Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century, 2009
"Waiting for the Spider to Come Home": Mothers and Mothering in Lalita Tademy's Cane River.
Revie... more "Waiting for the Spider to Come Home": Mothers and Mothering in Lalita Tademy's Cane River.
Reviews of Lalita Tademy's Cane River generally focus on the themes of miscegenation, passing, or victimization. However, a womanist reading of this historical novel raises questions regarding the characters' modes of survival. Like Harriet Jacob whose slave narrative recounts her decisions to take a white lover and to save herself and her family by hiding in the "loophole of [her] retreat," Lalita Tademy's ancestral matriarchs employ numerous strategies of mothering in an effort to rescue their families, especially their girls, from the intricate webs of race, class, and gender imbedded in Louisiana Creole culture. Through the voices of Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily, Tademy reconstructs the narrative of her family history, but in doing so, I propose, she also constructs alternative motherhoods and strategies of mothering.
In Cane River, mothers use their bodies to secure the futures of their children, they sacrifice their personal freedoms to ensure the birthrights of their offspring, and they nurse away the miseries of slavery, rape, and death. However, they are also silent, absent, or unmoved during times of crisis. They are not always the nurturers: sometimes they are the nurtured. They are jealous. They are obstacles in the way of dreams. Tademy does not idealize or romanticize mothering; instead, she humanizes the roles of her foremothers by revealing their flaws and fallibilities.
Yet, as Elisabeth reminds the ambitious Suzette, "You only have one family, and not everybody gets that" (25), we, too, are reminded of the importance of family in both African American and Southern cultures. Central to these families is the role of the matriarch. In Cane River, Tademy shows us the complexities of matriarchy and demonstrates the ways in which Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily mother their families and their communities. These women's strategies of mothering shift according to the threat posed to their family; thus, they move between multiple motherhoods.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Reviews of Lalita Tademy's Cane River generally focus on the themes of miscegenation, passing, or victimization. However, a womanist reading of this historical novel raises questions regarding the characters' modes of survival. Like Harriet Jacob whose slave narrative recounts her decisions to take a white lover and to save herself and her family by hiding in the "loophole of [her] retreat," Lalita Tademy's ancestral matriarchs employ numerous strategies of mothering in an effort to rescue their families, especially their girls, from the intricate webs of race, class, and gender imbedded in Louisiana Creole culture. Through the voices of Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily, Tademy reconstructs the narrative of her family history, but in doing so, I propose, she also constructs alternative motherhoods and strategies of mothering.
In Cane River, mothers use their bodies to secure the futures of their children, they sacrifice their personal freedoms to ensure the birthrights of their offspring, and they nurse away the miseries of slavery, rape, and death. However, they are also silent, absent, or unmoved during times of crisis. They are not always the nurturers: sometimes they are the nurtured. They are jealous. They are obstacles in the way of dreams. Tademy does not idealize or romanticize mothering; instead, she humanizes the roles of her foremothers by revealing their flaws and fallibilities.
Yet, as Elisabeth reminds the ambitious Suzette, "You only have one family, and not everybody gets that" (25), we, too, are reminded of the importance of family in both African American and Southern cultures. Central to these families is the role of the matriarch. In Cane River, Tademy shows us the complexities of matriarchy and demonstrates the ways in which Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily mother their families and their communities. These women's strategies of mothering shift according to the threat posed to their family; thus, they move between multiple motherhoods.
Although I have incorporated digital collections and text mining into most of my undergraduate courses, I will focus primarily on an upper-division course in World Humanities and on a summer research project with students in the Center for Undergraduate Research Project on my campus. In the upper-division course Six Degrees of Langston Hughes, students mapped places and events identified in Hughes’s autobiographies and created “exhibits” or collections on a specific theme relevant to our study of Hughes. The purpose of the course was to consider world literature and world authors through Hughes’s extensive travels and collaborations. The project may be accessed at http://sixdegreesoflangstonhughes.omeka.net/ . In contrast, the CURS project focused on text or data mining the poetry of Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker. The purpose of the research was to determine whether text mining was an effective tool for analyzing African American poetry. The project may be accessed at https://miningblackculture.wordpress.com/ . Neither group of students generated a formal research paper. However, students presented their scholarship verbally and in poster form to their peers and faculty on campus and at other universities in Georgia. The students certainly wrote the equivalent of a ten-page essay (and more) as a part of their final analyses. Moreover, they learned to use software to generate data and to publish their findings electronically. The students reported that they learned more about conducting research than in other research paper based courses. They also reported that the software they learned to use would help them in future courses and research projects.
