent studies in Caribbean women's writing. It not only addresses major concerns in feminist maternal scholarship by affording a critical textual discussion of different themes and literary genres but also enriches our understanding of diversity in the Caribbean context by adding more discussions in light of a wider spectrum of languages, cultures and racial differences, which none of the previous works is able to offer.? ?Yilin Yu, author of Mo