Jamaica Kincaid'S Writings Of History: A Poetics Of Impermanence (American Frictions)

Jamaica Kincaid's works consistently explore how colonial history affects contemporary everyday lives. Throughout her novels, short fiction, and non-fictional essays, Kincaid's texts engage with history through its medial representations, which are starkly determined by colonial perspectives. This study examines the entanglements of temporalities in current perceptions of the past and how literary text intervenes in historical consciousness. With a focus on the media text, image, and the human body, the chapters of this book demonstrate how Kincaid's "poetics of cyclicality" counter colonial representations of history with strategies of ambiguity, repetition, and redirection. This cyclical motion in Kincaid's writings of history returns to the past in a yet ever-forward motion to a different future. In this way, Kincaid's texts repeat and revise aspects of colonial history--a process that decenters the totality of historical colonial ideology and replaces it with self-determined versions of the past through a multiplication of perspectives and voices.

• | Author: Antonia Purk
• | Publisher: De Gruyter
• | Publication Date: Aug 21, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 234 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 311101861X
• | ISBN-13: 9783111018614