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Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place: A Comparative Analysis

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The Western World will continuously be linked to the Caribbean because of its habit of consumption. A high demand for product on the part of the West, and a need for money and resource in the Caribbean bred this relationship. Westerners consume the service labor of Caribbean workers through commodities and land; they consume land with respect to the tourist industry and commodity with respect to the farming industry. I argue that the overarching issue behind service labor is ownership, because the laborers do not and can not consume their creations. Directly related to this issue is, the issue of ownership with respect to race. People who are white or closest to white get own of the product of the service workers labor and depend on service labor for their daily activities. The issue of ownership is salient in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Audre Lorde’s Grenada Revisited, and Edwidge Danticat’s Farming of Bones. …show more content…

In context of this process, time is cyclical rather than linear because the past is as prevalent in the present as the present now is to the past. To understand how this process came to be, the past cannot be kept out of current events. In Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Jamaica discusses time and the people’s relationship to emancipation. “In a small place, the division of time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist” (Kincaid 1988:54). The concept of time is prevalent in the people’s ideology surrounding emancipation. Kincaid states on page fifty-five that the people speak of emancipation as if it occurred just yesterday; they speak of it as if it is a contemporary occurrence. Emancipation transcends time. This is likely the case because the people are still going through a process of the like. They have not yet been emancipated from the tourism

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