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book: Jamaica Kincaid’s Writings of History
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Jamaica Kincaid’s Writings of History

A Poetics of Impermanence
  • Antonia Purk
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2023
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About this book

Jamaica Kincaid’s works consistently explore how colonial history affects contemporary everyday lives. Throughout her novels, short fiction, and non-fictional essays, Kincaid’s texts engage with history through its medial representations, which are starkly determined by colonial perspectives. This study examines the entanglements of temporalities in current perceptions of the past and how literary text intervenes in historical consciousness. With a focus on the media text, image, and the human body, the chapters of this book demonstrate how Kincaid’s "poetics of impermanence" counter colonial representations of history with strategies of ambiguity, repetition, and redirection. Kincaid’s texts repeat and revise aspects of colonial history – a process that decenters the totality of historical colonial ideology and replaces it with self-determined versions of the past through a multiplication of perspectives and voices.

Author / Editor information

Antonia Purk, Universität Erfurt, Deutschland

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
September 18, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9783111027500
Hardcover published on:
September 18, 2023
Hardcover ISBN:
9783111018614
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
6
Main content:
234
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