Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text; Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing

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 within the Caribbean literary landscape, to call for attention on a theme that, although highly visible, remains understudied by academics. While this 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.

Cristina Herrera is Associate Professor of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno. She holds a PhD in English from Claremont Graduate University and specializes in contemporary Chicana/Latina literature. She has published in journals such as Chicana/Latina Studies, Confluencia, and Journal of Caribbean Literature and is the author of Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script (2014). Paula Sanmartín is an Associate Professor of (Afro)Spanish American and (Afro)Caribbean literatures at California State University, Fresno. She holds a Licenciatura from Complutense University (Spain) and an M.A and a Ph.D. in comparative literature, specializing in African American and Afro–Latin American women’s writing, from the University of Texas at Austin. Her previous publications have appeared in journals such as MaComère and Revista Iberoamericana, and as part of a book on African American and Afro-Caribbean women’s literature. She is a member of the editorial board of Cubanabooks, which publishes works by Cuban women authors, and she is the author of Black Women as Custodians of History: Unsung Rebel (M)Others in African American and Afro-Cuban Women’s Writing (2014).