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Angels in Antigua: The Diasporic of Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sarah Brophy
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Abstract

This essay endeavors to clarify the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997). By analyzing two related motifs—the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse—the essay explores how Kincaid's melancholic commitment to Devon complicates her approach to biographical and autobiographical writing. Weighed down and consumed by her brother's affliction, Kincaid traces how Devon—or, rather, her memory of him—possesses independent powers of articulation, forcing her to confront her own implication, as a relatively privileged expatriate writer, in the political, social, and economic contexts that shape his suffering. A self-theorizing text that testifies to the changing demographics of the AIDS pandemic, My Brother also overlaps with and significantly redirects current theoretical understandings of mourning and melancholia, through its relocation of melancholic subjectivity at the intersection of postcolonial and racial anxieties.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 117 , Issue 2 , March 2002 , pp. 265 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2002

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