A Small Place
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A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John
"If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . ."
So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up.
Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.
Loved by our collective!
The unusual structure and literary devices in the book, including a sizable portion written in second person perspective, punctuate Kincaid's searing indictment of 1980s western exceptionalism and the forever extractive relationship between the Caribbean and the global minority. Don't reach for this book if you're hoping for solutions or pacifications. But if you're wrestling with your relationship to the tourism industry, perhaps as a traveler yourself and/or a cog in a tourism-based economy like Asheville, "A Small Place" is guaranteed to give you big feelings. What you do with those feelings is entirely up to you...
Content warnings: discussions of colonial violence including slavery
Product Details
- Paperback
- 81 pages
- ISBN
- 9780374527075
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux (4/28/00)
- Dimensions
- 5.5 x 0.3 x 8.3 inches
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