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.
The African diaspora's search for both a collective voice and a freedom of identity has led many writers to be liberated only at the expense of being marketed and made part of the publishing machine. Forbes compares this marketplace to the "trading post," referring to the contact points where African slaves were bought and sold. Searching for new targets, many times the African diaspora's voice is cut by sales driven marketing. In illustrating his points, Forbes focuses on five travel narratives in this essay, including books by such authors Mary Seacole, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan, and John Edgar Wideman.;
