Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature

Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1996. BI5 - Stated first edition with no additional printings indicated. An unread, tight, clean, sound copy in red-brown cloth covered boards with black lettering and a graphic on the spine with only very, very slight overall shelf wear. With an introduction by the editor. A collection of essays that examine the mother-daughter relationship as it appears in the writings of African, African-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American, Native American, South Asian, and Australian Aboriginal women writers. The writers discusssed include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cherríe Moraga, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Amy Tan. The essayists examine the myths and reality surrounding the mother-daughter relationship in these writers' works and how women writers of color often portray the mother-daughter dyad as a love/hate relationship, in which the mother painstakingly tries to convey knowledge of how to survive in a racist, sexist, and classist world while the daughter rejects her mother's experiences as invalid in changing social times. The articles include "The Problems of Reading: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Indian Postcoloniality" by Radhika Mohanram, "A Continuum of Pain: A Woman's Legacy in Alice Walker's 'Possessing the Secret of Joy'" by Kimberly Joyce Pollock, "'I was cryin', all the people were cryin', my mother was cryin'": Aboriginality and Maternity in Sally Morgan's 'My Place'" by Joyce Zonana, "'My mother is here'": Buchi Emecheta's Love Child" by Patricia Lee Yongue, "(Re)claiming the Race of the Mother: Cherrí Moraga's 'Shadow of a Man,' 'Giving Up the Ghost,' and 'Heroes and Saints'" by Julia De Foor Jay, "The Poetics of Matrilineage: Mothers and Daughters in the Poetry of African American Women, 1965-1985" by Fabian Clements Worsham, "The Mother as Other: Orientalism in Maxine HOng Kingston's 'The Woman Warrior'" by Sheryl A. Mylan, "Love and Conflict: Mexican American Women Writers as Daughters" by Maria Gonzalez, "Mother-Daughter Relationships as Epistemological Structures: Leslie Marmon Silko's 'Almanac of the Dead' and 'Storyteller'" by Charlene Taylor Evans, "Disrupted Motherlines: Mothers and Daughters in a Genderized, Sexualized, and Racialized World" by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, "Voice, Mind, Self: Mother Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan's 'The Joy Luck Club' and 'The Kitchen God's Wife'" by M. Marie Booth Foster, and "To Make Herself Mother-Daughter Conflicts in Toni MOrrison's 'Sula' and 'Tar Baby'" by Lucille P. Fultz. Endnotes, works cited, indexed, 249p.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.