Matrilineal Family Saga Beyond Western Modernity

This book is due to be published in May 2027, and is now on back order. 

Matrilineal Family Saga Beyond Western Modernity is an interdisciplinary collection of essays and narratives that rethinks motherhood, kinship, and inheritance through non-Western, Indigenous, and diasporic perspectives. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from literature, history, film, psychology, autoethnography, autoarcheology, media studies, and sociology, the volume examines how matrilineal narratives reshape understandings of memory, endurance, and futurity beyond dominant Western frameworks. Through analytical essays, interviews, and personal testimonies, the book distinguishes motherhood as a lived, embodied practice from its institutional forms shaped by law, culture, and state power. It explores how caregiving is negotiated across migration, displacement, and evolving family structures, foregrounding the intimate and relational dimensions of care.

The collection also considers the impact of contemporary technologies on mothering and care work, from digital activism to reproductive technologies and speculative storytelling. These developments are shown to expand and complicate women’s practices of care, agency, and rights in contemporary societies. By weaving together theory, testimony, and creative practice, Matrilineal Family Saga offers a decolonial reimagining of archives and knowledge production. It positions matrilineal storytelling as both method and intervention—one that challenges inherited epistemologies while opening space for alternative histories and futures shaped through women’s voices, relationality, and embodied experience.

Amany Alsiefy is a MECAM Fellow at the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (Philipps-Universität Marburg/Université de Tunis) and senior editor of Open Cultural Studies (De Gruyter Brill). She previously taught at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on representations of the body and the modern public sphere in postcolonial literature and culture, particularly in relation to gender, masculinities, secularization, and fashion. She is the author of Modern Egyptian Women, Fashion and Faith: Discourses and Representations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023; German edition, 2026).

Yesmina Khedhir is a postdoctoral fellow and part-time instructor at the Institute of English and American Studies (IEAS), University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her research focuses on African American literature, trauma and memory studies, motherhood studies, Black feminism, (eco)womanism, migration studies, and Blue Humanities. She is currently writing her first monograph titled Narratives of Survival: Memory, Trauma, and Healing in Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage Trilogy.