"Recent West Indian literature by women offers a locus of debate over the retrieval of the body from and within western discursive erasure. This erasure of the female body and its possible reclamation is of course central to contemporary feminist debate, and has its own genealogy within feminist discourse. My interest in this question, however, is in the ways in which colonialism's discursive and institutional apparatuses obliterated and continue to obliterate the colonised (specifically female) body, and the counter-colonial strategies by which this 'lost' body might be reclaimed. In their fiction Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid anatomize the body's erasure under a colonialist scriptive drive and explore potentials for the re/cognition of corporeality and sexuality." (author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
223 p., Investigates the exilic literature of Caribbean-born and Caribbean-descent writers who, from their new location in Northern America, question their cultural roots and search for a creative autonomy.
This paper uses postcolonial theory to analyze Jamaica Kincaid's quasi-autobiographical book, A Small Place. Kincaid's critique of tourism in Antigua reverses traditional travel writing trends in which First World perceptions of the Third World dominate. She discursively dismantles the imaginative geographies of empire that cement binary oppositions, such as tourist/native and black/white. She collapses these binaries to illustrate the intricate ways in which the global neocolonial ethos created by economic dependencies manifest. Arguing that tourism is implicated in this hegemonic process, she utilizes the metaphor of a guided tour to redirect the imperial gaze. Kincaid argues that legacies of colonial oppression can change once tourist and host value the same things in the shared space of the contact zone.
