The expansion of self-representation in Jamaica Kincaid’s autobiographical discourse

Abstract

This study examines some works by the Afro-Caribbean-
American writer Jamaica Kincaid – At The Bottom of the River,
Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother – as
threshold examples of the autobiographical genre, in which
representation of the “I” is expanded to include the “us”.
Considering the limits between autobiography and fiction and
how self-representation deviates from the conventions of
autobiography in autobiographical novels, it analyzes the
extremely traumatic and painful mother-daughter relationship
throughout the texts, as an analogy to the colonizer-colonized
relations. The construction of a new identity free of
authoritarian influences symbolizes the ultimate reward in
the set of selected works, read as a bildungsroman of mythical
proportions.