Bridges to Memory

Maria Rice Bellamy is Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA.

Bridges to Memory claims ethnic American women’s writing as a space of trauma, memory, and postmemory. Shaped by the inheritance of past traumas of slavery and immigration, these powerful texts, discussed here with sensitivity and care, point us back to the legacies of violence and forward to a future that can practice recognition and imagine repair."" — Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust""Maria Rice Bellamy’s Bridges to Memory chronicles how contemporary ethnic American women writers have creatively confronted the ‘seething presence’ of trauma and of trauma survivors, especially the ‘female forebears’ including mothers and grandmothers–but also motherlands and mother tongues. An arresting feature of this discussion is that the narratives of postmemory–of ‘traumatic inheritance’—include African American, Cuban American, Korean American, and Haitian American narratives by women writers all variously seeking to ‘create a new world song.’ Much as Professor Bellamy puts these authors in conversation and community with each other, she herself is communing with them and with writers and scholars including especially Toni Morrison and Marianne Hirsch. The great result is that Bridges to Memory is one of the extraordinary literary studies that advances our thoughts –and creative energies—in many fields of inquiry and imagination."" — Robert B. Stepto, Yale University, author of A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama