ABSTRACT
Based on a Caribbean-rooted archipelagic framework, this chapter proposes to undertake a comparative study of Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière… Noire de Salem (1986), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2000) to establish how the use of the Medea figure—woven with other “disobedient female figures” such as La Malinche, La Llorona and the (Salem) witch—provides ways to resist the commodification of bodies and land during colonization and (neo-)imperialism. The rewriting of these figures and their myths challenges ways in which history is written and sheds light on the horrors of slavery and colonization, all of which are emphasized by the ultimate choice of infanticide. Despite being atrocious to the mothers committing it, this act still does not appear as cruel as having their children born into the brutal reality of slavery, and of an authoritarian regime in Moraga’s play. It preserves the children in an “other space”, blurring the boundaries of (capitalist) reality.
