Jamaica Kincaid: Colonialism and the Diasporic Condition in Jewish Political Thinking

Abstract

Aspects of African, Caribbean, and Jewish diasporic phenomena merge in Jamaica Kincaid’s critique of British colonialism and her experience raised as a colonial subject in Antigua. This paper focuses on the role of text to locate culture and place in a comparison of colonial and diasporic experience, highlight interesting and distinct aspects of power and resistance strategies for the colonized and those in diaspora. This discussion provides a fertile base from which to question significant options and limitations of rights as a paradigm to understand and respond to justice and varieties of the human condition.This work on Jamaica Kincaid is part of a larger study in Jewish feminist political thinking. As a component of the broader study on Kincaid, and based in a study of African Jewry and African heritage Jews in the Americas, for this paper I analyse Kincaid’s essay “On Seeing England for the First Time.” Here I utilize a comparison between Kincaid’s castigation of colonialism and the otherness of colonial subjects scattered about the empire with notions of diasporic conditions. I conduct this examination within a Jewish frame, exploring the ways Kincaid’s analysis of colonialism also, sometimes surprisingly, clarifies certain (sometimes very different) power dynamics within diasporic contexts.