Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past

In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean womens texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writers turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean womens historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria--an imagined maternal space and time--as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women.

Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past--slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization--this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses.

Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean womens historical fiction, such as Andrea Levys The Long Song, Edwidge Danticats The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshalls Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena Johns Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.