Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women's Literature in the Twentieth Century offers a critical valuation of literature composed by black female writers and examines their projects of reclamation, rememory, and revision. As a collection, it engages black women writers' efforts to create more inclusive conceptualizations of community, gender, and history, conceptualizations that take into account alternate lived and written experiences as well as imagined futures. Contributors to this collection probe the realms of gender studies, postcolonialism, and post-structural theory and suggest important ways in which to explore connections between home, motherhood, and history across the multifarious narratives of African American and Afro-Caribbean experiences. Together they argue that it is through their female characters that black women writers demonstrate the tumultuous processes of deciphering home and homeland, of articulating the complexities of mothering relationships, and of locating their own personal history within local and national narratives. Essays gathered in this collection consider the works of African American women writers (Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Audre Lorde, Lalita Tademy, Lorene Cary, Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sherley Anne Williams) alongside the works of black women writers from the Caribbean (Jamaica Kincaid and Gisele Pineau), Guyana (Grace Nichols), and Cuba (Maria de los Reyes Castillo Bueno).
About the Author: Verena Theile serves as Assistant Professor of English at North Dakota State University, where she teaches early modern literary and cultural studies, as well as world literature and literary theory. Her research focuses on how historiographical processes reflect the ways in which beliefs form, impact cultures, and are transmitted across cultures. Theile is currently involved in two other collections that probe the boundaries of literary, cultural inquiry, tentatively entitled Staging Superstitions: Early Modern Fears and Fancies and New Formalism. Marie Drews is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Her investigations of domestic practices in the 19th- and 20th-century United States, specifically as they intersect with cultural discussions about race, gender, and history, include contributions to Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning (SUNY, 2008) and Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (Summer 2007). Drews also recently co-edited Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature with Monika Elbert (Palgrave, 2009).