Benigno Trigo is currently Associate Professor of literature at Vanderbilt University. His areas of expertise include literary theory, psychoanalysis, and Spanish American literature. His publications include Subjects of Crisis: Race and Gender as Disease in Latin America (2000), Noir Anxiety (Co-authored with Kelly Oliver, 2003) and Foucault and Latin America: Deployments and Appropriations of Discursive Analysis (2002).

The Mother Tongue * Transformative Witnessing * Maternal Jouissance * Labile Time * Memoirs for the Abject * Accidents of Chicana Feminisms * Body, Language and Memory

Remembering Maternal Bodies is a collection of essays about the writings of several Latina and Latin American women writers who remember their mothers, and/or challenge our commonly held beliefs about motherhood and maternity, in an effort to stop depression and melancholy. It suggests that the widespread violent depression and sometimes suicidal melancholy that haunts our culture and society is the result of a terrible fantasy about the way we become ourselves. This fantasy has a matricide at its core, and this matricide will continue to have its depressing effect on us as long as it remains in place and invisible. The authors showcased in this book make visible this fantasy and change it in their works in an effort to bring us out of our depression and melancholy.