Matria Redux

Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past presents an overview of the Caribbean historical novel written by women in English from 1980 to 2010. The study organizes its corpus around four parts, each of which expresses the idea of matria—an imagined maternal space and time: slavery narratives; colonial and postcolonial narratives of deterritorialization; narratives of politicization or of political awakening; and narratives of return to the mother(land). The book’s formulation of matria as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist concept constitutes a new direction in the existing critical conversation on historical fiction. The book’s comparative approach traces the development of the Caribbean woman’s historical novel by closely reading a pre-millennium and a post-millennium novel in each historical section. The book demonstrates that Caribbean women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, have depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs such as mother-daughter bonds, genealogies, nonhistory, voice(lessness), herstory, trauma, return, and ritual. The chapters show that authors Dionne Brand, Andrea Levy, Jan Lowe Shinebourne, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Edwidge Danticat, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Paule Marshall, and Marie-Elena John are novelizing the past through fictional works attentive to the materiality and historicity of the maternal. Matria Redux therefore signals a definitive (re)turn to the Caribbean other(land) and maternal past in Caribbean women’s contemporary historical fiction.