Making Homes in the West/Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid

by Macdonald-Smythe,Antonia

• ISBN13: 9780815340379
• ISBN10: 0815340370
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-02-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This study focuses on the ways in which two of the most prominent Caribbean women writers residing in the United States, Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid, have made themselves at home within Caribbean poetics, even as their migration to the United States affords them participation and acceptance within its literary space. Availing themselves of the strategies of writing available from both traditions, Cliff and Kincaid are using their writings to theorize subjectivity within migratory and cross-cultural contexts. This book demonstrates that the patterns of convergent, yet multiply located subjectivity that both writer arrive at differ in scope and influence, contoured as they are by the peculiar intersections of race, class, and sexuality. Making Homes in the West/Indies is the first full-length study to mount a comparative analysis of Michelle Cliff's and Jamaica Kincaid's canon.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction Kwik? Kwak! : Narrations of the Self	1	(28)
Talking Back to the Bildungsroman	29	(42)
Negotiating Exile: Take your Bundle and Leave and Go!	71	(38)
Slippery Tongues: Re/Claiming Orality as a Tactic of Intervention	109	(32)
W/righting History: Locating the Traveling Subject	141	(32)
Kwik? Kwak!: Infinite Chronicles of the World and the Word	173	(18)
Bibliography	191	(12)
Index	203