Theses

Ruiz Pérez, Alicia. 2026.  "Mothers of Memory: Black Motherhood, Trauma, and Multidirectional Slave Memory in Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed  and Toni Morrison's Beloved ". (MA thesis,  Master in Advanced English Studies, University of Alicante).

This Master's dissertation examines the intertextual relationship between Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed (2006) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) to argue that their literary dialogue creates a site of multidirectional memory where the suppressed histories of enslaved Black mothers can be recovered and voiced innovatively. In this case, Beloved provides a resonant framework through which Unconfessed articulates the neglected history of Cape slavery, demonstrating that Black maternal trauma extends beyond geographical and temporal boundaries. Drawing on Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory alongside other memory theories, Black maternal theory, and trauma studies, this thesis employs close reading to identify how the two neo-slave narratives reconstruct the traumatic experiences of enslaved Black women that traditional historiography and institutional acts of repair such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission have silenced. To this end, the analysis explores representations of Black motherhood, infanticide as an act of maternal love, the enduring trauma of slavery, and the role of memory in both novels.