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Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kincaid, A Small Place, 8, 4.
2 Ibid., 4.
3 Ibid., 12.
4 Ibid., 4.
5 Ibid., 34-35.
6 Diane Simmons in “The Rhythm of Reality,” Keith Byerman in “Anger in a Small Place,” Rhonda Frederick in “What If You’re,” and Lesley Larkin in “Reading and Being Read,” among others, study how Kincaid’s A Small Place affects and challenges readers. For example, Larkin asserts the text ‘accuses the reader of continuing the exploitation begun by Columbus’ (466), and Frederick claims it ‘destabilize[s] readers’ established ways of knowing themselves’ (6).
7 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 68.
8 Ibid., 70.
9 Ibid., 73. Rothberg quotes Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects.
10 Ibid.
11 I was initially hesitant to work with Goodreads and Amazon reviews due to several ethical concerns related to the corporations’ violent practices – concerns shared by other scholars. For example, Simone Murray in “Secret Agents” and Lisa Nakamura in “‘Words with Friends’” respectively describe the ‘insidious’ power relations and oppressive structures that underlie online companies like Amazon and Goodreads. Murray discusses the dangers of ‘algorithmic selection processes’ (970), while Nakamura describes how these platforms exploit the ‘free labor’ of online reviewers and enable ‘a new regime of controlled consumerism’ (241). However, scholars, including myself, simultaneously recognise the value of engaging with the companies’ online review systems. I therefore remain cognizant of what Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak describe in “The Goodreads ‘Classics’” as the ‘tensions between democratic potential and corporate exploitation’ that characterise such online social networks (245).
12 Walsh and Antoniak, “Goodreads ‘Classics’,” 245. Aarthi Vadde similarly asserts in “Amateur Creativity” that ‘digital publishing ha[s] enabled the “mass amateurization” of the critical, creative, and communicative arts, allowing amateurs to bypass the gatekeeping practices of specific institutions (e.g. the gallery, the newspaper, the publishing house)’ (27).
13 Frederick, “What If You’re,” 6.
14 See Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo, “Faraway, so Close,” Ortner, Sindbæk Andersen, and Wierød Borčak, “Mnemonic Migration,” Schneider-Mayerson, “Does Climate Fiction Make a Difference?,” Vlieghe, Muls, and Rutten, “Everybody reads,” and Walsh and Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’” for more studies engaging with real readers and their responses to particular literary texts.
15 I build on the cutting-edge work in Vadde, “Amateur Creativity,” Nakamura, “‘Words with Friends’,” Mark McGurl, Everything and Less, Murray, “Secret Agents” and Walsh and Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’”. That said, I should note that even while drawing on digital tools (including Python and Voyant Tools), this essay is not strictly speaking a digital humanities essay, insofar as it does not chiefly engage in digital and quantitative analysis of empirical data but rather uses such strategies to supplement more traditional close reading practices.
16 My work on reader implication supplements recent scholarship by Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling, and Mihaela Mihai, Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care. While Meretoja explores how narratives can help us ‘mak[e] sense of the ways in which we are implicated in violent histories’ (23), Mihai analyses how artistic works representing implicated subjects can show ‘the complex situatedness and ambivalence of all human actions’ (17). My project builds on Meretoja and Mihai’s projects by examining how literary form, and not just content, can implicate readers in political violence as well as investigating how real readers actually respond to such works.
17 See Noji, “The Implicated Reader” for a more extensive description of my theoretical framework of the implicated reader.
18 Schmid, “Implied Reader,” 1.
19 Iser, Act of Reading, 34-35.
20 Noji, “The Implied Reader” explores in more depth how real readers who diverge from the implied implicated reader (for example, readers who are marginalized by the violence depicted in the text) might respond to the text very differently than those readers who identify with the implicated reader.
21 Kincaid, Small Place, 34. It is important to consider the potential ethical implications of Kincaid aligning herself with native Antiguans. While Kincaid was born and raised in Antigua, she writes A Small Place approximately two decades after leaving the country while working as a prominent writer and scholar in the US. She thus writes the book while occupying a more privileged subject position than many of the native Antiguans she identifies herself with; to use Rothberg’s term, she occupies a position of ‘complex implication’ (8).