Digital humanities taps into the interdisciplinary and experiential learning current pedagogical scholarship suggests as best practices for undergraduate learning. I do not suggest that digital projects replace research papers in undergraduate curriculum. Instead, I propose that digital humanities projects are equally valuable assessments of students’ mastery of proposed learning outcomes. Furthermore, digital humanities projects provide students with an opportunity to write and publish for an audience and to receive feedback from peers and other scholars.
By exploring how authors, filmmakers, historians, and others engage and challenge the narrative of American slavery, this volume invites further study of slavery in its contemporary forms of human trafficking and forced labor and challenges the misconception that slavery is an event of the past.
Reviews of Lalita Tademy's Cane River generally focus on the themes of miscegenation, passing, or victimization. However, a womanist reading of this historical novel raises questions regarding the characters' modes of survival. Like Harriet Jacob whose slave narrative recounts her decisions to take a white lover and to save herself and her family by hiding in the "loophole of [her] retreat," Lalita Tademy's ancestral matriarchs employ numerous strategies of mothering in an effort to rescue their families, especially their girls, from the intricate webs of race, class, and gender imbedded in Louisiana Creole culture. Through the voices of Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily, Tademy reconstructs the narrative of her family history, but in doing so, I propose, she also constructs alternative motherhoods and strategies of mothering.
In Cane River, mothers use their bodies to secure the futures of their children, they sacrifice their personal freedoms to ensure the birthrights of their offspring, and they nurse away the miseries of slavery, rape, and death. However, they are also silent, absent, or unmoved during times of crisis. They are not always the nurturers: sometimes they are the nurtured. They are jealous. They are obstacles in the way of dreams. Tademy does not idealize or romanticize mothering; instead, she humanizes the roles of her foremothers by revealing their flaws and fallibilities.
Yet, as Elisabeth reminds the ambitious Suzette, "You only have one family, and not everybody gets that" (25), we, too, are reminded of the importance of family in both African American and Southern cultures. Central to these families is the role of the matriarch. In Cane River, Tademy shows us the complexities of matriarchy and demonstrates the ways in which Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily mother their families and their communities. These women's strategies of mothering shift according to the threat posed to their family; thus, they move between multiple motherhoods.
Although I have incorporated digital collections and text mining into most of my undergraduate courses, I will focus primarily on an upper-division course in World Humanities and on a summer research project with students in the Center for Undergraduate Research Project on my campus. In the upper-division course Six Degrees of Langston Hughes, students mapped places and events identified in Hughes’s autobiographies and created “exhibits” or collections on a specific theme relevant to our study of Hughes. The purpose of the course was to consider world literature and world authors through Hughes’s extensive travels and collaborations. The project may be accessed at http://sixdegreesoflangstonhughes.omeka.net/ . In contrast, the CURS project focused on text or data mining the poetry of Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker. The purpose of the research was to determine whether text mining was an effective tool for analyzing African American poetry. The project may be accessed at https://miningblackculture.wordpress.com/ . Neither group of students generated a formal research paper. However, students presented their scholarship verbally and in poster form to their peers and faculty on campus and at other universities in Georgia. The students certainly wrote the equivalent of a ten-page essay (and more) as a part of their final analyses. Moreover, they learned to use software to generate data and to publish their findings electronically. The students reported that they learned more about conducting research than in other research paper based courses. They also reported that the software they learned to use would help them in future courses and research projects.
Digital humanities taps into the interdisciplinary and experiential learning current pedagogical scholarship suggests as best practices for undergraduate learning. I do not suggest that digital projects replace research papers in undergraduate curriculum. Instead, I propose that digital humanities projects are equally valuable assessments of students’ mastery of proposed learning outcomes. Furthermore, digital humanities projects provide students with an opportunity to write and publish for an audience and to receive feedback from peers and other scholars.
By exploring how authors, filmmakers, historians, and others engage and challenge the narrative of American slavery, this volume invites further study of slavery in its contemporary forms of human trafficking and forced labor and challenges the misconception that slavery is an event of the past.