Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy (review)

• Published in: Modern fiction studies Vol. 63; no. 4; pp. 769 - 771
• Main Author: Kingston-Reese, Alexandra
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2017
• Subjects: Aesthetics; African American literature; African Americans; Butler, Octavia E; Consciousness; Contemporary literature; Danticat, Edwidge (1969- ); Empowerment; Fiction; Genre; Inheritances; Jones, Gayl; Korean language; Literary characters; Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literary translation; Literature; Memory; Narrative structure; Narrative techniques; Narratives; Novels; Slavery; Trauma; Women
• ISSN: 0026-7724; 1080-658X; 1080-658X
• DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2017.0059

Reading works such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy casts each as revelatory: braiding narratives of past, present, and future generations to draw attention to and expose "inherited forms of traumatic memory" (2). While the first two chapters of the book analyze narratives of African American postmemory (particularly those of slavery) in novels by Jones, Butler, and Perry, the remaining three chapters provide examples by other ethnic American women that offer their own "particular challenges of geographical, cultural, and linguistic displacement": García's portrait of the Cuban Revolution, Keller's account of the Korean tradition of comfort women, and Danticat's story-cycle of Haitian traumatic history. [...]while in the first and second chapters Bellamy discusses blues form and quilting as "determin[ing] the structure" (69) of Jones's Corregidora and Perry's Stigmata, the later chapters observe how her subjects reimagine traditional narrative techniques: how the narrator of Comfort Woman uses stream of consciousness to channel her mother's spirit, for example, or how textual collage represents communal modes of expression in The Dew Breaker.