SUNY in Multiethnic Literatures

Mothers, Mobility, Narrative pairs women-identified writers whose work illuminates a range of maternal practices in the face of egregious structural inequalities and obstacles. By using the critical lens of maternal feminism, alongside recent theories of time, space, and memory, Mary Jo Bona reengages the field of motherhood studies to explore linkages between motherhood and movement. Across genres, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Kym Ragusa, Carole Maso, Cristina García, and Rebecca Makkai develop maternal figures who, in battling against institutional oppressions in eras of slavocracy, colonialism, dictatorship, and pandemic, expose the fundamentally intersectional nature of social categorization and disrupt traditional discourses of the maternal. Mothers, Mobility, Narrative rethinks maternality across a century and a half of literary expression in the United States, compelling readers to embrace more capacious understandings of maternal subjectivity, care, and kinship.

What if increased visibility of marginalized identities-a goal of much socially committed lyric poetry in the United States-does not necessarily lead to increased social recognition? For many contemporary scholars, this is the central question of lyric politics. Unlimited Eligibility? revisits and deeply historicizes this question. Ryan Cull explores the relationship of a diverse set of poets, including Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, and Claudia Rankine, to a series of movements intended to build inclusion: the St. Louis Hegelians, cultural pluralism, identity politics, and multiculturalism. In tracing the tensions in lyric poetry's merger with the pursuit of recognition, Cull offers a new history of the political work of lyric poetry while exposing the discursive roots of the nation's faltering progress toward becoming a more inclusive democracy.