Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy (review)

Broadening the definition of Marianne Hirsch's well-established concept of "postmemory," Maria Rice Bellamy argues that the memory of trauma, or "trauma's ghost" (1), gives readers "a lens through which a large portion of contemporary American literature can be read" (2). Bellamy's application of postmemory is a three-step process involving "identification, translation, and differentiation" (6), steps that she carries out through each of her five chapters. In addition to bringing Hirsch's concept forward through time, Bellamy also moves away from "the generally male-dominated world of postmemorial representations of the Holocaust" (8) in order to propose critical readings of ethnic literature, including Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata (1998), Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Women (1997), and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004). Through her feminist application of postmemory to contemporary ethnic American women's fiction, Bellamy contributes a new and expanded application of Hirsch's long-standing theoretical lens in order to analyze American literature of the past few decades.

In addition to the feminist turn, Bellamy argues for a pattern of representation that marks these texts as "hybrid" because they "alter the traditional form of the novel" (7). She then makes her larger claim that these texts "manifest both the subversive strategies required to render traditionally excluded perspectives and the development of a significant new genre in American fiction" (7). Through her analysis, Bellamy "recover[s] the female body from [the] violation and voice-lessness [of] traditional historical and fictional narratives" (9), working to make visible analytical threads that have been obscured by traditional male-dominated applications of postmemory.

In chapter 1, Bellamy claims that Jones's Corregidora "intervene[s] in the history of slavery" (18) through the female protagonist's engagement with her ancestral inheritance and its resulting trauma. For Bellamy, Corregidora operates bidimensionally. First, the protagonist's spoken narrative is postmemorial as it is a speech act working to reclaim possession over a generational story. Second, the novel itself "reimagines black female subjectivity" as it "extends African American cultural and literary traditions" (18). This expansion is exactly Bellamy's point: by applying postmemory to Jones's novel, we are able to better "decipher" (19) the way that history is transcribed onto black female bodies, bringing a new, feminist awareness to that act of transcription.

Chapter 2 continues Bellamy's focus on trauma and the ghost of slavery through an examination of Butler's Kindred and Perry's Stigmata. In this chapter, Bellamy convincingly argues for a reading of Kindred and Stigmata that focuses on the authors' use of "supernatural means to cause their contemporary protagonists to experience the physical as well as the psychological pain of slavery" (45). The supernatural is imagined through reincarnation and time travel, connecting generations through time, space, and bodily experience. In keeping with the bridge-building promise of her title, Bellamy uses these two novels, published nearly twenty years apart, to contemporize ideas of postmemory in ethnic American women's writing. Put another way, she studies the "convergence of trauma, memory, and history" as "the most effective means of eliminating the distance between the contemporary individual and her ancestors" (51). In this chapter, Bellamy also directly engages with reader experience, suggesting that Butler and Perry push us to question our own relationship to the legacy of slavery's trauma since we, too, are placed on the historical continuum.

Chapter 3 stays with the supernatural as a means to connect generations, pivoting to magical realism in García's Dreaming in Cuban. Bellamy argues that García's protagonist, Pilar, "constructs, as her postmemorial work, a personal, woman-centered counter-history of the Cuban Revolution" (77) to connect the generations between herself and the older members of her family in the wake of the...