The new Antigua, self-ruled, run by corrupt yet elected rulers, all of whom have had US green cards and most with Swiss bank accounts, each foreign investment has a suspect story attached to it. The actors switch on an overhead projector and encourage us to imagine on its blank screen the scenes they describe. These include air-conditioned hotel rooms and perfect sea views alongside the island’s grubbier side – the library in disrepair since an earthquake, the broken hospital system and the exclusive members of the Mill Reef Club, where the only local, non-white faces are those of waiting staff. Jamaica Kincaid’s bio-rant is a catalogue of the residue of slavery in Antiqua - and in the Caribbean and the Americas more generally. What remains from the formal ownership of people by other people is a commercial dominance symbolised most forcefully by tourism. The tourist is the modern liberal, middle-class slave-owner. “A tourist is an ugly human being.” The tourist is hated by the people he exploits just as the slave-owner was hated by the same people. aKincaid, Jamaica |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n83151180 |xHomes and haunts |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99005711 |zAntigua and Barbuda |zAntigua. |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50078110-781

Sure, you can steer away from voluntourism and disaster tourism, you can do your best to educate yourself about the country, you can let locals lead but still, you can't ignore the fact that your mere presence there isn't entirely positive. As a tourist, you represent something, your demands mean something and your existence means something. You are privileged, you can easily and sometimes even unknowingly end up exploiting entire nations. i19329969 |b1030002690325 |dcmg |g- |m |h10 |x0 |t0 |i6 |j18 |k010630 |n08-15-2016 19:33 |o- |aPR9275 .A583 K5637 1988 A jeremiad of great clarity and force that one might have called torrential were the language not so finely controlled.” — Salman Rushdie

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Kincaid, Jamaica. “In Conversation: A Conversation with Jamaica Kincaid.” Interview by Loh, Alyssa. The American Reader, 2013. Accessed July 31, 2016. http://theamericanreader.com/a-conversation-with-jamaica-kincaid/

Selengut, Suzanne. “Reluctantly Labeled.” The Jerusalem Post. May 17, 2006. Accessed July 31, 2016. http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Books/Article.aspx?id=22042. It was a small book, but boy, Jamaica Kincaid was angry in this one. The good kind of angry. The James Baldwin writing Dark Days angry. She is simply fed up with the way her country is being treated, and rightfully so.This is the 3rd Kincaid book I've read and she's always been a favorite. Where do I even begin with this one? ...It's brutal. Its brutal for the reader (especially if you are a reader who is white), for Antiguans, the Antiguan government and the tourism industry. Kincaid's 'A Small Place' is full of vitriol. She spews harsh criticisms on her native island's truly dishonest and disappointing leadership as an extension of colonialism. She also critiques the whole essence of travel, tourism and even tourists - who are mostly white. At some point, I wondered if Kincaid condoned xenophobia, because the way she describes the ways fellow Antiguans and other folks from the Caribbean dislike tourists (to the point where she actually insults white tourists), it could be seen as quite hateful. But then again, I read this book/memoir as a satire, so taking Kincaid's frank critique to heart is missing the point. As an adult, the same critical eye with which Kincaid saw through the pomp of the royal visit is turned on the island at large. She speaks bitterly of the corruption of the government and the passivity of the people, but the main force of her anger is directed toward the English who colonized Antigua. Kincaid lays the present predicament of the Antiguans at the feet of the English, for populating the island with their slaves in the first place and for educating descendents of those slaves to admire the country that enslaved them. Kincaid describes herself as so angry about England’s crimes that she cannot bear to hear England praised—she even speaks about her resentment at dinner parties. Her anger toward tourists is slightly less intense and is focused on the willful ignorance required of people to enjoy themselves in a desperately poor place. Unlike the average Antiguans she describes, Kincaid cannot resign herself to the past oppression and present corruption. She is mystified that more Antiguans don’t share her outrage, and is frustrated by their apparent acceptance of their status as bit players in the vacation videos of others. As the anger of the adult Kincaid reveals, she remains deeply attached to her home and to her people. However, Kincaid has no illusions about the future of the island and seems glad to have made her partial escape. Ms. Kincaid writes with passion and conviction . . . [with] a poet's understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur.” — The New York Times

