Beyond the Frame
Writing a Life and Jamaica Kincaid's Family Album
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12920447 |
|---|---|
| Authors | S Nasta (Open Geospatial Consortium, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 64-85 |
| Publication date | 2009-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary Women s Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-1476 • E-ISSN: 1754-1484 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/cww/vpp009 |
| OpenAlex | W1980837838 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 4 |
Like the photograph that tells us what is no longer before us, truth can only be read, if it can be read at all, in the traces of what is no longer present. (Cadava 22) ... every “I” is a fiction finally. (Walcott 28) Now established as one of the Caribbean's most distinguished literary voices, Jamaica Kincaid has produced enigmatic portraits of “self,” “family,” and “history” that are well known for blurring the lines between autobiography, fiction, non-fiction, and memoir. Mapping some recent theories of autobiography and postcolonial life-writing, this essay seeks to unravel some of the subversive aesthetic and political strategies Kincaid has invented in the past forty years to continue to write a life. Some brief biographical details might prove useful here for those not familiar with Kincaid's oft-rehearsed life-story. Born in Antigua, as Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949, she was encouraged by her mother to leave school at the age of 16 to earn money as a domestic servant in the United States. Following a period at college, where she studied photography at the New York School for Social Research, Kincaid became apprentice staff writer for the metropolitan literary magazine The New Yorker, authoring a regular and successful column called “Talk of the Town,” and using the journal as an outlet for some of her earliest fictions. In 1973, she decided to change her name to Jamaica Kincaid.1 She has since anthologized several short stories, published five “novels,” a so-called autobiographical “memoir,” and three works of “non-fiction.” She currently lives in Vermont. Kincaid has not frequently returned to her mother-island. She went back for the first time in 1986 to research material for her vehement political diatribe against tourism and the corruptions of the Antiguan government, A Small Place (1988), and returned again in 1995 when her younger brother, Devon, was dying of AIDS. By this time, Kincaid had not only maintained a physical separation from Antigua and her family for over thirty years but had also successfully consolidated herself as a prominent US writer and Harvard University teacher, married to the son of her mentor, then literary editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn. Kincaid's ambivalent relation to a troubled colonial past, combined with her diasporic location in the United States has further complicated her perspective, her persistent desire to revisit, reframe, and re-imagine the buried “truths” of her personal history
Art history · Biography · Frame (networking · Life writing · Media studies · Sociology · Telecommunications · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Computer Science · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Gender Studies · History
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,38 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2022 (5) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |