Autobiography Of My Mother Research Articles

Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Reviewed by: Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak Michele Daniele Castleman (bio) Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas. By Suzanne Manizza Roszak. University of Wales Press, 2022. Roszak's monograph Uncanny Youth is a close examination of Gothic texts that focus upon child and teen characters navigating the damage and recovery from Colonialism in the Americas. Roszak intentionally included literature, plays, and short stories from multiple countries and regions of the Americas to highlight the "patterns of representation that are localized and that simultaneously transcend those borders" to reveal literary resistance to the European features of Gothic literature (3). Roszak's work is geared toward exploring a "decolonizing view of hemispheric American Gothic literary childhoods" and examining how these works chronicle recovery from trauma (7). Although the majority of the sample consists of works intended for adults, this study is a necessary examination of how black, feminist, and indigenous authors use Gothic elements. In the introduction, Roszak asserts "hemispheric American writers have borrowed Euro-American Gothic conventions and given them new meaning" and adds they are "inventing new ways of defining what is horrific, terrifying and nightmarish in the lives of characters who have not yet reached adulthood, and across these more localized contexts within the Americas, they often echo one another" (6). The monograph includes five categories of focus, emphasizing the age-related and gendered experiences of the young characters. Only the final chapter, "Writing Gothic Scenes for Young Readers" and the conclusion discuss young adult and children's literature. The chapter "Haunting Perennial Girlhoods" focuses upon adult heroines for the purpose of examining how male anti-heroes have infantilized them through forms of literal or figurative imprisonment. Roszak pairs a canonical work like Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" with the plays La Hija de Rappaccini by Paz and Une Tempête by Césaire to draw out their sociopolitical implications. Examining the three female protagonists within these works, Roszak argues that Gilman's narrator's experience is limited and examining her with Paz's Beatriz and Césaire's Miranda provides an "intertextual through line" (25). She asserts the trope of infantilized and imprisoned women is "a way of resisting established paradigms and mobilizing for change" (45). The following chapter, "Cursed Pregnancies and Uncanny Children," draws upon Condé's La Migration des Coeurs and Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother to explore the shadow death casts upon pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Roszak asserts these retellings provide opportunities to "scrutinize the persistence of colonial injustice and to envision rebellions against it" (49). To do this work, Roszak compares each text to the Gothic elements within Brontë's [End Page 422] Wuthering Heights and explores the Gothic doubling of Kincaid's characters and how her and Condé's works "dismantle and disempower imperialist ideologies" (74). In "Gothic Boyhoods and Adult Betrayals," Roszak uses Naipaul's Guerrillas to demonstrate how Gothic whiteness is revealed through the white character of Jane and her well-intentioned racism and fetishizing of Black, male bodies. Roszak asserts that the character of Bryant experiences the body horror of self-loathing because of colonialism and neo-colonialism. This chapter also examines Mamaday's play The Indolent Boys and the Gothic elements within the history of boarding schools for Indigenous children while also destabilizing the American exceptionalist mythology within the history of the United States of America. The play uses dialogue to contribute to the Gothic elements and lends agency to the boys to resist the Imperialist messages they received at the school while also deconstructing the "Euro-American understandings of what might be conceived of as Gothic" (104). Roszak discusses how the use of a ghostlike chorus of children to sit in judgment of the play's events encourages contemplation of the settler colonialism that continues to threaten the lives of indigenous young people. Chapter 4, "The Teen Girls Aren't Alright," explores Gorriti's short story "La hija del mashorguero" and Loynaz's modernist novel Jardín. The texts reveal how teenaged, female characters endure loneliness while also revealing the political contexts of colonialism and how European, patriarchal family structures have been imposed within...

Fearsome Worlds and Uncanny Children: Gothic Early Childhoods in Condé’sLa Migration des coeursand Kincaid’sThe Autobiography of My Mother

AbstractGothic depictions of early childhood and its antecedents from conception to childbirth stand to fundamentally shape readers’ understanding of colonialism across the transnational and translinguistic space of the Caribbean. This effect is particularly visible in contemporary novels such as Maryse Condé’s La Migration des coeurs (1995) and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), which not only have been interpreted as rewritings of Wuthering Heights but also draw on a larger, more multicultural Gothic literary tradition. In their renderings of sexual violence, doomed pregnancies, and motherless infancy, Condé and Kincaid appropriate and edit Gothic conventions, highlighting persisting ramifications of the colonial project for women and children. Gothic youth also functions as a subversive site of resistance with the potential to dismantle imperialist ideologies and systems.

