Empire and Domestic Space in the Fiction of Jamaica Kincaid

Three novels by Jamaica Kincaid are critically investigated for their representation of colonial and domestic space. Aspiring middle-class Afro-Caribbean families in the patriarchal-colonial society of 1950s and 1960s British Antigua occupied social spaces gendered largely according to western design. In Kincaid’s fiction, the house and yard are designated as feminine and reproductive spaces, while outside the home lies the public world of employment, administration, formal education and migration opportunity, all of which are governed by the norms and expectations of a white Eurocentric culture. Kincaid’s female characters display strategies of subversion and resistance which disrupt the homogeneity of territorial and cultural colonisation.