22 Kincaid, Small Place, 35.
23 Evgenia Iliopoulou, Because of You describes how second-person address can evoke a kind of contemporaneity: ‘[a]uthors may employ the second-person address […] so as to create immediacy in the text, amplifying the conative function and encouraging coherence between non-compatible persons situated in different temporal and spatial circumstances (as authors and readers are)’ (62-63).
24 Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 8-9.
25 Kincaid, Small Place, 9-10.
26 I analysed 871 Goodreads reviews (32 one-star, 64 two-star, 175 three-star, 300 four-star, 300 five-star reviews) and 168 Amazon reviews (14 one-star, 7 two-star, 14 three-star, 36 four-star, 97 five-star reviews). I collected the Goodreads reviews on 20 April 2022 by scraping the website’s publicly viewable reviews through a Python program originally developed by Maria Antoniak and Melanie Walsh and modified by Austin Steady. You can access the Python program here: https://github.com/maria-antoniak/goodreads-scraper. Goodreads only shows a limited number of reviews at one time, which ultimately limited my dataset. I collected the Amazon reviews on 8 September 2021 by manually copying all publicly viewable reviews into a Google document, which I then converted into a Plain Text file, split, and organised using a Python program developed by Austin Steady.
27 AM, 4 stars, 16 May 2015. In order to protect the reviewer’s privacy (to an extent), I decided to omit all reviewers’ names and pseudonyms and instead opted to indicate only the reviews’ source, rating, and publication date. For a longer discussion about the ethics of anonymising ‘amateur critics’ in scholarly work, see Bruckman’s “Studying the Amateur Artist.”
28 GR, 5 stars, December 15, 2018. More examples of reviews that express a recognition of implication include: ‘[Kincaid] combines the individual reader into a collaboration of his/her personal/cultural histories to make that individual feel responsible for his/her cultures actions’ (AM, 4 stars, 10 September 2004). ‘Kincaid takes away the bliss of ignorance in her direct address to tourists […] The “source of pleasure” tourists are privileged to experience while visiting Antigua comes at the expense of those who cannot escape’ (GR, 5 stars, 9 February 2016). ‘It’s told in second person: addressed to you, the reader, a “you” cast as a European/white tourist on holiday in Antigua, a brilliant stance for the story, making you uncomfortable and challenged, especially if you are a white potential tourist reading it’ (GR, 5 stars, 14 February 2021).
29 GR, 4 stars, 18 July 2008.
30 GR, 5 stars, 20 November 2020.
31 The Python program I used to split and organise the reviews was originally written by Austin Steady. I made minor modifications to the code as needed.
32 While it is important to consider the discrepancy between the total number of positive reviews (733) and negative reviews (117), I think this finding is still significant.
33 While various scholars distinguish between ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ (Shotwell, Ahmed, Deonna et al.), this essay does not clearly distinguish between them and rather uses the words jointly, since the reviews I analyse seem to use the words interchangeably.
34 I identified reviews in which readers expressed feeling guilt and/or shame by using Voyant Tool’s ‘Keywords in Context’ textual analysis tool. Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based application for performing textual analysis.
35 Knowing Otherwise, 74.
36 Cultural Politics of Emotion, 103.
37 AM, 4 stars, 20 September 2004.
38 GR, 4 stars, 24 February 2019. Additional examples of positive reviews expressing guilt and shame include: ‘i [sic] have never felt so guilty for going on beach holidays overseas. but [sic] also this is so powerful and i [sic] wish everyone had read it’ (GR, 5 stars, 2 September 2019). ‘I feel ashamed to call myself a tourist after reading this essay… Excellently well written’ (GR, 5 stars, 28 October 2018). ‘[A] furious Jamaica Kincaid tries to make me feel guilty about finding any sort of comfort in visiting the post-colonial Caribbean… And succeeds!’ (GR, 4 stars, 4 May 2017).
39 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 104-105.
40 These reviews’ expressions of shame alongside self-criticism seem to reflect Deonna et al.’s description of shame as ‘a feeling of incapacity to live up to our self-relevant values to even a minimal degree’ (109).
