Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past

Tegan Zimmerman's book "Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past" argues that maternal histories are the defining feature of the transcultural and transnational genre of Caribbean women's historical novels. It proposes the concept of matria as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading these fictions, tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past. Matria functions as a counter-narrative to traditional historical and literary discourses, providing a vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 277 pages
Publication date: 31 July 2023
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

In her groundbreaking work, Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman makes a compelling argument for the relational reading of Caribbean women's texts. This comprehensive study posits that maternal histories play a central role in defining this transcultural and transnational genre. Through a comprehensive examination of a selection of historical novels published between 1980 and 2010, Zimmerman develops the theory of matria, an imagined maternal space and time, as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for interpreting fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women.

Tracing the evolution of the historical novel across four periods of Caribbean history—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study demonstrates that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions as a counter-narrative to traditional historical and literary discourses within the historical novel.

Through close readings of 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 Johns' Unburnable, Matria Redux explores the concept of matria as a vital vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria, as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy, envisions the possibility of alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans by returning to history.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496846358