The politics of race and gender: Mothers and daughters in the novels of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joy Kogawa

My dissertation explores the mother-daughter relationships in the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston and Joy Kogawa. These four distinct ethnic women writers problematize and reinterpret motherhood and maternal history in the texts that I have chosen: Morrison's Beloved, Sula and The Bluest Eye, Walker's Meridian, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Kogawa's Obasan. Ethnic women as mothers and daughters, situated at the intersection of race and gender, experience their separation and identification intensely, as their lives are inextricably interwoven in the racial history of oppression and discrimination. In Beloved, Sula and The Bluest Eye, Morrison presents the distortion of maternal love caused by slavery and the extreme poverty of African Americans. The paradoxical nature of maternal love is manifested in the violence and violation within the family. Walker's Meridian questions mothering as the defining parameter of women and suggests the life of social and political activism as an alternative. Kingston and Kogawa, in their autobiographical fiction, present mothers as the signifiers of the racial consciousness and cultural heritage. Kingston's separation and connection with her mother parallels her ambivalence towards the misogynistic Chinese culture. Kogawa's Obasan portrays the recovery of the lost mother as essential to the daughter's reconstruction of identity.; In these texts, the mother-daughter relationships become the lens through which the racial histories of African Americans and Chinese Americans, and Japanese Canadians are re-illuminated and revised. In particular, in Beloved and Obasan, lost historical and racial memories are recovered through the daughter's desire for reunion and reconciliation with the mother. Furthermore, the personal memories of mothers and daughters undermine the authority of public history and demand its revision. These four ethnic women writers then share a common political agenda in their writings; they rewrite public history and reconstruct female subjectivity through their exploration of mother-daughter relationships.