Beyond the Post|Colonial Canon: A Pedagogical Approach to Embodiment in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is worth noting that Nasta, Gilmore, Paquet, and Chansky allude only minimally, if at all, to The Autobiography of My Mother in their reflections on Kincaid's investment in a practice of “serial autobiography” (Gilmore 98). This is arguably attributable to the contrast between the novel's self-declaration as autobiography and its relative remove from the known signposts of Kincaid's life. Moreover, the anchoring of the narrative in the space of an island not Kincaid's own renders it relatively dissimilar to other of her works.

2. Spillers's construct describes the questions and conflicts raised by black subjects looking inward at their own community—at their “own stuff” (278). The greater scope of Kincaid's intervention lies in its willingness to include Indigenous peoples in this Afro-community.

3. Césaire, Lamming, and Retamar are the authors of the play A Tempest, the essay The Pleasures of Exile and its novelistic reversioning Water with Berries, and the essay “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” respectively.

4. I refer here to Nuñez's novel Prospero's Daughter, Paule Marshall's short story “Brazil” from the collection Soul Clap Hands and Sing, and Migdalia Cruz's play Fur. While these and other works push back forcefully against the silencing of the feminine in both Shakespeare's play and subsequent anticolonial rewritings of the play, they also remain anchored in the Prospero-Miranda-Caliban paradigm.

5. This formulation references both the after-the-colon of Wynter's essay and scholar Katherine McKittrick's study of black feminist geographies, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, of which the concluding chapter is devoted to Wynter.

6. The phrase “water with berries” is a line spoken by Caliban in act 1, scene 2 of Shakespeare's The Tempest:

When thou camest first,

Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me

Water with berries in ’t, and teach me how

To name the bigger light, and how the less,

That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee …

Part of the various seductions, among which the “gift” of language, initially offered by Prospero to Caliban.