Mothers, Mobility, Narrative

Mary Jo Bona is Distinguished SUNY Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Among her many books, she is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America and coeditor, with Irma Maini, of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, also by SUNY Press.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Mothers, Mobility, Narrative: Comparative Studies of Maternality in US Literature1. Mother-Daughter Plots and Maternal Black Bodies: Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl2. Long-Distance Mothering and Generational Haunting in Morrison's Beloved and García's Dreaming in Cuban3. Matrilineal Desire and Geographies of Return in Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging4. Queer Maternality in Maso's The Art Lover and Makkai's The Great BelieversCodaNotesBibliographyIndex

"By placing literary texts by women from multiple ethnic cultures in conversation, Mary Jo Bona makes a much-needed intervention into motherhood studies. In Bona's reading, these texts demonstrate how women singularly construct practices of motherhood that resist social scripts. Among other things, the book offers a fresh, timely look at the AIDS health crisis and its impact on the LGBTQ community over decades and across genders, drawing on the work of Audre Lorde to explore literary representations of queer maternality among caretakers." — A Yęmisi Jimoh, coeditor of These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship