DIASPORA, GLOBALISATION, NEO-COLONIALISM

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Native experience of time

“to the people in a small place, the division of time into the past, the present and the future does not exist. An even that occurred to then 100 years ago might be as vivid to them as if it were happening at this very moment

residual imperial structures

The Hotel Training School: “teaches Antiguans how to be good servants, how to be a good nobody”

• systems are instrinsic: without any collective consciousness, the systems keep running

• These structures not built for social benefit but for extraction and economic benefit

Black nostalgia

confused nostalgia for the library as a deeply colonised space

This black nostalgia is different to white nostalgia bc it has very different political coordinates

Nostalgic for the hopeful momentum that no longer exists—melancholia about helplessness to change

Audience and subject

there is a sense that you are there incidentally as an Antiguan, a sideshow in your own existence—> doing up the roads only when the Queen visits

Imaginative enclosure within the system removes the idea of progression

The absent subject: the white person complaining about Antigua—> Kincaid is exhausted, as seen by the over-explanation

Neo-colonial control

“People cannot see a relationship between their obsession with slavery and emancipation and the fact that they are governed by corrupt men…[who] have given away their country to corrupt foreigners”

• important connective tissue linking Antigua as a small place with warped temporalities between emancipation and neo-colonial control

A more holistic view of foreign identities beyond white—> Syrian and Lebanese

Independence as trading one imperialism for another—> a self-serving pragmatism led by corrupt govt

Morals, space and humanness

the idea of white tourists as impolite and rude—> inversion of racist rhetoric reminiscient of Cesaire

They enforce but do not embody their own values

Deontologising our subject position—> there is nothing about where you are in the governing structure that determines your moral standing

In response to white tourists blaming post-colonial corruption on indigenous population—Kincaid argues that the corrupt system is their fault

This demystifying and de-ontologising removes colonised and coloniser as fixed categories but dynamic labels based on specific circumstances —tourist=coloniser

Tourism

“a tourist is an ugly human being” but “you are not an ugly person ordinarily”

“There must have been some good people among you but htye stayed at home. And that is the point. That is why they are good. They stayed at home”

Even innocently, you materially contribute to a dispossession

You are always part of the colonial process, and by being a tourist you have entered into the colonial dynamic

Antigua not as home but for others to come and inhabit

COUNTER: even those at home are complicit

Kincaid’s diasporic voice

“Antigua is beautiful. Antigua is too beautiful” “can a sea be made to look brand new?”

• rift between kincaid’s adult voice and childhood memories

• Estranged from her environment—coming back is complicated

• Wonders how to be estranged—> goes to the library “to learn about myself”

• The sea and the middle-passage: can never be extricated from the white bodies in the water and the interlinking legacies of slavery

• Said’s ‘exilic consciousness’: you only become critical when you are on the outside

But as Laura Chrisman argues, the diaspora often intervene in unfriendly ways bc they want to preserve the past