ABSTRACTATLANTIC MOMENTS: MOTHER/CHILD RELATIONS AND HEMISPHERIC MIGRATION IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NARRATIVES BY NEW WORLD WOMEN WRITERSby:Kathryn CaccavaioMy dissertation investigates and examines representations of mothers and mothering in contemporary writings by New World women writers. The New World is a "contact zone" (citing Mary Louise Pratt); the social forces that feed into the perception of what motherhood is--or should be--and how it is practiced is heavily influenced by the dynamics of power in colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial contexts (Pratt IE 25). This project develops analyses of mother/child relations in African-American and Caribbean women's writings in order to highlight cultural connections between African diaspora communities of the Anglophone Caribbean and the North American mainland. My project investigates how New World women writers explore mother-child relationships that serve as a site of resistance to Eurocentric conventions of motherhood in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century writings by such authors as Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, Julia Alvarez, and Dionne Brand. I argue in favor of a hemispheric subjectivity that challenges constructions of the metropolitan center and the colonial periphery through narratives of modern migration in lieu of cultural "exile" that is first and foremost enacted within family units and can create conflict in larger kinship networks.I identify prevailing tropes within the scope postcolonial and feminist literary theory in order to better contextualize the cross-fertilization between Caribbean and African-American women's writings rather than codifying a strict set of theoretical parameters. Caribbean women's writings can be examined and investigated as postcolonial writings in the Americas rather than in a transatlantic postcolonial framework. By combining contemporary African-American women's writings and Caribbean women's narratives, this hemispheric approach allows for these literatures to be included within the wider scope of "global/world" literature.Using the shared history of colonialism and plantation slavery in each region, my dissertation is grounded in the concept that the motherhood and mothering is a key practice that allows women to form collectives that resist oppressive forces that subordinate them in a social context. The representations of the mother/child relationship in these literatures address--either implicitly or explicitly--the transition from a postcolonial consciousness to an expansive consciousness of globalization. With this transition in mind, I examine how these women writers use the tropes of motherhood and mothering in order to make sense of how this transition is contextualized historically and socially. I expand on Patricia Hill Collins' assertion that "ongoing tensions characterize efforts to mold the institution of Black motherhood to benefit intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation and efforts by African-American women to define and value . . . experiences with motherhood" (Collins 195) I explore how the added aspect of hemispheric migration between these two regions accentuate the significance of the intersection of race, gender, and class. Novels by Marshall, Cliff, Alvarez, and Brand envision and unpack this relationship in a variety of ways in order to highlight how motherhood and mothering singularly social practices rather than biological imperatives.
Read
