Construction of Whiteness in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya
Year: 2018
Shuva Raj Ranabhat
PhD Candidate, Department of English, The University of Texas at El Paso
This paper explores how Antigua-born-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, despite being known as an anti-imperialist, perpetuates whiteness in a disguised form of a travel writer through her travelogue Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. The way she represents Nepalese landscape, people and culture posits that her travel to Nepal is threaded with the rhetoric of whiteness, metropolitan culture and imperial politics. In particular, she looks at the travelled places and people with an Orientalist lens: surveillance or panopticism, nomination, debasement and binary rhetoric.