A Postcolonial Reading of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography Of My Mother (original) (raw)
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RE-CONCEPTUALIZATION OF RACE AND AGENCY IN JAMAICA KINCAID'S THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER
Jamaica Kincaid, arguably the most popular Caribbean woman writer living in the USA, has produced many o f her bestsellers by dissecting her personal and familial history. Yet in spite of her inclination to anchor the life o f her creative inventions in her personal and intimate experience, Kincaid, known for her radicalism and militancy, can be a fiercely polit ical writer. The aim o f this essay is to explore how Kincaid handles the trope o f race in her novel The Autobiography o f My Mother, how she uses racial imagery to unearth the covert mechanisms that account for the intricacies of identity formation and how she dismantles ide ological foundations that paved the way for racial exploitation. 1 will in particular focus on how Kincaid challenges, undermines and recasts the (post)colonial concept o f race by show ing that racial identity is a shifting category conceived through interaction with other cate gories o f identification such as class and gender.
Academic Journal of History and Idea, 2024
This article's focus is Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid's short story Girl. The story is also known as a poem since it is written in a poetic shape. The story was published by The New York Times for the first time in 1978, and then later it was published in a book named At the Bottom of the River in 1983, alongside many other stories by Kincaid. Girl talks about a relationship between a mother and a daughter in a colonial society. In Girl, readers can see how a mother teaches her daughter about her duties as a woman and a future wife. The piece has always been seen as either a postcolonial or feminist literary piece, rather than being a postcolonial feminist work. However, in this article, I claim that Kincaid's prose poem is a postcolonial feminist literary work that depicts the struggle of women in the colonized Antiguan society. I focus on postcolonial feminist concepts such as subalterns' voices and the concept of women's double colonization by giving related examples from Kincaid's Girl.
Performing Delusional Evil: Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother
In Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge. Eds. B Ledent, Evelyn O'Callaghan, and D. Tunca. Palgrave, 2018
Through locating the instances of unreliable narration and scrutinizing the mode and performative nature of the narrator’s account in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), this chapter argues that the novel exposes the pathology of colonialism. More precisely, by reading the novel alongside David Scott’s description of what would constitute a moral and reparative history, and Kehinde Andrews’s work on the psychosis of whiteness, the essay suggests that Kincaid’s text constructs the history that Scott advocates and reveals the psychology that allows the legacy of slavery and colonialism to continue.
Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2005
In her seminal work, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt seeks to "decolonize knowledge" by rethinking "how travel books by Europeans about non-European parts of the world" create the "domestic subject" of Euro-imperialism (6). Published in 1992, Imperial Eyes repeats similar chords struck by Jacques Derrida nearly twenty-five years earlier in "The Violence of the Letter," first published in 1966 by Cahiers pour l'analyse as part of a special edition dedicated to the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In "The Violence of the Letter," reprinted in Of Grammatology (1976), a seminal text of deconstruction-Derrida rereads Lévi-Strauss's "The Writing Lesson." The latter is an ethnographic reflection from Tristes Tropiques that describes Lévi-Strauss's experiences with the Nambikwara, an Indian tribe from the Amazon rainforest-a society that Lévi-Strauss represents as "without writing;" an expression that Derrida reads as "dependent on ethnocentric oneirism, upon the vulgar, that is to say ethnocentric misconception of writing" (Derrida 109). He classifies Lévi-Strauss's artful narrative composition as a travelogue: "In accordance with eighteenth-century tradition, the anecdote, the page of confessions, the fragment from a journal are knowledgeably put in place, calculated for the purposes of a philosophical demonstration of the relationships between nature and society, ideal society and real society, most often between the other society and our society" (Derrida 113). Derrida's concern about European-engineered dichotomies, along with his assertion that as an anthropologist Lévi-Strauss "violates a virginal space" (Derrida 113), anticipates Pratt's designation of "contact zones" where "disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (Pratt 7). Using Derrida's as well as Pratt's insights about writing/travel writing, autoethnography, and empire, in this paper I explore how Jamaica Kincaid, part of the Caribbean diaspora and a transnational travel writer herself, moves beyond the imperialist methods of a classic ethnographer like Lévi-Strauss, who typically attempts to explain "foreign" cultural systems to the cultural center which empowers that effort. Rather, Kincaid tells stories from the perspective of a tour guide whose sensitivity to the plurality of diasporic experience translates the polyphonic voices of decentered postcolonial subjects for a largely "foreign" audience. In this context, Kincaid becomes what Mustapha Marrouchi calls "the postcolonial writer as missionary in reverse" (6), retelling and often revising a colonial experience as she tours her homeland, "an imaginary land that lives and grows in her memory" (5), or to use Marrouchi's trope, home as Mother Periphery: "Its assault of words, hopes, dreams, and anguish all come together in 1 Ruckel: "To Speak of My Own Situation": Touring the "Mother Periphery"...
Re-conceptualisation of Race and Agency in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobigraphy of my Mother
Jamaica Kincaid, arguably the most popular Caribbean woman writer living in the USA, has produced many o f her bestsellers by dissecting her personal and familial history. Yet in spite of her inclination to anchor the life o f her creative inventions in her personal and intimate experience, Kincaid, known for her radicalism and militancy, can be a fiercely polit ical writer. The aim o f this essay is to explore how Kincaid handles the trope o f race in her novel The Autobiography o f My Mother, how she uses racial imagery to unearth the covert mechanisms that account for the intricacies of identity formation and how she dismantles ide ological foundations that paved the way for racial exploitation. 1 will in particular focus on how Kincaid challenges, undermines and recasts the (post)colonial concept o f race by show ing that racial identity is a shifting category conceived through interaction with other cate gories o f identification such as class and gender.
Postcolonial Interpretation of the Symbolic in Jamaica Kincaid's My Mother and Girl
This paper probes the symbolic in Jamaica Kincaid's short stories, My Mother and Girl. Its premise is that writers of Caribbean extract often deploy elements of symbolism to portray the peculiarities of their postcolonial experience and to express socio-cultural realities that may not be adequately explored by other means. This feature, therefore, necessitates a close and rigorous study of Caribbean writings to discover meanings communicated through symbolic characters, settings, atmospheric conditions and narrative undertones among others. This study, therefore, explores the historical and cultural experiences in the stories to highlight the socio-cultural dilemma and other historical complexities that shape the character of the Caribbean society. Using postcolonial theory as a critical compass, this paper is a library study through textual analysis and consultation of secondary sources to explore the content of the stories. The study concludes, therefore, that the use of symbolism in Caribbean literature, especially the short stories, is fitting and expedient to facilitate the depiction of the atypical range of experiences that shape Caribbean characters and which distinguishes them from other postcolonial societies. Further, the study shows that the writer succeeds, through the postcolonial experiences she explores, in communication her artistic vision to draw attention to the cultural limbo that is the lot of Caribbean characters.
Nine: Postcolonial Hauntings: Ghostly Presence in Jamaica Kincaid's the Autobiography of My Mother
Wagadu: a Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies, 2018
The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. This chapter explores the haunting or ghostly presence of both the living and the dead. The ghosts of slavery and colonialism haunt the character/s and the text; in retaliation, Xuela/Kincaid performs a “ghosting” by defying narrative conventions, by blurring the line between fiction, myth, biography, and autobiography. Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. A creolized subject (daughter of a Carib mother and a half Scot, half-African father), the novel’s protagonist, Xuela Claudette Richardson, embodies resistance, for she not only survives her mother’s death, but she also survives her father’s subsequent abandonment and several foster homes. Xuela’s mother dies shortly after giving birth 108 Wagadu Volume 19, Summer 2018 © Wagadu (2018) ISSN : 1545-6196 to her, leaving her in the care of her father who, in es...