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

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.