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Kristina S. Gibby - Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2023

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives

Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction

Av Kristina S. Gibby

Del i serien Reading Trauma and Memory

1141 kr

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Beskrivning
Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction examines four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. In this unique comparative analysis, Kristina S. Gibby explores the significance of female ghosts—specifically maternal figures, who haunt female narrators, inspiring them to transcribe the dead’s obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. The author argues that these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures through a matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, inevitably broadening historical consciousness and asserting the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby contends that in form and content, these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology. They favor cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits’ uncanny return), which underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.
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Kristina S. Gibby is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Utah Valley University.

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In the literary traditions of two disparate writers, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, Gabby examines the introduction of ghosts as a tool to connect protagonists' historical past to a defining identity of the present. This compact, compelling study of four women writers spans time and space, cultural identity and affinity, and throughout Gibby provides invaluable insights on the ineradicable historical traumas of women across cultural/physical borders. Examining the metaphor of ghosts in the fiction of the Erna Brober (Jamaican), Zoé Valdés (Cuban), Sandra Cisneros (Mexican American), and Maryse Condé (Guadeloupian), the author links the traumas of the past—slavery, dehumanization—to a search for self-identification rooted in the historical present. The ancestral female ghosts recover and embolden female voices, transcending time. This reclamation rejects the historical marginalization that failed to recognize the wholeness of the protagonists’ femininity and self-worth. Whether literal or figurative, the representation of ghosts links traumas that “collaps(e) the boundaries of space and time to restore what was lost, forgotten, and broken.” The global images that haunt the female protagonists link painful memory to restorative present. Adding to comparative literature in general and to the literature of women writers across the Americas, the book is expertly researched and detailed in its examination of the novels. Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

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