For Thursday: Kincaid's A Small Place (from handout)

Jamaica Kincaid's short book, A Small Place, is a kind of postcolonial Oroonoko, as it offers a cynical travelogue to the would-be tourist (typically American) to Antigua.  Read Chapter One (from the handout in class) and try to be alert to her anti-colonial stance and how she depicts tourism as a kind of neo-colonialism that keeps the Antiguans in a slave/master relationship long after independence.  Also consider some of the following ideas in your response...

* Why does she write in second person, a seldom used narrative technique?  What effect does this have on the reader?
* What does the tourist see in Antigua?  What does she particularly want us to see on our tour?  Would the Travel Board of Antigua agree? 
* Why does she claim, on page 14, that a tourist is "an ugly human being"?  How do you think she defines this term?  Is it simply a traveler?  Or someone else?
* Why does she feel that everyone is potential tourist, and everyone is a potential native? 
* How does her postcolonial point of view contrast sharply with the narrator of Behn's Oroonoko?  What experience is she trying to "sell" to the reader? 
* To whom do you feel she is writing as a "Commonwealth" writer?  To a British/American audience?  To Antiguans?  Academics?