Lexington Books
Pages: 162
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-7936-0555-9 • Hardback • November 2021 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-7936-0557-3 • Paperback • August 2023 • $39.99 • (£30.00)
978-1-7936-0556-6 • eBook • November 2021 • $38.00 • (£30.00)
Renae Mitchell is an instructor at the University of New Mexico at Los Alamos.
Introduction: Maternity in the Post-Apocalyptic Landscape
Chapter One: GESTATION: The Crisis of Native Pregnancy in The Future Home of the Living God (2017)
Chapter Two: BIRTH: Deliverance through Plague in The Unnamed Midwife (2016)
Chapter Three: NEW MOTHER: To Resist and Dis-Obeah in the Wasted Landscape of Brown Girl in the Ring (1999)
Chapter Four: MATERNAL FUTURES: Maternity and the Holy Book in Parable of the Talents (1999) and Who Fears Death (2014)
Conclusion: Material Memory: Maternity in the Future Present
A timely and incisive re-assessment of a paradigm: the maternal body as crucible of the body politic. Mitchell’s sensitive study reveals the latest iteration of the primal matrix as embodied locus of post-catastrophe creation. This is a critical study at a critical moment at the intersection of apocalyptic degeneration and post-apocalyptic regeneration. It is a salutary reminder that at anxious times of dystopian de-creation, transformative re-creation emerges as reflexive recourse. The perennial site of that regeneration is maternity and the maternal body as dramatized in the literary works Mitchell brilliantly examines in her insightful analysis.
— Djelal Kadir, Penn State University