Mothering at the Margins: Place, Memory and Migration in Circum-Caribbean Women's Writing

Abstract

My dissertation investigates how contemporary circum-Caribbean women’s literary fiction is shifting ideas of motherhood by narrating mothering in ways that complicate traditional notions of place and nation. I examine place, memory and migration across the novels of three circum-Caribbean women writers, including Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, Colombian-American Patricia Engel and Colombian Pilar Quintana. Although each writes from a specific linguistic and cultural context, they all imagine fragmented, transtemporal, deterritorialized and deeply subversive mothering that contrasts starkly with the “good mother,” trope circulated in popular state and religious narratives. My textual analysis focuses on key literary moments in which subversive mothering unfolds within marginal and liminal spaces: in memories, across borders, at the edges of a forest, on transient coasts, in the womb and beyond death. Taken together, these authors articulate mothering as processes that occur not in or for nations but across them, unsettling and expanding our understandings of place and motherhood, and ultimately, opening up spaces in the literary imagination for grappling with histories of colonialism and displacement while offering the possibility of reconnection and healing.