Mothering Across Cultures: Postcolonial Representations

by Angelita Reyes

Blending the personal and the historical, the practical and the theoretical, Angelita Reyes draws on a wide range of texts from Africa and the African diaspora to establish mothering as a paradigm of progressive feminisms. Reyes creates a comparative dialogue among the fictions of five postcolonial women Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Jean Rhys, and Mariama Bâ. Reyes discusses the theme of mothering as a human reality, as a paradigm for cultural crossings, and as what she refers to as autobiographical memory-telling. Not only does her work explore the fraught relationships among memory, history, and mothering, but it also questions conventional ways of approaching the often fragmented testimony and artifacts of the lives of women of African descent. Finally, Reyes uses memory-telling to present the autobiography of her own mother, whose extended American family said she "married a Spanish Negro who don't speak good English." Her blending of authorial, critical, historical, and autobiographical voices in this work extends our understanding of the cross-cultural ideas of mothering. Angelita Reyes is associate professor and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies and the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Genres: Research

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Scott Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book by a professor of mine. It's a good book, and timely since I am also taking a postcolonial class right now. It isn't really my area of expertise though, the cultural place of mothering, etc. But interesting nonetheless.