This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree

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Reading across the Archipelago: Anglophone and Francophone
Caribbean Perspectives on Place and Ontology by Jamaica
Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau

Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado
PhD in English Literature
University of Edinburgh
2014
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Declaration
This is to certify that the work within has been composed by me and is entirely my
own. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional
qualification.

Signed:

Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado

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For loved ones lost

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Contents
Acknowledgements 5
Abstract 7
Introduction Methods, Texts and Contexts 9
Chapter I Decolonising Caribbean Women’s Fiction: Womanist 24
Responses to Fanon, Walcott, Glissant and the Créolistes
Chapter II Xuela’s Autothanatography: Genocide, Ecocide and the 85
Death of the Caribbean Motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s
The Autobiography of My Mother
Chapter III Cycles and Cyclones: Violence, Memory and 117
Displacement in Gisèle Pineau’s Macadam Dreams
Chapter IV Postcoloniality and Postmemory: The Photographic 151
Spectre of Transgenerational Trauma in Jamaica
Kincaid’s Lucy and Gisèle Pineau’s The Drifting of
Spirits
Chapter V ‘Black’ Magic and Uncommon Realities in the 203
Caribbean: Obeah, Quimbois and Garden Space in
Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau’s Autofiction
Chapter VI Postcolonial Pathologies: Labour Migration and 267
Disordered Subjectivities in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and
Gisèle Pineau’s Devil’s Dance
Conclusion Re-orienting Dislocated Caribbean Ontopologies 344
Appendix An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid 351
Bibliography 395
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Acknowledgements
Firstly, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved family and
friends for their unwavering love and encouragement throughout the course of my
academic career. Their loving presence and the joy it brings have been the greatest
blessings in my life. For those whom we have lost, this is dedicated to your
memory. I have felt the sustaining power of your love every day, and knowing that I
carry you with me has pushed me onward in my journey and helped me to look
toward the future.
I would especially like to thank my primary supervisor Michelle Keown for
her enduring commitment as both an advisor and a dear friend. I am truly beholden
to Michelle for seeing me through the challenges that arose during the process of
completing this programme. From our very first meeting Michelle has been a
devoted counsellor, and her steadfastness and graciousness have demonstrated to me
the true meaning of mentorship. Her remarkable intellect and insightful
commentary have infinitely enriched this project. I would also like to thank my
secondary supervisor David Farrier for his assistance in assuming the role of
primary supervisor while Michelle was on maternity leave during my first year of
the programme, and for his valuable guidance throughout the remainder of my time
at Edinburgh. I am extremely privileged to be able to say that I have had two such
talented scholars as my primary supervisors during my doctoral studies.
I wish to thank my external examiner John McLeod for his optimism and
generosity of spirit, which have been inspirational to me throughout the duration of
the doctoral programme. His warmth and congeniality have been greatly heartening
and I am incredibly honoured that he agreed to take part in the viva voce. I would
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also like to give special thanks to my internal examiner Aaron Kelly for his
perspicacity and thought-provoking discussions, which were tremendously helpful
in opening up new lines of thought for this project. I am grateful for the kindness
and wisdom he has shared during my time at Edinburgh, and for his enthusiastic and
persistent support of this endeavour.
I am enormously indebted to Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau, the
exceptionally gifted authors whose writings are the enlivening force of this study.
Their creative abilities are truly extraordinary, and with each reading their works
continually unfold themselves, revealing a limitless depth of inspiration. I wish to
thank Jamaica Kincaid for welcoming me so warmly into her beautiful home in
Vermont for our interview in 2012 and for her continual encouragement and
assistance with this project. I am also immensely grateful to Gisèle Pineau for
participating in several long-distance interviews for this venture from her home in
Guadeloupe. The responses to my questions which I received from both writers
were poetical and fascinating, and provided a rich body of material to inform my
project.
Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not also thank my wonderful students from
the past several years of tutoring at Edinburgh, who have fuelled my love for
teaching and whose passion for literature and perceptive analyses were consistent
sources of motivation in my own work.

