Disguised Subjugation as Education: Colonial and Maternal Pedagogy in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

Year 2020, Volume: 30 Issue: 2, 325 - 342, 23.12.2020

Hediye Özkan

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2020-0025

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy: A Novel, an autobiographical narrative as opposed to what the title suggests, examines the colonial and immigrant experience of an Antiguan girl, who grows up in the British Caribbean and comes to the U.S. at the age of nineteen as an au pair. The colonial and maternal education along with the textual capture and erasure in her childhood controls Lucy’s choices over her intellect, voice, body, mobility, and sexuality, while leading her to a stage where she seeks the new definitions of womanhood, female re-embodiment, and personhood in the New Land. This paper focuses on the autobiographical narrative as a catharsis for Lucy, who confronts the constructed reality through personal reflections on colonial education, and by doing so, who eases the predicament of colonisation and dualisms due to the coloniser inside. I argue that the systematic colonial and maternal pedagogy depicted in the narrative is employed to mythicise reality, obliterate the Caribbean self/culture, and disenfranchise colonial society. Referring to “cultural invasion,” a concept developed by Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire to investigate disguised subjugation as education, this paper scrutinises Lucy’s retrospection both on her maternal and colonial tutelage that later becomes a leading force of her own decolonisation.

Keywords

Colonial pedagogy, maternal pedagogy, ultural invasion, amaica Kincaid, Lucy

References

• Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.) London: University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1981).
• De Abruna, L.N. (1999). Jamaica Kincaid’s writing and the maternal colonial matrix. In M. Conde & T. Lonsdale (Eds.), Caribbean women writers: Fiction in English (172-183). London: Macmillan Press.
• Cixous, H. (2010). The laugh of medusa. In V. B. Leitch (Ed.), The norton anthology of theory and criticism. (2nd.ed., 1942-1959). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company Inc.
• Cudjoe, S. R. (1989). Jamaica Kincaid and the modernist project: An interview. Callaloo, 39, 396-411.
• Donnell, A. (1993). When daughters defy: Jamaica Kincaid’s fiction. Women: A Cultural Review, 4(1), 18-26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574049308578142.
• Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. (C. Farrington, Trans.) New York, NY: Grove Press. (Original work published 1981).
• Ferguson, M. & Kincaid, J. (1994). A lot of memory: An interview with Jamaica Kincaid. The Kenyon Review, 16(1), 163-188.
• Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. B. Ramos, Trans.) New York, NY: Continuum, (Original work published 1970).
• Fulani, I. (2011). Gender, conflict, and community in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 32(2), 1-30. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/fronjwomestud.32.2.0001.
• Hall, S. (1991). The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity. In A. D. King, (Ed.), Culture, globalization and the world-system: Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, (19-40). New York, NY: State University of New York.
• Kincaid, J. (1988). A small place. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Kincaid, J. (1990). Lucy: A novel. New York, NY:Plume Books.
• Kincaid, J. (1991). On seeing England for the first time. Transition, 51, 32-40.
• Ledent, B. (1992). Voyages into otherness: Cambridge and Lucy. Kunapipi, 14(2), 53-63.
• Lima, M. H. (1993). Decolonizing genre: Kincaid and the bildungsroman. Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture,26(4), 431-459.
• Macaulay, T. B. (1952). Indian education: Minute of the 2nd February 1835. In G.M. Young (Ed.), Macaulay prose and poetry (719-730), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Majerol, V. (2007). Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and the aesthetics of disidentification. Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 4(3), 17-27.
• Mangan, J. A. (1993). The imperial curriculum: Racial images and education in the British colonial experience. New York, NY: Routledge.
• Maxwell, L. R. (2013). Romantic Revisions in novels from the Americas, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wq40b.5.
• Oczkowicz, E. (1996). Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy: Cultural ‘translation’ as a case of creative exploration of the past. MELUS, 21(3), 143-157. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/467979.
• Réjouis, R. (2003). Caribbean writers and language: The autobiographical poetics of Jamaica Kincaid and Patrick Chamoiseau. The Massachusetts Review, 44(1/2), 213-232. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/25091937.
• Said, E. (1994). Culture and Imperialism. New York, NY: Vintage Books.Smith, I. (2002). Misusing canonical intertexts: Jamaica Kincaid, Wordsworth, and colonialism’s ‘absent things. Callaloo, 25(3), 801-820. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/3300118.
• Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2001). Reading autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives. Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press.
• Thiong’o, N. W. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. London: James Currey Ltd.
• Tiffin, H. (1993). Cold hearts and (foreign) tongues: Recitation and the reclamation of the female body in the works of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid. Post-colonial Discourse, 16(4), 909-921. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/2932217.
• Tiffin, H. (1998). Flowers of evil, flowers of empire: Roses and daffodils in the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior, and Lorna Goodison. SPAN, 46, 58-71.
• Viswanathan, G. (1998). Masks of conquest: Literary study and British rule in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Welter, B. (1966). The cult of true womanhood, 1820-1860. AQ, 18, 151-174. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2711179.