My essay will provide an overview of a variety of critical approaches to Jamaica Kincaid’s
polyphonic fiction. Postcolonial as well as psychoanalytic theories have been the cognitive tools
by means of which most critics tried to make sense of Kincaid’s complex narratives that are at
once local and relational. There can be no doubt that psychoanalysis and post-colonialism are
important framing and structural devices that account for the inner life and socio-cultural situation
of Kincaid’s protagonists. The concern of my essay, however, will be how Jamaica Kincaid, an
African Caribbean writer living in exile in the United States, addresses through her writing such
issues as the relationship between the postcolonial theory and transatlantic slavery and the black
Diaspora that it engendered, which have been the focus of a relatively new school of literary
criticism - Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.Kincaid’s trans-cultural experiences - her long residence
in America as well as her obsessive preoccupation with her Antiguan past - make her texts a natural
site of interplay between various cultural influences and critical paradigms. In my essay, I will
try to demonstrate that Kincaid’s texts based on her Caribbean and American experience outline
die relationship between postcolonial, transatlantic and feminist studies and create a plane on
which these praxes are naturally conflated. I believe that using both postcolonial praxis and the
Black Atlantic can produce sounder and more comprehensive readings of Jamaica Kincaid. It can
also expand on Gilroy’s critical paradigm which so far has been mostly applied to texts by Afro-
American males.
Therefore my essay tries to achieve two interrelated goals. First of all, I propose a fresh
reading of Kincaid’s storytelling through the lenses of the Black Atlantic. Secondly, I extend the
range of Gilroy’s theory by using it to analyze texts by a West Indian female writer
