Conclusion

A generation of pan-Caribbean women writers emerged in the 1980s whose work was antipatriarchal and postcolonial. Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past demonstrates that these writers returned to the maternal past and depicted similar matria constructs. In identifying and defining matria as a recuperation of mother-daughter bonds in an imaginary mother-land, this book provides a new way of reading Caribbean women’s historical fiction. Advancing a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework, the book engages with and expands existent critical conversations and recent interventions in the genre (e.g., Francis, Halloran, Machado Sáez, Praeger, Rody). The woman-authored Caribbean historical novels assessed challenge the predominantly masculinist literary lineage and parameters of the genre as well as narratives of the region and its developments, e.g., slavery, colonialism, revolution, and imperialism. The close readings of four late twentieth and four early twenty-first century historical novels reveal matria as these works’ central conceit.