Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives explores how female ghosts in contemporary US and Caribbean fiction challenge historiographic power structures and assert the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. It highlights the importance of cyclical temporality and relational understanding in these novels, which disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology.

Format: Hardback
Length: 130 pages
Publication date: 04 December 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction is a unique comparative analysis that examines the significance of female ghosts in four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. Kristina S. Gibby explores how these female ghosts, specifically maternal figures, haunt female narrators and inspire them to transcribe the deads obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. Through the matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures and broaden historical consciousness. They also assert the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby argues that these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology, favoring cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits uncanny return) that underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.

Weight: 381g
Dimension: 237 x 159 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781666909647