카리브계 미국 흑인여성의 포스트식민적 글쓰기 — 자메이카 킨케이드의 「어느 작은 섬」과 「루시」

Abstract

The exploration of the multiple identities of the Caribbean women is intrinsic to the narratives of Jamaica Kincaid whose migration allows internal critiques of new inscriptions of colonial homeland and imperial new land in a variety of cultural contexts. This study considers the postcolonial writing of Kincaid in A Small Place and Lucy, centering on race, class, and gender/sexuality of female subjectivity of the Caribbean diaspora. A Small Place is a fictitious cultural essay, exploring tourist culture and Caribbean identity more polemically. Its main concern is the articulation of the effects of colonialism on subjectivity, specially on female subjectivity in the Caribbean area. As the narrator/writer describes to a tourist of the Antigua area, to invoke and reverse the discourse of white racism, with a critical insider/outsider perspectives on a Caribbean slave society and their legacy on contemporaries, she rejects almost everything that had negative influence on Antigua and its inhabitants. The narrator expresses indignation at not only the white tourists and colonizers but also her fellow Antiguans. With the purpose to explain the intricate situation of Antigua to a European or American audience in A Small Place, the narrator expresses the most elaborate analysis of an intricate cultural-political situation of Antigua, providing a postcolonial feminist definition of the (dis-)identity of a “third world” black woman. Lucy, an autobiographical text based on Kincaid's early experiences as a nanny for a well-to-do family in the U. S. A. dramatizes class, race, and gender dynamics. As a young black woman from a working class with colonial background, Lucy comes to reach a profound awareness that gender relations are mediated by race and class hierarchies. Firstly, the text presents conflicted mother-daughter relationship, focussing on Lucy's own subjective experiences as a daughter. The biological mother is connected to the gendered functions of colonial power. Secondly, Lucy studies her happy, affectionate employer, Mariah, who, like her mother, also would use Lucy in the same way. By exposing the relation between the wealth of people like Mariah and the poverty of the world's majority, Lucy foregrounds global inequality. However, as feminist protagonist Lucy rejects the available identities offered by her mother and Mariah. At the novel's end the act of writing will be a painful process of recovering the past and inventing a new identity. This process can be interpreted as a metaphoric exploration of decolonization. Within the narrow geographic space, the Caribbean area represents powerfully the effects of power and control, of domination and patriarchy. This area becomes radically disrupted in the writings of Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place and Lucy. These two texts explore the conflicts of power that stem from gender and race relationships in a postcolonial world presenting a postcolonial feminism that takes into account the complexity of the social and economic world in which the black heroine's life must unfold. In this sense A Small Place and Lucy embody the critique of western traditional middle-class feminism that we have come to associate with Gayatri Spivak.