Parenthetical Poetics in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid’s 1988 quasi-autobiographical critique of postcolonialism and neoliberalism, A Small Place, stylistically undermines and subverts the reader as guided tourist throughout her homeland of Antigua via her proliferation of parenthetical expressions. Although sold as memoir in the Farrar, Straus, and Giroux edition, for booksellers and distributors, this book has been difficult to classify as it traverses the genres of biography, memoir, and travelogue. This difficulty in interpreting both its parenthetical discourse as well as its genre classification represents Kincaid’s dual efforts to problematize for her intended audience, the common laborers of North American and Western Europe, their unconscious consumption of Caribbean space as leisure and recreation tourist destination. A Small Place explores the foundations of western modernity that rationalize the exploitation of black labor and render black life on the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda invisible. Through its parenthetical discourse of black social and political thought, Kincaid strategically subverts the readers’ orientation to the text, thereby deconstructing their western imperialist gaze. To this end, A Small Place offers a counter discourse by way of its extratextual interrogation of western modernity, postcolonialism, and neoliberal capitalism, and its performance of literary opacity serves to broaden Edouard Glissant’s concept of cross-cultural poetics and enacts a critical and decolonizing exercise of bearing witness.