The Autobiography of My Mother: Looking at the Past with Old Eyes.

The Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid 1996) is Xuela’s story. Xuela as the narrator and protagonist of the novel ‘moves between the imaginary world of the text and the real world of Kincaid’s life’ (Edwards 116-17). The Palimpsest metaphor shows to be useful to represent the ‘palimpsesting of her identity’ that Xuela does in her autobiography because the final perception of Xuela’s identity implies a selection of experiences in which the visible surface makes it possible to perceive not only the young Xuela but that who never was and the life she did not allow herself to live.

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

Is most writing on some level—large or small—autobiographical, whether it be emotional autobiography or straight out borrowing from our lives?—Edwidge Danticat, Contemporary NovelistsJamaica Kincai...

Isolation and Inclusion: The Modulation of Limited and Plural Points of View in Jamaica Kincaid’sThe Autobiography of My Mother

In Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid utilizes alternating points of view to portray the novel’s overarching narratological, spatio-temporal, and ideological concerns. Kincaid crafts her story’s postmodern narrative in interesting ways by implementing both first-person-singular and first-person-plural points of view as aging protagonist, Xuela Richardson, reviews her life and tells her complicated, coming-of-age tale involving her ongoing struggle against colonial racism and the oppression of women. Often, the narrator speaks alone to explore the quest she is undertaking, a journey in which she receives little help from potential mentors in her colonial island setting, and here Kincaid relies on the singular view. Alternately, Kincaid switches to the plural view to portray the possibility for camaraderie that Xuela pursues in alliances with others, namely, women who might serve as potential mother figures but fail. In some instances, the protagonist speaks together with both family and community members to present their common thoughts regarding their shared sense of subjugation in Dominica’s island setting, yet these acts of co-narration do not bring her the solace she seeks. As the narrator contemplates her identity, one affected by her mother’s death, her father’s abandonment of her, her rejection by her stepmother and stepsister, and her dismissal by teachers and classmates, Xuela attempts to tell her story both alone and with others. Finally, however, Xuela discovers that any capacity for self-knowledge lies beyond her in an alienating world, and she remains displaced within Dominica’s culture.

The Autobiography of My Mother: Narrative as an access to post/colonial trauma

The Autobiography of My Mother: Narrative as an access to post/colonial trauma

RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN JAMAICA KINCAID’S THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER

Jamaica Kincaid is an American novelist, short-story writer, gardener, essayist, and reviewer. She has become one of Caribbean’s major woman writers in recent decades. Kincaid’s writings comprise exile, search for identity, and alienation. Her production strikes the reader with a balanced mixture of anger and loss. Kincaid’s great variety of issues draws so many readers to her writings. Kincaid’s novels reflect her desire to draw on the people, places, language, race, mother-daughter relationship, values, cultural traditions, and politics that have shaped her own life and that of African American people. In America, Racial discrimination is very common and hurts very much. During the slavery era, white people had black people as slaves in their own household. Black people have to satisfy their white masters. If the white people were not satisfied, they would try to hurt the black people. This paper “Racial Discrimination in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother” focuses on how race plays a pivotal role in Africans literature and their day today life and how blacks suffered for their survival. It also reveals how Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother illuminates black American experiences in the contemporary American society from various perspectives. It also shows how black women have been exploited in a white dominated male chauvinistic society. In the face of enormous problems and frequent victimization, black women are shown imitating through their sense of community and social powers.

“And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’’: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Hanan Al- Shaykh’s The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story

The mother-daughter relationship is the most crucial human rapport. Western and Arab theorists have dealt profusely with this close female bond that persists as a determining force of personality structure and social system. Adrienne Rich (1986) and Nancy Chodorow (1978b ) undertake an analysis of the institution of motherhood in the context of western patriarchal society. In the Arab world, major studies of this theme such as Suad Joseph and Dalya Abudi’s works deal with the mother-daughter bond as culturally specific. This study attempts a psychoanalytic and feminist analysis of this “great unwritten story” where the two disciplines engage and enrich each other. This will be explored in ‘the life writings’ of Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, and Hanan Al- Shaykh’s The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story in which the mother-daughter relationship is the core concern. Kincaid and Al- Shaykh’s works contextualize what Rich (1986) calls “the essential female tragedy” portraying “the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter” and how this is articulated through genre choice, language, and colonial/patriarchal oppression. The study will also investigate the auto biographical nature of both texts.

