Drawing from Audre Lorde's ideas on power and language, extant essays about Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, and the text itself, "What If You're an 'Incredibly Unattractive, Fat, Pastrylike-fleshed Man'?" develops a strategy for teaching A Small Place that emphasizes how students might learn to read it, despite and because of its provocative style. This essay describes how Frederick taught students' unmediated responses to the text to introduce a discussion of how Kincaid places them as readers. She supported this emphasis with a close reading that paid particular attention to the author's multiple definitions of "tourist" and of "white people," as well as to Kincaid's shifting subject position. Finally, Frederick tested the resultant interpretation by using it to analyze Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Guiding students through this process allowed her to foreground Kincaid's writerly strategies and concerns—specifically her concerns with power.

Mary Seacole's autobiography has been read as a feminist performance as well as a paradigmatic Victorian travel narrative. While these assessments address important aspects of the memoir, neither affords the author's Jamaicanness significant space in its analysis. This essay addresses the silences left when Wonderful Adventures is removed from its Jamaican context, then offers a reading of it from this perspective. Grounded in histories that document nineteenth‐century Jamaican social categories, the article analyses Seacole's book using Caribbean literary perspectives that explore raced, ‘coloured’ and geographically‐located identities. The result is an interpretation of the memoir that offers insight into Jamaica's Creole population, its status and colour politics, and identity concerns. All have been expertly shaped by Seacole's rhetorical manoeuvres.

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