Trauma and Spirituality in Ethnic American Women's Novels

"Trauma and Spirituality in Ethnic American Women's Novels highlights the transformative potential of literature as a site for reclaiming spiritual knowledge, fostering resilience, and prompting social change through an awareness of interconnectedness. It offers a valuable critique of the Eurocentric focus of existing trauma studies and emphasises the need to incorporate non-Western spiritual practices and belief systems."

-Stella Setka, Associate Professor of English, West Los Angeles College

"With impeccable scholarship and new contributions to cultural directions for trauma studies and its relation to ethnic women's literature, Rodi-Risberg investigates how contemporary women writers, through spiritual trauma narratives, enact challenges to colonizing mindsets that have devalued indigenous cultures and women."

-Laurie Vickroy, Professor Emerita, Bradley University 

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.

Marinella Rodi-Risberg is Affiliated Researcher, Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and author of Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers' Incest Novels from the 1990s (2022). She has published on trauma in book chapters, including in Trauma and Literature (2018), and journal articles in, among others, American Indian Quarterly, Ecozon@, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.