C1 Book
Trauma and Spirituality in Ethnic American Women's Novels : Connected by Invisible Fibers (2025)
Rodi-Risberg, M. (2025). Trauma and Spirituality in Ethnic American Women's Novels : Connected by Invisible Fibers. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78641-9
JYU authors or editors
Publication details
All authors or editors: Rodi-Risberg, Marinella
ISBN: 978-3-031-78640-2
eISBN: 978-3-031-78641-9
Publication year: 2025
Publication date: 15/01/2025
Number of pages in the book: 261
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Publication country: Switzerland
Publication language: English
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78641-9
Publication open access: Not open
Publication channel open access:
Abstract
Trauma and Spirituality in Ethnic American Women’s Novels examines a genre of ethnic American women’s literature, which the author calls spiritual trauma narratives, that testify to traumas caused by epistemological violence, wreaked by ongoing colonialism, systematic racism, and marginalization grounded in a binary, hierarchical, and supremacist post-Enlightenment epistemology that negates the spiritual knowledge of interconnectivity found in people of color’s belief systems. Placing trauma theory in productive conversation with women of color feminist studies, Marinella Rodi-Risberg explores literary texts by Chicana, African American, and Native American authors that engage readers in the protagonists’ transformative encounters with ancestral knowledge through symbols, ritual, dreaming, storytelling, and interactions with the natural world. In this way, the author argues, they model a shift in awareness regarding historical and present traumas including slavery, genocide, racial and sexual violence, highlighting the importance of literature as a site of knowledge production and resistance.
Keywords: women; traumas (mental objects); ethnicity; spirituality (mentality); sexuality (sexual orientation); fiction; feminist literary criticism; literary research
Free keywords: literature, gender and sexuality; race and ethnicity; spirituality; trauma; Alma Luz Villanueva; Toni Morrison; Louise Erdrich
Contributing organizations
Ministry reporting: Yes
VIRTA submission year: 2025
Preliminary JUFO rating: 2
