What If You're an "Incredibly Unattractive, Fat, Pastrylike-fleshed Man"?: Teaching Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place

Abstract

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.

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“…Certainly some postcolonial texts prompt such a reading. Rhonda D. Frederick (2003), for example, in describing her pedagogical approach to teaching Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, emphasizes how she helps students make sense of the narrator's use of the second person to confront North American and white English people about the way they become tourists and exploit Antiguans (p. 7). Frederick notes, "The author uses the second person singular strategically to position readers in her world.…”

The Afterlives of Frantz Fanon and the Reconstruction of Postcolonial Studies

“…The arrival of Jamaica Kincaid, with her firebrand style and lack of hesitation to offend readers and critics, onto the stage with Fanon could not be more fitting, particularly given both writers' penchant for direct address. 36 In this chapter, Alessandrini situates Fanon as a Caribbean writer like Kincaid and proves that both share "an emphasis on what large historical forces have done to the inhabitants of small places in the Caribbean," and thus effectively address post-Cold War neo-imperialisms as well as globalization. Through a close reading of A Small Place along with Black Skin, White Masks, Alessandrini finds that "Kincaid's work thus provides a particularly dramatic illustration of Fanon's insight that colonialism is a purely destructive force for the colonized.…”