Writing Self, Narrating History: TextualPolitics in Jamaica Kincaid''s Novels

• Main Authors: Hsin-Chi Chen, 陳信智
• Other Authors: none
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/79005638163247166124

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 90 === Abstract In this thesis, I attempt to examine Jamaica Kincaid’s re-negotiation with the politics of power relations in her novels. Kncaid’s novels, through the strategic deployment of autobiographical writing, redress the power dimension in the notions of self and history. The fact that Kincaid frames the field of power relations within the thematic recurrence of mother-daughter relations structures her novels in a way that conflates her personal stories with her group history. Moreover, such a structure emphatically registers the self-positioning act of Kincaid’s writing as a strategy for survival. The first chapter explores how Kincaid mobilizes her self-writing as an act of political resistance. On the one hand, Kincaid opposes her writing which is delivered in the name of herself or her culture to the poststructuralist pronouncements of the general demise of a writing subject. On the other hand, Kincaid, through implicating the poststructuralist fracture of self in the protocol of decolonization, attempts to strategically inhabit in what Homi Bhabha calls the in-between space to define herself. The second chapter deals with the inscription of historical forces on the body. Foucault’s genealogical unpacking of history in the body here helps to investigate how Kincaid’s fictional alter egos bear and, more importantly, act out against the inscription of power. The third chapter focuses on the politics of Kincaid’s autobiographical writing. At first, I unpack the relations between history and the politics of women’s writing in the West Indies, and borrow the poststructuralist interrogation of Western historical knowledge to contradict the West’s epistemological claims to West Indian history. And then I turn to the analysis of Kincaid’s autobiographical writing, which, through its thematic deployment of mother-daughter relations, turns on the political empowerment in her strategic integration of her personal and collective history.