Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text

"While scholarship on Caribbean women's literature has grown into an established discipline, there are not many studies explicitly connected to the maternal subject matter, and among them only a few book-length texts have focalized motherhood and maternity in writings by Caribbean women. Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing encourages a crucial dialogue surrounding the state of motherhood scholarship with- in the Caribbean literary landscape, to call for attention on a theme that, although highly visible, remains understudied by academics. While our collection presents a similar comparative and diasporic approach to other book-length studies on Caribbean women's writing, it deals with the complexity of including a wider geographical, linguistic, ethnic and generic diversity, while exposing the myriad ways in which Caribbean women authors shape and construct their texts to theorize motherhood, mothering, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships. Though certainly it could be argued that the majority of well-known writers originate from Anglophone and Francophone islands, we insist on recognizing writers from across the Caribbean region to demonstrate the diversity and fluidity of women's voices that may serve as a point of (dis)connection among the writers. The texts engaged in this study do not idealize or romanticize motherhood; instead, they reveal the often-problematic ways that motherhood and maternal relationships are informed, unsettled, and even dismantled by the daily and historical challenges faced by women in a region that bears the violent mark of colonization."--