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In her book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Alice Walker addresses black American women's lack of opportunities to write their experiences for later generations. Walker points out that because black women historically were not allowed to write and often were unable to share their creative thoughts or experiences, black women's literary history has been less available. Walker suggests that women of color look back to their mothers and the oral traditions of their ancestors to recreate that lost history and thus create a more complete historical account that has been absent from white canonical representations of African American history. This undergraduate thesis examines three contemporary African American women's novels and demonstrates that they employ maternal genealogical experiences to reclaim and retell Afro-American women's history. Toni Morrison's Beloved, Octavia Butler's Kindred, and Gayl Jones' Corregidora are postmodern, postcolonial slave narratives ( often called "neo-slave narratives") that trace a broad historical memory of slavery through maternal genealogy. While scholars have addressed the presence of the mother in these texts, they have overlooked the importance of the matrilineal tradition of inherited memory as a tool to revisit and reclaim history.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / For women in patriarchal societies, life is stitched with silence and violence. This is especially true for women of color. In a world that has cast women as invisible and voiceless, to create from the margins is to demand to be seen and heard. Thus, women’s art has never had the privilege of being art for art’s sake and instead is necessarily involved in the work of articulating and (re)writing female experience. When women seek, through their work and art, to feel deeply and connect with other women, they tap into what Audre Lorde has famously termed “the power of the erotic.” Lorde suggests that to acknowledge and trust those deepest feelings within our bodies is a subversive power that spurs social change. In the following work, novels by Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, and Edwidge Danticat are linked by their female characters who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Furthermore, because the authors themselves are engaged in rendering the female experience visible, the novels discussed actively converse with their respective waves of feminism and propel social activism and feminist discourse. Hence, this project provides both a close reading of The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker, and a broader contention on the role of women’s literature in social justice.