41 GR, 5 stars, 10 March 2019.
42 GR, 5 stars, 21 October 2019.
43 GR, 5 stars, 10 March 2016.
44 GR, 5 stars, 15 January 2020.
45 GR, 5 stars, 11 March 2013.
46 GR, 4 stars, 18 October 2021.
47 GR, 5 stars, 10 March 2016.
48 GR, 5 stars, 11 June 2019.
49 GR, 5 stars, 18 May 2020.
50 GR, 5 stars, 16 July 2008.
51 AM, 5 stars, 28 December 2014.
52 Henrike Kohpeiß, “Bourgeois Coldness” addresses how self-critique expressed by an implicated subject can serve as a tactic to stave off change: ‘[s]elf-critique is a cunning strategy of the bourgeois subject to remain unchanged while promoting change and progress’ (439).
53 Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise, 94.
54 I once again used Voyant Tools to identify reviews expressing anger (see note 34).
55 GR, 1 star, 6 April 2019.
56 GR, 2 stars, 12 February 2018.
57 AM, 1 star, 27 September 2010.
58 GR, 1 star, 12 February 2016.
59 GR, 1 star, 20 December 2010.
60 GR, 2 stars, 11 March 2007.
61 This recurring description of Kincaid as ‘angry’ seems to reproduce the stereotype of ‘the angry Black women.’ In her book Sister Citizen, Melissa Harris-Perry describes the various stereotypes projected on Black women in the US, including their depiction as ‘shrill, loud, argumentative, irrationally angry, and verbally abusive’ (119). The reviewers who describe Kincaid and her writing in this way (in fact, using these very adjectives) are perhaps consciously or unconsciously drawing on this racist stereotype in writing their responses.
62 GR, 2 stars, 15 July 2008.
63 GR, 1 star, 9 March 2008.
64 AM, 1 star, 27 September 2010. This review and others like it seem to exemplify what Charles W. Mills’ calls ‘white ignorance,’ insofar as the reviews feature particular forms of ‘non-knowing’ that are influenced by ‘white racial domination’ (20). Even non-white reviewers can practice ‘white ignorance,’ since, as Mills asserts, this ‘cognitive phenomenon’ is not ‘confined to white people’ (22).
65 AM, 1 star, 27 October 2009.
66 AM, 1 star, 27 September 2010. This review’s angry response suggests the reviewer did not pick up on Kincaid’s use of irony. Whether or not a reader interprets the text as ironic undoubtedly influences their reaction to it.
67 AM, 1 star, February 6 2013.
68 GR, 2 stars, 11 September 2013.
69 Thirteen of the one and two-star reviews describe Kincaid and/or her work as hypocritical. None of the four and five-star reviews I analysed mention Kincaid’s purported hypocrisy
70 GR, 1 star, 25 September 2010.
71 GR, 2 stars, 18 May 2020.
72 AM, 1 star, 14 February 2017. Six of the one and two-star reviews explicitly describe Kincaid and/or her writing as racist. One of these review states: ‘One cannot say, with any degree of objectivity, that this isn’t one angry, clearly emotionally disturbed woman’s hate-filled racism made passable as literature’ (AM, 1 star, 26 January 2016).
73 GR, 1 star, 7 April 2018.
74 AM, 1 star, 12 December 2017.
75 Denouncing Kincaid as a hypocrite who is also implicated in political violence encapsulates what Jen Schneider et al. describe in “Under Pressure” as the ‘hypocrite trap’ – a rhetorical move to discredit opposing opinions by ‘establishing ignorance, exposing complicity, and naming hypocrisy’ (1).
76 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 104.
77 I want to reiterate that some readers will not identify with the implicated reader Kincaid evokes. Consequently, these readers – even while being formally and rhetorically implicated by the text – may not feel implicated and subsequently may not respond with any strong emotion.
78 Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise, 94.
