Abjection and the Collapse of Postcolonial Identity in Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place

Year 2026, Issue: 5, 101 - 109, 26.01.2026

Yazdan Mahmoudi

Abstract

This article reads Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place through Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection to argue that Kincaid depicts the postcolonial Antiguan subject as structured by contradictions at the symbolic and psychic levels. The essay argues about how both the Antiguan nation and the tourist are abject figures; entities that misconfigure boundaries, destabilize meaning, and both attract and repel. Through close reading, the article indicates that Kincaid constructs Antigua not just a site of beauty or depravity, but as a psychic wound, a country neither to be loved nor to be hated, neither remembered nor forgotten. The tourist is also an abject figure whose perspective trivializes historical trauma and hides economic violence under the cover of pleasure. The article also delves into how tourism functions as an economic abjection, restaging colonial hierarchies and enforcing cultural amnesia. Ultimately, the article illustrates that Kincaid’s narrative stage-manages a postcolonial subjectivity in terms of estrangement, where national identity is made a site of abjection, and where native and tourist are both complicit in a ritual of forgetting. The analysis unfolds in four movements: Economic abjection, the abjection of the tourist gaze, temporal abjection, and the collapse of symbolic institutions.

Keywords

abjection , postcolonial , subjectivity , Antigua , boundaries , contradictions , identity , historical trauma

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