Producing the Colonial Subject: Romantic Pedagogy and Mimicry in Jamaica Kincaid's Writing (Writing the Caribbean: A Special Cluster‪)‬

The intersection of two vectors, the effects of colonial education on Antiguan society and the effects of a mother's love on her daughter, lies at the heart of Jamaica Kincaid's body of writing. (1) Kincaid scholars, however, encounter the persistent problem of how to theorize the relationship of these two forces: the public colonial education that connotes largeness and the political, and the small, private and individualized mother-daughter relationship. (2) This article draws a connection between Kincaid's critiques of colonial pedagogy and her abiding concern over mother-daughter relationships by arguing that these two themes mirror each other through their common origin in the imposition of a mimetic subjectivity. I chose the epigraphs above to suggest the "binding" nature of Romantic poetry, colonial discourse, and Kincaid's representations of colonial mothering all share claims to authority that are based on an assertion of knowledge about the subjectivity of the other. These three central modes of Kincaid's discourse claim the primacy of the dependence of the "vast Empire of human society" (259), the colonized state, and the colonial child on the mother(land) by defining the relationship in terms of permanence and inevitability because it is warranted by the other's condition. In Kincaid's first novel, Annie John, the mother can no more imagine her children as independent subjects than Sir Edward Cust can imagine the colonies able to govern their own affairs as independent nations. Kincaid's novels, Anne John and Lucy, depict a profound ambivalence in the mother-daughter relationship that stems from the mother's desire to impose her own subjectivity onto the child. Kincaid twins this theme with the view that the canonical Romantic poetry taught in colonial classrooms is fundamentally connected to the ideologies of colonial control. Reading the linkages of these themes reveals that the destructive power of both stems from an imposition of a way of seeing the world on the child's subjectivity.