Pain, Pleasure and Resistance; Three Sides of an Equilateral Triangle: with reference to Jamaica Kincaid's “The Autobiography of My Mother”

According to the Bible, the whole human race evolved through the pleasure of the forbidden. It is natural that every human has an inborn instinct for pleasure particularly the forbidden. Human's pursuit for pleasure is for the sake of pleasure itself. Pleasure also serves as a survival tool. When pain exceeds its tolerable limits and when there is no valid reason for survival, pleasure becomes a tool for survival. The protagonist in Jamaica Kincaid's “The Autobiography of My Mother” pursues pleasure for various reasons. For Xuela, pleasure is a survival tool in a loveless world. To pursue mere sensual pleasure is to overcome pain and serve all strong emotional ties. To pursue forbidden pleasure is to show resistance against authority. An equilateral triangle has three equal sides, angles and a stable structure. Similarly pain, pleasure and resistance forms three sides of an equilateral triangle i.e. Xuela's life. The impact created by one element on the other and the stability which the protagonist derives from these elements are discussed in the paper.

Pain, Pleasure and Resistance; Three Sides of an Equilateral Triangle: with reference to Jamaica Kincaid's “The Autobiography of My Mother”

Pain, Pleasure and Resistance; Three Sides of an Equilateral Triangle: with reference to Jamaica Kincaid's “The Autobiography of My Mother”

A Feminist Narratological Study of Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

Feminist narratology has become a rich field in the study of language and literature. Gerald Prince states that it explores the implications of sex, gender and/or sexuality for understanding the nature, form, and functioning of narrative (1987: 65). The aim of this research paper is to examine the term ‘feminist narratology’ and its essential characteristics in gender construction. This interdisciplinary approach which combines the analysis of the narrative form with gender politics will be applied to Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) with a special reference to the use of language in the narrative discourse as a powerful tool in subverting the colonizer’s power

What´s in a name? The resurrection of the author in Jamaica Kincaid´s The autobiography of my mother

Trying to break up the shackles that had held the literary studies still for so many years, Roland Barthes declares that the author is better off dead. Such a surprising statement aimed at wiping away all of the efforts to reach an origin of a literary text, that is to say, a unique answer or a final interpretation. Nevertheless Philippe Lejeune posits that when it comes to autobiographical writings, the presence of the author is to be felt, and even gladly expected. For this reason, hermeneutics is able to interchangeably adopt either Barthes´s perspective or Lejeune´s standpoint. This essay intends to shed some light on Jamaica Kincaid´s The Autobiography of my Mother based on those both perspectives. Xuela, the protagonist, can be taken entirely on her own, that is, strictly textually. In so doing, the author will be dead. On the other hand, she can also be spotted under a different name, that is, Kincaid´s. In so doing, readers are to view the resurrection of an author.

Caribbean Diasporas’ Racial Conflicts and Reconciliation in Wide Sargasso Sea and The Autobiography of My Mother

Caribbean Diasporas’ Racial Conflicts and Reconciliation in Wide Sargasso Sea and The Autobiography of My Mother

Jamaica Kincaid's regressive writing

This article deals with Jamaica Kincaid’s “regressive style” in her novel The Autobiography of My Mother. Critics generally present this book as a quest for origins : the narrator’s desire to recapture the image of her dead mother, a Carib Indian whose community has largely disappeared, is equated to her yearning for the recovery of her lost original island. In search of a “vanishing race”, the heroine dreams of recreating an “imagined community”. However the novel documents the impossibility of reversing the course of History, of returning to the idealized pre-colonial/prelapsarian past that the protagonist fantasizes. The painful realization of this impossibility has a paralyzing effect on the girl who is left alone in an imaginary world, an “I-land” of solitude and doubt. Her feeling of stagnation and self-centeredness is conveyed through a particularly haunting prose that this article means to analyze. It explores the various narrative strategies that produce an original style wavering between the discursive regression of a text constantly returning to its starting point and thus creating its own stasis and the movement of expansion of the heroine’s inner life who, through a sensual approach to body and language, manages to counteract the effect of this stasis.

Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds

Reviewed by: Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds Michele Rowley Jana Evans Braziel . Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds. New York: State U of New York P, 2009. viii + 196 pp. In Caribbean Genesis Jana Evans Braziel examines the ways in which Jamaica Kincaid's fiction disrupts and reconfigures the categories of genres, genealogies, and genesis. Kincaid's literary oeuvre, Braziel suggests, reveals the co-constituting nature of these categories and imbricates itself within the fissures of these three categories in order to tug at their seams so that new words and worlds can emerge. Braziel's chapters engage Kincaid's more well-known texts, including At the Bottom the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, and Mr. Potter. Further, the text's philosophical and analytical frame draws on interviews with Kincaid, her essays, and a stunning array of philosophical contributions from the likes of Immanuel Kant, Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Edouard Glissant, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, and Derek Walcott, among others. In title and organizational structure, Braziel's Caribbean Genesis mirrors the very disruptive turns that she analyzes in Kincaid's work. The declarative simplicity of her title, Caribbean Genesis, foreshadows the many dual inflections that are investigated within the text. The title serves to critique the ways in which coloniality has infused narratives of the Caribbean's genesis while simultaneously pointing to the ways in which "genesis" modified by "Caribbean" opens room to tell another story about the region's coming of age. Organizationally, the most comprehensive engagement with the ideas embedded in the text's title appears in its concluding chapter, not in its introduction or early chapters. In this final chapter Braziel fully engages narratives of beginning and becoming through her analysis of Kincaid's Mr. Potter. With this reordering, Braziel's organizational structure seems to mirror her argument about the capacity of Kincaid's work to disform and reposition our expectations regarding narratives of beginning. The text closes with Jamaica Kincaid's daunting rejoinder that Mr. Potter [End Page 173] was a man of no consequence, a mere speck, no different from the many others who inhabit the world as a "second (does) in a minute" (196). Braziel, however, does not comment on Kincaid's words and so the text ends abruptly. Braziel's refusal of a concluding paragraph disforms the traditional practice of closure and points us to an end that is both unfinished and signals a new beginning. In this concluding-beginning chapter, Braziel argues that we find in Kincaid's character Mr. Potter a "Caribbean everyman" whose subjectivity embodies a series of sociohistorical ruptures. Mr. Potter becomes a proxy for the region's violent and cataclysmic 1492 birthing into modernity and, as Braziel notes, also allows Kincaid to explore the contradictions and silences of her own personal genesis/genealogy by exploring a life that is "intimately connected to her father's even if she did not know him well during his lifetime" (195). Pushing against these creationist impulses, Braziel teases out the ways that Kincaid's work engages Glissant's quarrel with history where History and Literature, as genres, function as canonical mediums through which mythologies of genesis and genealogy travel. This contestation of and engagement with genealogy, genesis, and authorial self-exploration brings us to one of the most innovative contributions of Braziel's text: her use of the term "alterbiography." Braziel argues that Kincaid's frequent return to modes of biographical writing bleeds beyond and transmutes what is presently conveyed by the term autobiography. Braziel posits that autobiography "almost always exceeds the individual who writes it, exceeds the life and the subjective experiences of the writing subject; autobiography will also be about the others who surround the writing subject and whose experiences are enmeshed with those of the writer" (3). Alterbiography, then, captures the entanglements and co-constituting moments that reside within the autobiographical narrative. Feminists and queer theorists have long critiqued the effacing impulses of Enlightenment desire to posit an individuated and unified self. Therefore, in addition to the co-constituted nature of the biographical narrative, Braziel draws on alterbiography to question the ways...

