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Otherworldly Mothering - by Marika Ceschia (Hardcover)

Otherworldly Mothering - by  Marika Ceschia (Hardcover) - 1 of 1
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Highlights

  • Otherworldly Mothering argues that literary works by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara reimagine subjectivity in processual and relational terms through a rewriting of maternal praxis, a technique that unveils the historical continuities between antebellum and neoliberal America.
  • About the Author: Marika Ceschia is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
  • 270 Pages
  • Literary Criticism, American

Description



About the Book



"Otherworldly Mothering argues that Black women's literary narratives of the 1970s and 1980s reimagine the processes through which Black subjectivities are constructed. They achieve this through what Marika Ceschia terms a maternal grammar that rewrites the ancestral practices deployed by enslaved women. Such reimagining disrupts a brutal American grammar of description based upon a hierarchical taxonomy of the human and a concomitant erasure of the maternal that originated during slavery. Unveiling the disturbing historical continuities between antebellum and neoliberal America, the maternal grammar identified by Ceschia allows for alternative, relational modes of subjectivity, reimagined in processual terms and based upon a return to, rather than a break from, the maternal. In so doing, Ceschia argues, literary narratives strive to counteract the racial violence engendered by the neoliberal mode of reason and its concomitant teleological and hierarchical order of being. Focusing on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Audre Lorde's Zami, and Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Ceschia frames her analysis of these novels alongside current debates about the ontology of the human. If the human has been made and unmade throughout history to serve various economic ends, then, as Sylvia Wynter contends, being human is a praxis, not an immutable ontological category or essence but a process that is ongoing. By uncovering the maternal displacement that has helped to convert some human beings into property, the novels analyzed by Ceschia theorize the potential to reverse this process, changing the terms that dictate how the human is performed. What needs to be left behind is the processes of maternal ousting that brought about the human's current manifestation as a gendered and racialized order of being. Each novel in its way confronts the toll that racial violence exerts upon Black mothering. Otherworldly Mothering uncovers how these texts, rather than idealizing lost maternal figures, posit maternal praxis as a means of understanding the processes through which the human can be made and unmade. They thus not only rewrite historical situations but the figure of the human itself"--



Book Synopsis



Otherworldly Mothering argues that literary works by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara reimagine subjectivity in processual and relational terms through a rewriting of maternal praxis, a technique that unveils the historical continuities between antebellum and neoliberal America. By refiguring materials drawn from the tradition of slave narratives, Black women's literature of the 1970s and 1980s often conjures maternal otherworlds where it is possible to engage alternative modes of being.

In conversation with the work of Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Saidiya Hartman, Marika Ceschia analyzes how Black women writers find in the maternal a means of creatively reenvisioning the figure of the human. Morrison's Song of Solomon, Naylor's Linden Hills, Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Lorde's Zami, and Bambara's The Salt Eaters each change the strictures that dictate how the human is performed. As these texts show, maternal praxis can have a transformative ontological effect: confronting the toll exerted by centuries of racial violence, these writers reclaim the maternal as a site of subject formation.

Otherworldly Mothering reassesses canonical works of twentieth-century Black women's literature alongside theoretical debates around the ontology of the human, antiblackness, and Black motherhood. Ceschia proposes a reappraisal of maternal praxis that challenges neoliberal discourse and questions recent critical turns toward Afropessimism and posthumanism.



About the Author



Marika Ceschia is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a PhD in African American literature from the University of Leeds.
Dimensions (Overall): 9.0 Inches (H) x 6.0 Inches (W) x .75 Inches (D)
Weight: 1.25 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Number of Pages: 270
Genre: Literary Criticism
Sub-Genre: American
Publisher: LSU Press
Theme: African American
Format: Hardcover
Author: Marika Ceschia
Language: English
Street Date: August 9, 2024
TCIN: 92373362
UPC: 9780807182499
Item Number (DPCI): 247-34-7948
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported
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Shipping details

Estimated ship dimensions: 0.75 inches length x 6 inches width x 9 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 1.25 pounds
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