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 GarcĂa'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.
Copyright:
2016
Book Details
Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780813937977
Publisher:
University of Virginia Press
Date of Addition:
12/04/15
Copyrighted By:
the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia