RE-CONCEPTUALIZATION OF RACE AND AGENCYIN JAMAICA KINCAID'STHE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid, arguably the most popular Caribbean woman writer living in the USA, has produced many of her bestsellers by dissecting her personal and familial history. Yet in spite of her inclination to anchor the life of her creative inventions in her personal and intimate experience, Kincaid, known for her radicalism and militancy, can be a fiercely political writer. The aim o f this essay is to explore how Kincaid handles the trope o f race in her novel The Autobiography of My Mother, how she uses racial imagery to unearth the covert mechanisms that account for the intricacies of identity formation and how she dismantles ideological foundations that paved the way for racial exploitation. 1 will in particular focus on how Kincaid challenges, undermines and recasts the (post)colonial concept of race by showing that racial identity is a shifting category conceived through interaction with other categories of identification such as class and gender.