Isolation and Inclusion: The Modulation of Limited and Plural Points of View in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (original) (raw)
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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-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.
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.
A Postcolonial Reading of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography Of My Mother
Caribbean literature exposes a history of dispossession, exploitation and oppression which has been neglected and often deliberately misinterpreted. In this article the destructive effects of colonization and slavery in Jamaica Kincaid's 1996 novel The Autobiography of My Mother are scrutinized thoroughly. The main objective of this research is to examine Kincaid's novel within the framework of postcolonial studies, in the light of Albert Memmi (2013) and Frantz Fanon's (2008) theories on the psychology of colonialism. Frantz Fanon argues that colonialism had brought together two opposing social orders doomed to coexist in everlasting tension; the colonizer's and the colonized's; these tensions cause the moral and spiritual deformity of an ideological system based on racism, oppression, and exploitation. In contrast to Fanon, Kincaid regards resistance and liberation in a quite different perspective. Instead of attempting to build a "new woman", Xuela refuses to accept the colonizer's views of those like her that lead to self-destruction and self-hatred. Instead, in order to survive, she confidently chooses self-love, albeit an almost grotesque and obsessive one. Kincaid uses Xuela's relationships with various characters to categorize the social types that Fanon describes in his writings—from Philip and his wife Moira as examples of the deformation of behavior caused by colonial social hierarchies to using mask as a metaphor for her manipulative father's mimicry of the oppressors. This research finds out that colonization and slavery have negative impact on both the colonizer and the colonized.
What's in a Name? The resurrection of the author in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of my Mother
Trying to break up the shackles that had held the literary studies still for so many years, Roland Barthes declares that the author is better off dead. Such a surprising statement aimed at wiping away all of the efforts to reach an origin of a literary text, that is to say, a unique answer or a final interpretation. Nevertheless Philippe Lejeune posits that when it comes to autobiographical writings, the presence of the author is to be felt, and even gladly expected. For this reason, hermeneutics is able to interchangeably adopt either Barthes´s perspective or Lejeune´s standpoint. This essay intends to shed some light on Jamaica Kincaid´s The Autobiography of my Mother based on those both perspectives. Xuela, the protagonist, can be taken entirely on her own, that is, strictly textually. In so doing, the author will be dead. On the other hand, she can also be spotted under a different name, that is, Kincaid´s. In so doing, readers are to view the resurrection of an author.
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.
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...