The daughter's return: Revisions of history in contemporary fiction by African-American and Caribbean women writers

Contemporary African-American and Caribbean women's fictions, written amidst a worldwide resurgence of previously suppressed histories, reencounter ancestral pasts in dramatic, often fantastic plots of daughterly return. Allegories of historiographic desire, these texts reimagine traumatic history in the form of a romance: the romance of a returning daughter and an emblematic mother-of-history. The figure of the revisionary daughter, created by writers newly attaining a measure of cultural authority, embodies the will to reclaim untold stories of their own genesis and celebrates the newly born power of African-American and Caribbean feminist reimagination.; These two distinct but related literatures, now enjoying simultaneous "renaissances," foreground the female body as site of history and vehicle of transhistorical encounter. They develop a complex, radically new tropology of mother-child relations to render female historical existence, figuring normative history through childbirth and representing the entrance of historical trauma into women's lives through violent disruptions of the mother-child bond. Reimagining maternal inheritances within a myth of female generative power, African-American and Caribbean women writers affirm the birth of the daughterly imagination from within a traumatic historical matrix.; In Toni Morrison's Beloved, the return to the story of slavery unleashes a drama of daughterly historiographic desire for a lost matrilineage. Diverse texts by a range of African-American women, including Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, Jewelle Gomez, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker, also send a magic, time-traveling black daughter to contact and recuperate her unknown ancestors, embodying a generation's will to imaginative mastery of historical loss. Caribbean women writers register a more vexed relationship to the figure of the historical mother. Jean Rhys makes an inspired daughterly intervention into England's literary historical relations with the Caribbean in Wide Sargasso Sea, and the returning daughter in Michelle Cliff's novels radically revises the colonial history of Jamaica. Maryse Conde, rewriting the story of a Barbadian woman enslaved in America, highlights Tituba's encounters with American women. She thus makes visible the vital cross-cultural strand in this new genre: the daughter's return to "ethnic," maternal history becomes a discovery of the inter-ethnic history of her relationships with others.