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Abstract
This interdisciplinary study traces the relationship between place and
ontology in anglophone and francophone Caribbean contexts, respectively, in
selected fictional texts by contemporary Afro-Caribbean women writers Jamaica
Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau. In particular, the thesis considers the ways in which
notions of place are complicated by the fact that these authors are doubly diasporic.
Kincaid and Pineau are of the African diaspora, and they are also migrant writers
who travel back and forth between the Caribbean neocolonies and the neoimperia
(the United States for Kincaid and France for Pineau). The Antiguan-born Kincaid
relocated to the United States as an adolescent and continues to reside there today –
despite not having renounced her Antiguan citizenship. Pineau was born and raised
in Paris by Guadeloupean parents, who later transplanted the family to their
Caribbean homeland when Pineau was an adolescent. After moving between the
Caribbean and Paris throughout the ensuing decades, Guadeloupe is now her
primary place of residence. Kincaid and Pineau, who are of the same generation and
from neighbouring Caribbean islands, share fascinating points of intersection and
divergence with regard to their treatment of place and ontology in their oeuvres.
This project draws upon a number of theoretical paradigms and examines them in
conjunction with Kincaid and Pineau’s fiction in order to discern whether or not
these models are apposite to their work. Some examples are:
decolonisation/decolonial, postcolonial, womanist and feminist, gender, critical race,
psychoanalysis, trauma, ecocritical, spatial, semiotic, ethnographic, Marxian and
post-Marxist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, postmodernist, aesthetic and anti-
aesthetic, and photographic theories. The thesis opens with an introductory chapter
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that locates my research within larger, ongoing discussions of place and ontology in
the field of postcolonial studies. It also explains the methodological approaches of
the project, in addition to brief descriptions of subsequent chapters. The first
chapter of the investigative body of the thesis outlines the decolonising theoretical
axiomatics which underpin Kincaid and Pineau’s fictional writings. Next I provide
a chapter each on key works by Kincaid and Pineau in order to establish their
individual thematic and formal concerns before turning, in the ensuing chapters, to
connective readings of their texts within certain contextual frameworks. I also
examine Kincaid and Pineau’s imbricated treatment of connecting themes that
appear to ricochet throughout their corpora of writings. This linkage between
landscape and ontology is fundamental to understanding migration experience in
that multiple landscapes and cultures become rooted in individual and collective
identities as complex biographic phenomena. Kincaid and Pineau address this
relationship between the environment and (auto)fiction as a way of investigating the
constitutive relations between place, body, and ontology.

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Introduction
Methods, Texts and Contexts
This thesis performs what I would like to call a connective, rather than a
comparative, reading of anglophone and francophone interpretations and
interrelations of place and ontology in texts by contemporary Caribbean women
writers Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau. Here I am adapting Marianne Hirsch’s
assertion that we need to perform ‘connective rather than comparative’ readings of
traumatic narratives in order to ‘[eschew] any implications that catastrophic histories
are comparable’ (2012: 62). Correspondingly, I believe that this approach can be
modified for application to the study of postcolonial literatures across different
linguistic, geographical and spatio-temporal contexts in order to ‘eschew any
implications’ that postcolonial narratives, which frequently grapple with the
specificities of various ‘catastrophic histories’ of colonialism, are somehow
inherently comparable. With this methodology I aim to circumvent, and ideally,
explode the minefield of entrapments embedded within the landscape of
comparative postcolonial literary studies – namely, those of hierarchization,
classification and synthesis. As Johannes Fabian argues, ‘There would be no raison
d’être for the comparative method if it was not the classification of entities or traits
which first have to be separate and distinct before their similarities can be used to
establish taxonomies and developmental sequences’ (26-7). In other words, when
examined under the glaring light of Michel Foucault’s ‘operating table’ in The
Order of Things (1970), Postcolonial Studies, the brainchild of its progenitor,
Comparative Literature, looks an awful lot like an imperialist episteme – a hideous
paradox that has evolved out of its institutionalisation by the academe. Comparative
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