Colonialism and Gender in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

Colonialism and Gender in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

Jamaica Kincaid: A Literary Companion

Reviewed by: Jamaica Kincaid: A Literary Companion Anna Borgström (bio) Snodgrass, Mary Ellen . Jamaica Kincaid: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2008. Although acclaimed writer Jamaica Kincaid has not published a full-length text since the travel narrative Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya in 2005, and not a piece of fiction since Mr. Potter in 2002, interest in her work has not diminished. Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) are considered modern classics and are frequently taught at American universities. One of the newest additions to the growing body of criticism surrounding Kincaid's work is Mary Ellen Snodgrass's insightful Jamaica Kincaid: A Literary Companion, a guide aimed at students, general readers, and teachers, but which is also a useful tool for researchers. The companion begins with a brief introduction to Kincaid's authorship, followed by a detailed chronology of Kincaid's life and works. This section is especially valuable as it is difficult to find information on Kincaid, who, unlike many other contemporary authors, does not have an official website devoted to her life and work. Snodgrass provides an overview which is relevant and detailed, especially concerning Kincaid's youth and early career. The information supplied in each entry is interesting as well as important to the understanding of Kincaid's work. However, the entries could have been even more useful if they had been placed in a wider context—the book would, perhaps, have benefited from a more extensive general introduction to Kincaid as an author and a philosopher, as a complement to the chronological overview. The analytical sections of Snodgrass's guide are thematically structured, organized as an A-to-Z guide to Kincaid's work. There are eighty-four entries, which vary in length from one to six pages and combine brief analyses of Kincaid's work with critical commentary and interviews with Kincaid, as well as links to other texts related to Kincaid's work. The entries are quite varied in scope; some focus briefly on Kincaid's full-length texts, others outline the fictional characters' family trees, and the rest—which are the most compelling—explore themes that are central to Kincaid's writing, such as "mothering" and "colonialism." Snodgrass provides a brief introduction to these central themes and the criticism devoted to them, also discussing less familiar topics. The entries on "music" and "abortion," for example, provide an especially creative and enlightening analysis. The range of entries ensures that most readers of Kincaid will discover new aspects of her writing in the refreshing blend of familiar and less familiar aspects of her life and work. In addition, Snodgrass provides cross-references to other related issues as well as suggestions for further reading towards the end of each entry, which both encourages and facilitates the exploration of any theme that the reader finds especially intriguing. The structure and organization of the analytical sections is the guide's most important contribution to Kincaid scholarship. Other full-length studies of Kincaid's craft have, in contrast, been structured by focus on her novels, where each chapter, or part of a chapter, focuses on and presents a close examination of one text at a time. (The only exception to date is Diane Simmons's award-winning study Jamaica Kincaid from 1994, where half the study is devoted to a few selected central themes and techniques of Kincaid's, and the other half to analyses and close readings of each of her then published full-length texts.) Snodgrass's thematically structured guide thus offers a new and refreshing structure and perspective, one which is especially suitable for approaching Kincaid, as many themes, [End Page 567] relationships, and episodes recur conspicuously throughout her oeuvre—and the format of Snodgrass's study enables a quick, yet relatively comprehensive overview of several of these central and recurring themes in Kincaid's writing. In addition to the advantages of a thematically structured guide, there are, of course, potential drawbacks to an A-to-Z structure. Any critical study will have to grapple with questions of delimitation, but the issue is brought to a head in a thematically structured guide such as this...

A expansão da representatividade do "eu" no discurso autobiográfico de Jamaica Kincaid

Esse trabalho examina textos da escritora afro-caribenhaamericanaJamaica Kincaid – At The Bottom of the River, AnnieJohn, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother – como exemploslimítrofes do gênero autobiográfico, em que a representaçãodo “eu” se expande para representar o “nós”. Considerando oslimites entre autobiografia e ficção e como a representação doeu em romances autobiográficos opera a distância dasconvenções da autobiografia, analisa-se o relacionamento mãe-filha extremamente traumático e doloroso que perpassa ostextos como uma analogia da relação colonizador-colonizado.A construção de uma nova identidade livre de qualquerautoritarismo, no conjunto das narrativas, comparado a umbildungsroman de caráter mítico, simboliza a recompensa finalda busca.

Developing Identities: Jamaica Kincaid Evaluates the Challenges of Identification in a Postcolonial World in her Novel 'The Autobiography of My Mother'

Developing Identities: Jamaica Kincaid Evaluates the Challenges of Identification in a Postcolonial World in her Novel 'The Autobiography of My Mother'

Jamaica Kincaid’s <i>The Autobiography of My Mother</i>: Allegory and Self-Writing as Counter Discourse

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