Mothering Across Cultures: Postcolonial Representations - Softcover

Reyes, Angelita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816623538 ISBN 13: 9780816623532

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2001

Synopsis

Blending the personal and the historical, the practical and the theoretical, Angelita Reyes draws on a wide range of texts from Africa and the African diaspora to establish mothering as a paradigm of progressive feminisms. Reyes creates a comparative dialogue among the fictions of five postcolonial women writers: Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Jean Rhys, and Mariama Bâ.

Reyes discusses the theme of mothering as a human reality, as a paradigm for cultural crossings, and as what she refers to as autobiographical memory-telling. Not only does her work explore the fraught relationships among memory, history, and mothering, but it also questions conventional ways of approaching the often fragmented testimony and artifacts of the lives of women of African descent.

Finally, Reyes uses memory-telling to present the autobiography of her own mother, whose extended American family said she "married a Spanish Negro who don't speak good English." Her blending of authorial, critical, historical, and autobiographical voices in this work extends our understanding of the cross-cultural ideas of mothering.

Angelita Reyes is associate professor and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies and the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota.

About this title

About the Author

Reyes is associate professor and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies and the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0816623538
• ISBN 13: 9780816623532
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264