Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities. Drawing on the concept of postmemory--a paradigm developed to describe the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have to their parents' traumatic experiences--Maria...