Matrilineal Family Saga Beyond Western Modernity

'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.