Contents -- Introduction: The Daughter's Return -- PART I: AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS -- 1. Toni Morrison's Beloved: History, "Rememory", and a "Clamor for a Kiss" -- 2. Adventures of the Magic Black Daughter: History and "Renaissance" in Contemporary African-American Women's Fictions -- Mothering the Renaissance -- Return of the Magic Black Daughter -- 3. Further Adventures of the Magic Black Daughter -- One Dark Body -- Variations on Childbirth -- Coda -- PART II: CARIBBEAN WOMEN WRITERS -- 4. Caribbean Women's Literature and the Mother of History -- Recovering the Mother-Island -- The Caribbean Daughter's Return -- Jamaica Kincaid and the Maternal Void of History -- 5. Burning Down the House: Daughterly Revision in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea -- 6. Decolonizing Jamaica's Daughter: Learning History in the Novels of Michelle Cliff -- The Novel as Abeng -- Becoming History: No Telephone to Heaven -- 7. Crossing Water: Maryse Condé's I, Tituba and the Horizontal Plot -- Epilogue: History, Horizontality, and the Postcolonial Hester Prynne: On Condé, Mukherjee, and Morrison -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.