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Fracturing Subjectivities: International Space and the Discourse of Individualism in Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain and Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter

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Abstract

This article addresses a concept of individualism that has emerged in some contemporary Caribbean fictions. I examine the evidence of this in a general way and then with reference to Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter and Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain. I suggest that their individualism, though seemingly anomalous to diasporan thought, is in fact an “uncanny” product of the diasporan search for connections across borders.

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Mostly the culture of literacy has taken shape within a realm of freedom, seemingly distant from the needs of the body and the demands of sustenance. At the same time, the world represented within so much of the world’s narrative, both truth and fiction, has been saturated in struggle and deprivation. This article tries to make some sense of this juxtaposition, freedom on one side and necessity on the other: in particular, the pull of past or residual forms of unfreedom in the sphere of literary representation, within and against new or emerging expressions of emancipation, themselves accompanied or countered in modern times by ever-novel styles of exploitation
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According to Anne Whitehead, “autobiography constitutes an important art of memory.” In fact, the contemporary interest in memory and Memory Studies coincides in time with a boom in life-writing genres to which the British ex-colonies have greatly contributed. Writing autobiography in a postcolonial context implies facing unwanted memories and coming to grips with a great measure of what Homi Bhabha has called “unhomeliness.” It also invites reading in allegorical terms since the personal and the domestic are imbued with the legacy of the Empire; and the autobiographical subject struggling to form an identity reverberates with echoes of the homeland. Extrapolating from Ian Hacking’s reflections on Holocaust memories, we can also establish that in the former colonies, what links group memory and personal memory is the experience of trauma. In order to accommodate the traumatic experience, contemporary autobiographies have often had to revise traditional genre codes. The work of Afro-Caribbean author Jamaica Kincaid constantly returns to her childhood in Antigua—then a colony of the British Empire—and to her problematic family relations. This article analyses two instances of Kincaid’s “ongoing self-representational project” (Gilmore 2001). Leigh Gilmore has approached Kincaid’s work as an example of limit-case autobiography, a kind of writing in which the interaction between self-representation and trauma questions the pillars of traditional life writing, bringing them closer to the preserves of fiction. This is particularly the case with The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), a fictional biography of a dead mother written by her daughter, and Mr. Potter (2002), a singular portrait of Kincaid’s biological father. The main interest in Kincaid’s 1996 novel lies not so much in spotting the connections with the life of its author as in exploring how it complicates the very concept of memory. Having no direct memories of her Caribe mother, who died in giving birth to her, the protagonist fills this absence with her own life story of neglect and abuse, which unfolds against the backdrop of colonialism. I here intend to approach Xuela’s particular act of remembrance as one in which the self, the mother, and the motherland—the staples of most (auto)biographical writing—merge in the context of a traumatic past. Mr. Potter follows in the footsteps of the earlier novel in predicating the story of Kincaid’s father upon personal and historical memories of trauma, a decision signalled not only at the level of content but also, conspicuously, in terms of form. My approach to Mr. Potter revolves mainly around Kincaid’s unconventional textual strategies and their repercussion on generic boundaries.
Article
We live in the shadow of an America that is economically benign yet politically malevolent. That malevolence, because of its size, threatens an eclipse of identity, but the shadow is as inescapable as that of any previous empire. But we were American even while we were British, if only in the geographical sense, and now that the shadow of the British Empire has passed through and over us in the Caribbean, we ask ourselves if, in the spiritual or cultural sense, we must become American. We have broken up the archipelago into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity. Everyone knows that these are pretexts of power if such power is seen as political. This is what the politician would describe as reality, but the reality is absurd.
Article
Small Axe 10.2 (2006) 1-18 This paper examines the operations of the closet in two historically distant texts from the English-speaking Caribbean: Alfred Mendes's Black Fauns (1935) and Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother (1997). These books are more than sixty years apart and are very different in terms of their plots and styles. Yet they intersect in their thematic explorations of sexual identities that do not conform to the heterosexual norm. Mendes's novel is a representative of the Trinidadian "anti-establishment" fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, dubbed barrack-yard literature. The novel is quite radical for its time, having a lesbian or bisexual relationship as central to the complications of the plot. Kincaid's memoir chronicles the death of her brother Devon from AIDS-associated complications in homophobic Antigua. My Brother belongs in the new generation of Caribbean literature that has brought to the table the turbulent geography of sexuality, and openly challenges myths of normative heterosexuality. Not surprisingly, both texts represent same-sex desire as repressed social content and therefore function as fertile discursive fields for a reading of the socio-psychic mechanisms that reproduce the ontological displacement of homosexual persons as legitimate human subjects. The phenomenon of the closet is of particular interest in this regard. In the context of this essay, it is approached as a social structure engendered and maintained by the stigma attached to same-sex orientation as a mark of deviant or subhuman "nature." While for some the concealment of sexual identity functions as a necessary space of survival against the fear of discrimination and rejection, the closet is primarily understood as a prison house of privacy or a disciplinary apparatus, ideologically and legally enforced by a heterosexist culture to justify the exclusion of same-sex orientation from "real" or legitimate human experience. This is not to say that coming out is the remedy against discrimination and exclusion. While it is a proactive insistence on presence, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that visibility can become the impetus for the recovery of the ideological effects of prejudicial binaries that make the closet a resilient "shaping presence" in social life. The decision to reenter to whatever degree remains a necessary option given the "deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption" that requires "new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure." Debates on social equity and sexual orientation have been more intense and accessible to a wider world audience than ever before. Further, the AIDS pandemic has forced a global confrontation with the issue of sexual identity and practice given that it is now appropriate to say that every human being can be categorised as "living" with the virus. It is no news that the Caribbean is second to sub-Saharan Africa in the prevalence of the disease. This, coupled with a traditional reticence about engaging the truths of human sexual life, is certainly a recipe for disaster. The region and the world at large cannot afford to ignore the matter. Neither the reproduction of heterosexism nor silence proves a productive response to this crisis that offers opportunity for serious consideration of the ways in which the human condition has been understood. By exploring the authors' treatment of issues relevant to persons of nonheterosexual orientations, this paper seeks to invite dialogue on the question of sexual identities and the nature of being human on the one hand, and the more difficult issue of discerning the boundaries of acceptable, responsible sexual practice on the other. Even today, discussing sexuality in the Caribbean proves to be a most difficult undertaking that is more often than not policed by a host of insecurities and prejudices. The region has neither a very long nor a very secure tradition in the cultural and literary discourses that treat nonheterosexual matters in particular. This general absence of public representation on issues concerning sexuality is not at all surprising in light of the politics of disinterest and suspicion that marks the Caribbean's track record on sexism battles, beginning with feminist activism. For instance in the 1990 preface to Out of the Kumbla, Carole Boyce Davies laments the lack of "sufficient excitement and passion about feminist issues" and Elaine Savory...