Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds (review)

Jana Evans Braziel’s Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds is a good example of how a scholarly study focusing on a single author, by now a comparatively rare form of publication, continues to be relevant for contemporary scholarship when placed in the larger theoretical contexts of identity formation and textual practice in the diaspora. In Caribbean Genesis Evans Braziel productively ties Kincaid’s literary oeuvre to debates surrounding the role of the Caribbean diasporic writer in the creation of a specifically Caribbean New World aesthetic. The author of three monographs, Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures (University of Florida Press, 2010), Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2008), and Diaspora: An Introduction (Blackwell Press, 2008), Evans Braziel is among the foremost critics of contemporary Caribbean diasporic literatures and cultures in the United States.

In Caribbean Genesis she rightfully laments that scholarly studies on Jamaica Kincaid and, by extension, women writers in the Caribbean diaspora in general, frequently assume a direct and therefore one-dimensional relationship between author and narrator or between subjects and objects of narrative. This privileging of a unified immigrant experience or diasporic identity does not allow for a more accurate understanding of the complex and self-reflexive philosophical underpinnings of identity formation in Kincaid’s work. As the author suggests in the introductory chapter, ethnic writers’ “preoccupations with philosophical notions of the self, others, subjectivity, and alterity” (8) are often elided in literary scholarship, a gap the author seeks to rectify in her study. Evans Braziel’s discussions of Kincaid’s rejection of one-dimensional identity politics are insightful and clearly formulated, as when she astutely observes that “[o]ne cannot simply . . . write oneself into being. The textual I always stands in relation to the culturally constructed or interpellated I” (18).

Drawing on close textual readings, interviews with the author, and a theoretical framework grounded mostly in continental and francophone Caribbean philosophy, Evans Braziel identifies four G’s as guiding tropes for a philosophy of self in Kincaid’s work: genesis, genealogy, genocide, and genre. Drawing on Kincaid’s assertion that she frequently draws inspiration from two biblical texts, Genesis and Revelations, Evans Braziel persuasively argues that the tension between creation/genesis and destruction/genocide propel Kincaid’s complex “life-writings.” The complex relationship between history and fiction is a central concern in Caribbean thought ranging from Aimé Césaire to Edouard Glissant, and from C.L.R James to Derek Walcott, from Frantz Fanon to Wilson Harris. Evans Braziel’s discussion of Kincaid’s work in light of this tension adds a much-needed gendered perspective to this debate.

The intellectual goal of Caribbean Genesis consists in an exploration of the multiple ways in which Kincaid writes “new worlds” by reinventing the genre of autobiography and infusing it with “alterity, biography, and history” (2). Evans Braziel introduces the term “alterbiography” in an effort to show how Kincaid reinvents the Eurocentric genre of autobiography for a Caribbean diasporic context, in which collective experiences “powerfully write other into the self” (3). The author defines alterbiography as a literary form that “attempts to understand the genre of autobiography as gendered, sexuated, and above all, racialized” (8). Rather than seeing alterbiography as an alternative to or modification of existing forms of autobiography, Evans Braziel thus views alterbiography as “a deconstructive or degenerative force within life writing - one that erodes and contests the boundaries of genre as they are predicated on notions of geneaology, genius, and race” (13). Alterbiography, then, becomes a genre that calls the very genre of autobiography into question, and instead provides a forum to expose its exclusionary practices. Evans Brazil’s term is very useful and appropriate for an analysis of Kincaid’s work, yet it is surprising that no reference is made to previous redefinitions of the genre by contemporary women writers, especially given Evans Braziel’s otherwise concerted efforts to show how Kincaid...