79 While I lack data about the reviewers’ racial identities and thus cannot analyse the relationship between racial groups and affective responses, race undoubtedly influences readers’ responses to Kincaid’s book, which foregrounds issues of race and racism. Indeed, while several reviews explicitly discuss race, others more implicitly express racialized affects, including those linked to ‘white ignorance’ (Mills, see note 60). Yet, regardless of their racial identities, reviewers who implicate Kincaid in violence yet take no responsibility themselves risk ‘protect[ing] white primacy’ (Shotwell 94).
80 GR, 1 star, 7 April 2018.
81 GR, 2 stars, 28 November 2010.
82 GR, 1 star, 6 April 2019.
83 GR, 1 star, 30 December 2015.
84 GR, 2 stars, 12 February 2018.
85 AM, 1 star, 21 March 2011. Notably, the reviewer’s comment that Kincaid’s book ‘makes me want to disagree with her on everything and do the exact opposite’ seems to demonstrate what Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart describe as ‘cultural backlash.’
86 GR, 3 stars, 12 January 2022.
87 GR, 3 stars, 3 June 2014.
88 GR, 3 stars, 31 March 2008.
89 GR, 3 stars, 18 December 2014.
90 GR, 3 stars, 25 January 2019.
91 GR, 3 stars, 7 March 2021.
92 GR, 3 stars, 12 January 2016.
93 GR, 3 stars, 9 September 2021.
94 GR, 3 stars, 2 July 2017.
95 Several three-star reviews explicitly describe the complexity of Kincaid’s book. One writes: ‘I found this book difficult to read due to its’ [sic] form: long, complex, clause-laden sentences. While eloquent and witty, and integral to sustaining the tone of this novel, I found myself getting lost in the page with no endpoint in sight’ (GR, 3 stars, 11 February 2020). Another states: ‘[s]ometimes her syntax could get a little confusing and I had to go back and reread an entire paragraph to understand what she was saying’ (GR, 3 stars, 20 February 2015).
96 Slaby and von Scheve, Affective Societies, 28, 49.
97 Ibid., 46.
98 For instance, one needs only to compare common left-wing and right-wing responses to the Critical Race Theory debate in the US in order to recognise similar sentiments and emotions as those expressed in the high-rating and low-rating reviews, respectively.
99 GR, 3 stars, 19 November 2017.
100 GR, 3 stars, 3 November 2010
101 GR, 3 stars, 8 March 2018.
102 Kohpeiß, “Bourgeois Coldness.”
103 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 2, cited in Rothberg (“Feeling Implicated (1)” (267).
104 Rothberg, “Feeling Implicated (1),” 267). Such lack of affect, or indifference, in response to implication is also evident in discussions of climate change and settler colonialism, among other cases of large-scale, structural, and ‘slow’ violence, see Nixon, Slow Violence.
105 GR, 3 stars, 3 September 2016.
106 Kohpeiß “Bourgeois Coldness.”
107 I am here referencing Rothberg’s distinction between the ‘three levels at which affect plays a role in forging, consolidating, and contesting implication’ (“Feeling Implicated (1),” 273).
108 Murray, in “Secret Agents”, drawing on Cheney-Lippold’s Citation2011 study, shows that the ‘typical Goodreads user’ is a ‘25- to 34-year-old, US-based, Caucasian, graduate-educated woman with children, a median income of US $100,000–150,000’ (979). While I cannot attest to the accuracy of Murray’s findings, I recognise that Goodreads and Amazon users are not representative of the US’s entire population. For example, using Goodreads and Amazon necessitates having access to a computer and the internet. Additionally, it is important to consider people’s motivations for leaving reviews. Noticeably, there are many more positive reviews than negative ones, which perhaps reflects people’s tendency to like the books they choose to read.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jennifer Noji
Jennifer Noji is a PhD Candidate and AAUW American Fellow in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works in the fields of Asian American and ethnic studies, critical race theory, memory studies, and human rights. Her current research project, titled The Implicated Reader: Politics of Address in Literatures of Political Violence, explores how writers can construct literary works to implicate their readers in past and present political violence. She also researches the roles of stories and storytelling in the 1980s Japanese American Redress Movement and the contemporary movement for Black Reparations. Jennifer’s work also appears in Narrative and The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, and she is a cofounder of the UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies. Email: [email protected]