The Daughter’s Return

Abstract The Daughter’s Return offers a close analysis of an emerging genre in African-American and Caribbean fiction produced by women writers who make imaginative returns to their ancestral pasts. Considering some of the defining texts of contemporary fiction—Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven—Rody discusses their common inclusion of a daughter who returns to the site of her people’s founding trauma of slavery through memory or magic. Rody treats these texts as allegorical expressions of the desire of writers newly emerging into cultural authority to reclaim their difficult inheritance, and finds a counter plot of heroines’ encounters with women of other racial and ethnic groups running through these works.