Description
Book SynopsisAncestral 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.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Phantom Ache: Ghosts, Fiction, and Alternative Histories
Chapter One: Ghosts in New World Literature
Chapter Two: “Anthropology of the Dead”: Ghosts, Subaltern Knowledge, and Alternative History in Louisiana
Chapter Three: Haunting and Affect: Ghosts and Nostalgia in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo
Chapter Four: Haunting, History, and Imagination in Victoire
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author