Oblomov: Two seconds, Kev, I need to down this pint before I can stomach talking to you without hitting you with a chair. Part 3 - Opens up with the statement that imprisoning, murder, tyranny and corruption are lessons learned from the colonialists. An interesting theory not borne out by human history anywhere in the world, as afar as I am aware. This hypocritical theme continues its whining diatribe decrying bureaucracy and capitalism but offers up no alternative; ironically called out from a person who thrives in the US privately-funded academic system, hardly a bastion of socialist freedom.A Small Place is divided into four loosely structured, untitled sections. The first section begins with Kincaid’s narration of the reader’s experiences and thoughts as a hypothetical tourist in Antigua. The reader, through Kincaid’s description, witnesses the great natural beauty of the island, while being sheltered from the harsher realities of the lives of those who must live there. Kincaid weaves into her narrative the sort of information that only an “insider” would know, such as the reason why the majority of the automobiles on the island are poorly running, expensive Japanese cars. Included in her guided tour are brief views of the mansions on the island, mostly gained through corruption or outright criminality. She also mentions the now-dilapidated library, still awaiting repairs after an earthquake ten years earlier. The tour continues at the hotel, and Kincaid concludes the section with a discussion of her view of the moral ugliness of being a tourist. Others’ problems can even add to the attraction of a place for tourists. Kincaid notes that tourists tend to romanticize poverty. The locals’ humble homes and clothing seem picturesque, and even open latrines can seem pleasingly “close to nature,” unlike the modern plumbing at home. Kincaid believes that this attitude is the essence of tourism. The lives of others, no matter how poor and sad, are part of the scenery tourists have come to enjoy, a perspective that negatively affects both tourists and locals. The exotic and often absurd misunderstanding that tourists have of a strange culture ultimately prevents them from really knowing the place they have come to see. Admiration vs. Resentment of the Colonizer Elaine Potter Richardson, who later became the novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid, was born in 1949 in St. John’s, the capital city of the small Caribbean nation of Antigua. By Kincaid’s own account, she was a highly intelligent but often moody child, and she became increasingly distant from her mother as the family grew in number—an estrangement that would later become a central theme in her fiction. As she matured, Kincaid also became estranged from the social and cultural milieu in which she found herself. Too ambitious and intellectually curious to be satisfied with her career prospects in her tiny island home, she was also becoming alienated from the mostly white, European tradition handed down to her through her colonial education. Broadly, “texts” serve a number of similar functions in the post-colonial critique developed in Kincaid’s body of work, as well as for many in diaspora, Jewish and otherwise. While different texts are primary to different Jewish communities, some texts are central for most Jews in diaspora. While no text is quite as central to colonial life as something like the Jewish bible or Talmud, in Kincaid’s rendering there certainly are central texts of colonial education, both “vivid” and “subtle.” Like Kincaid, many Jewish feminists struggle with Jewish historic texts, their role in gender and co-constructed oppressions, as well as their emancipatory potential. Kev: And you said she was writing in 1988? So that's seven years the Antiguans could have rebuilt it but they didn't. But I bet she makes out that's the British's fault too?

The rich members of the Mill Reef Club have the funds to help, but will do so only if the old library is rebuilt—a demand that Kincaid sees as having more to do with nostalgia for the colonial regime than with a true desire to help. Kincaid mentions the ironies involved in Antigua having a Minister of Culture without having a culture to administer. She also mentions her politically active mother’s run-in with the current Minister of Culture, who has allowed the library to languish. Education has clearly suffered on Antigua in the years since independence, and Kincaid ruefully notes the poor speech habits of the younger Antiguans. Oblomov: Terry, make that two shots! Jesus, for you always bitching about 'them coming over here', you never think it's rude when we do the same, do you? Like you're a God send for tipping the waiter at the bar pool?Džamajka Kinkejd je u jednom intervjuu rekla kako piše tako da svi budu makar malo manje zadovoljni nego što su bili. I u pravu je – izvesno iritirajuće sneveseljavanje je zagarantovano. A malo ko bi to rekao kad se susretne sa kristalno jasnim rečenicama i duhovitim, pa čak i razdraganim pripovednim tonom. Sve deluje savršeno naivno, čak i pojednostavljujuće, ali iza te fasade nema šta nema. Lukavo je to pakovanje, jer nema koga u ovoj knjizi Kinkejd nije, na ovaj ili onaj način, potkačila, ali tako da će se malo ko pronaći čak i u neposrednim optužbama. Doduše, ne treba prenebregnuti da je ona mogla da o svojoj rodnoj Antigvi piše bespoštedno tek van nje, ali sa druge strane, da nije živela u SAD, pitanje je da li bi uopšte njena priča i mogla da dopre to ostatka sveta. But there is an oddity here. Kincaid hints at it when she says, “We felt superior, for we were so much better behaved and we were full of grace, and these people were so badly behaved and they were so completely empty of grace.” The island of Antigua is a very religious place. Its density of Moravian, Baptist, Independent Evangelical, Pentecostal, Adventist, Christadelphian, Methodist, and Anglican churches is remarkable. Christianity dominates the culture of the island. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. So, maybe it takes one to know one. Jamaica Kincaid's 'A Small Place' seems to me to be a scream of rage and frustration over her past and because of the intentionally created decrepitude and degradation of Antigua. Like me, she has good reasons to scream in rage. Perhaps her heightened sense of unending injustice is more noble than mine, idk, too, as her agony is about the overall legacy of slavery rather than a subset like mine of child abuse or gender inequality. She certainly writes better than I can.