Jamaica Kincaids Writings of History: A Poetics of Impermanence

Jamaica Kincaids works consistently explore how colonial history affects contemporary everyday lives. Throughout her novels, short fiction, and non-fictional essays, Kincaids texts engage with history through its medial representations, which are starkly determined by colonial perspectives. This study examines the entanglements of temporalities in current perceptions of the past and how literary text intervenes in historical consciousness. With a focus on the media text, image, and the human body, the chapters of this book demonstrate how Kincaids poetics of impermanence counter colonial representations of history with strategies of ambiguity, repetition, and redirection. Kincaids texts repeat and revise aspects of colonial history a process that decenters the totality of historical colonial ideology and replaces it with self-determined versions of the past through a multiplication of perspectives and voices.