Isolation and Inclusion: The Modulation of Limited and Plural Points of View in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (original) (raw)
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...
My Mother’s Story as a Narrative of Contradictions
Journal of Mennonite Studies, 2010
Why do we tell stories to each other? According to Candace Spigelman and Walter Fisher, stories help us to make sense of our lives, since "human understanding is intrinsically conditioned by narrative insight" (Spigelman, Personally Speaking, 90). While the narrative paradigm has served the general populace for centuries, the world of academe has only in the last decades begun to consider the personal narrative a legitimate genre. Perhaps this is, in part, due to postmodernism's renunciation of meta-narratives that, in turn, encourages us to practice what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls "'little narratives,'" described by Hans Bertens as "small-scale, modest systems of belief that are strong enough to guide us, but are always aware of their provisional nature" (143). Or maybe we turn to personal story-telling as an antidote to the malaise brought on by postmodernism's insistence on lack of closure and coherence. Or perhaps the personal helps us respond to what Margaret Willard-Traub calls "the diversity of experience within the current moment" (28). In any case, as life writing becomes increasingly popular within the academy, we ask a number of questions. First, how do we establish parameters within which to tell our stories in an effort to safeguard academic standards? Second, why and how do we tell our stories?
Discursive Heterogeneity in The Autobiography of Miss
Various critics are interested in the aesthetic scope of literary discourse; those who are truly inscribed in that perspective, adopt varied approaches. Accordingly, countless meanings are given to the same literary texts. What is termed "discursive heterogeneity" in the current study is purely ideological and is about the implicit views entertained by colonists during and after colonial period, which are symbolically romanticized by African American writers as illustrated by Ernest J. Gaines in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Note 1). That novel is a symbolic instance in which a double period, marked by distinctive ideological discourses, intertwine in a unified and dynamic way, thus creating a narrative harmony. The former differs from the latter by its unilateral characteristics, which imposes an exclusive submission upon Blacks and the latter is opposed to the former by its controversial ambivalence, granting restricted liberties to Blacks. Practically, Blacks are free without actually being free. A close glance at the type of communication prevailing between white colonists and black folks before the Proclamation of Freedom helps to discover its unilateralism (downward communication) and the post-Proclamation one is bi-dimensional (downward and upward communication). But between both preceding periods, there is the Proclamation of Freedom, whose message is more constraining and transcendental in the narrative universe. So, to learn more about that "discursive heterogeneity" and bring out its related meanings, this study leans on narrative semiotics. That methodological tool examines the discursive clues; particular attention is paid to Blacks' evolution from the period before the Proclamation of Freedom up to the prevailing era after the Emancipation.
2016
Chapter One-Introduction "If 'difference' is what makes culture visible to observers, then the emphasis on difference has the merit of underscoring specificities that would be muted and ignored otherwise." Françoise Lionnet, "Logique Métisses" (1995) "I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood." Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" (1977) One attribute unique to the human experience and yet unifying for humanity is the ability to speak, to have a voice representative of who we are and recognizable by its quality. Voice, the ability to verbalize the longings and wishes of the heart, is intricately tied to our understanding of human identity. It is an identifying feature of our Self and our identity as both a human and an individual. Our voice is uniquely our own, and therefore, when it is taken, silenced, or ignored, our identity cannot be clearly represented or expressed; we are not clearly representing our Self. Voice is intricately connected not only to what we verbalize, but also the written word. In literature, authors have the responsibility and opportunity to not only share their own voice in a very permanent way, but often to serve as a representative voice for a greater community at large. When writers tell their story, they are sharing the experience of the characters they have created, as well as parts of themselves. The ability to shape a story is unique to the human experience, and it is what allows us to create a unique sense of who we are. Some writers, in particular, truly see their writing as an extension of themselves, and sometimes it becomes nearly impossible to separate the lives of these authors from the stories they Oldacre 4 tell. Especially when these are fictional stories being told, writers have the difficulty of telling a story that is not "reality." However, when the characters, settings, and conflicts are reminiscent of the struggles and victories of the author and his or her cultural and historical context, a reader can begin to identify more fully with the story they are telling. It is clear for many writers that their history, their culture, and their past experiences compel them to tell their unique stories. I assert that it is this very act of storytelling that creates a sense of who we are as human beings, and that writers have the unique capability of recording these stories for those other than themselves. Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Danticat are three such writers who allow the stories they write to serve as an extension of themselves. Although these women, on the surface, are very different American writers writing their narratives at very different times in history, their commonality comes in their ability to communicate the stories of their protagonists, who in unique ways, experience life a little bit like the respective author. This commonality is further exposed with their desire to create a voice through what they write for a population often historically ignored or silenced-women. Not only are they telling the specific stories of people who look and think and act like them and those they have known, but these authors' works are highlighting an important voice that has often been missing throughout American literature. It is evident that these authors and their novels, The Awakening (1899), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and The Dew Breaker (2004) respectively, show the power of voice and silence in American literature and the very clear ways that this voice, or lack of it, expresses a person's, and protagonist's, Self and identity. Oldacre 5 Chopin, Hurston, and Danticat each represent a unique time in American history, and thus their writing, their voice, is representative of a group larger than themselves. Elaine Showalter considers women's literature in this way in "American Questions" a chapter from her book Sister's Choice, "I wanted to avoid the idea that women's writing had a universal sameness that might be biological or psychological. Rather… women's writing had to be seen historically, in its specific national contexts" (2). Each author is characteristic of their historical moment, and it is their differences that help define American women's literature. Kate Chopin's protagonist, Edna, in The Awakening represents women at the turn of the twentieth century struggling to self-identify in a male dominated society. Although Edna is ultimately unsuccessful in her ability to create a complex identity, Chopin uses her death and failure to assert the necessity of a multifaceted voice. Zora Neale Hurston's Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God continues to represent women in her time still seeking to be recognized as a valuable and independent individual in human society following the literature of freedom of the 1920s and the Depression of the 1930s, but adds an additional layer as she also seeks to represent her culture as an African-American woman. Although often associated with the tradition, Hurston is writing long after the Harlem Renaissance, and literature during this time that did not operate as a more serious cultural representation was often rejected or ignored. Hurston's work comes to fruition during this time causing many to question the role an African-American woman writer should have. Finally, Ka in Danticat's The Dew Breaker represents more modern women, particularly Haitians and Haitian-Americans, struggling to establish their identity as "hyphenated" Americans (Haitian-American etc.). Danticat's voice enters the scene historically at a time when the cultural
2008
My project seeks to uncover the multiplicities of interpretation found in the peculiar simultaneity of oppressions that affect African American motherhood. I expand this notion to the Afro-Caribbean, interrogating the power of place and comparing how it influences mothers' interactions with their children. To this end, my research responds to contemporary theoretical approaches to race, motherhood, and psychoanalysis, including the writings of Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Paule Marshall about black motherhood as a site of resistance. Simultaneously, it highlights successful acts of resistance black women create employing alternative ontologies that bypass patriarchal notions of inheritance and remain matrifocal in nature. The first chapter, "A Failure To Resist: The Dangers of the Mother Who Loves Too Much," centers on the black feminist theme of maternal resistance. The mothers in Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Toni Morrison's Sula (1973) are successful within the relative safety of their homes in both the humanization of their loved ones and the teaching of resistance to destructive hegemonic forces. My second chapter, "Maternal Abjection: Mothers Who Resist the Ideal," places Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection within a racial context. I begin with an exploration of Patricia Hills Collins' and Gloria Wade-Gayles' insistence upon the complex nature of black motheriv daughter relationships. I use this dynamic to analyze the Caco women in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). The mothers in Tina McElroy Ansa's Ugly Ways (1993) and Maryse Condé's Desirada (1997) choose to abject their daughters to reclaim their own individuality, their own sense of self. The final chapter, "The Transcendent Black Maternal: The Power of Female Inheritance," examines the transcendent Black Maternal as a system of knowledge that is based on a spiritual communication process between a young female novice and two dead female ancestors. This process leads the women to an alternative expression of being, which I term the communal "I," that models itself upon the Holy trinity. The transcendent Black Maternal figures centrally in three texts: Erna Brodber's Louisiana (1994), Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972), and Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata (1998). v DEDICATION This work is for Gregory, Wanda, Cincia, and Kelsi. Also, to all the Brooks and Dunn women who came before me-Clara Mae,