Gender Relations and Rebellion in Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiographical Project

Abstract

This paper examines how the Afro-Caribbean-American writer, Jamaica Kincaid, intertwines discussions of gender relations with colonial and postcolonial rebellion in her writings. In parallel it analyzes Kincaid’s non creative writing – A Small Place (1988) and My Brother (1997) – as well as her novels – Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990) and The Autobiography of my Mother (1996) – in order to evidence her underlying autobiographical project that distances itself from the canonical form of autobiography, by substituting a collective I for the central subject of self-representation. From her protagonists’ complex relationships with their incipient sexual development, Kincaid moves to the analysis of equally complex and tempestuous relationships between the black colonized woman and her domineering partner, whether himself a Negro, or the white male colonizer who sees her as mere object of desire.