Beyond Postcoloniality: Female Subjectivity and Travel in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers

Abstract

In feminist studies, the relation between gender and travel has been addressed in many important critical discourses. Feminist critics have pointed out that travel writing had for long remained oblivious about women’s travel, one reason being that travel was, forever, a masculinist exercise. Underlining the gendered aesthetics of travel writing, feminist criticism has read women’s travelogues as interesting sites of struggle between repeating the normative patterns of male travelling and casting an ‘alternative’ gaze. However, reading women’s travel writing simply as feminist narratives against their masculinist counterparts can be an oversimplification, as it may mean ignoring the deeper complexities underlying the texts. Being an autobiographical form, travel writing creates textual spaces where the formation of selfhood happens through a constant negotiation of the ‘self’ with the ‘world’, not only in terms of gender, but also other subject identities like race, class, and culture. In this context, my paper proposes to read Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers. A Walk in the Himalaya (2005), as a female travel writing, where the question of gender intertwines with her non-white, ex-colonial, diasporic identity during her travel in Himalayan Nepal. My focus would be on examining the writer’s narratorial self as a female agency, influencing, and negotiating her postcolonial identity. The paper will try to address how the travelogue functions as a register of female experiences, while Kincaid, as a post-colonial black traveller, negotiates her position within the existing imperialist paradigm of white travelling.